We’re All Voice-Over Stars

I’ve been involved in the VO world for decades and have watched it change dramatically, then become commercially disrupted and change again, then socially and change again.

In the entirely different world of the 1960’s and 70’s voice-over artists were a neat little boutique extension of the entertainment business, who worked mostly out of three cites: New York (by far the largest market), Chicago and LA. 

To be a VO talent was to be represented by a union talent agency and be a card-carrying SAG and AFTRA member. Your agent brought you into their offices several times per week to record demos of radio and TV commercial copy, then the tape operator edited several auditions together onto a reel-to-reel tape and messengered it over to the advertising agency for review and hopefully, a booking.

There were stars in the voice-over world, quite different from any other types. They were only known to the agencies and each other and enjoyed both the faceless anonymity of being regular people in the outside world, but also made gobs of money with ongoing campaigns that could pay residuals as high as a quarter million per year, per campaign. Which, if you were really hot, could be one of a dozen you’d nabbed and could go on for years. I recently met the woman who played Charley Tuna’s girlfriend for Starkist Tuna, back in the 70’s. That gig netted a house and a college education for her kids.

By the 1980’s, voice-over got a suddenly glitzier with the advent of major TV and screen stars landing million-dollar contracts to become the voice of big and luxury brands. It gave the brand a sheen to be associated with a premier voice and it gave the VO business a deep and fearful shudder to see a significant portion of its rank and file actors being shunted aside for in the name of glamor.

By 2000, digital recording made it possible to record from casually constructed home recording setups, then submit via the internet to your agency, which would assemble a digital link to send off to the client, now anywhere on earth.

And by 2010, entirely digital agencies had established such an internet stronghold, that many traditional agencies dried up, replaced by direct-to-client business models via digital handshake, repeated thousands of times per day.

Today, with something like 500 hours of video getting posted online per minute, voiceover is anyone making a smartphone video and talking over the picture. It’s turned the cultural tonality of voice recording into a much more casual overall style and created dozens of sub-genres, ubiquitous on a web that seems second only to the infinitely expanding universe out there in space.

Where outer-worlders are undoubtedly listening.

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Monolith

Fifty years after the fact, the majestic black structure found on the moon by astronauts in the film 2001 still stands as a perfect metaphor for the mysteries of space. Left by some vastly superior race, they are present on Earth at the dawn of man and in the astronaut's Jupertarian bedroom in what appears to be his final destination.

Author Arthur C. Clark, the brilliant geek who brought us this vision, describes them as objects that were placed around the universe to observe, interact and when necessary, to regulate... Behave and everybody gets to evolve the way they will, including you messy humans. Eww.

But how perfectly symbolic to turn to a solid black rectangular block as the key to unfolding the mysteries of the cosmos. A big black block o' “Huh?" Never mind, silly Earthlings. When you're ready, you'll know.

Meanwhile, I've got a monolith of my own. No, not a metaphor for a belief or how I live my life. It's a real, miniature model of a monolith! Six inches tall, it's solid black plastic and sits majestically on a dusty section of bookcase, just waiting for me to throw it some attitude. I love this thing, which came wonderfully blister-packed on a card that pronounced it an action toy, featuring "zero articulating parts!" Bought several and gave them to friends couple Xmases back, proudly inviting them into my elite club. They were, all of them, struck more or less speechless with what I can only conclude was sheer and grateful delight. I imagine the places of honor where their facsimiles now reside, these graceful reminders of our puny insignificance in this minute li'l corner of galaxy.

Brothers and sisters, WE are the Monolith. We stand tall, proud slabs of black plastic, wildly gesticulating, windblown, winsome non-articulating parts. Don't let the opportunity pass. EMBRACE the Monolith. BE the Monolith. We are ALL Monoli-Thick.

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Close Encounters

Let me tell you about my experience with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I’m old enough to have seen it first run at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood back in 1977 and this weekend is its 40^th anniversary, celebrating with new prints in a one-week run at theaters around the country.

I’d never imagined anything close to the overwhelm of witnessing the moment we make actual contact with beings from another planet, who naturally, would need to be coming to us, seeing as our piddling technical prowess is hundreds of years away from finding them. 

There were two extraordinary things about Steven Spielberg’s vision, brought to life on-screen. First, there was an incredible cinematic build-up with sightings and visions to the ultimate major encounter, which was run by government experts and professionals who were both welcoming and awestruck. And second, here was a story of a peaceful visit. No ray-guns, no megalomaniacs, no nervous, trigger-happy army generals or panic in the streets.

That blew me away; the concept that this wasn’t some catastrophe on the way, but that given the right circumstances, we could actually handle it. And welcome it. And be invited into this heretofore hidden galactic community that we had no inkling of until that moment.

I staggered home and spent the next couple of days in contemplation, ultimately writing a deadly serious song about our present situation call Exile in the Universe. 

The chorus:

We are in exile in the universe

And we’ve been sentenced to serve ten million years

Let the courts of the Infinity

Be the judges of our destiny

As we struggle with our prejudice and fears…

That was the chorus, for cryin’ out loud… And I’m looking for the tapes but don’t know if I’ll find them. If not, I’ve got to get around to re-recording something, just to have it and share it with you guys.

That experience changed me in my conscious and unconscious relationship with everything out beyond. And made me the person who ultimately came around to wanting to share that future vision on stages around the world. The movie is playing for one week only (THIS week) – so join me in experiencing history’s most powerful positive experience of things to come. I’ll be sitting center row halfway back, in awe all over again.

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Unbearable Love

Solaris, the Stephen Soderbergh’s 2002 film starring George Clooney and Natascha McElhone, frames a classic story of heartbreak a billion miles from Earth, orbiting a mysterious planet in a space station sent to figure what’s up. Something big enough to fly Clooney’s eminent psychologist and space higher-up out to investigate why people are flipping out and dying.

This is a love story, built around a rare level of attraction between two people, which is so powerful, it seems like it could transcend life itself. Which, thanks to the weirdness around Solaris, it does. Spending his first night on the orbiting station, Clooney awakes to find his beautiful wife sitting next to him, smiling serenely. Shocking not only as to the mystery of how she got there, but because she’d committed suicide on Earth years earlier. Yet here she is, flesh and bone and heart and brain, dark memory-free, in one piece, staring at him innocently and asking what’s wrong.

Remember how little dialog there was in 2001? The empty spaces were filled with huge and lush mixes of giant orchestral works, including the iconic Also sprach Zarathustra – Daaa-Daaa Daaaaaaaaaaaaa…. DiDAAAAAA, boom-boom-boom-boom-boom… etc.

The paucity of dialog in this film makes for the most underwhelming framework since then, adding to the mystery of these manifestations that it turns out each member of the crew is dealing with. Whoever meant the most to them – they’re there now. How to go insane in one easy step.

Clooney makes an ultimate decision at the climax of the film, all the more desperate because in this brainy experiment, he’s ostensibly the brightest bulb. Yet he cannot resist chasing the greatest love of his life towards what must surely be his doom, satisfied it’s what’s worth living for.

Heady stuff, the things that matter most. The greatest love. The biggest score. The most magnanimous gift. The ultimate expression of art, skill, gratitude, forgiveness…

These things that stir our souls, now and a thousands years hence. It’s the stardust talkin’. And we’re all made of it.

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What to Watch

Every year, many thousands of hours of mass market professional film and video content are produced and released and several of those thousands of those hours are eminently watchable, whatever your taste. Add to that my official count of 2.3 gazillion peta-hours of product already in watchable existence (not including cat videos) and you are confronted with a creepily uncomfortable FOMO on a skin-crawling scale.

How important is it to see Casablanca, Citizen Kane, 2001, The Partridge Family, Batman and the Lion King, when Housewives of Dallas is streaming on Bravo right now!? Depends on what's relevant to your basic grokking of what entertainment means to you. Play that out over the next say, 40 years and you reach an inescapable fact: the longer we live, the more stuff we're missing. It's piling up way too fast and at some point, everybody's gotta take a break to pay the rent! What's a concerned cine-TV-phile to do?

Chill. Produce your own content and let someone else worry about not seeing it. Pick the stuff that matters to you and screw the rest. Or go looking for what might matter to you and download that. Five hundred years from now, there will be 11.7 to the 6th power sextupla-jillion movies, series, holograms, injectibles and implantibles available for your viewing pleasure. And we’re talking the GOOD stuff… Maybe that's what the whole concept of digital immortality is about -- watching a portion of that whilst yer inanimate butt is implanted in some earth-bound cloud farm. Seems plausible. Just hope that don't mean it won't be garden-gated with monthly credit charges that relegate less fortunate souls to dealing with an inevitably endless stream of summer re-runs.

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