From Bruce Bennett…
I like to watch old sitcoms, especially the well-written ones, and after seeing a particularly good episode of The Bob Newhart Show, I noticed Lorenzo Music happened to write it. I also remember that Steve Martin mentioned him in an interview about the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, where he wrote a lot for Pat Paulsen, which was some of my favorite stuff from that wonderful series.
So my question is, did Lorenzo Music stop writing comedy after becoming such a successful voice actor playing "Carlton, Your Doorman" on Rhoda, and then Garfield the Cat? You wrote Garfield. Did he ever make suggestions for storylines or dialogue with you? Or was he satisfied to be just a voice artist?
Lorenzo was a much-praised, very successful writer-producer before transitioning into (mostly) a much-praised, very successful voice actor. He didn't stop writing completely but a lot of his later writing was the kind he described as "for myself." He was a co-writer on one of the prime-time Garfield specials before I got involved with The Cat but he never suggested any storylines to me.
As for dialogue, yes. He didn't do it often but sometimes, he would ask me if he could rephrase a line to make it funnier and I probably said yes every time. Most good voice actors do at least a little of that. Lorenzo was very sharp and he'd had years of fine-tuning dialogue for comedy shows so as to wring all possible mirth out of a speech.
I should explain that on many cartoon shows — including all the ones I've voice-directed — the actors do not get the scripts in advance. On Garfield and Friends, I spent every possible moment writing and rewriting. I even sometimes rewrote during a session after I'd heard the lines read.
There are other ways to do it but the way we found worked best would be that we'd hand the actors a script for a cartoon and I'd assign the roles of non-recurring characters. In addition to playing Odie, Gregg Berger might also do the voice of a policeman or an alley cat. The scripts merely had the dialogue — no description of what the characters were doing in each scene — so I'd walk the actors through the script: "On line 22, you're falling down a flight of stairs…on line 23, you crash into a live goat…"
Then we would start recording. There was no point in rehearsing since we'd just do it over and over until we all thought it was as good as it was ever going to get. If a script was ten pages, we might do the first three until we were happy and then do the next three and so on. Our cast was amazing and a lot of what made it onto the air was the first time we did it. Some of the seven-minute cartoons were recorded in under fifteen minutes. As I explained back in this post, a guest star might occasionally be stunned by how short a time they were there.
So Lorenzo didn't have a lot of time to study the script and think of ways to improve it. From the moment my assistant handed him a script to the moment the engineer said "This is Take One" was about five minutes. But he was very fast and very funny and that was more than enough. And since I'm talking about Lorenzo — and because I miss the guy — here's a photo I've run here before of the two of having lunch at one of his favorite (but now defunct) restaurants…
Lorenzo is on the left, of course. And the reason I have that odd look on my face is because, I suspect, I just realized that the restaurant served nothing but cole slaw. No wonder it went out of business.
