Therapist and columnist Barton Goldsmith talks about his work behind the cameras on movie and TV sets
Therapists play an important behind-the-scenes role on movie and TV sets.
Just ask Dr. Barton Goldsmith.
The therapist and News-Press columnist is there during filming to hold a space for calm and help actors, who must transition between emotional highs.
Dr. Goldsmith told the News-Press his main role is to alleviate crisis.
Producing a movie means lots of long days with the same people who are all under lots of stress, which makes it nearly impossible to not have some conflict during production. When this happens, Dr. Goldsmith steps in and handles the conflict by treating it like family therapy, pulling from his over 30 years of experience in marriage and family therapy.
However, Dr. Goldsmith does not just help deal with conflicts on set.
He also provides emotional guidance for actors as they prepare for, then recover from an emotional role. Even though actors are pretending when they perform emotional scenes, their bodies still produce the very real chemicals connectedwith those emotions. In order to move on, those chemicals (often cortisol) must be released.
Dr. Goldsmith’s work has led him to meet stars such as Dakota Fanning, Tracy Morgan and Patricia Arquette, as well as Freddie Highmore, who stars as a surgeon with autism on ABC’s “The Good Doctor.”
When people ask Dr. Goldsmith how they can become an on-set movie therapist, he responds with the question, ‘Have you ever made a movie?’ To Dr. Goldsmith, having shared experiences with his clients is essential to being a good therapist.
“If I haven’t walked a mile in their moccasins, I don’t take them” (as a client), he said.
He even went as far as to joke that he chose psychotherapy over psychiatry because psychotherapy is for neurotics, who he called his people.
Dr. Goldsmith got his start as an onset film therapist a couple of years after getting his doctorate in psychology Someone he knew was making a movie and asked him to act as a therapist on set. From there, word got around to other movie productions, and it snowballed from there.
On top of being an on-set film therapist, Dr. Goldsmith has been a nationally syndicated columnist for over 20 years. His columns are published Saturdays and Mondays in the News-Press.
After 9/11, Dr. Goldsmith decided it was not about money anymore and started the column “Emotional Fitness,” which won the Clark Vincent Award for Writing from the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. For the first decade, he didn’t get paid a dime for his column, so he left and was picked up by numerous newspapers.
Eventually, the column turned into a book, then six more books. And Dr. Barton is still writing. He said, “Writing is my therapy,” so he integrated it into his life, reducing his work, and keeping his work something he loves.
This allows him to keep the same promise to every patient. Once he takes a patient on, a sacred trust is built, so he journeys with his patients until they find some form of peace of mind.
Dr. Goldsmith’s work is a product of his life’s goal, to leave behind his best work, best writing and best therapy. In his attempt to do so, Dr. Goldsmith has won multiple awards — including the Peter Markin Merit Award and the Joseph A. Giannantonio II Award — and was inducted into the CAADAC Hall of Fame.
email: cbeeghly@newspress.com
FYI
Some words of wisdom from Dr. Barton Goldsmith:
— Families should have dinner as a family as often as possible.
— In relationships, a little bit of awareness can go a long way. See who can “outnice” the other person. Kindness can make someone feel good, which leads them to do kind things.
— People put so much unnecessary angst into their lives, and they need to learn how to control it, such as how one acts under stress and being able to identify what is motivating someone.
— People don’t realize the “concept of good enough.”
— If you need a good cry, listen to “Monsters” by James Blunt.
Dr. Goldsmith is based in Westlake Village. To book an appointment, go to bartongoldsmith.com.
