The Rest of the Story Part 1

I was over at Walaka's having dinner, and he asked me if I'd worked with any celebrities. I demurred. I couldn't honestly think of any, but I have. A lot of them are people that would mean something to me--for instance, Russell Johnson ("The Professor" from "Gilligan's Island"*) or Frank Buxton--he asked me to update his demo, as he'd just come into town, and his name was familiar enough that my "Spidey Sense" started tingling. Turns out he was a writer-director in New York, had hosted a kid's show that i watched regularly on Saturday mornings, had voiced the cartoon character "Bat-fink" (now out on video), was the producer/editor of "The Bill Cosby Radio Show" that I listened to religiously, oh, and he'd worked on "Love American Style" and "The Odd Couple" writing and directing, but, hey, that's not as big as "Bat-fink."

There are others, but I don't want to do too much name dropping...except for two stories with surprise endings, ala Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story."

Story 1

I was working on a radio play series for NPR, sponsored by the Boeing Company called "Sixteen Stories of Anton Chekhov." I've talked about it before, but in another context. One of the plays had the cream of Seattle acting all in one room. Folks like John Aylward and Ted D'Arms, who've done decades of stage plays and even made it to Hollywood. This particular radio script was based on Chekhov's "Sleepy," a tough story about a young baby-sitter who is basically a slave in a 19th Century Russian household: she cooks, she cleans, she does laundry, she takes care of the baby--the constantly fussing baby. She's exhausted--sleep-deprived, actually, and haunted by visions of her mother and others trudging as refugees through a driving rain. Tough story. Tough, in that the girl narrates most of the story...and tough in content. Especially, when at the end, in her delirium, the girl smothers the baby. Okay, it's a devastating story. Cast in the role of the girl was a very young girl. She was, actually, the daughter of the fellow who helped secure the Boeing funding, who inquired if their was a role his aspiring actress-kid could play. Well, yeah, this one. It would be an acting challenge for anyone, but this girl was relatively untried. The director assured us that she seemed okay in the reading, but was prepared to either work with her for a good performance, as well as lowering his expectations.

We assembled the actors in the studio together and hoped for the best.

When she began to perform, it became clear that she was prepared for the ardurous task of recreating this part. Her voice was a low, hopeless, exhausted monotone. It drew you in. You hung on her every word. Early on, we started exchanging looks in the booth. She was good. Could she sustain it? And we noticed something else. The actors in the studio weren't looking at their pages, or fussing with their parts. They were watching her. She was this tiny little frame, huddled, her face intense, focussed on the script, and all eyes were on her. When the actors' parts came up, they were always on-cue, and when they had to be rough, they cranked it up a notch in intensity. The actors in the dream sequences, inched closer to their microphones and made their parts more intimate, more haunting. There were very few pauses, not a lot of takes--it had the intensity of being done live and they had to get it right, riding on the wave of this little girl's heart-breaking performance.

By the end, we were all drained, our jaws on the floor. Not only was she better than expected, she was better than we COULD expect. At the end, there was silence as the final haunting words were spoken with a tragic depth, and it was like no one wanted to move, to hold the tension as if it would all go away if anyone said anything to break the moment. "Wow," someone said in the studio. "Yeah!" The actors congratulated the young actress. "Was it okay?" she looked up at the booth. "Yeah, it was VERY good. You'll want to hear this."

"REEALLY?!!"

We brought her in and let her listen to the recordings, and she began to relax. "Who's picking you up?" we asked. "My Dad." "Well, he's going to want to hear this."

Dad showed up. "How'd she do?" We praised her to the skies (in all honesty), and told him he should listen to what she did. We played it for him, and his eyes became cloudy, listening to his daughter's performance. He was obviously proud, as well he should have been. She did an amazing job, and when we put it together and combined it with sound effects, we took extra care with it, she was that good. And doubly amazing because she was so young and the acting was so mature.


This aspiring actress' name? Anna Faris.


http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0267506/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Faris

http://www.annafaris.net/



* Johnson's a great guy and a very talented man. I loved recording him. He had a very specific reading set-up when he first came in, which he, rather sheepishly, requested, and I went and got it all set up. He was genuinely grateful, "Thanks, I really appreciate it." "Hey! No problem" I said "After all, you went back in time to save Lincoln!" He looked at me like I was daft for a moment. Then he smiled and laughed and said, "We're gonna have to talk about that!" On "The Twilight Zone" episode "Back There" Russell has played a theoretician who found himself going back in time right before Lincoln's assassination, but is frustrated that no one took him seriously enough to stop it and I vividly remembered that episode. Every session things would be set up just so, without him having to ask, and as I was shutting the studio door, I'd say "Hey! You went back in time to save Lincoln!" Last time I said that to him he had a look on his face like "Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did."