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The Audio Book: A New Script for Actors |
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Premium Archive - New York Times January 4, 1996, Thursday CULTURAL DESK |
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By WILLIAM GRIMES (NYT) Larry McMurtry's novel "Dead Man's Walk" presents a densely populated world, which means the reader has the pleasure of meeting lots of new faces. For Will Patton, who read the novel for the audiotape version, the book was an actor's decathlon. "I was doing, I think, 57 characters, everything from little Scottish boys to Indian women," he said, describing the recording session. "There was one point where seven characters were talking to each other, none of them like me, and I stopped and said, 'This is insane.' " Mr. Patton, a steadily working actor (he recently played a sinister police officer in the film "Copycat" and was Gene Hackman's aide in "No Way Out"), regrouped and eventually struggled through. His publishers, Simon & Schuster, expected nothing less from a man who has emerged as one of the stars of a medium that has begun to attract serious attention from serious actors. The audio book has barely reached adolescence. The oldest audio divisions, at publishing houses like Random House, Simon & Schuster, Bantam Doubleday Dell, Time Warner and HarperCollins, are only now celebrating their 10th anniversaries. But in the last five years the business has taken off, opening up a new market for actors with the special talents, and the endurance, to make a cast of characters spring to life from the page and keep listeners enthralled for hours. Audio books now account annually for $1.4 billion in retail sales, according to estimates by the Audio Publishers Association. The largest publishing houses turn out 80 to 100 titles a year, usually abridged versions of best sellers that run from three to six hours. Dozens of smaller companies, many of them specializing in literary fiction and biography, have also entered the market in the last three years. For actors, the audio boom means work, and work of a seductive nature. The material tends to be good, and doing a reading has cachet. "It's high prestige, especially if you are doing a classic or an award-winning book," said Miranda Levenstein, an agent at the William Morris Agency in New York. It's convenient. A three-hour tape can be recorded in a day or two, which means stage actors can squeeze in a book-reading session while doing a play. The money, typically a flat fee of $2,500 to $5,500, depending on the length of the studio session and the length of the book, cannot mean much to a Brad Pitt, who has done the audio-book versions of two novels by Cormac McCarthy, but it makes a nice supplement for Broadway and Off Broadway actors. There is one thing more. Audio is a one-person show, from beginning to end. There is no shared billing. The reader plays every character in the book, or at least all the characters that survive abridgment by the freelance editors who cut the book down to audio size. "It calls on them to provide all the characters with only the tool of their voice," said Judy McGuinn, the director of Time Warner Audio Books. "That's the biggest challenge an actor could have, to communicate without benefit of facial expression or bodily movement." Some actors can do it; some can't. Audio producers and casting agents say that actors with theater training stand the best chance of succeeding, since they tend to have the endurance to deliver a sustained performance and are comfortable saying lots of words. Who else? "This might seem strange, but people who sing," said Rick Harris, the executive producer of Harper Audio. "Musical comedy actors do well at this because they know how to inflect, to color, to phrase." Mr. Harris said he also looks for actors with radio experience and British actors. "Not all Brits," he said. "But Brits tend to be pretty damn good." Not surprising, producers say, the best readers seem to be actors who love books and the English language. "Some actors act from the gut," said Sandy Moore, the vice president for program production at Simon & Schuster Audio. "They're not really cerebral, and they are not necessarily good readers. If you don't really love words and playing with words, you're not going to paint the picture." The actors who can paint the picture now form a constellation of audio stars. Mr. Patton is a highly prized commodity. "He has a lovely voice, very expressive, not quirky and hard to listen to," said Jenny Frost, the president and publisher of Bantam Doubleday Dell's audio division. "Also, he really works hard on the scripts before going into the studio." Other hot properties are Edward Herrmann, John Lithgow, Joe Mantegna, Lynn Redgrave, Natasha Richardson, Kate Burton, Michael York, Blair Brown and Stephen Lang. "Quite a number of people we know are terrific time after time," said Sherry Huber, the producer for Random House Audiobooks. "They have the skill to do multiple characters one after the other. Others, like Joe Mantegna, may not go in so much for characterizations, but they have a way of reading that makes you hang on every word." The work can be grueling. "Guys who go in and try do it cold are in for a big surprise," said Mr. Mantegna. Imagine a stage soliloquy stretched to four or five hours, with only an occasional break. Any sign of dullness, fatigue or boredom will come across loud and clear. "There comes a point where you just can't figure out what you are saying, or how you can continue concentrating," said Mr. Patton. "There is inevitably a moment of freakout." The studio offers no place to hide. The actor sits virtually motionless in a small soundproof room, text in hand, and speaks into a microphone that picks up even the tiniest stutter, nasal whistle or smacking of the lips. Ms. Burton reads about five books a year, most recently an unabridged version of Dean Koontz's forthcoming "Intensity" that she recorded while performing on Broadway in "Company." She made the mistake one day of wolfing down a fast-food lunch before a recording session. When her stomach began making funny noises, the taping had to be canceled. It's not enough to go the distance. Readers also have to make characters distinctive without being intrusive. They quickly discover that they cannot inhabit a role in the same way that they do onstage or on screen. "I've become adept at finding a little vocal characterization, like making my voice a little gravelly or pitching it up a little," Ms. Burton said. "It doesn't have to be major." Ms. Brown, who has read novels by Anne Tyler, Patricia Cornwell and Stephen King, said that she started out thinking she had to be "the woman of a thousand voices," but has since adopted a style closer to the one she used when reading to her son when he was small. "The hardest thing for me is love scenes, because you have to do both the man and the woman," she said. "Also, in women's books you often end up with three best friends, all from the same place and same background." Mr. Mantegna, an audio-book veteran who started out reading Raymond Chandler for Random House in 1984 and has since read novels by Richard Price and Elmore Leonard, said that he took a minimal approach. He adopts a generic voice for minor characters, as long as they don't congregate in the same scene, and adjusts his voice just enough to differentiate major characters, with a slight change in tonality to indicate female characters. "When you're reading a book to yourself, you don't change the voice in your head when you come across a feemale character," he said. "Ido the same thing." On the other hand, Mr. Mantegna said, unlike some actors who strive for narrative neutrality, he does try to convey a writer's narrative voice. "The good stuff is hard," he said. "You get a writer like Elmore Leonard or Richard Price, writers with a flair, a distinctive voice, and it's trickier than a flat narrative. You have to reproduce what they have as writers." Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
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