Brian Dreger sends a follow-up question to this earlier one…
I have to ask this, and I need an answer…if you can, please!
When you had an opportunity, as a Voice Director to hire people that you admired previously in other works that you had nothing to do with, did you have to force yourself to refrain from bombarding them with "fan" questions? I mean…Howard Morris? You could've annoyed the hell out of him just asking questions about his career! If I'm not mistaken, at the time you started doing voice directing you were a "seasoned" (a dopey description, but you get what I mean) professional writer, but new at being a Voice Director and maybe meeting — for the first time — artists you admired? Or maybe that was never a thing with you…you just saw them as people who are simply talented and then moved on to the work…?
I'm going to expand your question a little to answer it. I've spent a lot of my life meeting and often working with people whose work I'd admired when I was younger. It's not just as a director of cartoon voices. It was meeting Jack Kirby and Groucho Marx and George Burns and Sid Caesar and Stan Freberg and Steve Ditko and Charles Schulz and June Foray and Jay Ward and Carl Barks and Jerry Siegel and Joe Barbera and Daws Butler and legions of others in comic books, comic strips, animation and other creative fields.
Darn near 100% of these people (if not every last one of them) were pleased that I knew who they were and what they'd done. Now, it is possible to make a fool of yourself with some such folks by slobbering and pestering and asking stupid questions…and I know I did that at times and probably did it many times when I didn't know it. But there is a way to talk with such people, especially when — as in the case of Howard Morris — the meeting would or could lead to a job they welcomed.
(I told the story of meeting Howie in this message. That was the second time I met him. The first was on the set of an episode of The Andy Griffith Show that he was directing and I probably made a fool of myself then. But I had a good excuse then: I was eleven years old.)
As an adult, you need to respect their personal space and not "crowd" them, physically or emotionally or at an inappropriate time. Remember that they are human beings and they weren't put there, wherever they are, for your personal amusement and gratification. Remember that they often get asked the same questions over and over and over.
And if they're a performer and you fancy yourself a performer, they're probably not all that interested in you performing for them or trying to equate what you do to what they do.
Chuck McCann once told me that when people met Stan Laurel, around 99% of them started by asking him how he and Oliver Hardy met. Maybe it would have been refreshing for someone to save that question for later (if ever) and ask about something else. If they have one towering credit in their life, maybe they'd be pleased to be asked about something else for a change. When I met Robert Morse, I did not start off our very-short-term relationship by talking just about How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. I asked him about other shows and movies he'd been in. I sensed that he liked that I didn't think he'd only done one thing in his lifetime.
Basically, it's like the way you'd approach someone who wasn't famous but just someone you wanted to get to know: Don't come on too strong. And I've also found that most famous people don't like being told how awesome and legendary you think they are. If you give them a compliment, don't make it a clichéd one and make sure it's at human scale. I personally think the word "legend" has been so devalued by constant application that it's hollow and meaningless. It's like a standing ovation on a talk show. They give them to everyone.
Bottom line: Just don't be a jerk. That's all it takes. And if you can't manage that, try not to be too big a jerk.
