Profiles In Emmy Achievement Presents: Ellen Burstyn's Nine-Second Acting Master Class
The What I'm Watching blog has video of the notorious, Emmy-nominated role in HBO's Mrs. Harris that ignited the growing EllenBurstyngate controversy we first noted last month. In it, the seated actress delivers exactly two lines of dialogue directly to the camera, in a vaguely Eastern European accent. Total running time of the performance the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences deemed worthy of singling out for excellence? Nine seconds—or roughly double the amount of time it took voters too lazy to watch the screeners delivered directly into their hands to glance at names on a list and pick the only one they recognized.
CORRECTION: A reader tells us that Burstyn is cut back to once again after the initial nine second shot, giving her bravura, tour-de-force performance a whopping grand total of fourteen seconds of screen time, as some media outlets have been reporting.
UPDATE: The What I'm Watching blog has now added the second, one-sentence-long clip.
