PASADENA, Calif. _ Performer John Michael Higgins harbors a secret acting technique. He perfects his skill by ignoring it. Anybody who's seen him improvise in films like "A Mighty Wind" or "Best in Show," or watched his comic portrayals on shows like "Wilfred" or "Pitch Perfect" would never guess that Higgins cultivates his "art" by forgetting it as soon as he leaves the set.
"I'm not an actor who gets lost in my job or anything like that," he says in a quiet alcove of a hotel lounge here. "I leave work behind, go home, have great family life, and almost never consume entertainment products, just never do it," he says. "I don't watch film, don't watch television. I try not to."
That's very unusual for someone who's been acting since he was 9 years old. And yes, it was his idea at such a young age. "My parents were flabbergasted. I was flabbergasted," he recalls.
"It came out of nowhere. There's no actors in my family. I woke up and I knew exactly what I was doing. I was clear. I was in a school play, and I was good at it. My parents, thank God, were the type of people _ for not being in the business in any way, I don't even know why they were this way _ they said, 'If the motor is that, let's see what we can do.' They put me into plays and classes and quickly I became a professional actor who was doing juvenile roles on stage for many years."
Higgins keeps applying his "secret" as he does with NBC's new comedy, "Great News," premiering April 25. He plays the egoistic news anchor who intimidates everyone on the staff except the middle-aged intern who's there to champion her daughter, a fledgling TV producer.
Higgins, 54, confesses he's been acting so long, he doesn't think about it. "I don't even separate it from myself. It's sort of what I am, not what I do. As I have aged, the good news for me is I went out of an obsessional phase with acting and film and theater and all that stuff � because I'd done it so long � I started looking around and saying there are other subjects that interest me."
That compulsive stage hung on for 10 years from the time he was 15, he says. "I was chasing after a kind of perfection. I wanted to learn from everything and make it better for the next time. I was constantly watching actors closely and seeing what works and what doesn't work. I was constantly remolding my own stuff. It was just working out my skills, refining whatever natural talent I have and building on to it. That became an obsessional thing for me, maybe it's the way my work ethic is, or my brain function. I was a very good student."
The world outside interested him in college, where he majored in history and English. "I almost became an academic. It was a little more interesting to me than acting. But it wasn't something I was doing, it was something I was. I just WAS an actor. I knew how to do it. I knew how to tell stories that way."
But his calling grew even tougher when he became the father of a daughter, 13, and a son, 11. "If it's a few months (between jobs) it gets panicky," he says. "They didn't ask to be here. The longest was four months without a job. I'm knocking wood on that. The problem with any amount of time is you don't know how long it's going to be. You enter the tunnel and there's no daylight, and then you're like, 'This could go for one mile or 100 miles and I don't know which one it is.' So you have to round up the wagons and say, 'It's 100 miles.' Then suddenly there's daylight."
Always true to the text as an actor, Higgins also has a keen facility for improvisation. The trick to that, he says, is simple. "The whole game is listening. If you actually hear somebody, you'll say the right thing. You have to hear it though, you have to be interested. You have to be hungry for the information. The minute you have it, it comes in, you will respond, you can't help but respond. You couldn't hide it. That's great improvisation when you just do it and you move on," he says.
"I never sought improvisation out. I'm not very interested in it. It turned out to be something I'm good at, but I'm good at it because I'm interested in other things. That's all it is," he shrugs.
He met his wife of 14 years, Margaret Welsh, when they were performing "Arms and the Man" together. He says he forged an iron tight rule against dating actresses. "She broke that rule. She was that extraordinary," he says.
'VAMPIRE BAT' FLIES AGAIN
Even millennials are fans of some of the schlocky horror films of the '30s and '40s, classics like "Dracula," "Frankenstein" and "The Black Cat." Now thanks to UCLA's Film and Television Archive and The Film Detective, an evergreen has been revived for Blu-ray and DVD. "The Vampire Bat," made in 1933, starred B-actor Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray (famous for "King Kong") and Dwight Frye (Renfield from "Dracula").
Considering the current fascination with peripatetic vampires, it's a perfect time for "The Vampire Bat" to be unloosed on an unsuspecting public. Digitally remastered from a 35 mm composite acetate fine-grain master and a 35 mm nitrate print, the film even sports a color sequence not seen since its very first run. The release date is April 25, and the 63-minute thriller will set you back $20 for Blu-ray, $15 for the DVD.
TECHNOLOGY UNCOVERS SECRET TUNNEL
It was modern technology and the determination of archaeologists that uncovered a lost escape tunnel dug by Jewish prisoners during World War II. The team had gone to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to recover traces of a synagogue that had been destroyed during the war.
Through the loan of equipment and two geophysicists by WorlyParsons Canada Services Ltd. in Calgary, they were able to search above ground. Not only did they find the synagogue, they found the escape tunnel in the town of Ponary that had been described by Holocaust survivors.
The story of this discovery is the subject of PBS' "Nova" airing Wednesday. "I think we're still unpacking the scientific end of it for the report," says Dr. Richard Freund, professor of Jewish History at the University of Hartford, who led the team.
"The story has touched a nerve for scientists who work in every area of genocide in the world," he says, "because one of the biggest problems you face is, using traditional archeology, you dig up people. We want to try to avoid digging up people in order to somehow calculate the devastation of a genocide or the Holocaust. And this is what this technology allows us to do."
The survivors were reluctant to talk about their experiences. But Hana Amir, whose father was there, recalls: "To live with someone that survived it, everything is good, like you eat a lot, you drink a lot. Everything is overwhelming, and when there's a meal, you have so many portions you can't even think about it. So that's one part," she says.
"The other part is a lot of silence. And my father kept on washing. He kept on washing his hands. He kept on washing my hands. I am a mother of three boys. He kept on washing their hands. I think I managed to tell him something after many years, because my sons used to hide their hands when grandpa came. So I slowly told him, 'Daddy, they were not in Ponary. They don't need to wash their hands.'"
ENGINEERING WONDERS ABANDONED AND FORGOTTEN
They are unbelievable sights that few people have heard of, but the Science Channel will uncover some of them when "Mysteries of the Abandoned" premieres Thursday. They are mammoth structures that were built for a seemingly good cause that somehow failed their promise. The first episode includes California's Goat Canyon Trestle Railway, the largest wooden train trestle in the world built in 1932 to connect San Diego and Arizona and later abandoned. The Ukraine's massive over-the-horizon radar facility that stretches a half-mile is another engineering marvel that has been forsaken. The six-episode series is full of these miracles that fell to modern technology or just plain inadequate planning.
