He's not a movie buff, so New York musician Larry Saltzman doesn't always watch the Oscars. This year, however, he's got a rooting interest.
Saltzman taught actor Timothée Chalamet how to play guitar for the role of Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown.” In turn, Chalamet earned a best actor nomination and the film is also up for best picture at the Academy Awards on Sunday.
A guitarist who's performed with Simon & Garfunkel, Bette Midler and David Johansen, as well as in the pit at Broadway productions “Hairspray” and “Ain't Too Proud to Beg,” Saltzman has developed a specialty in teaching actors how to play music for their roles. Besides Chalamet, recent pupils have included Adam Driver and Sadie Sink of “Stranger Things.”
On a fellow musician's recommendation, Saltzman first got a call from a movie studio about a decade ago. He admits to being cranky as discussions dragged on. “I almost did everything to talk them out of hiring me,” he said, The AP reported.
Not until the fifth phone call did the studio identify the client: Meryl Streep.
She needed to learn the electric guitar for her starring role in the 2015 film “Ricki and the Flash,” where she portrayed an aging rocker trying to keep her career and life together in the wake of a series of disappointments.
Working with Streep is a little like a political consultant's first client being elected president. If she likes you and word gets around, other students will follow. Teaching actors now represents about 40% of his business, the 69-year-old said.
“My time spent with her was excellent,” he said of Streep. “She's smart. She knows how to learn things. There was a steady progress over three or four months. She did very well.”
Faking it just won't do for serious actors and film directors. It's like lip-syncing — the audience is going to tell the difference, and the characters will be less believable. That was especially true with Chalamet, who needed to sing and play at the same time for a character whose artistry is the centerpiece of the film.
“When the actors come to you, they're kind of vulnerable,” Saltzman said. “They want to do a great job.”
Saltzman had more than 50 sessions with Chalamet, starting in person and retreating to Zoom during the pandemic. It wasn't easy. Chalamet had to learn some 25 songs in the script.
“Sometime in 2018 I had my first lesson with this great guitar teacher named Larry Saltzman who at some point became less of a teacher and more a co-sanity artist through COVID,” Chalamet recalled during a recent interview with The Associated Press. “I think we were keeping each other sane. We would Zoom three, four times a week and doing songs that never made it into the movie.”
It helped that Saltzman is a Dylan buff. Focusing on imparting “the guitar playing of ‘pre-electric Bob,’” he taught his charge so well that Chalamet was a musical guest as well as host on “Saturday Night Live,” performing obscure Dylan cuts last month. Saltzman says, in the course of their sessions, Chalamet “went the extra mile” and unearthed “very early, obscure” Dylan songs that weren't even in the script.
Saltzman generally likes teaching actors more than common folk, in part because there's a specific goal: They need to learn certain songs to inhabit a particular character. When it's open-ended — someone just wants to learn the guitar — it can be more of a challenge, he said. Saltzman also believes that it's an advantage to not be a regular teacher, someone who may approach clients with a more rigid style.
Actor Johnny Cannizzaro said he appreciated Saltzman's calming “bedside manner” and felt welcome in an apartment filled with guitars. Cannizzaro has the role of E Street Band member “Little Steven” Van Zandt in the upcoming Bruce Springsteen biopic, “Deliver Me From Nowhere.”
“There was never really a moment where he expressed any sort of frustration or impatience with me during a session,” said Cannizzaro, who has background playing keyboards but not guitar. “If anything, he would express some excitement when you grasped something he was teaching. That put me at ease.”
Saltzman also studied film of Van Zandt so he wasn't just teaching Cannizzaro guitar — he was showing specifics of how Van Zandt plays, the actor said.
Beyond teaching, Saltzman's time is divided between studio work, playing in New York clubs accompanying different artists and Broadway — he's just about to begin “Smash.”
It's an eye-opening experience for him to later see his students on screen. That was particularly the case when he saw “A Complete Unknown” and marveled at Chalamet's ability as an actor.
All the more reason to watch the Oscars, and to take some pride in his own work.
“In my own humble way, I'm a small gear in that machinery,” he said. “What is rewarding is knowing that in some small way I'm contributing to making a better film.”
