I love this little piece of video because I loved the guy in it — Howard Morris, a great character actor and one of those people I'm so glad I had in my life for a not-long-enough period. Howie died in 2005 and I often think of him as a wonderful, crazy honorary uncle or something. I don't expect you to watch all of this but maybe you'll watch enough to see some of what made him so very special both as a performer and as a person.
This is raw footage from a show Howie appeared on in 1985 called Tales in the Oral Tradition, which I gather was a Jewish-themed public service TV program. The tape is in four parts. Part One is an interview of Howie in which he talks a lot about his career. Somewhere in there, he speaks about his problems auditioning for people much younger than him — a bugaboo in his life that I wrote about here. It was a constant area of frustration for a man like him who was only really happy when he was performing.
Part Two is more interview. Apparently after they finished taping the conversation, someone decided it might not run long enough so Howie sat for additional questioning which could be edited into what they'd already done.
Parts Three and Four will give you some sense of what was so marvelous about Howie as an actor. He sits on a stool and tells one of the great Sholem Aleichem stories, in this case one about the wise men of Chelm. If you're not familiar with Sholem Aleichem, he was kind of the Jewish Mark Twain. And if you're not familiar with Chelm, it was a fabled city of fools written about in hundreds of tales.
As I continue my listing of the Twenty Greatest Cartoon Voice Actors of an earlier era, I will soon get to Howie. If you want to see the talent that made him truly great at doing voices for animation, watch Howie read a story. I think he was working here with two TelePrompters mounted on two cameras and while he's reading the copy, it's hard to catch him doing so.
I'm further thinking the copy was marked to tell him to move his gaze at certain moments from Camera 1 to Camera 2 or vice-versa because the director was cutting back and forth between them in real time. Watching him do this effortlessly — and he did not have a lot of experience reading a Prompter or working directly to camera — I'm impressed with how well he does it without harming the telling of the tale.
Part Three starts around 24 minutes into this video and that's his first take. Even better is his second take which is preceded by a brief conversation with his director. Put the little slider to 33:20 and watch a little of this if you can. That, folks, is how you tell a story…