Career Highlight: Working With Richard B. Schull
Richard B. Schull is one of the greatest character actors or the 70s. Easy. He's in an incredible string of great films. THE ANDERSON TAPES. KLUTE. COCKFIGHTER. HEARTS OF THE WEST. SPLASH. And my second-favorite movie of all time (and a perfect example of a loopy 70s comedy), SLITHER (1973).In 1999, I was working on a radio campaign for a neighborhood here in Raleigh called Falls River. We were going with an old-time radio show kinda vibe and had the budget to hire the kind of talent you need to pull off such a thing. I got a few voice demo CDs from some New York places and got to casting.
Making my way through the demos, I came across the name Richard B. Schull. I thought NO WAY, and encouraged by my good friend and CD Tomas Gardner, made a call and signed him on. No other male voices were ever considered. I made a quick pass through the three scripts, tweaking them a tiny bit to make sure they'd fit him. The other voices were then selected for how well they might play off Mr. Schull.
The entire cast was perfect. Real pros. My only direction was to get them to speed things up a bit so my lengthy script would fit within the 60 seconds.
Mr. Schull was really nice and let me be Johnny Fanboy and tell him how much I love SLITHER. I didn't go to New York. Instead, we did an ISDN patch with Soundtrax here in Raleigh, so we communicated through some sorta digital thing — otherwise I woulda had my photo taken with him.
The resulting spots were terrific. They're still a highlight of my radio reel.
Sadly, Mr. Schull passed away a few months later. It was such a huge honor to work with him.
(This photo comes from SLITHER, by the way. Sorry I don't have a way to upload the spots and link them to this post. Oh, and thanks to my wife, I have a 16mm print of SLITHER.)
posted by Toby Roan at 9:24 AM
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