As part of a performance art display at MOMA, actress Tilda Swinton is periodically appearing in a glass case, sleeping. Story HERE.
Showing posts with label actor/acting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label actor/acting. Show all posts
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Actress Tilda Swinton on Display at MOMA
As part of a performance art display at MOMA, actress Tilda Swinton is periodically appearing in a glass case, sleeping. Story HERE.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
"Breaking Bad" actor Bryan Cranston on acting and fidelity to character
“Physically, to create Walter White, I use my dad,” he said one night over dinner. “My dad is 87 years old. I’m not going to dodder, but Walter is always a little hunched over, never erect. The message to the audience is that the weight of the world is on this man’s shoulders.”
Cranston is from the total-commitment school of acting, and he once famously did a scene in “Malcolm in the Middle” while covered head to toe with bees. When Gilligan declined to fill in large holes in Walter’s back story, Cranston sat down and wrote out one of his own. On a handful of occasions, he has flagged lines in the script that felt false to him. Cranston reads each episode about a week in advance so that these bumps can be smoothed over before it’s time to start shooting. When he can’t resolve the issue with the writer on the set that week, a call is placed to Gilligan, who is usually in the writer’s room in Burbank. “It’s up to them, but I won’t bend unless I’m convinced it’s the right thing to do,” Cranston says. “Convince me and I’ll do it. I have a theory — our job isn’t to lie to the audience, our job is to find the truth in the character. If we lie, we’re giving the audience a little pinch of poison. They won’t even know they ingested it. But if you lie again and again and again, all of a sudden, your audience is going, ‘This isn’t working for me.’ They just feel sick, and they turn you off.”
Read the full story on Breaking Bad HERE in the NYT Magazine.
Cranston is from the total-commitment school of acting, and he once famously did a scene in “Malcolm in the Middle” while covered head to toe with bees. When Gilligan declined to fill in large holes in Walter’s back story, Cranston sat down and wrote out one of his own. On a handful of occasions, he has flagged lines in the script that felt false to him. Cranston reads each episode about a week in advance so that these bumps can be smoothed over before it’s time to start shooting. When he can’t resolve the issue with the writer on the set that week, a call is placed to Gilligan, who is usually in the writer’s room in Burbank. “It’s up to them, but I won’t bend unless I’m convinced it’s the right thing to do,” Cranston says. “Convince me and I’ll do it. I have a theory — our job isn’t to lie to the audience, our job is to find the truth in the character. If we lie, we’re giving the audience a little pinch of poison. They won’t even know they ingested it. But if you lie again and again and again, all of a sudden, your audience is going, ‘This isn’t working for me.’ They just feel sick, and they turn you off.”
Read the full story on Breaking Bad HERE in the NYT Magazine.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Remembering Actor J.C. Quinn, Plus a Scene from Vision Quest
For some reason I thought of this guy today, actor J.C. Quinn. In the 1990s he used to come listen to my Latin jazz sextet, an ideal audience member nursing a drink and really listening through the surrounding din. He introduced himself as "J.C., you know, like John Coltrane." He always wanted to talk music on breaks while I wanted to ask him about cinema. He had great stories, and thinking back I don't know why I didn't ask him twice as many questions; I was on the job and too damn busy, I suppose. He fell into acting late but went on to study at Strasberg's Actor's Studio. He possessed a face and voice oozing with character. This scene from Vision Quest (1985) with Matthew Modine isn't particularly well written, but the dude is totally committed and just owns it; he makes it art. I miss ya, J.C.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
A Lovely Rememberance of Paul Newman
SLATE
obit
Paul Newman
He used his fame to give away his fortune.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, at 10:20 AM ET
The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp opened in Connecticut in 1988 to provide a summer camping experience—fishing, tie-dye, ghost stories, s'mores—for seriously ill children. By 1989, when I started working there as a counselor, virtually everyone on staff would tell some version of the same story: Paul Newman, who had founded the camp when it became clear his little salad-dressing lark was accidentally going to earn him millions, stops by for one of his not-infrequent visits. He plops down at a table in the dining hall next to some kid with leukemia, or HIV, or sickle cell anemia, and starts to eat lunch. One version of the story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the Newman's Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, "Are you lost?" Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and demands, "Are you really Paul Human?"
Newman loved those stories. He loved to talk about the little kids who had no clue who he was, this friendly old guy who kept showing up at camp to take them fishing. While their counselors stammered, star-struck, the campers indulged Newman the way they'd have indulged a particularly friendly hospital blood technician. It took me years to understand why Newman loved being at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. It was for precisely the same reason these kids did. When the campers showed up, they became regular kids, despite the catheters and wheelchairs and prosthetic legs. And when Newman showed up, he was a regular guy with blue eyes, despite the Oscar and the racecars and the burgeoning marinara empire. The most striking thing about Paul Newman was that a man who could have blasted through his life demanding "Have you any idea who I am?" invariably wanted to hang out with folks—often little ones—who neither knew nor cared.
For his part, Newman put it all down to luck. In his 1992 introduction to our book about the camp, he tried to explain what impelled him to create the Hole in the Wall: "I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it." Married to Joanne Woodward, his second wife, for 50 years this winter, Newman always looked at her like something he'd pulled out of a Christmas stocking. He looked at his daughters that way, too. It was like, all these years later, he couldn't quite believe he got to keep them.
Of course, it wasn't all luck. He lost his son, Scott, to a drug overdose in 1978, so in 1980, he founded the Scott Newman Center, which works to prevent substance abuse. When he first began to donate 100 percent of the proceeds from his food company, Newman's Own, to charity, critics accused him of grandiosity. Grandiose? Tell that to the recipients of the quarter-billion dollars he's given away since the company's creation in 1982. First Paul Newman made fresh, healthy food cool, then he and his daughter Nell made organic food cool. Then he went and made corporate giving cool by establishing the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. And all this was back in the '90s, before Lance Armstrong bracelets and organic juice boxes.
But Newman never stopped believing he was a regular guy who'd simply been blessed, and well beyond what was fair. So he just kept on paying it forward. He appreciated great ideas for doing good in the world—he collected them the way other people collect their own press clippings—and he didn't care where they came from. Whether you were a college kid, a pediatric oncologist, or a Hollywood tycoon, if you had a nutty plan to make life better for someone, he'd write the check himself or hook you up with somebody who would.
Today there are 11 camps modeled on the Hole in the Wall all around the world, and seven more in the works, including a camp in Hungary and one opening next year in the Middle East. Each summer of the four I spent at Newman's flagship Connecticut camp was a living lesson in how one man can change everything. Terrified parents would deliver their wan, weary kid at the start of the session with warnings and cautions and lists of things not to be attempted. They'd return 10 days later to find the same kid, tanned and bruisey, halfway up a tree or cannon-balling into the deep end of the pool. Their wigs or prosthetic arms—props of years spent trying to fit in—were forgotten in the duffel under the bed. Shame, stigma, fear, worry, all vaporized by a few days of being ordinary. In an era in which nearly everyone feels entitled to celebrity and fortune, Newman was always suspicious of both. He used his fame to give away his fortune, and he did that from some unspoken Zen-like conviction that neither had ever really belonged to him in the first place.
Hollywood legend holds that Paul Newman is and will always be larger-than-life, and it's true. Nominated for 10 Oscars, he won one. He was Fast Eddie, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy. And then there were Those Eyes. But anyone who ever met Paul Newman will probably tell you that he was, in life, a pretty regular-sized guy: A guy with five beautiful daughters and a wonder of a wife, and a rambling country house in Connecticut where he screened movies out in the barn. He was a guy who went out of his way to ensure that everyone else—the thousands of campers, counselors, and volunteers at his camps, the friends he involved in his charities, and the millions of Americans who bought his popcorn—could feel like they were the real star.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2201116/
obit
Paul Newman
He used his fame to give away his fortune.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, at 10:20 AM ET
The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp opened in Connecticut in 1988 to provide a summer camping experience—fishing, tie-dye, ghost stories, s'mores—for seriously ill children. By 1989, when I started working there as a counselor, virtually everyone on staff would tell some version of the same story: Paul Newman, who had founded the camp when it became clear his little salad-dressing lark was accidentally going to earn him millions, stops by for one of his not-infrequent visits. He plops down at a table in the dining hall next to some kid with leukemia, or HIV, or sickle cell anemia, and starts to eat lunch. One version of the story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the Newman's Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, "Are you lost?" Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and demands, "Are you really Paul Human?"
Newman loved those stories. He loved to talk about the little kids who had no clue who he was, this friendly old guy who kept showing up at camp to take them fishing. While their counselors stammered, star-struck, the campers indulged Newman the way they'd have indulged a particularly friendly hospital blood technician. It took me years to understand why Newman loved being at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. It was for precisely the same reason these kids did. When the campers showed up, they became regular kids, despite the catheters and wheelchairs and prosthetic legs. And when Newman showed up, he was a regular guy with blue eyes, despite the Oscar and the racecars and the burgeoning marinara empire. The most striking thing about Paul Newman was that a man who could have blasted through his life demanding "Have you any idea who I am?" invariably wanted to hang out with folks—often little ones—who neither knew nor cared.
For his part, Newman put it all down to luck. In his 1992 introduction to our book about the camp, he tried to explain what impelled him to create the Hole in the Wall: "I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it." Married to Joanne Woodward, his second wife, for 50 years this winter, Newman always looked at her like something he'd pulled out of a Christmas stocking. He looked at his daughters that way, too. It was like, all these years later, he couldn't quite believe he got to keep them.
Of course, it wasn't all luck. He lost his son, Scott, to a drug overdose in 1978, so in 1980, he founded the Scott Newman Center, which works to prevent substance abuse. When he first began to donate 100 percent of the proceeds from his food company, Newman's Own, to charity, critics accused him of grandiosity. Grandiose? Tell that to the recipients of the quarter-billion dollars he's given away since the company's creation in 1982. First Paul Newman made fresh, healthy food cool, then he and his daughter Nell made organic food cool. Then he went and made corporate giving cool by establishing the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. And all this was back in the '90s, before Lance Armstrong bracelets and organic juice boxes.
But Newman never stopped believing he was a regular guy who'd simply been blessed, and well beyond what was fair. So he just kept on paying it forward. He appreciated great ideas for doing good in the world—he collected them the way other people collect their own press clippings—and he didn't care where they came from. Whether you were a college kid, a pediatric oncologist, or a Hollywood tycoon, if you had a nutty plan to make life better for someone, he'd write the check himself or hook you up with somebody who would.
Today there are 11 camps modeled on the Hole in the Wall all around the world, and seven more in the works, including a camp in Hungary and one opening next year in the Middle East. Each summer of the four I spent at Newman's flagship Connecticut camp was a living lesson in how one man can change everything. Terrified parents would deliver their wan, weary kid at the start of the session with warnings and cautions and lists of things not to be attempted. They'd return 10 days later to find the same kid, tanned and bruisey, halfway up a tree or cannon-balling into the deep end of the pool. Their wigs or prosthetic arms—props of years spent trying to fit in—were forgotten in the duffel under the bed. Shame, stigma, fear, worry, all vaporized by a few days of being ordinary. In an era in which nearly everyone feels entitled to celebrity and fortune, Newman was always suspicious of both. He used his fame to give away his fortune, and he did that from some unspoken Zen-like conviction that neither had ever really belonged to him in the first place.
Hollywood legend holds that Paul Newman is and will always be larger-than-life, and it's true. Nominated for 10 Oscars, he won one. He was Fast Eddie, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy. And then there were Those Eyes. But anyone who ever met Paul Newman will probably tell you that he was, in life, a pretty regular-sized guy: A guy with five beautiful daughters and a wonder of a wife, and a rambling country house in Connecticut where he screened movies out in the barn. He was a guy who went out of his way to ensure that everyone else—the thousands of campers, counselors, and volunteers at his camps, the friends he involved in his charities, and the millions of Americans who bought his popcorn—could feel like they were the real star.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2201116/
Friday, September 19, 2008
Read Me a Story, Brad Pitt: When audiobook casting goes terribly wrong
SLATE [audio at original post site]
Read Me a Story, Brad Pitt: When audiobook casting goes terribly wrong.
By Nate DiMeo
Updated Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, at 11:15 AM ET
M&C NOTE: This article gets into my archive for the phrase "audio blackface."
For all the column inches downloaded to Kindles this year about how electronic books will someday replace traditional ones, little has been made of the steady rise of another rival to the printed word: audiobooks. Nearly $1 billion worth were sold last year, meaning 15 percent of all books sold these days are the kind that read themselves.
Today's recorded book has come a long way from its humble, federal origins. In 1931, Sen. Reed Smoot (he of the arguably Depression-spurring Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act) helped bring forth the Books for the Adult Blind Project—a bit of progressive do-goodery intended to give the gift of literature to the sightless. The result was audiobooks with a vaguely institutional air, employing bland, monotone narrations thought appropriate for the incapacitated. They remained this way through the 1970s, until the gas crisis brought over more fuel-efficient Japanese cars and their standard-issue cassette decks. Soon commuters in their Datsun B210s discovered the time-killing properties of audiobooks.
The industry came of age in the '80s: Sales grew, and the listening experience improved. Nowadays, narrators are recruited from the ranks of top-notch voice-over talent, big-name authors, renowned stage actors, and Hollywood stars. Audiobooks can be spectacular. But too many fine books are still being turned into bad audiobooks; worse still, their producers are making the same mistakes over and over. What follows are the three most common pitfalls—and how to avoid them.
The Perils of Genre Rigidity
Genre fiction can make for great audiobooks. Detective novels come to life when read by a well-cast, hard-boiled narrator, and the smoky-voiced actresses of Great Britain are Play Mediakept very busy these days by the demand for erotic audiobooks. But producers get flummoxed when a title bumps up against the confines of genre. Take Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon's nonfiction account of the year he spent shadowing the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit. Simon's remarkably well-observed account is written in matter-of-fact prose that destabilizes the reader who has previously encountered city police only through Hollywood stereotypes. The audiobook is read by actor Reed Diamond, a regular on the TV series inspired by Simon's book. Diamond's tough-guy noir narration is dissonant with the text: The dismal reality of Simon's work gets undercut by the unreality of Diamond's heavy-handed line readings.
A similar fate befalls Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century. Ross' history of Classical composition in the age of mechanical reproduction, atonality, and world wars is written with a passion and urgency that helps make the esoteric relatable. Appropriately, it reads like a really long New Yorker article, and in a more perfect world the audio version would sound like a really long episode of public radio's Studio 360—smart, witty, and intimate. Instead, audiobook veteran Grover Gardner comes off like a tweedy prat holding court at a dinner party. The stentorian, lecture-hall tone is off-key; just as Homicide is miscast as a potboiler, The Rest Is Noise is miscast as a dusty dissertation in an unvisited corner of a university library. With Gardner reading, Ross' vibrant book about Life and Art and Passion becomes a book about Classical Music.
One Reader + Multiple Voices = Multiple Problems
The audiobook experience descends from that of the old radio-plays, but full-cast dramatizations are rare (though, typically, rad; Max Brooks' smarter-than-it-has-any-right-to-be zombie novel, World War Z, and Phillip Pulman's His Dark Materials trilogy are great listens in large part due to their full casts). Usually, the listener gets one reader who uses tone and inflection to distinguish between the narrator and the book's characters. The best readers aren't necessarily great at "voices"; they're able to differentiate between characters without resorting to showy parlor tricks. British actor Jim Dale has achieved a deserved rock-star status (of the peculiar, audiobooky sort) for his work on the Harry Potter series, modulating between Lavender Brown, Parvati Patil, and Gilderoy Lockheart with a nimbleness that should be the model for all school librarians and bedtime-story readers.
But too often, an overreaching reader ruins a book. Nothing is less intimidating than a noir tough guy voiced by a hammy female narrator, and nothing is less sexy than a literary seductress voiced by a dude in falsetto. Too often a narrator will opt for bad audio drag when "she said" would suffice.
While gender bending can grate, racial drag can offend. Consider Columbia sociologist (and occasional Slate contributor) Sudhir Venkatesh's best-seller, Gang Leader for a Day. The book recounts the author's decade-plus immersion in a decaying Chicago housing project. His observations about the social and economic lives of crack dealers, prostitutes, project-squatters, and poor strivers reveal a side of American life few readers—including academics and policymakers—have ever experienced. The book humanizes characters that most of America has encountered only through crime statistics. The audiobook does something quite the opposite.
The reader, actor Reg Rogers, is a white guy. Every character but the Indian-American narrator is black. This is always tricky audiobook territory, but here, not only has Rogers unwisely chosen to bring a little "sound of the street" to his characters, he's opted to bring the sound of the street from movies of the 1960s. JT, a twentysomething gang lieutenant, sounds like Sydney Poitier circa In the Heat of the Night. Ex-gang members in their 50s veer toward Fred Sanford at best, Uncle Remus at worst.
After forcing us to suffer through seven hours of Rogers, the producers of the Gang Leader audiobook make an interesting choice: The book's final hour is read by the author. In that hour, the lives that Venkatesh worked so hard to bring to the page become real lives. He's no professional voice actor—he doesn't always punch the right words for emphasis, the art of the dramatic pause eludes him—but he tells a straightforward story in a straightforward fashion. No outrageous accents. No audio blackface. And the listener, and his subjects, are better off for it.
Read Me a Story, Brad Pitt
Actors can often find in the audiobook realm a stardom that has eluded them on stage and screen. Roles such as "Deputy" in the direct-to-video The Killing Grounds have not made Scott Brick a household name, but the man has narrated more than 200 books—he has a devoted following and is one of the most in-demand readers in the business. (His tone is cultured with a dash of swagger—he's brought an enjoyable air of righteous indignation to books like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven.)
Lately, with the audiobook business booming, actual Hollywood stars are frequently stepping behind the mic. Kevin Spacey has read Bob Woodward. Oprah reads White Oleander. Matt Damon reads A People's History of the United States. While a big-name Hollywood actor may help sell a title, using a big star can backfire on the listener. I can't listen to Sean Penn read Bob Dylan's autobiography without thinking, "That's Sean Penn reading Bob Dylan's autobiography."
You can't help but wonder if the demands of celebrity prevent the Hollywood star from taking the time with the source material that an audiobook star would. Whether it's a clumsy cadence or a preponderance of retakes (which jump out at you when listening on headphones), there seems to be an inverse proportionality between the size of the star and the quality of the experience. Here, Brad Pitt shows off his español while reading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses.
But we can't really blame Brad Pitt or, for that matter, any of the mis- or overmatched narrators who keep good books from becoming good audiobooks. The unsatisfied listener should direct her complaints to the producers making the casting and directing decisions, who keep making the same mistakes. As Brad might put it, no más.
Read Me a Story, Brad Pitt: When audiobook casting goes terribly wrong.
By Nate DiMeo
Updated Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, at 11:15 AM ET
M&C NOTE: This article gets into my archive for the phrase "audio blackface."
For all the column inches downloaded to Kindles this year about how electronic books will someday replace traditional ones, little has been made of the steady rise of another rival to the printed word: audiobooks. Nearly $1 billion worth were sold last year, meaning 15 percent of all books sold these days are the kind that read themselves.
Today's recorded book has come a long way from its humble, federal origins. In 1931, Sen. Reed Smoot (he of the arguably Depression-spurring Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act) helped bring forth the Books for the Adult Blind Project—a bit of progressive do-goodery intended to give the gift of literature to the sightless. The result was audiobooks with a vaguely institutional air, employing bland, monotone narrations thought appropriate for the incapacitated. They remained this way through the 1970s, until the gas crisis brought over more fuel-efficient Japanese cars and their standard-issue cassette decks. Soon commuters in their Datsun B210s discovered the time-killing properties of audiobooks.
The industry came of age in the '80s: Sales grew, and the listening experience improved. Nowadays, narrators are recruited from the ranks of top-notch voice-over talent, big-name authors, renowned stage actors, and Hollywood stars. Audiobooks can be spectacular. But too many fine books are still being turned into bad audiobooks; worse still, their producers are making the same mistakes over and over. What follows are the three most common pitfalls—and how to avoid them.
The Perils of Genre Rigidity
Genre fiction can make for great audiobooks. Detective novels come to life when read by a well-cast, hard-boiled narrator, and the smoky-voiced actresses of Great Britain are Play Mediakept very busy these days by the demand for erotic audiobooks. But producers get flummoxed when a title bumps up against the confines of genre. Take Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon's nonfiction account of the year he spent shadowing the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit. Simon's remarkably well-observed account is written in matter-of-fact prose that destabilizes the reader who has previously encountered city police only through Hollywood stereotypes. The audiobook is read by actor Reed Diamond, a regular on the TV series inspired by Simon's book. Diamond's tough-guy noir narration is dissonant with the text: The dismal reality of Simon's work gets undercut by the unreality of Diamond's heavy-handed line readings.
A similar fate befalls Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century. Ross' history of Classical composition in the age of mechanical reproduction, atonality, and world wars is written with a passion and urgency that helps make the esoteric relatable. Appropriately, it reads like a really long New Yorker article, and in a more perfect world the audio version would sound like a really long episode of public radio's Studio 360—smart, witty, and intimate. Instead, audiobook veteran Grover Gardner comes off like a tweedy prat holding court at a dinner party. The stentorian, lecture-hall tone is off-key; just as Homicide is miscast as a potboiler, The Rest Is Noise is miscast as a dusty dissertation in an unvisited corner of a university library. With Gardner reading, Ross' vibrant book about Life and Art and Passion becomes a book about Classical Music.
One Reader + Multiple Voices = Multiple Problems
The audiobook experience descends from that of the old radio-plays, but full-cast dramatizations are rare (though, typically, rad; Max Brooks' smarter-than-it-has-any-right-to-be zombie novel, World War Z, and Phillip Pulman's His Dark Materials trilogy are great listens in large part due to their full casts). Usually, the listener gets one reader who uses tone and inflection to distinguish between the narrator and the book's characters. The best readers aren't necessarily great at "voices"; they're able to differentiate between characters without resorting to showy parlor tricks. British actor Jim Dale has achieved a deserved rock-star status (of the peculiar, audiobooky sort) for his work on the Harry Potter series, modulating between Lavender Brown, Parvati Patil, and Gilderoy Lockheart with a nimbleness that should be the model for all school librarians and bedtime-story readers.
But too often, an overreaching reader ruins a book. Nothing is less intimidating than a noir tough guy voiced by a hammy female narrator, and nothing is less sexy than a literary seductress voiced by a dude in falsetto. Too often a narrator will opt for bad audio drag when "she said" would suffice.
While gender bending can grate, racial drag can offend. Consider Columbia sociologist (and occasional Slate contributor) Sudhir Venkatesh's best-seller, Gang Leader for a Day. The book recounts the author's decade-plus immersion in a decaying Chicago housing project. His observations about the social and economic lives of crack dealers, prostitutes, project-squatters, and poor strivers reveal a side of American life few readers—including academics and policymakers—have ever experienced. The book humanizes characters that most of America has encountered only through crime statistics. The audiobook does something quite the opposite.
The reader, actor Reg Rogers, is a white guy. Every character but the Indian-American narrator is black. This is always tricky audiobook territory, but here, not only has Rogers unwisely chosen to bring a little "sound of the street" to his characters, he's opted to bring the sound of the street from movies of the 1960s. JT, a twentysomething gang lieutenant, sounds like Sydney Poitier circa In the Heat of the Night. Ex-gang members in their 50s veer toward Fred Sanford at best, Uncle Remus at worst.
After forcing us to suffer through seven hours of Rogers, the producers of the Gang Leader audiobook make an interesting choice: The book's final hour is read by the author. In that hour, the lives that Venkatesh worked so hard to bring to the page become real lives. He's no professional voice actor—he doesn't always punch the right words for emphasis, the art of the dramatic pause eludes him—but he tells a straightforward story in a straightforward fashion. No outrageous accents. No audio blackface. And the listener, and his subjects, are better off for it.
Read Me a Story, Brad Pitt
Actors can often find in the audiobook realm a stardom that has eluded them on stage and screen. Roles such as "Deputy" in the direct-to-video The Killing Grounds have not made Scott Brick a household name, but the man has narrated more than 200 books—he has a devoted following and is one of the most in-demand readers in the business. (His tone is cultured with a dash of swagger—he's brought an enjoyable air of righteous indignation to books like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven.)
Lately, with the audiobook business booming, actual Hollywood stars are frequently stepping behind the mic. Kevin Spacey has read Bob Woodward. Oprah reads White Oleander. Matt Damon reads A People's History of the United States. While a big-name Hollywood actor may help sell a title, using a big star can backfire on the listener. I can't listen to Sean Penn read Bob Dylan's autobiography without thinking, "That's Sean Penn reading Bob Dylan's autobiography."
You can't help but wonder if the demands of celebrity prevent the Hollywood star from taking the time with the source material that an audiobook star would. Whether it's a clumsy cadence or a preponderance of retakes (which jump out at you when listening on headphones), there seems to be an inverse proportionality between the size of the star and the quality of the experience. Here, Brad Pitt shows off his español while reading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses.
But we can't really blame Brad Pitt or, for that matter, any of the mis- or overmatched narrators who keep good books from becoming good audiobooks. The unsatisfied listener should direct her complaints to the producers making the casting and directing decisions, who keep making the same mistakes. As Brad might put it, no más.
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