Nancy Cartwright: Anyway, when they did that, it sort of planted a seed, then when I went on to Ohio University and competed, I had met up with a gal at the radio station, who was promoting music, but she was with Warner Brothers Music, and Warner Brothers to me meant Mel Blanc (famous voice actor who did the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and many hundreds more), so that’s where it kind of started, that seed now got a little bit of water and it started going wow! Mel Blanc! I said “Do you work with Mel Blanc?!” And she said, “No, I’m not, I don’t work in animation, but here’s my card. I’ll see if I can…Put a little tape together maybe..” And demo tapes they weren’t really something (used then), even while I was in Ohio, had I been in Los Angeles, I don’t know that there would be such a thing as an official demo tape. Eventually when I moved out to California, she really backed me up, and I did put a very amateurish, a very unprofessional tape together, and I say that because it was like fourteen minutes long, fifteen minutes long, and a demo tape should be about a minute and a half, or two minutes long.
Nancy Cartwright: I didn’t have any knowledge of what I was doing, I didn’t know, but I think to my benefit, I didn’t know, so I didn’t have any obstacles. There were no considerations getting in my way.
Hollywood Sentinel: Awesome, I love that!
Nancy Cartwright: Nothing getting in my way of what I wanted to do, and that’s a great thing! It’s a great thing to ‘not know’ because you don’t have any ‘back off’ you know?
Nancy Cartwright: Well you know, there are no hard pressed rules. There are some etiquette, and certain protocol that people need to be aware of. You need to be kind of savvy to that. Don’t show up late, you know, you should be a professional. It’s kind of common sense sort of thing. I get a lot of requests and e-mails from young people, different age’s people asking me, you know, “I have an unusual voice, people have told me my whole life, you know, I’m 48 years old, and I’ve always had this wacky voice and, what can I do?” And I say well, you know first you have to be a professional. You can’t be a dilettante. You can’t just pick this up like well, I’m just going to do this as a hobby. To do it, you’ve got to do it all the way. Read all the books you can read. Filter out for yourself what is good information, what is going to help you, and what is not going to help you, and start your own little list of things that will help you out.
(Dilettante: A person who claims an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge)
Nancy Cartwright: Right. It’s kind of common sense, I mean anything you want to do, If you’re gonna’ be working on cars, you would go to auto shows, and you would open up the hood of a car! And get familiar with the different kinds of motors, and how things are put together, and likewise, myself, meeting people like Robert Easton (Burke, the man of 1000 voices), and going in and taking a lesson from him, you know or, take a tape recorder with me when I travel throughout Italy, and start recording the various accents of the different regions, you know, and get the difference in the sounds. Get that as a tool, so I have those real life accents. It’s a bit challenging, because you don’t want people to know that you’re tape recording them.
Hollywood Sentinel: (Laughs)
Nancy Cartwright: I’m just doing it, not for what they’re saying, but to listen to the look of their voice, or how they emphasize certain words or whatever.
Nancy Cartwright: It rhymes with ingraining.
Hollywood Sentinel: Ah! OK!
Nancy Cartwright: It rhymes with raining or braining!
Hollywood Sentinel: (Laughs)
Nancy Cartwright: Graining!
Hollywood Sentinel: Ha! OK Cool Groening. Thank you. So, I guess my next question is, aside from your genius talents, why do you think the Simpsons has been so successful and lasted so long?
(To be continued in next issue).
See Also: Nancy Cartwright – The Rise of a Legend
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