June Foray was honored this evening with a celebration at the Motion Picture Academy, from whence I have just returned. It was to honor June's many years of service to the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch. The Academy is, as you may know, a somewhat political entity with various folks lobbying for more attention and money to be directed towards their area of specialty. The lighting people are always pushing for more Oscars to be presented (and more prominently) for lighting, and for more film retrospectives and exhibitions to focus on lighting, etc. June's efforts on her committee are high among the reasons that there are still Oscars for short subjects, and now one for feature animation, and that all are presented in the on-air telecast and treated as major areas. So a load of her friends and cohorts convened to salute her, and there was food and drink and speechifying and applause and a very good time was had by all.
This is as good a place as any to mention that I am assisting Ms. Foray with her long-awaited biography. Soon, I will be advertising here for someone who wants to earn rotten money for transcribing interviews I'll be conducting with her. Right now, I'm asking if anyone out there can help me jog her memory with some of the more obscure things she's done. Her powers of recall are very good but no one could have worked as much as that woman has worked and remember more than about a third of it. The other day, she received a residual check for her work on the Frank Sinatra movie, Dirty Dingus Magee and she called me up and said, "Was I in that? What did I do?" I've never seen the film so she called Frank Sinatra Jr and he didn't know, either. But June's in a lot of movies dubbing other actresses and sometimes children, and I'd like to try and identify as many of them as I can.
In the speeches this evening, director Arthur Hiller mentioned one such role. When he did the 1971 movie, The Hospital, there was a line spoken by Diana Rigg that he thought was not perfect. This was decided during the editing process and as Ms. Rigg was back in England, he brought June in and she redubbed it with a slightly different inflection. She did it so well, he said, that Diana Rigg did not even notice the substitution and had to be told that it had been done and which line it was. That's the kind of thing I'd like to itemize…as many of those as possible. If you know of any, let me know. June is a remarkable woman and I have a feeling this is going to be a remarkable book.