– Looking inward by Michael Smith.
The other day, talking to one of my students about how he had the right attitude for success, reminded me of just how far I have come from my not so humble beginnings in this business. When I first started, my ego wasn’t in check, I thought I was much better than I actually was, my head was wedged “Way up there” and I was off on a mission to destroy my career before it even started.
It was New York City, the upper west side. The room was full of agents and want-to-be talent. It was one of these $99 dollar hustles that dot the landscape of this business and completely blanket the island of Manhattan. The hustle is this: You pay some lady $99 dollars and she’ll get some of her agent friends together in a crappy little board room in a 5th floor walkup and you get to come in and ask the agents questions and play your demo for them. The hustle has been going on for a while. It goes on in every business. This particular hustler is still in operation today and even worse, the price for her hustle has gone up by at least 200 dollars.
So here we were, 20 or so suckers who had fallen for the shell game, which was advertised in Back Stage under the ruse of going to this location to meet agents, drop off your demo and shake hands with people. Sure, that is exactly what we were all there to do, and in the sense that we were able to do it, I guess it wasn’t really a ruse. But it was a pointless, meaningless expenditure of time and money because at the end, as with many of these little shell games, you never find the bean. In this case the bean would have been walking out of this little meeting somehow better off in the business. That, my readers, didn’t happen. I doubt it ever will.
I knew this going into it. I knew I was better off spending that money on shoes or something. But I spent it because of one person who was in the room. I had spent a hundred bucks and traveled to NYC just to meet this guy. I was convinced he was going to roll out the red carpet once he heard my voice. I was convinced that once he heard me, the golden gates of voice over were going to swing open and showgirls dressed like the *censored*cat dolls were going to surround me and light me a cigar and start pouring champagne down my gullet. My delusions had me drunken. And the words this agent I had come to see would eventually say to me, have served as the most sobering words of my career.
Here’s the setting. As you walked in, the agents and other “supposed to be important people” were all lined up on the wall to my left. On the table were plastic beer pitchers full of water and assorted Styrofoam cups, along with a little plastic bin with holes in it that you were supposed to drop your demos into if you had them. In the demo bin were tapes with handwriting and stains on them. Some weren’t even in cases; some were just plain old cheap tapes with no labels. There were a few that had headshots attached to them or vice versa. Into the bin I dropped my tape, which was professionally printed, professionally produced and I was sure that would make it stand out. It did, but in a way you might not have expected.
To my right, were 4 or so rows of tables all packed tight with hopefuls. There were people taking notes, people tapping their pens nervously on the tables and chairs in front of them. Some were picking their noses, others just sat there frightened and pale looking like they might be sitting in a courtroom rather than a business function.
I took my seat and glanced up at the head table and there was my guy. At this point he was a representative for a major agency in town, the same agency that represented Howard Stern and quite a few other notables. One of his clients was at the time, my voice over idol and I had done everything in the book to make myself sound like him. I had his voice down to a T. I could talk like him no matter what I was doing and because I was so into myself, I didn’t see what was coming down the track that would smack me into reality when I finally got a chance to introduce myself to this agent.
So here we all were, anxiously awaiting the demo segment of this little program. We had all essentially paid a bill to have these guys critique our demos. Whatever the hustler woman said during this whole thing is completely forgotten. I do know that she spent most of the time trying to shill her little buddies at the table who were all too happy and available to charge you more money for coaching, more demos and headshots. I still haven’t figured out why there was a headshot photographer there but there was. Just one more link in the financial chain of bandits I guess.
If you have never witnessed or been involved in a shell game on the streets of New York or any other major city, it consists of some jive turkey leaning over a stack of cardboard boxes moving around a trio of walnut-shell halves on top of the box. Under one of the halves is a bean, or a rock, which “magically” disappears as this character moves the shells around and around then stops. At this point you are supposed to guess which one of the shells the bean is under. No matter how many times you guess, you will never be right. The bean is never under the shell you pick.
Most people wouldn’t get involved in these silly games if there were never a winner, so the hustler brings in some of his buddies to stand around the boxes and place bets. When they see a mark (a sucker in less polite terms) coming down the street, one of the hustlers buddies will “magically” win and start yelling and causing a scene; waiving his money around in the air. The mark will see this and say, “Hey, that guy just won. Maybe I can.” Over to the table goes the mark, and tosses some of his money on the box, which is quickly snatched, never to be seen again.
Without going any further, maybe you can see the correlation I am drawing between the hustler standing in front of the boxes, and the hustlers buddies all standing around trying to make the hustler look good, which in turn draws in the mark. So what if the hustler who got these agents and other people together wasn’t out on the street. A hustle is a hustle, and the one I bought into just happened to serve coffee. Much like any other mark, I thought I could beat the hustle. I was so sure of myself I thought I could find the bean.
The time came when we were all going to listen to the demos in the little demo box. The lady plugged in a couple of demos and played them, handing out her opinions to whoever had made them; all along saying to the ones with their homemade cassette tapes, that one of the people at the table would be happy to talk to them about a new demo. I noticed she was very flattering toward the people with the worst packages. She would go out of her way to be complimentary of people who needed the most help.
Then it came time for my demo. The only pro demo in the box. She played it and then proceeded to shoot it down, talk about how good it wasn’t and how I should get a new one; which, surprise-surprise, someone at the table was more than happy to help me with. This is when I knew this was a mining operation looking for people to take advantage of. A collective group of profiteers looking to sweep up some of these marks up into a delusion similar to mine.
I don’t to this date think any of the agents in attendance were in on this. I think they were there as a favor, or maybe to find some new blood, but I don’t think they were in on the hustle. I don’t know if any of them even participate in this type of plundering hype any longer. I think they were there just to lend a hand and give the whole gathering some credibility. At the time, they amounted to the people who weren’t connected to the shell game or the hustler, but just happened to be standing around the box to see what was happening.
The reason she was trashing my demo should have been obvious. Whether or not my demo showed promise, there wasn’t any more money to be made off of me. The others in the room were desperate and would pay even more money to have someone tell them they stink. I wasn’t going to pay that money, so it was to her advantage to crap on my stuff and move on to the other marks. I wasn’t going to buy into the idea that I might have sucked anyway. In my mind I was Joe Cool, and the world needed me more than I needed them.
The meeting came to an end and now came time to shake the hands of the various agents that sat for the most part like uncomfortable bumps on a log the entire time. The hustler was off trying to sink her teeth into the various marks in the room. I can remember her saying, “Who does this tape belong to? I need to talk to you and you and you…” Of course she never uttered a word to me. So I wandered over to the agent whom I had been stalking this entire time.
I started talking to the agent in the voice of my idol. Every word that came out – came out sounding just like a guy he talked to all the time. I thought this was my shot. I thought this was my chance to show this guy I could sound just like one of the big dogs. He turned and looked at me almost smirking and said, “Hey, have you ever heard of…” finishing with the name of his client and my idol at the time – to which I said, “Yes.”. He replied by saying, “We’ve already got one, thanks.” And he put on his jacket and walked away.
I stood there quiet, speechless, and awash in the oft-times sour breath of epiphany.
I realized at this time more than any other, that I was an idiot and had been to this point in the pursuit of voice over as a career. I was an idiot for falling for the hustle. But I was an even bigger one for falling for my own. I had been lying to myself, and it took this embarrassing moment to make me realize it and to admit it. It was so embarrassing in fact that it has taken me over a decade to write about it, which is what I am doing here. My motive for writing about it more so than to clear my head, is to try to help new talent talk them selves back off the ledge if they ever find themselves on it, or to avoid it all together.
I was so sure that because I had taken a mess of voice over lessons and gotten a quality demo tape that the VO world was just dying to hear me. Not only were they not waiting to hear me, they didn’t even know I existed. Unfortunate as it was, to make the problem even worse I was walking up to real movers and shakers in this business introducing myself as one of their clients rather than introducing myself as me. I don’t care if that’s bad English.. Suck it up and get over it.
In short, this is not the impression we should be making on people we meet. Certainly not the impression we want to make on agents that deal with some of the highest paying clients in the country. To this day, I still send e-mails to that agent. He is still a bigwig in the VO world. Every now and then he writes me back. I have been trying to make amends for that first meeting ever since. In many respects I have let it go. But I still wish I could take that day back.
Over the years, I have gotten a lot better at what I do. The temptation to get big headed has never returned. If anything, I have become more humble with every success and have met and or talked to voice talent much more successful and subsequently more humble than myself. They have taught me that I still have a long way to go.
If ever again I catch myself starting to think I’m a little too cool for everyone else, all I have to do is close my eyes and walk back into that room in New York and take a seat at the front table. From that seat I can watch those stupid words come out of my stupid mouth again and again. It is that vision that keeps me in check.
It is also that vision that I have shared with my students over the years. I want them to know the traps and the pitfalls that lie along this shadowy road; obstacles that we most often create ourselves. I tell them about the shell games as well. The hustlers are out there around every corner and some of the most prolific marketers in this industry still set up their boxes. Those are pitfalls we cant do a whole lot about except avoid them.
What we can do is:
not get to thinking that we sound better than we do.
not get to thinking that we are better voice actors than we are.
not get to thinking that because someone made us a demo tape the world is waiting to hear us.
not get to thinking that we sound better with any voice other than our own.
I think part of the reason people getting into voice over try to effect there voice by having it be anything other than in its natural range, is they have convinced themselves that this contrived voice sounds cool. Maybe they heard it on the radio and got to thinking that if their voice sounded like that guy, they could be on the radio too. Or they could be like I was in the beginning and idolize someone so much that they wanted to sound like them in order to improve their chances. What this tells me now, that it didn’t tell me then is that maybe the people who go this route aren’t that comfortable being themselves.
If you think you might be one of these people I can only offer you this advice: Stop now and don’t do it. You sound anything but cool. Take it from me. I have been there and made that mistake. If you want to get into voice over and claim any kind of success, before getting into character work, before getting into any kind of voice work, before trying to find any other voice, focus on finding your own. If you never learn how to use and manipulate your own voice, you will never have one.
So many young VO’s try to get into this business by doing characters on their demos and making their voice sound “like something” other than their own. Of the many who have tried it, the only ones who made it are the ones that stuck with it and became exceptionally good at it like Billy West, Rob Paulsen and Beau weaver, or the entire cast of The Simpsons. None of them would have been able to develop those characters had they not first discovered and crafted their own voice. All of them are capable of backing out of their characters and performing straight work. But they didn’t put a bunch of bad, silly voices on a tape and suddenly find themselves at the top of the character VO heap. If you want to spend a few moments looking at the cream of the crop, look at this page on Marc Graue’s web site.
These are all people who started somewhere, but they didn’t get where they are buy being full of them selves. As big as the voice over world may seem, it is a very tiny world and none of the people in it want to work with a jerk. If you aren’t the type of person you would like to hang out with, it is time for some assessment. If you are the type of person you would like to hang out with, yet you find no one else wants to, then you really need to take a look at yourself.
I was able to discover through the startling honesty of that agent and subsequent self-awareness practices, that walking around thinking I was cool would only lead to an empty place where I sat alone, telling myself how cool I was. I wanted to be a voice actor, and in order to achieve that goal I would have to start down the road of being myself, and sounding like me. Not trying to be or sound like someone else. It is the words of that agent and the reality they forced me to see, which are almost entirely responsible for the success I have had in voice over. A reality I wish I had known before that fateful night in New York.
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