Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

"I Get So Emotion-Able, Baby"

While watching the most recent Oscars telecast a friend remarked on a particularly dramatic acceptance speech saying, "Actors are so emotionable!" And you know? They really are! I mean, they are so capable of signifying emotion. How can we believe in what they are expressing from behind that podium? The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that emotionable is synonymous with emotional but I think that "emotionable" has a much more active sense to it and that got me thinking about books that capture the act and the action of emoting.

 In Character: Actors Acting is full of famous faces doing what they do best, often with ridiculous results. Photographer Howard Schatz challenges his subjects to capture, in a single frame, a moment of his design. Where else might you see F. Murray Abraham as "a teenage girl chosen to go backstage at a Justin Timberlake concert" or Edie Falco doing "a little girl telling your mother that your twin brother said a dirty word." Copious sidebar comments from the actors regarding their craft provide useful context but the real joy here is the sheer over-the-top nature of every expression on every page of this book.

If you require a more serious (or more hilarious depending on how you look at it) set of emotionable images then check out Sam Taylor-Wood's Crying Men. When a friend first mentioned this book to me my first stammered, impatient question was, "But does it have Robin Williams in it!?" and indeed Mr. Williams does make an appearance. While his cheeks are dry, his wrinkled and worried brow rests upon those familiar, furry forearms in a way that can only suggest that the deepest and most intense of fake tragedies has just taken place. Does it count as schadenfreude if the object of your joy is feigning their misery? I'm not sure but I can say that while some of the subjects of this book inspired serious contemplation of the import of human emotion in our daily experience of reality, others made me laugh so hard I nearly dropped the book. Yes, Jude Law in the fetal position and Ed Harris with the trembling, lower lip, I'm looking at you.

If a person wanted to find themselves on the other side of the camera, as the puppet master pulling the strings, it'd be hard to find a better source of inspiration than Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1988. Lee Goldberg's collection of descriptions of unsold pilots is outlandish and wild. Witness: Dr. Franken, a drama featuring a doctor who reanimates a dead accident victim with organs and limbs from a hospital medial bank. The resulting creature has the memories, convictions and emotions of the donors and goes about contacting the living associates of said patrons. Think of it as Frankenstein meets Highway to Heaven. Or, consider Clone Master which was to be a series in which a government scientist makes 13 clones of himself. Each clone is sent to battle evil and is the focus of his own episode. Presumably, each clone would meet a shadowy end and season two would have featured a fresh batch of 13 clones. Bad ideas? This book is chock-full of them. Ideas so bad that they're good? Yeah, there just might be a few of those in there too. Lots of opportunities here to draw out that perfectly emotionable performance!