Lewis Talking Funny For Money

Pamela Lewis - Exclusive Interview

Pamela Lewis may talk funny, but she's mighty good at math.

After spending several years on stage, she realized she could kill herself for $200 a week working long hours in theater or she could spend an hour in a sound studio and earn handfuls of money with flashy residual checks.

"Theater is fun," she says, "but I'm very practical. It is incredibly hard work for a little bit of money. Fortunately, I really love voiceovers. I'm lucky to find something that is lucrative but is still fun for me to do."

The Life Behind the Voice

Lewis, who has been a voiceover artist for the past 20 years, has an impressive filmography and voice-over resume. She's done voices for such films as Working Girl, The Untouchables, Married to the Mob, Primary Colors, Man on the Moon, The Cider House Rules, Beavis and Butthead, Cold Mountain, Cape Fear, In and Out, Blair Witch 2, and The Pelican Brief. Her other professional credits include voices in commercials for Clairol, American Express, Ritz Bits Crackers, Diet Coke, Hershey's Chocolate, AT&T, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. She's done voices for Nintendo games, including the space monster in the games based on the Alien movies. Her voice has been in Frasier, Homicide, Antiques Roadshow, and the Big Bag on Cartoon Network. Lewis has also taught voiceovers for the past 10 years, an experience that prompted her to write her first-and what is likely to be her only-book, Talking Funny for Money. It's accompanied by two CDs, a workshop that will replace her introductory courses and allow her to focus on teaching advanced classes. It is the first CD workshop on the topic to ever be released. Lewis hopes it will be the perfect tool for all those people who have ever been told that they should do cartoon voices.

From Microphones to Keyboards

The writing of Lewis' book evolved rather organically. While she says she is proud of it, she also has no burning desire to be an author. In fact, even this publication didn't start out as a book.

Lewis had been teaching live workshops for years. She realized that to take a five-night, $400 workshop was a hefty investment for people who are just curious about the industry. Many of the people taking her class weren't even actors. They were housewives or a businessman who thinks it might be a good side job. It wasn't uncommon for people to get to the end of the week and know they aren't going to proceed.

"I wanted to come up with a way that they could find that out without spending $400. Voiceover is an expensive and competitive part of the industry. I don't know any way to break into it that is easy and cheap," she said.

Her answer was to create a CD workshop. She'd gone to the drama bookstore in New York and seen the whole shelf of books on voices and looping. But voiceovers is about sound and it is difficult to teach sound with black and white text on the page.

So Lewis approached the publisher about creating a workshop that contained the sounds of professionals that the buyers could compare themselves to. She saw no point in writing another book that didn't have sound involved. Her publishers then convinced her to add an exercise manual/companion text.

As the workshop continued to go into production, Lewis' publishers returned to her and said that the book needed more pages or else it would get relegated to the nether regions of bookstores. They told her that if she would write at least 150 pages-pages that would include information about the industry, marketing, agents, how to behave, etc., then they could create a seven by nine paperback with a spine. Such a format would be stackable and could be sold at the major bookstores.

"I ended up being an author, but it didn't start out that way," she said. "I ended up knowing a lot more about my industry than I ever care to knew. Once you have to sit down and write it, you know what these things are called. IT was hard work, but it was a recap of my career in a way. I was able to pass on information I've learned over the past 35 years as a performer and 15 years as a voiceover."

Lewis is ultimately pleased that her book expanded. She refers to the section on professional tips, saying the book is worth the $22.95 for that section alone. "So many people shoot themselves in the foot through ways they're not even aware of. They're young, they don't know any better."

In The Sound Studio

Her best-known work is probably her voice in The Untouchables. Who can forget that tension-ridden scene where the baby carriage is bounding down the steps of Chicago's Union Station in slow motion? The baby's cry throughout that scene is Pamela Lewis.

"It was my first baby," she says. "We're always getting calls to do things that we've never done. I always say 'yes, I can do it' and figure it out later. I'm very familiar with the placements and how I have to open and close my throat. I know what I have to do to make noises."

She describes sitting in the sound studio with the other voice-over actors when one of the executives came in and asked who could do babies. The other actors pointed to her because she was known for doing crazy things that no one else would try. She had never voiced a baby, but the taping wasn't until the next day.

That night, Lewis began to do her research. She asked herself where she could listen to babies crying. "Nurseries and hospitals aren't going to let me in there," she said. "I thought, 'Where do babies really annoy me? Airports!" So Lewis headed out to the airport and spent the night casually following mothers with babies into bathrooms so that she could listen to them cry.

Making A Living With Voices

Lewis says that she can't recommend character looping highly enough to her fellow actors-especially at the stage she is at. She warns, though, that she didn't get where she is overnight. "I've been acting for a living for 35 years," she says.

Looping is a film sound technique, also known as automated dialogue replacement. The actor records dialogue in a sound studio which is later added to the film. Sometimes it replaces existing dialogue, other times it provides background noises to the main action.

Part of the reason Lewis prefers voiceovers to theater is that she's a self-proclaimed control freak. Voiceovers take her into a studio where it is just she, the engineer, and the client and they are all collaborating and anxious to get the job done quickly and well.

"There is nothing artsy fartsy about it," she says, "Studio time is very expensive. It makes everyone cut to the chase. There is no director pretending to be an auteur. There isn't a bunch of actors standing behind you upstaging you whether you like it or not."

"Twenty years ago, I noticed how unkind the visual world was going to be to middle-aged women. The typing thing was going to get more and more prevalent. I was a good character actor because I was never one particular type. But casting agents like to type you. It makes their life simpler. I was already running into trouble with that. I needed to find a part of the industry that wasn't how tall, how fat, how blonde, how brunette you are."

And the part of the industry she found was voiceover and looping. In this segment of the industry it doesn't matter what you look like so long as you can do the voice and have a wide range. It's a career that can last a lifetime. The nasal, high-pitched voices that actors rely on for babies and cartoon voices doesn't degenerate with age. "Jean Vander Pyl, who did Wilma, Pebbles, and lots of voices for Hanna Barbara, could make that noise right up until her 80s," Lewis said. "You'll have that strange, goofy placement even when you're 120-and you'll really freak people out."

Voiceovers had all the things that Pamela Lewis enjoyed and relied on talent, training, and experience. "I really feel strongly that this end of the business has more to do with talent, training, and experience than theater. Theater is so ephemeral and subjective. Voiceovers is like ballet or trumpet. You can either do the pirouette or you can't. You can either play a scale on the trumpet or you can't. We can tell right away whether you have voiceover skills or not."

"In theater," she continues, "any bozo off the street can come in and be a star because of the charisma or look or whatever, but no amount of talent, training, or experience is really going to help you. In voiceovers, it does. It is more specific, which is very comforting to me."

She does warn, though, that while sweat and hard work make up a good part of the recipe for success, that training and experience doesn't replace talent. Without talent, she says, you can study hard, market well, and you still won't be successful.

Sometimes even talent, training, and experience put together isn't enough. Sometimes the client is just looking for a particular sound. "We can control our effect," she says, "but we can't control the result. It's hard because you can ace an audition and know you deserve it and when you don't book it, it is heartbreaking. At that point, you have to let it go. Do the best you can and then don't think about it again until they say you've got the job."

Even though she can't control everything, voice work isn't a job Lewis would trade. Voiceovers are a creative way to make a living, she says, and much of it relies on improvisation skills. "Many times they haven't written lines for us. They'll say here is the new Ritz cracker or the new 7-Up dot. We have to find the sound and figure out what they might be saying. It's work that keeps your mind very fluid, flexible, and funny. Coming up with a funny line in an audition will often get you the job. Not ever ad writer is all that funny."

"A person successful at voiceovers," Lewis goes on, "is very smart, has a lot of talent, and gets the proper training to have the necessary technique."

Google and Voice-Overs

Research is a key part of the job for voiceover and looping artists. Most clients, Lewis explains, wants you to be saying things which are authentic to the movie even if all the audience will hear is "peas and carrots, peas and carrots" as background murmuring. So when artists are supposed to be background voices for an archeological dig, they have to say things that make them sound like they went to school for 12 years and have 20 years in the profession.

This type of research has been made much easier with the advent of search engines such as Google. Voiceover artists can find just about anything they need to know to help them create a script of background noise.

"Certain research was difficult," Lewis says of the days before Google. Such as when you're asked to be a devil worshiper. "Try to get the Catholic priests to tell you the Latin Mass so you can say it backward. Can you believe it? Certain priests weren't sympathetic," she joked, "Try explaining, 'I have to have this Mass so I can say it backward tomorrow to invoke Satan.'"

But now, she goes on, you can find such things on the Internet without having to explain yourself. "There are a lot of sites for freaky people," Lewis says. "It's very specific-frighteningly so. There is no end to the bizarre things. I'm probably on an FBI list now for all the strange sites I visit." Lewis was recently called upon to do Cold Mountain. She said the director came to New York and was looking for real southerners who would be able to improv in 1863 North Carolina style. "Fortunately," she said, "My grandmother raised me and she was a country woman. You can talk about so few things. You can't talk about cars or televisions. It's got to be your garden or your quilting. For those who weren't raised by a country woman, they can go to Google and figure it out there."

The Cold Mountain directors were originally looking for people who were truly from the mountains and not actors. This was set aside due to time constraints. Lewis believes this might have been a nightmare. "Looping looks easy, but it isn't. You bring 20 real people in and they don't know how to use a microphone. They don't know how loud or soft and it takes 15 to 20 takes before they get it right. They don't know you can't make extraneous noises or pop your p's."

Avoiding the Pitfalls

Lewis has no pretensions that her book alone can launch a reader into a successful career without any further training. It could happen, she says. "Quite frankly, say they had lots of acting background and technique. They have mastered beats, builds, and transitions and were already a wonderful actor either because they had studied it or were innately brilliant or have years of experience. That could happen.

So, if you have an already brilliant actor with a really wonderful ear, a facility for listening to things, and knowing what to do with their voice to replicate that sound. Let's say that they had fantastic personal skills, were wonderful at ass-kissing, happily obsequious, and were so well-adjusted they could be a therapist. Let's say they were incredibly industrious, don't mind extreme amounts of hard work, don't mind marketing, don't mind building Web sites, don't mind making calls to strangers and know how to do it already. Say they are already independently wealthy and can be flexible (or are supported by a parent or spouse). Then, they're also clever and can put together the ideas for a demo tape and find the perfect studio to make a brilliant tape. Let's say they are brilliant at improv and have an innate ability to stand up in front of a microphone and not blow a take because they popped a p."

That person, she says, would need no further training than her CD. For everyone else, it is the beginning training-it is the way they can determine whether they should go on and spend more money on the business or whether they should stop there. The workshop helps to illuminate to its readers that a sound is not enough. They have to be able to fill the sound with personality and to sell a product without sounding like they're selling anything.

The professional tips in the book are Lewis attempt to help others profit from her mistakes. She hopes that she can make their lives a little easier in the business and keep them from doing things that might make them look stupid.

What is her best piece of advice? "It is not just about sound. The people who think it is just about how gorgeous their voice is-we don't want to work with them. We call them noises with legs because they have no heart, no spirit. What we really want is a brilliant actor with fabulous technique."

It is that heart and spirit that has helped make Pamela Lewis one of the nation's leading voiceover actors. And it is the heart and spirit that she shares with the publication of her book, Talking Funny for Money.

--B. Redman