My buddy Bob Bergen continues to release wonderful videos on Instagram…tips on voice acting for those who wish to enter that profession. Some of them are worth watching if you're aspiring to any kind of job anywhere. If you haven't checked them out, go to this page and start watching.
I spoke with Bob last week to suggest a topic and it turns out he already covered it on a video I missed…but I'll tell you a story that illustrates it. In fact, I'll tell you two of them. The first occurred a number of years ago when in my occasional role as a Cartoon Voice Director, I had to hold auditions and find just the right actor to do the voice of a new character in a new series. I had written some audition copy for the actors to read.
These days, almost all those who audition do so from their home studios but this was back when they used to have to come in to a recording studio as per an appointment made through their agents. I think I auditioned about twenty actors that day. It was a long day.
An actor would arrive, usually while I was auditioning the guy before them. My assistant would welcome them and give them the audition copy which included a few drawings of the new character and a brief explanation of who he was and what he was like. They could study it until it was their turn to come in and record something to show how they'd handle the role.
So midway through the day, in came an actor I knew (sorta) from TV and some on-camera roles, though he did have credits for voice work. I was not the one who asked his agent to send him in to audition. An executive producer of the show thought this might be The Guy and that was how his audition was arranged.
When it was this actor's turn, I welcomed him, told him a bit more about the character and asked if he had any questions. He said no and went into the booth and positioned himself in front of the microphone we had in there. I was outside the booth, seated at a console next to the engineer who controlled all the buttons and dials. In such a set-up, I have a button I can push and communicate with the guy in the booth and I used it to ask him if he was ready. He said he was "more than ready" and he launched into…
Well, he was supposed to be reading the audition copy he'd been given but he wasn't doing that. He was instead ad-libbing a speech based vaguely on the same premise. What he was giving me was not the copy I'd written nor was it even close to the character he was supposed to be playing.
I hit the talkback and told him — nicely, I thought — "You might like to know that I wrote the audition copy you're not reading." "Nothing personal," he said, 'But I never follow the copy."
I said, "Well, if you do this show, you'll have to."
He said, "I don't do that. Like I said, nothing personal. But there's no one in the business who can write dialogue better than what I come up with."
I said, 'Even if that's true, you're not doing the character we need. He's nothing like what you're doing."
He seemed strangely uncaring about that. He just shrugged and said, "So change the character."
I said, "I think we're both wasting our time here." He agreed…and in an oddly friendly manner, came out of the booth, shook my hand and said, "Okay, thanks." He headed for the door, then stopped and looked back at me. "Someday, someone's going to try it my way and have the best friggin' cartoon show ever done." Then he left. The guy who got the part was terrific and just what we wanted.
The funny thing about this was that what he did in the booth was very colorful and I could imagine someone somewhere building a good show around what he was doing. It just wasn't the series we were doing.
(And just for context: I was also the main writer on this show so I did have some power to alter the script and I suppose I could have gone back to the network and the producers to suggest minor (minor!) changes in the character. But I didn't want to in this case, and in most instances, the voice director doesn't have the power to do that. We're hired to supervise the recording of the show the network bought and the script everyone has already approved.)
Up until a few years ago, every cartoon show I voice-directed was recorded in a studio in Los Angeles with all the actors present. It was technically-possible to record an actor via what they call a "phone patch" where he or she is in another studio in another city but except once in a rare while, we didn't do that. It took more time, it cost extra money, the results were not as good and I could probably think of a few other reasons we only did it in an emergency.
All that time, you'd be amazed how often I got a call or an e-mail or someone approached me at a convention to urge me to hire them for a voice job…but they would have to do it over the phone from far, far away. And when I told them, "That's not the way we do it," their reply was, "Well, you can change the way you do it."
And the reply to that which I usually didn't say aloud was: "Why should I? I can get the absolute top voice actors in the business to come into the studio and work the way I like to work." I wasn't going to change things to accommodate some beginner.
COVID has changed the way most cartoons are recorded. Most voice actors have now installed small state-o'-the-art recording studios in their homes and they record from there. Usually, it's with all the actors online at the same time in a ZOOM conference or something similar…so it doesn't matter as much where they are. But it changed because it had to, not because some kid way outta town wanted it to for his sake.
So now here's the other story…
For a brief time in the seventies, I edited a line of Tarzan and Korak comic books for the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate. These were comics published overseas and, so far, never in this country. One day, a young man who had never worked in comics before showed up at the office with his portfolio seeking work on these comics. That portfolio consisted of about two dozen drawings of the way he saw Tarzan. There were two things wrong with his work…
One was that all he had were figure drawings of the character — no backgrounds, no other characters, just a guy in a loin cloth in action poses. If he was drawing Tarzan swinging on a vine, he didn't even draw the vine. And there were no comic book-style pages that told any sort of story to demonstrate that he could do that.
I told him I'd need to see all that — actual panel-by-panel storytelling, backgrounds, the character interacting with others, etc. He said, "I don't want to draw that. I just want to draw Tarzan. Can't you just have some other artist draw all that other stuff?"
No, I told him, I couldn't.
The other problem was that everyone in this project was drawing the version of Tarzan depicted by Russ Manning. In fact, Russ had been the editor, making sure all the artists drew Tarzan roughly as he did. When he got too busy, I took over but the rule was still that the artists were drawing that Tarzan. The young man applying for work was drawing his own version of Tarzan who looked nothing like the same character.
And when I told him that's what I needed, he just shrugged and said, "That's the way I see Tarzan." Okay…but that wasn't the job.
When I said I couldn't even give him a tryout, he grabbed up his samples and walked out. The receptionist later told me he'd stormed past her desk and out of the office, cursing me out and muttering something about how when he was a big, famous illustrator, I'd be humiliated for having turned him down. I've since been humiliated for many things but I don't recall that being among them.
I have more examples but you get the concept. Audition for the job they offer, not for what you wish someone would offer. There are times when someone comes in and they're so spectacular that those doing the hiring will change their minds about what they're seeking but it's like winning the lottery. It happens so rarely that you shouldn't expect it.