Keith Brunson:
Hello, I'm Keith Brunson, and welcome to The Voice Choice. Here at The Voice Choice we meet the people that you hear that you never see in documentaries, movie trailers, commercials, all of those voices that you've heard that you never see. Who are those people? Today we will meet unequivocally one of the superstars of the Los Angeles Hollywood community, Bill Ratner. We welcome to the show right now. How are you, Bill?
Bill Ratner:
Hey, Keith.
Keith Brunson:
I would like to know straight off the bat, why do you think, amid all of the different voices that you do, that you've become the voice of choice?
Bill Ratner:
Actually, I just got my real estate license and I'm trying massage school. No, no, no. I'm kidding. My default, because I started out in the advertising business at age 14 as an errand boy, my default comment to a producer, a director, or friend, "How's it going at voiceovers?" Is "Well, I can always go back to being an errand boy." The truth is, I fell in love with voiceovers when I was five years old. My dad, I am very lucky to say, was an advertising guy. At the time, he was in publishing. But he made me very aware of TV and radio and the announcers and the musicians and the copywriters and so on.
The first time I remember watching television, I was five years old, and the announcer said, literally, "The following commercial message will be 60 seconds long," which is what they did in the early days of television, announcing the commercials. I thought, "Who is that guy? He's invisible. What a voice. He seems to know everything." I watched ... It was like Dodge Motor Company for 1952 blah, blah, blah. As soon as the commercial was over, I ran into the kitchen and I said, "Mom, I know what a minute is." "What's that, dear?" "60 seconds." "Oh. Did you learn that in kindergarten?" "No, the man on TV told me."
At about age 12, my dear friend, John Waterhouse, and my neighbor friend, Steve Gray, and John Barstow and Bill Connors, we all formed the brotherhood of radio stations. We each took old AM radios that our parents had either left up in the attic or weren't using, and tore them apart, and soldered a microphone to the volume control, and turned them into PA systems. Instead of listening to WDJY at 1039, we were listening to ourselves all day long. "Hi, my name is Bill. I love the sound of my voice."
Then we thought, "How could we put this to use?" Each one of us wired our houses for sound. We put intercom speakers in secret places where we could bug our parents' conversations, and when they were listening, we could broadcast the music and news shows we would write and so on. That was adolescence.
I didn't really get into radio and television broadcasting until I was 30 years old. I took a decade off to do small theater in Minneapolis and San Francisco and Berkeley. Then I went to film school, City College of San Francisco. I had this wonderful old television writer named Larry Menkin, who wrote Bonanza and the Virginian and Harlem Detective and lots of early television cop shows. He pointed to me in class. He said, "You. You're going to narrate the class film." I went, "Oh, okay." That was the beginning of my voiceover career.
Our business is so weird, that our mothers don't understand what we do. Our spouses don't ... "What did you do today, honey?" "I played the part of an artichoke." "Oh, that's nice, dear."
I worked at a radio station out in the suburbs of San Francisco, KKISS 99, one of the sales guys, making all the money with the Mercedes in the parking lot, Ralph Pizzella said-
Keith Brunson:
Of course.
Bill Ratner:
"You should do voiceovers." I said, "What are voiceovers?" He said, "Are you kidding me?" I said, "No." I was 30 years old and I'd been in the radio business for a couple years. He said, "That CVS pharmacy commercial you just did, where you did 55 tags. It took you an hour and a half and you made 165 bucks a week?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "The guy who recorded the 30 second spot, whose voice you heard, he made 289 bucks for a half hour's work." I went, "Gee, the math is not too difficult." He gave me the name of a guy in L.A. I was moving to L.A. from San Francisco, Berkeley, named Johnny Rabbit. His mother knew him as Don DiPietro, who had worked for Dick Clark, for radio stations that Dick Clark owned. And I took a voiceover workshop, which was really fun, because it wasn't as nervous-making as an acting class, where your body, your face, your butt is on the line. In voiceovers, it's a little more collegial in class, and it's just your voice. It's just you and the mic in the booth.
For the next six years, literally, probably about 40 weeks of the year I took voiceover workshops every single week. Privates, mainly classes, because they were cheaper. These days you can do it online.
Keith Brunson:
That is a very long time to study.
Bill Ratner:
I could've earned a medical degree and been a brain surgeon, but I make more money this way, Keith. No, I have more fun and there's less stress and I don't have to explain why I ruined somebody's skull, unless they feel their skull was ruined-
Keith Brunson:
Right.
Bill Ratner:
By a commercial that airs in the Superbowl.
Keith Brunson:
How did you get the role of Flint in G.I. Joe? That is such a deep dive into the big time. How did you achieve that success? Tell us the story.
Bill Ratner:
Hasbro had great success with the character, the 11 and a half inch tall G.I. Joe was his name, for many, many years. Then when Star Wars came along, and George Lucas went to China and had all of his action figures made three and a half inches tall, not a foot tall, but three and a half inches tall, with little arms that moved and so on, and was making hundreds of millions of dollars, kids and parents stopped buying Hasbro action figures and started buying Star Wars action figures. They were cheaper, you could buy more of them. Their stock really went into the toilet. This is the late '70s. Star Wars, I think, came out in about 1978, '77.
Hasbro in Rhode Island said, "What do we do? What do we do? What do we do? Let's do what George Lucas is doing, but we can't shrink G.I. Joe down. Why not? Let's make him the Joe Team. They went to Stan Lee at Marvel Comics and said, "Would you be able to create a G.I. Joe comic book, a limited series with Destro, Cobra Commander, Flint, Lady J, Duke, Scarlett?" That sextet of characters.
The comic book was advertised on television and served, essentially, as an advertisement for what became ... What they planned to be a miniseries with those six characters from the Joe Team, the brand new Joe Team. And they had a huge audition. [Sunbow 00:09:09] Pictures was the distribution arm and the production arm. And of course, Hasbro said, "Let's make a miniseries. Let's see if we can sell these action figures. Flint, Duke, Lady J, et cetera." None of the networks wanted the show, so the sales people from Sunbow and Hasbro had to go station to station across the country, wearing out shoe leather and running up their gasoline credit cards, to sell the idea of a G.I. Joe miniseries, six episodes, I believe.
They held an audition. They called every talent agent in Hollywood. I think over 100 of us showed up. One day, beautiful sunny day, in Studio City, outside the Wally Burr Recording Studios, lined up on the sidewalk ... Studios are not gigantic places. They're basically like a one bedroom apartment with a great big mixing board and so on. There were executives from Hasbro and executives from Sunbow and writers and animators all crowded into the studio, and one voiceover person at a time. But there were character actors from TV, I remembered, from the '50s and '60s, and voice actors, of course, who I knew and we had the same agent. People from all over Southern California who were professional actors or voice actors, auditioning for these characters, and were standing in the sun, and the associate producers were passing out black and white Xeroxes of characters they wanted us to play.
They handed me one with a character named Flint, but it was a black and white drawing. Ink drawing. Xerox.
Keith Brunson:
I remember very clearly. I do.
Bill Ratner:
With 30 seconds worth of text from Flint. He had this t-shirt and big pectoral muscles and a black beret and everything. "All right, Lady J, you better get your [dartans 00:11:08] on because Cobra's on their way and I can't bring up the [inaudible 00:11:11] system. We got to get out of here. Yo, Joe!" I look nothing like Flint. I was sort of a dumpy middle-aged man with a scraggly beard.
I got in the studio and Wally Burr directed each one of us. We weren't able to watch each other's auditions. It was one at a time. You go into the soundproof booth and they shut the door. "All right, louder. Faster. You're angry now. Don't sound wimpy. You've got a dinosaur trying to bite your neck. A space monster. Come on. Fight. Fight. Just make noises like you're being killed. All right, next." I thought, "That was fun."
Maybe 10 days later, I get a call from my agent saying, "Well, you got the G.I. Joe thing." I said, "What ... I remember auditioning, but what is it?" "They're going to do a limited series, six episodes, and you get scales," Screen Actor's scale. We're all members of the Screen Actor's Guild, our union.
Keith Brunson:
Right.
Bill Ratner:
The scale, I think, at the time was, I don't know, 670 bucks for an hour and a half's work. Cool. And residuals after that.
I went to the session and met my fellow actors and six microphones were lined up. That's how I got the gig.
[Cutaway to G.I Joe]
Keith Brunson:
Turned out pretty well, Bill. Turned out pretty well.
Bill Ratner:
The story of G.I. Joe, the TV cartoon, is still going on. You can go on Hulu today, 40 years, four decades after we began production of the cartoon. We did 52 episodes in L.A. You can download episodes from Hulu of G.I. Joe. That's right. Now you know and knowing is half the battle.
Keith Brunson:
I heard that voice. I heard that voice. Just for purposes of demonstration for people watching, give me two or three lines ad libbed of that character right now.
Bill Ratner:
You know, Lady J, last time we were up on the roof and you asked where's the sunscreen, I thought you were in love with me. All you really wanted to do is protect your own skin. But I love you anyway, kiddo.
[Cutaway to “Unseen”]
Keith Brunson:
Let's switch gears for a moment here. You're probably ... I've looked into it. Out of the people who are doing movie trailers in the Hollywood community, you're one of the choice voices for sure. How did you get in the very complicated game of MGM and Paramount and Dreamworks and all of the movie people? How did they come to realize they wanted you doing their trailer?
Bill Ratner:
Years ago, I think really into the '80s, they generally hired ... Paramount would produce a picture, and then the last thing, of course, they would do is the trailer for the marketing department to get it into the movie theaters and get it on TV and so on. And they would hire ... "We need an announcer," so they would call CBS or call NBC. "You guys have a staff announcer, right? Get him over here. We'll pay him an extra couple hundred bucks." When you go on YouTube and Google trailers 1960s, 1950s, "And then War of the Worlds, the biggest movie Universal Studios have ever made." That's what they sounded like, really, from the time talkies came in.
But then the movie trailer became more of an art.
[Cutaway to “Megamind “ trailer]
Bill Ratner:
The marketing departments of these gigantic studios, especially when they began making big tent pole pictures, the Marvel pictures, the DC Comics pictures, the superhero movies, movies with sequels and so on, there was such profit to be made in movies, greater and greater. There's always been profits to be made, but they got, really, in the '80s, just huge. 100 million dollar movie would make four or five hundred-
Keith Brunson:
Big films.
Bill Ratner:
Million. Yeah.
Keith Brunson:
Big films, big budgets.
Bill Ratner:
With budgets like that, they could afford to advertise on television. TV advertising is not cheap.
When they started making television commercials, TV trailers for movies, they wanted specialty voices. A man ... A great man, the late great Don LaFontaine ... You should really Google Don LaFontaine, was-
Keith Brunson:
I remember him well, actually.
Bill Ratner:
An editor.
Keith Brunson:
I sure do.
Bill Ratner:
He was not a voiceover guy. He was not an actor. He went into the Army at 17 and was a recordist for the Army band. And then he got hired a couple years later by his boss from the Army who was working for Paramount Radio, doing radio commercials for Paramount Pictures. And he began to edit and hired voiceovers guys, and did for years, did that. He was in his 40s. He was one of the top end writers of movie trailers and editors of movie trailers. And the story goes that one day in the early '80s, his voice was on what they call a scratch track, or the practice track, the voice track of a movie trailer for a Kung Fu picture out of China, out of Taiwan.
The producers were there, and apparently the voiceover guy was late, and they played the track with Don LaFontaine's voice, and he didn't have a typical announcer's voice, but he had a beautiful deep mellifluous voice, and spoke very naturally. "And Ling Chow was a killer. His mother was a lover. And together, they took over the world." The guy goes, "Where's the voiceover guy?" "He's late, but this guy sounds fine. Who's he?" "He's the editor. That's Don LaFontaine." "Let's use him."
Slowly but surely, Don LaFontaine started getting used on these low budget, imported Kung Fu pictures, and very quickly ... The marketing world in the movie world is like a small town. It's just a few thousand people. Picture a small town somewhere behind the mountains in Nevada with 2,300 residents, but they all write and produce trailers for motion pictures. That's what you have in Hollywood, and a few in New York that do mainly foreign movies for the distributors that are in New York. 99% of it is done here in L.A.
Very quickly, word spread about this voice guy named Don LaFontaine. But he thought, "They're pulling me away from my editing bay. I got to figure out what I am doing with my life. This is crazy. I'm newly married, I'm having kids." He met an agent named Steve Tisherman, Tisherman Agency, who represented a lot of guys with deep voices. Tisherman pursued Don for two years, so says Steve Tisherman, begged him. "Don, I could make you so much money. You don't have to edit anymore. You don't have to stay in the editing bay at 2:00 in the morning. You can go home and have dinner with your wife and kids. You can get a limo to drive you to your voiceover gigs." Finally, Don LaFontaine, he was being hired by so many of the studios and so many of the small boutique ad agencies that do nothing but movie trailers and TV promos for the networks, and became what began to be known as the voiceovers Six Million Dollar Man.
Were he alive today, he'd be making more like 15 or 20. We all-
Keith Brunson:
Everybody knows the story of Don LaFontaine and his success. Would you say that he got things going in the movie trailer television business? Would you give him that credit?
Bill Ratner:
What he did was very interesting, because actors can be paranoid, performers can be jealous of other performers. He was the opposite. He went to Tisherman and he said, "Look, Steve, I'm getting so many gigs, I'm working from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night, and I want to get home with my wife and kids. Will you pick a half a dozen guys, younger guys who want to do this and just tell them they can ride along with me in my limo and I'll introduce them to some of the producers and see if they can take some of this work off my back?" That's literally what happened.
The worst mistake I ever made in my career was when Don said, "Hey, Bill, listen, you got a nice voice. You're doing voiceovers, but you ought to get in the trailer business. Do it from your heart, man. Why don't you ride along with me in limo," literally, "and you can watch me work?" I thought, "That's interesting." My ego did not allow me to do it. I liked him. I trusted him as a friend, but I didn't want to be the guy who was tagging along. The six guys who tagged along with Don for a few months and went to the studios and the trailer houses all became great successes in the trailer business. It took me longer.
Keith Brunson:
I don't think that anybody really understands just how meticulous the work is, so let's show them an example of you doing a piece of audio for Lady Gaga. Mike, roll that right now for everybody to see, and we'll come back afterwards.
Bill Ratner: Tonight, we talk to folks in the area about the crimes, going gaga for Gaga. Going gaga for Lady Gaga. Going gaga for Lady Gaga.
Keith Brunson:
The first thing that everybody gets to see is that you go up and you go down, and you're in the middle, and there's really a great deal of detail that goes into getting it just right. Would you elaborate on that?
Bill Ratner:
I was in a studio on Melrose Avenue in East Hollywood, right across from Paramount Studios, which is the great huge piece of real estate that has made billions and billions of dollars for everybody from Desi Arnaz onward. The great movie studio, which was started in the '20s, which is still there and producing motion pictures.
It was an older guy who ran the studio, and I was doing some commercial for the Los Angeles Times. Today, in the Los Angeles Times ... And I knew that his father had started the studio in the '30s. I said, "Tell me about your dad," and he said, "My dad was busy recording the stars." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Look across the street," which was the gate, the entrance to the great Paramount Studios. In the '30s, all the big Paramount movie stars, males and females, would take their lunch hour, run across the street to this little recording studio, and record their parts in the big radio network dramas.
Radio drama, of course, preceded television dramas. All the cop shows, all the comedies, everything you see on cable and NBC, TBS, blah, blah, blah, was preceded in time by radio drama. Radio dramas were huge. You can talk to your great-grandparents. "Oh, yeah. We used to sit around the radio at night and listen to I Love A Miracle."
I tell that story because needless to say, when you look at pictures from the Golden Age, movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood, you see the great, great stars. Wonderful actors. You don't see [slock 00:25:10], you don't see amateurism.
The people who did radio drama were the people who preceded voice actors today.
Keith Brunson:
It all began with radio drama, and then just continued to escalate from radio into television, television into film, and it just kept building, right?
Bill Ratner:
Yeah. Of course, it was preceded for centuries and eons by theater, but in the 20th century, radio drama actors and later voice actors had to learn you are not in a theater. You're not on a Broadway stage. It doesn't all sound like this. The art of voice acting, which is a lot of intuition, and it's a lot of watching, listening what other actors do, and listening to voiceover demos, and watching the great actors from Michelle Pfeiffer to Marlin Brando on TV and on your smart TV, get a Criterion app on your Apple TV and watch the great movies, to find out what voice acting is.
With voiceovers, you're doing about three things at once. You're selling, you're telling a story, and you're emphasizing specific copy that the copywriter and the producer has said, "This is what we want to sell." It's directed by the marketplace. It's commissioned by the marketplace to achieve a specific result, and that's to get people in their seats to pay the $10.50 to get in.
It's interesting, I have a very close friend. We were school dads together, and he was a star of a major network, sitcom, and said, "My agent told me I should get into the voiceover thing." I said, "Come on over. I'll hand you some copy. We'll play around." He was a friend. He's from Ohio, so he has kind of a very flat neutral American accent. A lot of actors training went to Juilliard and did a lot of Shakespeare and this and that, but when he speaks on television he has a very neutral American accent. He doesn't draw attention to himself. He just talks.
But when he got in the voiceover booth, all of a sudden it was 1919 and the Titanic was about to crash. I said, "Why are you talking like it's 1919? It's not." "What do you mean?" "What do you mean?" Everybody who gets in front of a microphone and wants to do voiceover, has what I call their default voice. It's a voice that they automatically end up doing. My default voice is kind of a late 1970s suburban radio voice where everything is kind of just the same and kind of boring, and Bobby's Used Car Lot is just as good as Bimby's Beauty Parlor. That's clearly not going to win me a lot of auditions, but unfortunately, all actors, all performers, all voice actors have bad habits. One of the biggest and hardest habits to defeat is your own particular default voice.
My friend, the actor, from the TV show, his default voice, automatically in the voiceover booth was to sound like he was in a comedy at 20th Century Fox in 1932. Why? I don't know. And he couldn't stop. "What do you mean?"
Keith Brunson:
Isn't the reason that happened historically is because it started in the New York stage? I know what you're talking about. I will attempt to do it. That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard in all my life. I can't believe you're saying that. That type of thing?
Bill Ratner:
It's not conscious. It's an unconscious thing that people do. What do you have to do? You have to learn to get out of that. You have to learn to sound real, sound like it's a person talking and not a professional announcer. You have to learn that if you have an accent that we can't really quite understand you, you have to learn to be able to actually get your lips out of the way your mouth but still sound natural.
I had a producer once say, "Smile." I said, "Smile?" He said, "Yeah. I'm not saying you sound happy. Just get your lips out of your way because we don't understand what you're saying." Literally, I had to make the mechanical adjustment of doing what a smile is in order for the words to be clear. That was in a commercial where I had 29.5 seconds to say 75 words, and to say them clearly and to make people sound like I was a regular person talking about this fabulous soft drink.
It's a trick. When people take voiceover workshops, voiceover classes, there are two completely different things you learn. People don't spend enough time on voice production. [inaudible 00:30:26] To save your voice from being injured, like football players in the Superbowl do. They warm up their bodies. But when they play when they're on the field, they're vamping. They're calling subconsciously on everything they've ever learned since high school football to get that ball across the line. It's the same with voice acting.
The great James Earl Jones. Verizon, and Star Wars, et cetera. It wasn't until he was in his 60s when he started having a huge career in voiceovers. For 40 some years, this guy was learning to be a master actor before Hollywood and the broadcast business said, "Mr. Jones, would you please come and do voiceovers for us?"
Keith Brunson:
I remember when he broke in and got the CNN voice. I had been following him for many years prior to that, but I did not know that he was in his 60s when he made his voiceover break. That's very interesting. You're 74, and every time that you and I talk, you talk about the importance of study. Would you articulate just a little bit about why, at your age, you're still in study?
Bill Ratner:
There is a wonderful, wonderful actor who, before his acting career, was an advertising executive, named Hal Douglas. Hal Douglas. You should Google him and go on YouTube. In his 40s, he left the advertising business because he was getting so much voiceover work, and he did everything from network commercials to movie trailers. Everybody tried to imitate him because he had kind of a natural sort of voice. He wasn't down like Don LaFontaine.
And then I will never forget my voiceover manager, who specialized in trailers and promos, he was not an agent but a manager, said, "They want Hal, but he sounds too old these days." I thought, "Sounds too old?" Because he was still working. He was still making tons of money out of his home, his home studio, next to his ranch, his horse barn, literally.
I've never forgotten that. I'm sure that there are producers out there who have said to my agent, and my agent has, bless his heart, not passed it on to me, because it would've made me depressed, "We love Bill, but he's sounding a little older." The voice gets older. The body gets older. The face gets older. The hands get older. But for me to continue working, the great Don Pardo of Saturday Night Live with Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, he worked as the announcer for Saturday Night Live until he was 92. He's my hero.
Keith Brunson:
I don't think that everybody understands just how meticulous it is, so let's take another look at another clip of you in studio paying attention, being very focused, what it takes just to get a line or two out. Let's take a look at that now.
[Cutaway to “Unseen”]
Keith Brunson:
What I'm seeing in this video we've just watched shows a lot of attention to detail to your vowels, to your pronunciation, to everything.
Bill Ratner:
I need to keep my voice and the timbre of my voice and the physical voice box well-oiled and well-worked. I do it by taking classes where the teacher goes, "All right. Get your head back. Get your chin up, and get into your head voice. Go [inaudible 00:35:19]." And if you have a cold, Yogi Bear. Yogi Bear talks like this and expands his throat just before you start to talk like this, so you don't sound like this. The editing a 16th second out of my voice on Pro Tools also helps occasionally. But there literally will be a ... They call it a vocal fry. Vocal fry.
I listen to myself ... A response I recorded 10, 15 years ago, and I can tell the difference.
100 yards, 4.5 seconds. The results are in. Presenting the 40 mile per gallon Hyundai Sonata Hybrid. Could've had a V8.
Fortunately, I study enough and I workout enough vocally, not for hours and hours a day. I'm not a classical pianist. Way too lazy for that. But a minute or so, a few minutes before I go in the booth, I'm [inaudible 00:36:25] Literally, warming up the voice so it's relaxed and I don't injure it, and I don't make my vocal cords red, and I don't eat huge chunks of cheddar cheese and high caffeine coffee before I go in the booth, since it dries out the vocal cords.
Keith Brunson:
You bring up a very good point about instruction and teaching. At the Voice Shop in New York, we offer ... If you go to voiceshopcoaching.com, you can learn how to do dialects, you can learn entry level, you can have expert classes. But for those of you who are watching this, and you think you might like to discover if you have the it factor, just go to voiceshopcoaching.com and they will reach you and teach you. Here we have Bill Ratner, 74 years old. Did I get it right, Bill?
Bill Ratner:
Yes, that's actually correct. Thanks so much for broadcasting that, Keith.
Keith Brunson:
No problem.
Bill Ratner:
Actually, Keith's wrong ...
Keith Brunson:
Never mind giving up that personal-
Bill Ratner:
I'm turning-
Keith Brunson:
Information.
Bill Ratner:
49 this week. I look this way because I've lived a very hard life.
Keith Brunson:
It's just most people, when they get into your particular demographic, aren't trying to study anything, and it's just ... It's so wonderful to talk to you and hear your voice and to hear your imitations, and for you to take it all back to training. It's unusual.
Bill Ratner:
The truth is, if I had not done literally six years of voiceover classes ... And I went from teacher to teacher to teacher to teacher and had a lot of different teachers, and mainly groups, like I said earlier, because they're cheaper, but it was also helpful to listen to the mistakes that other voiceover artists would make. Occasionally, there was going to be somebody who was really, really talented and knew more than I did, certainly, listening to them was helpful, and the critique you get in the class.
If had not done six years of voiceover training, I would be working at a PR agency as a junior partner being asked to retire. Looking back at, gee, those days in radio in the '70s and '80s were fun, I wish had pursued voiceovers. Or I wish I had been hired. Had I not studied, had I not gone to class and met producers who were really directing, and met voice actors who were teaching, who really knew how to do it, and just worked and worked and worked ...
The thing that's difficult for a voice actor that's different from the on camera actor or the stage actor is the on camera or stage actor, I really believe, gets more time in front of the camera in an acting class, more time on stage, or with a scene partner, whether you're memorizing lines or rehearsing a scene. The voice actor has to be on mic in order to be working, or has to pretend there's a microphone there when you're listening to a voiceover demo, or listening to a commercial on cable TV going, "That's right. I do sound like John Hamm in a Mercedes commercial." That, to me, is the best exercise you can give yourself as a voice actor. Imitate the commercials on TV, or imitate the commercials on voiceoverresourceguide.com, or cunningham.com, or any of the talent agencies. Google voiceover talent agencies. Listen to the reels. And then take a voiceover class.
Lots of people are taking voiceover classes these days because they're not heavy duty ego busters like acting classes can be. You're studying an art that is grayer, more shadowy, ancient, the voice, the storyteller.
Keith Brunson:
Let me ask this as we wrap up. What is left for you to prove? Is there anything left that is an ambition of yours that you'd like to get into, that you haven't achieved?
Bill Ratner:
I have the naïve belief that I have almost always had since I started doing voiceovers over 40 years ago, and that's that the best, most interesting, creative gig is yet to come. Because I auditioned for a ton of computer games. I was Donnel Udina in Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3, and then they killed him off because he was such a bad guy. I auditioned for tons of that stuff. One day they're going to go, "We want Bill," and it's going to be a huge game, and it's going to make them billions of dollars, and I'm going to go to Comic-Cons and shake people's hands, and they're going to call me back in the studio and go, "We think, instead of Seinfeld, we want it to be the Bill Show on NBC."
Keith Brunson:
Do you understand what you're saying? You're telling me at this particular time in your life, you're still hungry to achieve the next great feat? That's pretty impressive, Bill. It really, really is.
Bill Ratner:
It's a naïve belief. I write on the side. I got a book published called Parenting for the Digital Age, about doing voiceovers and about advertising to children, and how parents should view it. I've gotten two books of poetry published by small presses last year. This weekend I'm performing in a poetry show with a bunch of jazz players. I'm absolutely thrilled. Because of the pandemic, there haven't been a lot of live shows, but I'm one of six poets reading. My goal is to be ... For the New Yorker Magazine to call me up and go, "Mr. Ratner, we've been on your website listening to your poetry and Carnegie Hall has a free date in March 2023. We hope you're still alive for it, because we'd like to feature you."
Keith Brunson:
Hopefully you are still alive for it. I have a premonition that maybe it just might actually come true for you. One thing for sure is that you can't get out of your voice what you can get out of a 25 year old, nor vice versa. It is mature, you've been working on it all of your life, for at least 44 years, if my math is correct in my head. That is a long time to be a voice artist, and you've done so well. You've been so kind to me and Ryan and Mike and all the guys that are involved in the production of this show. We would just like so very much to thank you for coming on today, telling your stories, and expressing things.
Bill Ratner:
Keith, I want to tell you that I love you and I hate you. I love what you do. You're a wonderful writer. I've seen your work in The Village Voice, which for me, has been one of my favorite weekly newspapers since the '70s.
Keith Brunson:
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Bill Ratner:
And your enthusiasm and your interest in this weird art. I hate you because you and your ilk are promoting the brilliant dark art of voiceovers, which makes so many people interested in voiceovers that it makes my work more competitive, Keith, so stop it. Please.
Keith Brunson:
You are a gentleman beyond belief. I thank you you so much for those kind words, Bill. All the guys here in the studio, all of us that put this together, we were looking forward to this. From Knoxville, Tennessee, we salute you and thank you for joining us, and we will be talking soon enough.
Bill Ratner:
Great, Keith.
Keith Brunson:
Thank you so much, Bill Ratner.
Bill Ratner:
Thank you, sir.
Keith Brunson:
Okay. Take care.
