Tomorrow afternoon, I'm hosting a live online YouTube version of The Business of Cartoon Voices, a panel I've been hosting every year at Comic-Con International. For the last umpteen years, my Sunday at that convention has gone as follows. Unless there's a business-type meeting elsewhere, once I get to the convention hall, I go upstairs and stay there until the convention is over.
I start with the 10 AM panel, which is the Annual Jack Kirby Tribute Panel in Room 5AB. That ends at 11:15, whereupon I hike down the hall to Room 6A and host the Sunday Cartoon Voices Panel, the second of two such presentations at the con. That's over at 12:45 and by the time I get the panelists out of the room, it's at least 1 PM.
One of the hardest parts of moderating a panel, especially in one of the big rooms, is ending it on time and clearing out so the next panel can begin on time. Audience members rush the stage at the end to meet the panelists up close and personal and to ask for autographs while I try to do two things. I have to get the panelists in a group so photographers — amateur, freelance and shooting for the convention — can snap off some shots. Then I have to get the panelists to physically leave the stage and exit the hall while the stage crew resets for the next event. That is sometimes more difficult than you'd imagine.
I then have an hour before my next panel. The con is nice enough to provide me with an assistant who usually has my lunch waiting but I may have to wolf it down while giving an interview or discussing business. No matter what, I have to get myself down to Room 25ABC, which is quite a schlep, to set up for the Cover Story panel which starts at 2 PM. If you've never seen Cover Story, it's kind of "shop talk" for artists who create covers for comic books. I invite some good ones to participate and we discuss design, color, art supplies, lettering, logos…even how the cover illustration is cropped.
At 3 PM, I get to stay in the same room for The Business of Cartoon Voices. I have a couple of voice actors and an agent or two and we discuss how one goes about getting into the business of speaking for animated characters. This panel evolved out of the Cartoon Voices Panels I've been doing at Comic-Con for a couple of decades. If you've never seen one, six that I've done online since The Pandemic started can be found on this page. They consist of oft-heard Cartoon Voice Actors demonstrating their art (or craft; it's a little of both) and the panels are very funny and fascinating, not because of me.
The in-person ones used to end with me taking questions from the audience but I stopped doing that some years ago. All the questions seemed to be from folks asking the panelists some version of "How do I get your job?" For reasons of time and mood, that did not seem to be the place to sufficiently answer those questions.
And I'll be honest with you: An awful lot of the questions wound up being from wanna-be voice actors wanting to turn their moment at the microphone into their audition. They'd talk about their careers and what they'd done and they'd start doing voices. Often, they wanted to "work with" (sort of) the panelists. If June Foray was on the panel, at least one audience member would want to do his Bullwinkle impression and have her do Rocky. If Rob Paulsen was on the panel, someone who thought he did a much better impression of The Brain than he did would want Rob to do Pinky so they could have a little exchange.
As a moderator, I always keep an eye on the audience. That's as important as anything else you do when you're hosting something like this. And what I saw when the audience-questioners were trying to make it all about them was members of the audience rolling their eyes, yawning and walking out. It ended those panels on a low note.
At the same time, I had another concern…
Hollywood (and I'm not just using that word in a geographic sense) abounds with wanna-bes…people who dream of careers they may or may not ever attain. It also therefore abounds in people who seek to profit from those dreams. Exploitation seems to materialize in any situation when there are people leaving themselves open to be exploited.
If you're one such person who wants to be a successful, working voice actor, they want to charge you for photos or for coaching or for participating in "showcases." Showcases — which always seem like scams to me — give you the opportunity to pay some serious bucks to perform in front of people who may or may not have the power to hire you to be in a movie or on a TV show. Please read the following paragraph carefully…
There are coaches and photographers and teachers who are honest and good and helpful and you may be able to benefit mightily from their services. Most folks who do make it in the business have studied with good ones. There are also people who will tell you that you have talent and potential, especially if you don't have much of those but do have money. About all they'll do is take that money while moving you no closer to the career you seek. You need to be really, really careful to avoid those in this second category.
I have seen some heartbreaking instances of preying on Aspiring Talent. Often, it takes the form of a parent shelling out cash they can ill-afford to try and give their beloved child the career that the beloved child wants oh so badly. This bothers me and it bothered a great friend of mine named Earl Kress.
Earl passed away in 2011 and I miss him every day. Here is the obit I wrote for him back then and it still makes my eyes damp when I read it. He was a writer but also at times a voice actor. We were introduced by another lovely, talented person I miss a lot…Daws Butler. One of the best voice actors who ever lived.
Earl had co-hosted a few Cartoon Voices Panels with me and we talked a lot about the above two concerns — the Q-and-A segments and what they'd become, and also the predatory gougers of newcomers. He as much as I came up with the idea for the Business of Cartoon Voices panels and he was involved in the first one. I think I wrote here once that those panels were my way to try and lessen the predatory practices. If I said it that way, I was wrong. I should have said our way.
So every year, I don't take questions from the floor at the Cartoon Voice Panels but I do host this seminar. I am very pleased that we have seen audience members — a few, please understand — go from being audience members to being working cartoon voice actors. At least two have even appeared with me on Business of Cartoon Voices Panels to serve as instructors for the kind of folks they used to be.
It's the last program event I do each year in San Diego. It starts at 3 PM and runs 90 minutes…then panelists and audience move out into the corridor and we talk in little groups and one-on-one for at least a half-hour. By the time I get away from that, the convention downstairs has closed so that is how my Comic-Con International always ends. It is always very satisfying for me.
For tomorrow's online version, I've asked two of the best voice actors (and coaches) working today…Debi Derryberry and Bob Bergen. And I've lassoed two of the best agents…Cynthia McLean, who represents some stellar voice actors at SBV Talent, and Paul Doherty who is the "D" in CESD Talent. There are also bad agents in this business and if Cynthia and Paul are too modest to explain why they are among the best, I will.
The panel is live at 4 PM tomorrow. That's Pacific Time so you can figure out what it is in your Time Zone. You can watch it on this site but if you want to ask questions while it's in progress, you'll need to watch it live on YouTube, which you can do via this link. If you miss it or miss part of it, don't fret. It will rerun here and there on demand for a long, long time.
Just think of it as yet another Public Service from newsfromme.tv.