Rubber Balls and Liquor (15 page)

Lucky for you, the technology isn't quite there yet. But it will be, soon. And when it is, I'll be all over it. Or, I should say, I'll be all over
you
.

 

 

7

Adventures in Animation

Okay, so that pretty much covers the front end of my career. It's the rear end that gives me trouble.

Let's just say my career has walked a tightrope between early-morning children's programming and hardcore porn. I remarked on this once in an interview, in an offhanded way, which is how I do most of my remarking when I give interviews. But then I realized that many a truth is said in jest, sometimes in an offhanded way. I know this because I read it in a fortune cookie.

Say what you will about my career (and, frankly, I'm satisfied when someone says
anything
about my career), there's no denying that sometime after those first few movies and those early fits and starts I came to occupy a creepy place on the spectrum of mildly popular culture. How this happened—or, when; or, why—I've got no idea, only that it seems to have been a happy accident, because I'm quite certain I never dreamed of a career in show business that walked a tightrope between early-morning children's programming and hardcore porn. It just worked out that way. You see, it turned out that I have a face for voice-overs. That line is not original to me, of course. Every schmuck who's ever worked in radio has used a version of that line to appear self-deprecating and humble, but I'm borrowing it here because I really do have a face for voice-overs.

(For what it's worth, and it's probably not much, I tend to avoid self-deprecation and humility, unless they involve some form of direct compensation.)

I know this because some Disney executive once told me it wouldn't be such a good idea to show my face in public at a Disney event or to appear at one of their theme parks because I might frighten small children. This was discussed at the corporate level, apparently, and there was General Consensus—and who am I to question General Consensus? Up and down the chain of command, it's a different story. Corporal Punishment? Him I can second-guess. Private Parts? Also, open to scrutiny. Major Disappointment? Ah, this fellow keeps turning up, without fail, every time I speak into a microphone, and of course I can't be expected to keep from questioning
him
. But General Consensus? No, he knows his stuff.

Not to mention Sergeant Flea Collar …

(By the way, what the hell kind of phrase is
not to mention
? Think about it: those words never appear in a sentence unless whatever it is that's not quite worthy of mention is in fact being mentioned. But it's a resilient little phrase. You can be on the lookout for it, and guarding against it, and it can still sneak its way into your sentences when you're looking the other way—as I have apparently been doing here. I can't tell you how broken up I am about this.)

Back to that thing I wasn't about to mention: Sergeant Flea Collar, for those of you too young or too disinterested to remember, was a promotional character developed by the Sergeant line of pet products, and it's hardly worth mentioning here except that it amuses me to do so. My thinking here is,
To hell with you, dear reader, if you choose not to join me in my amusement
. But that's entirely up to you.

Actually, now that I've gone and not-about-to-mentioned it, I'm a little fuzzy on this one. Let's just say I
think
Sergeant Flea Collar was a promotional character, but I can't be certain. If it wasn't, it should have been. At the very least, if it wasn't, those Sergeant people really missed out on an opportunity—and I could have made a buck doing the voice-over.

If memory serves—and here I am almost certain that it does; not only that, it also cleans up after itself—the first voice-over role I ever auditioned for was the part of the wisecracking parrot Iago in the animated Disney feature
Aladdin.
I was born to play that role, it turns out. To this day, it stands as one of the defining moments of my career, which even I have to admit is somewhat sad.

(Check that: I don't
have
to admit it, but I believe that doing so makes me somewhat more attractive to women—or, at least, to the sort of women who might not find the idea of a short, foul-mouthed Jewish comedian admitting to a slight professional regret to be not too terribly repulsive.)

One thing led to another, and after that toward some other thing that was neither here nor there, and after that I was headed off on this whole new career path that would never have presented itself if I hadn't gotten this Disney job. Now all these years later I'm known for playing this wisecracking parrot, and for telling the world's filthiest joke—two crowning achievements, to which I must also add the appearance of my bald, misshapen head bursting through my mother's vagina during childbirth (technically speaking, my first crowning achievement, according to official records). Not incidentally, it was at just this moment, family historians have noted, that I uttered my first word—“Aflac!”—which came out sounding like a whiny, nasally honk, and after that the OB-GYN turned to my mother and said, “I think you might have something here!”

I can no longer recall with any reliable degree of certainty if I knew I was reading for the role of a cartoon character when I went out on that
Aladdin
audition. It's possible that I asked my agent what I should wear, but I don't think so. If you've seen my wardrobe, you'll know there's no point in even asking.

(“Oh,
pants
? You think?”)

But it became apparent to me soon enough that I was reading for the voice of a cartoon parrot. Certainly, by the second act. Afterward, I heard one of the Disney executives who'd been sitting in on my audition turn to one of his colleagues and say, “Gilbert Gottfried? I don't know. He always struck me as a little one-dimensional.”

Really.

I could only imagine at the time who I was up against for the role—De Niro? Duvall?—but it appeared that they weren't born to it the way I had been born to it. I later learned that it came down to me, Joe Pesci and Danny DeVito. Apparently, the call was out in Hollywood for short, unattractive Jews and Italians. Eventually the part went to me, and once it did I was determined to do a good job with it.

(Years later, I heard it on good authority that the producers had originally offered the part of Iago to Warren Beatty, who turned it down because the thought of playing a parrot in the desert reminded him of his role in
Ishtar.
I have no idea if this is true, but I was raised to believe that a book of comic reminiscences is incomplete without at least one
Ishtar
reference, even if it appears in a parenthetical aside.)

(Moreover, if the parenthetical
Ishtar
reference appears in a stand-alone paragraph, I'm told it can be especially funny.)

I kept asking the
Aladdin
director to help me with my motivation. I wanted to know everything I could about my character, just like they tell you to do in those Method acting classes. This would be my method, I decided, now that I was finally working in a major role, in a major release, from a major studio. It didn't matter that it was a cartoon. It didn't matter that it was a supporting role. At least, I told myself these things didn't matter. In truth, they mattered a great deal. The entire business was like dreaming of being a ballplayer and waking up one day with your balls cupped in your hand and thinking you'd somehow arrived. Still, this was my big break, and I wasn't about to fuck it up. Not if I could help it. Some people might say I was a perfectionist, but that's just me. (Meaning, of course, that it would just be me, saying I was a perfectionist.) At one point, I think I even threw up my hands, and the pages of my script went flying all over the place, and I stormed off the soundstage screaming, “My character would never say such a thing!”

At some other point, immediately following, I think I heard someone ask if Joe Pesci might still be available.

The thing about voice-overs is you're never made to feel like you're working on a movie. You're just standing in a room, reading your lines into a microphone. It's like having a telephone conversation, with a group of earnest people with stopwatches looking on, and no one on the other end of the line. There's no interaction with the other actors, reading the other voices. There's no dressing room, because of course there's no dressing. There's no fancy catering truck, or craft services table filled with good things to eat. There's no syncing of your voice to the action on the screen. That's all done later, in post. In fact, if I had a dollar for every time I heard some middle-aged techie-type tell me something would be done later, in post, I'd have a lot of dollars—enough, certainly, to eat off the McDonald's “Dollar Value” menu for quite some time, which in turn would probably eliminate the need for the fancy catering truck.

Sometimes, the postproduction stage continues long after the movie has been in theaters. Once, after
Aladdin
had become so ridiculously and unaccountably successful it had spawned a couple sequels and a theme park attraction and a Disney Channel cartoon series, I was called back to the studio to redub a scene. In voice-overs, they call this procedure an ADR, which stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement. For years, I thought it stood for Another Disney Requirement, but I was mistaken. Apparently, that was just the way these Disney executives had been trained to make us voice actors feel, like we were beholden to them for our very existence. And, in many ways, we were.

Here, they wanted me to replace one word in a scene from the cartoon series, after it had already aired. In the scene, Iago the parrot was being chased by a tiger, so he quite reasonably exclaimed, “Let's get out of here! That cat is looking at us like we're kitty chow!”

Now, in the Gilbert Gottfried Method School of Voice-Over Acting, this surely counted as something my character might have said, in just such a situation, but apparently there was a woman somewhere in Middle America who begged to differ. Either she didn't understand Iago's motivation, as the cartoon drama was unfolding, or she was just a complete fucking idiot. I tended to lean toward the latter. What happened, best I could tell, was that this complete fucking idiot was watching the cartoon with her children one afternoon, and misheard my character's line. That's all. She thought I said that the cat was looking at us like we were “titty chow.” This was troubling, she wrote in a heated letter to the appropriate Disney executive, because it was potentially confusing to her young children, who might have taken Iago's comment as an offhanded endorsement of a popular product developed for people who kept women's breasts as household pets.

Such is the power of a Middle American woman who believes she and her children have been wronged. And so it fell to yours truly, as a caretaker of the Disney brand, to race back to the studio to redub the scene in such a way that even a stupid person with a hearing problem could take no offense.

The human ear can certainly play tricks on us, and I am reminded here of an amusing miscommunication with a woman I was thinking of hiring to clean my house. At least,
I
found it amusing, and this is the most important thing. The woman was British, with the unlikely name of Cunt. I think she spelled it with a “K,” but it felt unnatural to me, so I insisted on spelling it with a “C.” After all, we were in America, where we can call a Cunt a Cunt, without fear of reprisal.

This was where the amusing miscommunication came into play, because I suppose it's possible that with her British accent the cleaning lady's name wasn't really Cunt at all. Rather—or,
rawther
, as the Brits were wont to say (and you'll notice here that I've slipped in another Brit-seeming word,
wont
, to suggest that I have an ear for accents and dialects and regional phrasing)—it might have been Kant or Kaunt or Kauliflower, and my ears were just playing tricks on me. Either way, this would-be cleaning lady wasn't particularly qualified for the job, but I ended up hiring her anyway, mostly for the opportunity to chase after her all day and say, “Hey, Cunt, dust that cabinet over there!” Or, “Hey, Cunt, you didn't do such a good job mopping my floor!” Or, “Hey, Cunt, I thought I told you to look me in the eye when I talk to you!”

It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—for
me
, of course, and not necessarily for that Cunt—although looking back I'm a little ashamed of my behavior. Some people might say I was a real prick about it, but I prefer to think of myself as more of an asshole. In my defense, my actions came from an honest mistake. I kept hearing one thing, while my hardly qualified cleaning lady kept saying another. After a while, the poor woman couldn't stand it anymore. She didn't want to give up the job, so she changed her name. I think her name was Jane Cunt, so she changed it to Susan Cunt, and after that there was no longer any confusion.