Brent McKee wrote to ask…
I heard something on a podcast I was listening to today that surprised me. It was Leo Laporte's Tech Guy Podcast from May 19th. In the course of the show there was a call from a guy who had been doing radio and voice work for years and knew some of the legends including Daws Butler.
Daws apparently gave this guy some advice which was to never work in Hollywood. He also said that in the years that he worked for Hanna-Barbera, Daws was always paid daily rate. There was much tut-tutting from Leo about how important Daws was to the success of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but it got me to wondering what the standard practice is in the industry. Because you don't need a voice man every day, you wouldn't keep them on salary, would you? Now the amount might be greater or lesser, but surely you'd only pay them for when you need them? Or am I misunderstanding what the guy was saying?
Leaving aside a voice actor who also performs some other function on a show (like Bill Scott on Rocky & Bullwinkle where he was an actor-writer-producer), the only cartoon voice performer I can think of who was ever on a weekly salary was Clarence Nash. Disney always had him around when they needed the voice of Donald Duck for practically anything including promotional recordings. They also sent him out with a Donald puppet to make personal appearances.
I can't think of any others. In his autobiography, Joe Besser bragged about being paid some huge, unrevealed weekly salary by DePatie-Freleng to do voices on their cartoons in the sixties or maybe seventies. He didn't do anywhere near enough for them to make that cost-effective so I kinda doubt that claim.
All the actors at Hanna-Barbera were paid by the job. Most received union scale — whatever the Screen Actors Guild had negotiated at that point. Some of those who had important roles or long-running successful characters or personal fame would negotiate for amounts above union scale.
Often these days and sometimes back then, a lead would get double-scale or triple-scale or scale plus $500 or something like that. Sometimes, they would also negotiate for a certain guaranteed amount of work. Joe Barbera told me that at one point, Alan Reed was holding out for a substantial raise to do another season of The Flintstones. He wanted one amount above scale for each session; H-B wanted to pay him another. They compromised somewhere in the middle and also guaranteed Mr. Reed a certain number of sessions at S.A.G. scale on some other Hanna-Barbera show…which is why he was the voice of the character Dum-Dum in the Touché Turtle cartoons.
So yes, Daws Butler was a day player. So was Don Messick, so was John Stephenson, so was Jean Vander Pyl, etc. They may have negotiated rates above scale and at times, certainly did. But they did not get a weekly paycheck from the studio. They were hired when needed and paid by the session.
At times, Daws was down on the whole process. This is just my opinion but I think Daws did not always have the best agents. But he also for a long time had a little school in his home where he trained young actors for the profession so I don't think he was too down about working in Hollywood.
And he charged very little for those classes so I don't think he was hard-up for money. I would not however disagree with someone who felt that, given his value to the success of that studio and to the worth of most characters he voiced, he was grossly underpaid. I feel the same way about most of the great cartoon voice actors that I feel about most of the great comic book writers and artists.
