The Voiceover Artist (30 page)

“But in an interview he gave to
The New Yorker
in
1953
, Walz bristled at the term. ‘I am not an announcer,' he declared, in what the columnist described as Walz's ‘signature, clear-as-a-bell baritone.' Walz went on to explain that ‘an announcer simply vocalizes the text put in front of him, and if he's any good, he vocalizes well. I do something more. If there is any heart in a sponsor's script, any humanity at all in the words, I make it the centerpiece of my performance. And the audience can
feel
the humanity coming through the radio, even if my voice sounds the same as it always has.'

“For hundreds of Walz's contemporaries in stations across the country,” the narrator continued, “simply announcing the text put in front of them was good enough to earn a living. And surely Harrison Walz was handed commercial scripts so shallow or coarsely consumerist that he could find no humanity in them. But by digging deep and finding something human in so many of the scripts he performed, Harrison Walz created and played many more characters than the famous radio actors with whom he shared a studio. He made the craft of commercial voiceover an art form, one that many voice professionals would claim to practice, but few truly understand.”

The audio ebbed into silence. I stood before the exhibit, afraid to move. I had dreamed throughout my long silence of becoming what I thought of as the best kind of voiceover artist: a highly skilled straight announcer. Now, near the end of my accidental pilgrimage to this one-room tribute to radio's survival, I'd heard emphatic testimony from one of the Great Voices that announcement and voiceover artistry were entirely distinct, that a straight announcer was no voiceover artist at all.

Worse, I knew deep down that Walz was right. What had made Larry Sellers my hero was the way his voice made me
feel
when I heard it. Until that moment, though, I hadn't been conscious that I'd been hearing anything more than the richness and precision of his delivery. They didn't have names, they didn't have silly voices, but Larry Sellers had been finding and creating characters—human beings behind the words—for as long as I'd been listening to him. Larry Sellers was a voiceover artist, just as Harrison Walz had been.

I yearned for the seconds-ago past in which my legitimacy as a voiceover artist seemed to hinge on the kind of script I'd be handed for the New York Red Bulls session. Now I could see that I was already an impostor: I wasn't really a voiceover artist. And in that moment, I was certain I never would be. I believed I had as much chance of creating a character on my own as I did of growing six inches taller.

Even the Manhattan Museum of Radio Arts was a place where Connor belonged and I did not.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find the attendant standing behind me.

“We're closed.”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“I need the docent.”

I pulled off the headphones and handed them over, along with the audio device. The attendant unclipped a karabiner from his belt loop and pinched a key between his thumb and forefinger. Then he gave me a look that said,
Get out.

I started walking. The attendant followed. Nearing the door, I noticed an exhibit I'd missed on my way in. A triangle of warm, yellow light shone up from behind an old wooden radio cabinet, illuminating the exhibit's title—“The Voices”—and a dedication: “In honor of the on-air personalities of New York radio.”

The installation had the collective, anonymous feel of a memorial marking a mass grave, and I understood that hastily buried among the newsreaders and traffic reporters were the practitioners of straight announcement, the soullessly technical virtuosos who had recorded hundreds of commercial scripts without finding even one character lying moribund on the page and reviving her.

 

•••

 

WHEN I FINALLY
 got into my hotel room, I didn't open up my laptop to see if the script for the next day's session had been sent to me. I dropped my bag in a corner and left the laptop zipped inside it.

I drew the curtains, blacking out the city lights that were beginning to outdo what little daylight remained. I stood on the heel of one shoe and lifted my foot out of it; the other shoe I wrenched off with my hands. I undid my belt, pulled down my pants, and stepped out of them. When I was out of my t-shirt, too, I stood still alongside the queen-size bed, feeling my sweat evaporate into the cool, stale air. I threw all but one of the bed's pillows onto the floor, gathered the comforter, blanket and sheets into my hand, and yanked them back. I hadn't eaten since leaving Chicago, but I wasn't hungry. I wasn't tired, either. The sensation of rushing into bed without any thought of going to sleep was familiar—I'd done this many times—but this time was different. I had a voice now, and I'd bet everything on it.

I sat down at the head of the bed, peeled off my socks, and swung my bare feet onto the bed sheet, which felt cool but rough to the touch. Then I reached over to the bedside bureau, picked up the clock radio, and turned it on. Scanning through the stations, I studied every character-driven commercial I could find, trying desperately to make myself—overnight—into a voiceover artist.

A real one, this time.

11

 

Lily Eisenberg

 

I CHECK THE
 calendar on my phone: yes, today is Friday, August
6
th, and yes, I told everyone on my team that we'd record voiceover from
10
to
11
a.m. at Steel Cut Studios. I'm staring at the fucking calendar event I sent out. For the life of me, I don't see any good reason why we are twenty minutes into the session and the talent I
flew to New York for one hour of work
isn't here yet.

Simon Davies' tardiness doesn't seem to matter much to my client, Kevin Earley. He's standing with his back to me, waving his arms around and talking at the sound engineer and my intern. An audience of any size makes Earley louder and more annoying.

“So I find the guy who looks like the level head in the group—”

Earley's dress shirt, starched to the stiffness of cardboard, lets out a muted crack as he rests his hand on the shoulder of an invisible man.

“—and I say, ‘Look, man. You gotta get your boys outta here or we're gonna have problems.' And the guy gives me a look—the real fuckin' stink-eye—and he says, ‘You'd better get
your
boys outta here, because
my
guys ain't leaving.' Now we got fuckin' problems.”

We
do
have problems. We have this studio for only forty more minutes, and we haven't recorded a thing.

Earley's audience—one man and a weasel of a kid—is slouched into opposite corners of an overstuffed, black leather couch. The man is Derrion, the engineer Steel Cut has provided for the session. The enormous hood of his oversized dark blue sweatshirt rumples down over his shoulders, and he is chewing on the knotted end of a drawstring. Derrion's calm, unchanging expression is that of a man getting paid whether he is running a soundboard or pretending to care about some crazy white guy's story. On the other corner of the couch is Michael, the intern I've been stuck with for two weeks. He is somebody's nephew. His only credentials are having muddled through four years of prep school and two semesters of pass-fail classes at Brown. The official reason Michael is assigned to me is that he wants to be a copywriter, like me, but when I opened our first meeting by saying, “So you want to be a copywriter,” Michael responded, “Not really.”

“Oh.” I thought I might have stumbled onto an argument for pawning him off on someone else. “What do you want to be?”

“A creative director,” he said.

“Really.”

He nodded. “I'm an idea guy.”

So far as I can tell, the Idea Guy has no idea that I hate him. I have not been trying to hide this. Perhaps Michael has failed to notice the white-hot loathing in my eyes because, when he looks at me at all, he stares at my tits like a hungry toddler.

To Kevin Earley, though, Michael pays unblinking, worshipful attention. He is completely taken with the down-market, white-ethnic version of manhood Earley is selling.

“By now,” Earley says, “my buddy is in another guy's face. They're nose to nose. And nobody is stepping in to stop it. We're crowding around, itching for somebody to throw the first—”

A tone from the intercom interrupts Earley's story.

“Simon Davies is here for Lily,” the receptionist says.

“Thank God.” I stand up. “Michael, would you bring Simon back, please?”

“Whoa!” Earley says. “I'm just getting to the good part.”

“I'm sure Derrion can't wait to hear it,” I say.

Earley points his hand at Michael, who has not moved. “The kid might learn something.”

“We've got half an hour to get this spot.”

“And whose fault is that, Lily?” Earley asks. “I didn't pick the talent. You did.”

I transfer my hard stare from Earley—you can only give a client so much grief—to my intern. And what does Michael do? He looks at Earley, all but asking my client to overrule me.

“Better do what she says, kid,” Earley says.

In his tone, I hear what Earley doesn't say:
You know how these bitches can get.

With an eye roll he probably thinks is subtle, Michael gets up and walks around the far side of the mixing console to the control-room door. I watch him, daring him to challenge me again, but the weasel just pouts.

When Michael is out of the room, Earley slides his hands into the pockets of his pleated pants, takes a few steps toward me, and says, “You're taking all this pretty seriously, wouldn't you say, Lily?”

I don't answer. I don't even shrug my shoulders. Derrion tries to escape into the kaleidoscopic screensaver playing on the monitor in front of his empty seat at the soundboard.

Then, at a low volume meant to signal that he is speaking some profound truth, Earley says, “Let me put it another way. If you think this spot is going to sell New York Red Bulls tickets, you're the only one.” He shakes his head and swipes his hand through the air. “Not true. My idiot boss agrees with you. But what the fuck does he know? He likes soccer.”

This is Kevin Earley in a nutshell: doing work he doesn't believe in, for a man he doesn't respect, in a sport he sees as a waste of time and money. From the day I started working with him, Earley has made no bones about wanting to get out of professional soccer and into professional baseball, and not any-way, any-how. Earley wants an in-house marketing job with the Yankees.

“The biggest brand in sports,” he says, referring to the Yanks.

He's right about that much.

I'd never tell him so, but I want out of soccer and into baseball as badly as Earley does. Unlike Earley, though, I
love
soccer. I started playing on traveling teams as a ten-year-old and played all the way through college. I became who I am running alongside girls—and, later, women—matching them step for step, my thick, kinky ponytail bouncing with every footfall and my pale blue eyes glued to their hips. (A player can't fake you out with her hips. Hips don't lie.) As we ran and shoved and clawed at each other, I shouted in their ears, making them believe with the breath I wasted on words that I still had another gear if I needed it. I was never much into scoring goals. I threw my body in front of hard heads and cleated feet to win the ball and, if I felt like she needed it, I'd use my shoulders and spikes to teach a striker a lesson. Whenever I walked off the field a winner, I would hear the catty, stage-whispered comments—losing brings out the worst in people—about the central defender with the bleeding knees.

What a bitch. She'll make some guy miserable some day.

What makes you think she likes guys?

I let them say what they wanted. My answer was up on the scoreboard.

When I was seventeen, playing in a weekend tournament outside Baltimore, I answered a whisper coming from inside me. I went to the hotel room of a girl I had bodied for position and kicked in the ankles for ninety minutes that afternoon. I watched her undress. And I kissed every bruise I'd given her.

Kevin Earley grew up playing football. The American kind. More than once, I've heard him slander soccer as “a sport for pussies.” Whenever he says that, I make a silent bet that I've already had more pussy than Kevin Earley will ever get.

I'm not sure Earley has even read the script we are about to record. It's the first script I've had total creative control of, a side benefit of the general opinion at my ad agency that the soccer side of the enormous Red Bull account is where creatives go to die. Assuming the Red Bulls buy decent airtime for it, this spot will sell tickets. I know it will. But selling Red Bulls tickets is a distant second on my list of priorities for this spot. I need it to do something else entirely. I need it to sell
me
.

The control-room door opens. Michael walks in and heads straight for his place on the couch as the thick, insulated door closes slowly on its noiseless hinges. I'm about to ask Michael where Simon Davies is when a young man catches the closing door and pushes it open again.

“Simon?” I ask, taking a step toward him.

He nods oddly and says, “Yes.”

“Lily Eisenberg,” I say, shaking his hand.

“Nice to meet you.”

Simon smiles and I smile back, but my smile is fake. I'm pissed he's late.

“This is Derrion, our engineer.”

“Hello,” Simon says.

“How you feel?” Derrion says.

“Lounging on the couch over there is Michael Hendershot,” I say. “He's interning at the agency.”

“Hi again.”

Michael lets out a little laugh, letting all of us know what he thinks of Simon's quaint, Midwestern greeting.

“And this is Kevin Earley. He's with the New York Red Bulls.”

“How's it going,” Earley mutters, sounding bored already. He shakes Simon's hand without turning to face him.

“Pretty well,” Simon says. “How are you?”

“Peachy.”

Finally getting the vibe of the room, Simon doesn't say anything else. He seems stiff and nervous and looks to be working on more than a few sleepless nights. That he is jittery
and
overtired
and
late should piss me off even more, but Simon's tardiness has begun to work in his favor. I'm mostly relieved that there's still time enough for Simon to give me the one perfect take I need to take my last good shot at getting into baseball.

“We're about twenty-five minutes behind,” I say, “so we should get started.”

“Wait,” Simon says. He looks as if I've just told him there's no Santa Claus. “My agent told me
11
o'clock. I thought I was early.”

“The session started at ten. It
ends
at eleven.”

“But my agent told me eleven. I'm sure of it.”

I am just about to tell Simon that we don't have time for a whodunit when I remember who called Simon's agent to book him.

“Michael, what time did you tell Simon's agent he should be here?”

“I don't remember.”

“Yes,” I insist, “you do.

“Look,” he says, “I might've adjusted for Chicago time.”

My eyes squint as I try to decipher what the hell he might mean. “Chicago is an hour
behind
New York. The time you gave him was an hour ahead.”

“I guess I only think in hours ahead of Eastern Time,” he says with a shrug. “My family vacations in Europe.”

“You're not looking too good here, kid,” Earley says.

“We don't have time for this,” I say, picking up the thin stack of paper in front of me. “Kevin, Simon—I apologize for the confusion.”

“No problem,” Simon mumbles.

“Like I told you,” my client says. “Late, early—” He shrugs and shakes his head. “Nothing we do here makes a lick of difference.”

I don't agree, but I don't argue. What can I say that won't invite Earley to tell us all—again—that we are wasting our time and effort?

“Here's the script, Simon,” I say. “Take a minute to read it over.”

“Great,” Simon says, taking the sheet of paper from me. “Thanks.”

With a grunt, Derrion throws his bulk forward, stands up, and settles into his seat in front of the recording console. I pass out copies of the script to the others, even Michael. While Simon studies up, I skim the sentences I hammered on for days, over thirty drafts.

It took twenty drafts to come out from behind my favorite parts of soccer: the dirt, bruises and blood that separated winners from losers. As a player, I'd lived for the vicious, spikes-up tackles and the elbows thrown into throats when a corner kick takes flight. But the Red Bulls spot couldn't be about these things. It needed to capture the feel of the live event from a
fan's
point of view, not a player's. And to see the game as a fan does, I had to get in touch with my feelings for the game. Just that phrase—“my feelings for the game”—makes me want to puke. I'm not impressed with feelings and people who indulge them. What impresses me is doing what needs doing, despite how you feel. I like people who play hurt, keep the pain to themselves, and make their opponent feel it, too. That's more than a way to play soccer. It's a way of life.
My
way.

By the twenty-fifth draft, though, I'd made it off the field and into the seats. I imagined a clear evening with the perfect temperature and low humidity. I described the elegant rising and setting of a goal kick and tried to capture with my words the exhilaration of watching two players run at full speed, chasing the ball into open space. To write these things, I had to stand naked before my love of the game—not as a player, but as a fan. I felt more defenseless—vulnerable might be the better word—than I ever had standing naked in front of a woman. I didn't like that feeling. I promised myself that the moment the script was approved, I could leave all those feelings on the page, where they belong. Then they would be some voiceover guy's problem. Not mine.