What degree do you guys think could help an actor with there career if they studied it? I am going to go back to college and I was thinking about studying Business Marketing because I feel I could use the information I would learn and apply it to acting. Do you guys have any other suggestions?

Acting is a business, it's all about marketing yourself and business courses can help you land a lot of jobs while you're getting started.

Accounting, boring, but you can get good paying temp work every day if you want it.

Journalism allows for a flexible skill, especially freelancing while you're out auditioning and even to supplement your income when a show is running. A knowledge of Public Relations will also help you build contacts while paying your rent!

Never knock a degree in education, in most areas, a substitute teacher in certain disciplines (especially math and science) can work every day they don't have an audition. It will also help you land educational tours and teaching fellowships for some great regional theatres.

Those are just a few ideas, anyone else?

Those are good suggestions. I'd add English, Arts Management, Psychology, Film Studies.

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I recall that this topic has been raised before.

The original poster asked if a college degree was necessary to break into Hollywood. I answered with an unequivocal, "No!"

This thread takes a slightly different tack... what degree would help in the business aspect of the acting profession. As important as a college education can be, regardless of the subject, I think that you're way off base in believing that some sort of college degree is going to assist you to any significant degree in attaining your acting goals.

Simply stated, being a history teacher on the side isn't going to make you a better actor. Neither will any fancy Ivy League education. You can attend every university, take every college course available, and never become a professional actor or even earn a single dime in this industry. To draw any sort of correlation between having a sheep skin on your wall and having a Golden Globe on your mantel is absolute nonsense. An MBA degree doesn't equate to success in anything, much less something as subjective as acting. I've discovered that the only actors who rise to greatness never relied on "a backup plan" to get them there. They all possessed a talent and passion for the craft that precluded any other life, any other pursuit, and any other education.

When an actor becomes successful, they simply HIRE a top attorney and accountant to handle their legal and financial affairs. Most agents and managers were either actors or receptionists at one time, neither requiring specialized educations or legitimate degrees of any kind. Then, the personal assistants they hire to act as their personal go-fers will no doubt be old high school chums or college drop-outs. You want a career crunching numbers or being a reporter in some po-dunk town, yes. A degree in advanced mathematics and journalism is a requirement. But as for a life in the theater? 'Surely you jest.'

Want to make it in this business? Leave the calculus and theoretical physics to the tenured professors who make their living measuring up to the Dean's expectations and bucking for a paltry raise every decade or so. And if your goal is to be a substitute teacher for a bunch of grade school juvenile delinquents, by all means, pursue your dream. But that won't get you any closer to a successful career in acting than the proverbial fish with a new bicycle.

“Whatever works.”

www.robertkim.com
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0453647

If this is about what kind of education can help your craft as an actor, I would say majoring in English, History, or any sort of humanities including drama/theater.

Actually, it's not really about helping you be a better actor, as much as helping you be a more informed artist (of which acting is just one of the disciplines).

A humanities or liberal arts education can help you become more aware of the literary and cultural traditions that underpin so much how we think and feel (and therefore what stories really connect with audiences). As actors, directors, writers or whatever, we're all storytellers, and knowing what and why we tell certain stories can give you that deeper level of appreciation and understanding of the particular project you may be working on, while perhaps given you another avenue to find more depth in your own work.

Even looking at some of our most respected actors with humanities or liberal arts degrees:

Meryl Streep (BA Vassar, MFA Yale)
Edward Norton (Yale - BA History)
Jodie Foster (Yale - BA English)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (NYU - BFA)
Laura Linney (BA Brown, then Julliard)
Paul Giamatti (Yale - BA English, MFA drama)
Kevin Kline (Indiana - BA, Julliard)
Forest Whitaker (USC, UC-Berkeley - Music)
Denzel Washington (Fordham - BA Journalism)
Angela Bassett (Yale - BA African American studies)
Viggo Mortgensen (St. Lawerence U - BA Gov't/Spanish)
James Woods (MIT - BS Poly Sci but dropped out shortly before graduating)
Hugh Jackman - (Sydney - BA Journalism)
Holly Hunter (Carnegie Mellon - BA drama)
Frances McDormand (Bethany - BA Theater, Yale - MFA)
Julianne Moore (Boston University - BFA)
Chris Cooper (U. Missouri - BA Agriculture and Drama)
Tommy Lee Jones (Harvard - BA English)
Sigourney Weaver (Stanford - BA English)
Tim Robbins (UCLA - BA Drama)

Now there are plenty of respected actors with no formal education (or dropped out very early), but from this list alone, you'll likely to see one thing in common: There's a certain gravitas and intelligence that they bring to their body of work on a wide range of roles - they are respected for their craft and not just their bankability. They have a strong facility for language that can come from a liberal arts or humanities education, which can really help with dialogue rich, complex characters.

Also, notice that they aren't exactly "young Hollywood". Many of them are still busy working into their 40s and 50s (and beyond). And without even knowing their educational background, I'm willing to bet that these people you wouldn't immediately assume to be "vacuous" or "airheaded" -- that they are more than just "actors" but artists who likely have the literary ability to write or direct as well (to be more than just actors).

Even some of the quirkier comedians like Owen Wilson (UT-Austin, BA English) or Adam Sandler (NYU - BFA) or Sasha Baron Cohen (Cambridge - BA History) have an education. Or you can try Jerry Seinfeld (CUNY - BA Comm & Theater), or Robin Williams (Indiana U - BA Sociology, Julliard dropout).

Others you may not have known: Hugh Grant (Oxford - BA Art history), or David Duchovny (Princeton - BA, Yale - MA English) or Brad Pitt (U. Missouri - BA Journalism but dropped out in senior year)

As for "younger Hollywood" - you have (they're all women, but it seems like women are a bigger % of college campuses these days anyhow):

Reese Witherspoon (Stanford - BA English)
Natalie Portman (Harvard - BA Psychology)
Renee Zwelleger (UT-Austin - BA English)
Maggie Gyllenhaal (Columbia - BA English)
Julia Stiles (Columbia - BA English)
Ashley Judd (Kentucky - BA French)
Elizabeth Banks (Penn - BA)
Amanda Peet (Columbia - BA History)

Then you have Ashton Kutcher (!!) graduating with a biochemical engineering degree from U of Iowa.

This won't help you pay the bills (maybe the biochem degree could), but if you want to stay in the industry in some creative capacity, having a humanities or liberal arts background is probably the best education to have -- whether it's acting for the theater/film, or being a playwright, screenwriter, director, story editor, etc.

I'm not saying you need a degree - there's plenty who studied at mostly or exclusively conservatories (Deniro, Pacino, Brando, Daniel Day Lewis, Angelina Jolie although spent time at NYU), or have little formal education (Kevin Spacey, Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, Heath Ledger, Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, etc.) but that of those who actually do have a college degree, most of it is in humanities, and I don't think it's an accident. You just don't see many accountants or business grads or engineers becoming actors.

An interesting case history in statistics.

But all of this exhaustive research comes with a "hitch." DID THESE ACTORS BECOME THE SUPER STARS THEY ARE TODAY AS A DIRECT RESULT OF BEING UNIVERSITY TRAINED, OR WOULD THEY HAVE SUCCEEDED WITHOUT THEIR DEGREES? Jodie Foster, and many actors like her, went on to earn major university degrees long after achieving fame and fortune in acting, totally eliminating them from inclusion on this list. There are 120,000 actors represented by the Screen Actors Guild. If your goal is to present a serious statistical evaluation of college graduate-to-success ratios among actors, you have a lot more research ahead of you. I could easily find many more failures among degreed actors than this miniscule sampling represents.

The question remains: What role did college educations have in creating these actors? To probe even deeper, would they have succeeded without studying the irrelevant subjects that a typical college education entails, or the gravitas provided by their various school's reputations? What role did geology,biology,political science and algebra have in the ultimate success of these great actors? Suffice it to say, talent is independent of college credit. If you have proof otherwise, provide it here. Intelligent people gravitate to intellectual pursuits as certainly as young actors gravitate to Theater Arts as the most logical college curriculum. I'd be much more impressed by an exploration of how college-offered acting classes are somehow superior to acting methods provided by other venues.

As much as college degrees have been touted as a precursor to success in years past, I see less and less the need for them, particularly in relation to ultimate success in acting. Once upon a time, a college degree was a virtual guarantee of some modicum of success, the ultimate "ace in the hole." Today, many college graduates face a bleak future indeed, brought upon by social change and the vagaries of the global marketplace. Education for its own sake is something to be admired, and college will remain the cultural heart of such pursuits. But I don't believe that the tools necessary to compete favorably in acting require a collection of college degrees, anymore than "talent" can be found with any more regularity or abundance in college classrooms than in the thousands of non-collegiate acting schools in existence throughout the world.

“Whatever works.”

www.robertkim.com
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0453647

quote:

Originally posted by DewRag:
What degree do you guys think could help an actor with there career if they studied it? I am going to go back to college and I was thinking about studying Business Marketing because I feel I could use the information I would learn and apply it to acting. Do you guys have any other suggestions?

I just graduated from college this May and thinking back on it I really wished I majored in Psychology. I just think it would have been a good avenue to study about people the individual mind, their behavior, etc. I also thought about Sociology and anthropolgy for simiular reasons. But I love to read and I can just go get a book if their is anything I want to know more about. I wanted to minor in marketing.I thought that would be a good idea to learn more about how sell yourself. But my school didn't have marketing .

I think getting a B.A. in Film Studies would be very helpful to an actor: it never hurts to know the process of filmmaking, especially if you wouldn't mind producing and/or directing at some point in your career.

I think simply going to college is important for intangible reasons that are hard to explain, but real nonetheless.

For one thing, as an employment counselor once told some of us, it shows you're willing to complete those four years (or so) of effort. It marks you, in a fairly standardized way, as a serious person. And in many situations in life, fairly or unfairly, we are judged in that standardized way.

It also obliges you to open yourself to a wide range of subjects you would most likely never go near left to your own devices. And it does so (for most people) at a time when you have time to do so - Life kind of takes over after that.

You can't ignore all the contacts it gives you either, especially if you went to a good one. The links between Harvard, Brown and other alums in Hollywood are notorious. A woman I know who went to Carnegie-Mellon told me of her network out here.

Personally, I was too oblivious an adolescent to profit from this, but the people around me when I was in college included Christopher Guest, the founders of Steely Dan, Herb Ritts, songwriter Billy Steinberg, screenwriter Michael Tolkin, Thom Mount (who later became the youngest head of a studio ever) and others whose stature in their field may be less obvious publicly but was none the less real. Certainly, being in that bath of creativity (at Bard College) later helped me when I went into radio, rich with a variety of music listening I would never have done on my own.

As for specific degrees, I don't think it's incidental that so many in Don Quixote's excellent list studied English. It's especially dismaying today to see how even professional writers often have little knowledge of the English language. Just being well-grounded in literature and in the language itself will put you ahead of most actors and many in other fields as well (including, again, those who are paid to write).

I was doing a Shakespeare play once and during the read-through one of the young actors, having rattled off some of the Bard's more withering epithets, looked up blandly and said, "Were those insults?"

Uh, yeah.

Words are at the heart of what actors do, yet so many people in the profession have the most cursory understanding of them, or of the rich stories behind the work they are doing.

Did you know both Christopher Reeves and Daniel Day-Lewis were (are) the sons of poets? Or that the greatest English actor of the 18th century, David Garrick, arrived in London with Samuel Johnson, the "great lexicographer" (that is, creator of the first major dictionary)? The link between acting and literature is an ancient and intimate one.

So I vote for an English degree, or at the least, a lot of literary studies while you're at school. But an overall knowledge of history can't hurt, or an understanding of marketing.

The important thing is to go to college, and become as rich and rounded a human being as four years can make you.

PS I feel especially strongly about this since none of my siblings finished college in their teens and several struggled to remedy that lapse in later life. NOT doing it really is something many people regret.

Perhaps it’s because I didn’t graduate from Carnegie Mellon or Vassar or Yale that makes my writing style so difficult to understand.
Or maybe it’s because the letters of this message board are too small to be easily read. So, I’ll put it another way:

YOU DO NOT NEED A DEGREE IN PSYCHOLOGY TO KNOW THE JOYS OF ACTING. YOU DO NOT NEED A DEGREE IN CARDIOLOGY TO UNDERSTAND THE HUMAN HEART. YOU DO NOT NEED A DEGREE IN ECONOMICS TO BALANCE YOUR CHECK BOOK. YOU DO NOT NEED A DEGREE IN QUANTUM PHYSICS IN ORDER TO EFFECTIVELY PORTRAY ALBERT EINSTEIN, YOU DO NOT NEED A DEGREE IN ANTHROPOLOGY TO PLAY THE DINOSAUR HUNTER IN “JURRASSIC PARK,” YOU DO NOT NEED A DEGREE IN POLICE SCIENCE TO WORK ON “LAW & ORDER,” AND YOU CERTAINLY DO NOT NEED A DEGREE IN MARKETING TO SUCCESSFULLY PROMOTE YOUR ACTING CAREER.

All of the scholastic training that you need to pursue acting you learned in grade school. Does that mean I’m against higher education? Absolutely not. I support anyone’s choice to improve their mind, by any means. But I’ll say it again. A degree is no panacea or “security blanket” for anyone, for anything. Don’t confuse a college degree as some sort of bulwark against the difficulties of -- or some sort of assisted entre into -- this business. I’ve seen far too many college graduates start out their lives broke and penniless that it’s almost a cliché, burdened with crippling student loans that hamstring their early efforts at success even before they get started.

What succeeds in this business is TALENT, PERSERVERANCE, CONNECTIONS AND SHEER, UNADULTERATED LUCK. Without possessing all of these ingredients in abundance, you will never succeed at the highest level, in this industry or any other.

“Whatever works.”

www.robertkim.com
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0453647

Jim Chevallier: couldn't have said it any better. You're right about English. It's a certain level of literacy that helps the craft of acting beyond 'technique'.

Robert Kim: please read the last paragraph of my previous post. Not to be an ass, but it seems like you were responding to what you *wish* I was saying, rather than what I was *actually* saying. Nowhere was I implying or directly stating that you needed a college degree to succeed as an actor (and even stated that explicitly in the last paragraph of the post if you actually bothered to read and comprehend it). I was just addressing the fact that if one were to go to college (which in my opinion is an important rite of passage of life, regardless of whether it helps one to be an actor or not), you can take a look at some of the other renowned actors who have gone to college to see what they've studied -- and a pattern emerges.

You call it selective statistics without really showing otherwise. If you really think it is, I challenge you to come up with a list of equally renowned college educated actors who majored in accounting, biology, engineering, or pre-med.

What's wrong with "focus"?

Focusing strictly on that which your wish to learn, and not which you don't?

College isn't the sole depository of all important knowledge. What I learned in college served me little in the "real world." Yet I don't criticize anyone who feels the need for college curriculum in order to succeed in this business, or any other.

The key here is: CONTINUING EDUCATION. And the key element of all of education is READING. Reading all that you can. But if you insist that a college classroom is the only place to do that, you're barking up the wrong tree. If you read two books a week for a year on the same subject, you can consider yourself an expert on that subject. If you can do it for two, you'll probably be considered a scholar in the field.

We can debate this until we're blue in the face. The fact remains -- only those with the talent and guts to succeed make it in this business. Those that don't simply TALK about it.

“Whatever works.”

www.robertkim.com
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0453647

Robert, this is becoming quite comical.

I'm not saying nor did I ever say that college is necessary (but you insist on wishing that I was saying that) -- but that college is a valuable life experience. If you didn't find college valuable yourself, that doesn't negate the fact that college can still be a valuable experience for many other actors or civilians. It's like a divorcee saying that because marriage was a horrible experience for him/her, it should necessarily be a horrible experience for everyone else.

Note that "valuable" isn't the same thing as "necessary" -- something most reasonable people can see isn't just a matter of semantics, but of substance. But it seems like you fail to see that distinction which is perhaps why you continue to misinterpret what is being said here.

quote:

Originally posted by donquixote:
Robert, this is becoming quite comical.

I'm not saying nor did I ever say that college is necessary (but you insist on wishing that I was saying that) -- but that college is a valuable life experience. If you didn't find college valuable yourself, that doesn't negate the fact that college can still be a valuable experience for many other actors or civilians. It's like a divorcee saying that because marriage was a horrible experience for him/her, it should necessarily be a horrible experience for everyone else.

Note that "valuable" isn't the same thing as "necessary" -- something most reasonable people can see isn't just a matter of semantics, but of substance. But it seems like you fail to see that distinction which is perhaps why you continue to misinterpret what is being said here.

There is nothing "comical" about this subject, your present comment notwithstanding.

If memory serves, this entire thread is an offshoot of the question posted by "PNW" on June 23rd, below:

Is it necessary to have a collge degree in Hollywood? Will one land auditions etc if they have no degree? For the big pictures,do agents directors etc only want collge grads?or can a talent well trained experienced actor break in?
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This poster's question was simple and straightforward. So was my reply.

I never completed college. For as many of my young counterparts thought it was "a necessary part of getting ahead," I found it a colossal waste of time. Everyone's goals are different, everyone learns differently.

I am a professional photographer and actor by trade. But if I were a casting director, I’d be much more interested in the content of your resume, donquixote.

I’ve posted mine here for all to see. Let’s see yours. Or as I alluded to earlier, would you prefer to simply TALK about acting?

“Whatever works.”

www.robertkim.com
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0453647