Rubin-Vega, Lewis, Snow, Shindle and More to Be Part of Voices Remember Fundraiser

Voices Remember is the title of an upcoming "intimate musical cabaret" that will benefit the Alzheimer's Association.

Presented by "Secrets of Voice-Over Success" author Joan Baker, the Alzheimer's Association and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, the April 28 fundraiser will be held in the residence of Ron Pobuda at 210 Central Park South on 59th Street.

Among those scheduled to take part in the concert are Daphne Rubin-Vega, Norm Lewis, Kate Shindle, Phoebe Snow, Larita Gaskins, Nita Whitaker, Judine Somerville, Bobbie Eakes, Don Lafontaine, Joe Cipriano, Valerie Smaldone, Les Marshak, Rodd Houston, Sylvia Villagran, Bill Ratner, Cedering Fox and Steve Zirnkilton.

In a statement author Baker said, "In a very uniquely staged show of support, performers whose careers and livelihood depend on their vocal talent will honor and remember those who have lost their voices to Alzheimer's disease."

The evening will begin at 7 PM with hors d'oeuvres and cocktails followed by the performance.

To purchase tickets, priced $525, call (212) 269-0700, ext. 14. For more information about the Alzheimer's Association, visit www.actionalz.org.

—Andrew Gans, Playbill
March 17, 2008

Giving dad a voice: Joan Baker honors her father by raising funds to fight Alzheimer's

When my elderly father suddenly and unexpectedly died at home in July, it was a heartbreaking shock — and, I have to admit now, partly a relief. My two older brothers and I had long weathered and attempted to counter his brushes with the law, his attempts to keep driving despite several serious accidents and his habit of going up to security guards at Manhattan offices and telling them he had a bomb.

I miss my dad, but I had missed him for quite a few years before his actual death. The father I knew had died years ago, his mind slipping away in his advancing years as dementia and depression progressed, though he was still cognizant and supportive enough of my writing career near the end to send me cartons filled with books by Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner and John Updike.

That's why, when I read about Joan Baker, a Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, resident who'd been through a similar ordeal and was honoring her late father's memory by writing a book and donating the proceeds, I knew we'd have lots to talk about.

Baker watched her father's mind evaporate from the effects of Alzheimer's disease, a degenerative brain disorder of unknown cause. Its most famous victim was President Ronald Reagan, but it also killed actress Rita Hayworth, politician Barry Goldwater, conductor Aaron Copeland and other celebrities.

When her father, James P. Baker, passed away on September 20, 2003, Baker channeled her grief into helping others. An award-winning voice-over artist, she gathered 18 of the top talent from that world and asked them to contribute a chapter each to a book about the business. Some were friends, some were strangers. All said yes, and two years later, Secrets of Voice-Over Success was published — with all royalties donated to the Alzheimer's Association, the world leader in Alzheimer's research and support.

Baker is also donating fees for book-related speaking engagements to Alzheimer's Association.

Greeting a visitor in the downtown office she shares with her husband of eight years, Rudy Gaskin, Baker shows what those who hear her voice-overs are missing — a thousand-watt smile and piercing gray eyes.

"The idea of the book was to highlight the art of communication, but it was twofold because we were also helping to give voice to a segment of society who are no longer able to communicate," she says.

Baker's business is communication, and word of her crusade spread after the book was published. "Rudy and I were invited to a party where we met with Dr. Sam Gandy, the chair of the Alzheimer's Association's Medical and Scientific Advisory Council," she says. She was also asked to join the Public Policy Forum, a team that lobbies Washington each year for Alzheimer's research funds.

One of the contributors to "Secrets of Voice-Over Success," Don LaFontaine — who has narrated more than 4,000 movie trailers — says he had a personal interest in Baker's cause. "I'd lost an aunt and an uncle to [Alzheimer's]. I don't think anyone on the planet hasn't had their family touched by it. You get robbed of your past. It's as insidious as cancer as far as I'm concerned. "But Joan is pretty much an unstoppable force. She's not coming from the Home for the Shy. Once she sets her mind to something, it's just gonna get done. I really believe in what she's doing."

Baker's father was a stevedore working on cargo ships, a physically demanding job. "Dad was 5-foot-10 and very muscular, very athletic," she says. "They called him 'Superman' at work. As long as I knew him, he never had a cold, or even a headache.

"By the time he got diagnosed, he had become violent. It's one of the symptoms. my mom and he would get into drag-out fights. She thought he didn't like her anymore. It was pretty well-progressed when it was diagnosed, but the difficult thing was part of him was still connected to reality. As the disease went on, he got more and more out of his mind.

"People with Alzheimer's do very peculiar things," Baker continues. "Like, he would wander down on the highway picking up garbage. He was a loner in the disease, spent a lot of time alone and wandering, and obsessed with mail. He would get junk mail and take it seriously. There were piles of it around the house."

Baker gives off a vibe of city sophistication, but she grew up in the country. Born the oldest of four kids to a black mother and white father in San Francisco, she moved with her family to nearby Marin County when she was 3.

"There were no mixed families there," she says. "The only reason my dad could buy a house was because he was white. The kids my own age as I was growing up accepted me; their parents covertly didn't.

"One time I went to a friend's house, and his mother took me aside and said, 'I don't want you to talk to my son. I don't even want you to look in his direction.' I didn't tell anybody. I thought there was something wrong with me. But it made me work harder in the world."

After high school, Baker auditioned and won a dance scholarship to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center in Manhattan, and moved to New York. After several years of performing professionally, she put together a demo tape in 1991, got her first voice-over job and signed with a major talent agency. She and her husband met in 1994 and started PushCreative, a branding agency, in 2000. Her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's that year.

Baker visited her father for the last time a month before he died. "It was a pretty profound experience seeing him," she says. "He wasn't in this sphere any more. He was staring straight ahead and not moving. I stayed with him a couple of hours. Then I asked him, 'Are you okay?' He shook his head no, and that was the only time he responded."

Doing something about a cure after his death gave Baker solace. "My father's voice was and is still very much present in my mind," she says. "I feel like I have his wings on my back."

The Rita Hayworth Gala, which has raised over $42 million for Alzheimer's research since 1985, will be held Nov. 14 at the Waldorf-Astoria. For more information on the Alzheimer's Association, visit www.alz.org or call (800) 272-3900.

—Josh Max, New York Daily News
September 25, 2006

Challenging The Voice of God

Joan Baker, a top voiceover talent, questions the idea common among advertisers that a woman’s voice isn’t as impactful as a man’s.

As one of the auspicious few who have been able to navigate the world of voiceover acting successfully, I am grateful I have had the opportunity to work with great producers and writers and extraordinary voiceover actors around the world.

Indeed, it was the joy of doing voiceover acting that led me to write, Secrets of Voice-Over Success: Top Voice-over Actors Tell How They Did It. The book includes some of the greatest talents in the business: Don La Fontaine, Les Marshak, Nancy Giles, Sylvia Villagran, Keith David, Joe Cipriano, Cedering Fox, George DelHoyo, Stephen Newman, Valerie Smaldone, Fred Collins, Steve Zirnkilton, and many others. They are truly the cream of the crop. Clearly, the voiceover industry has been good to me on many levels.

It is important to note, however, that there are still important opportunities for improvement, particularly for women. The multi-million dollar voiceover industry is biased against women’s voices to the point that insiders see it as just the way things are. As such, men regularly feast upon the incredibly lucrative voiceover contracts that are the meat of the industry. Women’s opportunities are sparingly sprinkled around like so much salt on a thick, juicy steak.

Why is that? Do men’s voices have some innate God-given ability to enthrall and inspire while women’s voices can be no more than frivolous accessories?

In 2006, we look back upon women’s suffrage and shake our collective heads at how things were. We know in our hearts equality is a right for all, not a privilege for the few. But in this age of presumed social consciousness, executives in the advertising and promotions business are still able to get away with the following statement: “Her demo reel sounds great but we don’t use female voices.”

In the voiceover biz, there are common expressions to describe the deep-voiced pitchman. He’s the voice of God,” or “thunder throat.” Those men have “authoritative, bigger than life, powerful” voices.

“The voice of God” label is the most troublesome. When we think God, we all think male. The God as man myth has tipped the scales against women—yes, even women in the voiceover field.

And the myth has insidiously crossed gender lines. Often in auditions, even female listeners tend to pick male voices over women’s . A producer for a major cable network reported that his network president-a female-looked him straight in the face and said, with great managerial brio, “I think our network voice should be male. I’m very sexist when it comes to that.”

Centuries of mental jack-hammering have convinced us that God’s voice is that of a man, strong and confident, credible and authoritative.

But women have uber-strength. If you don’t believe me, visit a delivery room sometime, or study the lives of Harriet Tubman or Mother Teresa or Joan of Arc. Women have the power to evolve the human spirit. So why isn’t a woman’s voice strong enough to inspire you to buy a fourth generation iPod with Naviplay Bluetooth speakers and compatible home Sound Dock?

The essential directive is simple. All of us: voiceover actors, producers, creative directors, art directors, vice presidents, presidents, and CEOs must jettison our biases toward female voices and look upon women voiceover actors with open minds. The issue is far bigger than advertising and promotion, but what a great place to start the revolution!

Yet maybe things are changing. CBS CEO Les Moonves said, before bringing in Katie Couric, that he wasn’t looking for a “voice of God” anchor for the CBS Evening News. Maybe, just maybe, people are beginning to realize that what makes a voice powerful or truthful, inspiring or convincing, is not the gender behind the voice. It’s the heart, mind, soul and talent of the person behind the voice.

However, Moonves, while choosing a female talent, still propped up the “Voice of God” as a male entity. So did many critics, who immediately after she was named wondered if Couric was too soft to do hard news.

Too bad. As an industry with global influence and as fellow human beings we owe it to ourselves to evolve beyond decisions made with the involuntary knee-jerk rationalizations.

The good news is that it hasn’t necessarily been intentional, at least not for a long time. And the even better news it that we don’t have to allow this belief to paralyze our gender awareness any longer.

It is not the gender, but things like intention, desire and need that create the magic of an inspired performance, whether for commercials, film or stage. To the executives, writers, producers and marketers who cast the voices that make the whole world buy, I say cast them fairly, according to talent. Let the consumers decide.

Baker is also SVP, public relations at New York-based advertising agency Push Creative. She is conducting a July 11 Learning Annex seminar about the voiceover business in Los Angeles, and another one Aug. 15 in New York.

—Joan Baker, Broadcasting and Cable>
July 6, 2006

Welcome to the World of Promos: It’s Not Just Another Voiceover Gig
By Simi Horwitz

“If you want to do promos, take a course in it, create a good demo, get an agent, and don’t give up your day job. It’s a slow, long process!” The speaker is the Los Angeles based Don LaFontaine, who would surely know something about the subject. Indeed, he is a star in the world of promos—those ubiquitous voiceovers on television, promoting upcoming shows— and movie trailers (viewed as the gold standard of promos). In fact, LaFontaine has more than 4,000 movie trailers and tens of thousands of promos for all the major networks under his belt. And has just received Hollywood Reporter’s Lifetime Achievement Award at its 34th annual Key Art Awards ceremony.

Who would imagine promos evoking that kind of hoopla? The fact is they are a self-contained art form (of sorts), requiring a set of skills that are distinct from any other kind of voiceover work. According to four voiceover artists, who have found their niche in the world of promos, they are specialists who face particular challenges on the job.

For starters, they have to have a clearly defined voice quality—and we’re not simply talking about that authoritative mellifluous sound, although that may (or may not) help.Today’s promo voice reflects the genre it’s promoting.

“For TV drama, they usually like a heavier voice, with weight,” explains LaFontaine. “For television comedy, it’s a light and happy sound. Action programs are usually promoted by a voice, with a hard edge. Sometimes you’ll be selling different shows on the same spot, so the challenge is to move from one show to the next easily.You may start out sounding sad and then end up sounding happy.

“If you’re doing a movie trailer you want to give weight to what you’re saying and remain true to the spirit of the movie,” he stresses. “If it’s a trailer for ‘Bridges of Madison County,’ the voice should have a romantic sound. With any movie trailer, you have to see yourself as a part of the movie, not someone advertising it. You’re part of the process. A lot of careers are riding on it. It’s your job to put seats in the theatre to justify your phony baloney existence.”

His self-effacing cynicism aside, he makes it clear he is grateful to have gigs that “don’t require too much work and can be very lucrative.”

They are also a hell of a lot of fun, suggests Joan Baker of New York, who has just published a book on voiceovers, Secrets of Voice-Over Success, and has done promo work for HBO, ESPN, and ABC News, among others. “I love to do promos,” she says. “There’s more of an opportunity to put your personality into a promo than a voiceover. Voiceovers require the art of subtlety. But in a promo, because you’re competing with so many other noises in that promo”--e.g., music, dialogue from the narrative, for example— “you need a voice that can cut through all of that to get an audience to listen to you and then to watch the show you’re promoting. With promos I can be authoritative or sexy and not seem over-the-top.”

That said, there are prototypes for each genre, which function as guidelines for the voiceover artist, she points out. “Diane Sawyer is the prototype for the news program promo. Her voice is authoritative, proper, and genuine. You feel there is a genuine smile in Diane Sawyer’s voice. Mary Hartman on ‘E’ is the prototype for the corporate crisp presence.”

The Los Angeles based Joe Cipriano has created his own prototype for television comedy promos. He calls it his “money voice—the up tempo, high energy smile in voice.” He intones one of his promos: “Sunday, it’s all new ‘Simpsons’ on Fox, followed by ‘King of the Hill.’” He offers another promo. “It’s the final episode of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond. CBS Monday.”

Cipriano has served as the promo voice for the Fox Television comedies for 17 years and the CBS comedies for the past eight years, in addition to reading all the promos for the Food Network, among others.

Doing promos is not all fun and games. There are potential stumbling blocks, such as the precise timing that’s required “to do narration between sounds on tape,” Baker points out. “Sometimes the script will indicate that there are seven seconds to say the line.You are saying the line in real time and your reading has to be perfectly timed. Sometimes we’ll do the promo in a sound booth while watching the film on a monitor and listening to the music on a headset.”

Adds LaFontaine:“You need an internal clock, an instinctual feel when to speak.”

Interestingly, not all promo artists are actors. Cipriano, for example, was an onair radio personality in the Washington D.C. area before he decided to pursue the voiceover game. Similarly, LaFontaine worked as a recording engineer for an advertising company when he got involved in voiceover work quite by accident.When an actor did not show up to read for a trailer, LaFontaine took his place and his voice was discovered and work started coming his way. Nonetheless, he did not go into the field full time for close to 20 years.

All agree that promos are a highly competitive profession and becoming more so. Admittedly, there are hundreds of outlets with cable and satellite today, says Joe Cipriano. “But at the same time, because of technology today you no longer have to be in New York or Los Angeles to do a promo. You can be virtually anywhere in the world.”

Voice Jurisdiction

So, how many people are doing promos? Nailing down precise numbers is difficult. For starters, both the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists (AFTRA) represent them. If the spot is shot on videotape,AFTRA has jurisdiction; on film, it’s SAG. Clearly, many of the same actors appear—or, more precisely, their voices can be heard--on both tape and film. Still, the Los Angeles based Cedering Fox, who co-chairs AFTRA’s promo chapter, speculates that approximately 120 voiceover artists do promos. The amount of money earned clearly varies with the number of promos one does and whether the promos are for national or local programs—not to mention the particulars of the individual’s contract.

Baker suggests that a very successful promo artist—one who does the promos for “The Today Show,” for example, may make $350,000. Others who make a living at it, but on a more modest scale,may earn a high five figure income, she remarks.

Most promo work still goes to men, says Fox, who was told that she “made history on ABC by doing the promos for the morning talk shows, the afternoon soaps, the prime time shows, and the late night shows. I was told that I was the first woman to do what men have done for years. I was told I had the authority of a male voice and the warmth of a woman’s voice.

“Today, for the most part, women are relegated to doing promos for daytime television,” she continues. “This happened after nine eleven and I suspect that trend has something to do with the idea that voice of God—the voice of security—is believed to be a male voice.”

Since the competition for these gigs is keen, all agree the ability to do the job well and quickly is the key.“No more than two takes,” Cipriano says. “And don’t arrive with an attitude. Check your ego at the door. Come in with energy and have fun. It’s not brain surgery and it’s not acting on Broadway either.” He adds, “It’s very important for people who are doing promos to know cultural trends. Be aware of what’s happening in pop culture and contemporary music. Don’t be labeled yesterday.”

LaFontaine concurs, “Never stop evolving. Maintain a youthful attitude and a willingness to adjust to what’s happening.” In other words, be conscious of the vocal styles that are being used and new developments in advertising, marketing, and promos.”

Baker, a former dancer, makes the point that one’s physical appearance is relevant, despite the fact that the voiceover artist is not seen on screen. “It is important to look like your voice, especially if you are not a sizzling personality,” she says. “Of course, this is more true for women than for men, more true for older women than younger women. An older man can look anyone he wants. An older woman—if it’s obvious that she’s 45 or 55—is going to turn them off, unless she’s really looking good.”

As a racially mixed performer, Baker has also encountered some racial stereotyping she says. “I’ve done the promos for black history month. They were looking for a black sound. My voice has a heaviness, but I don’t sound particularly anything. The producer kept hinting that she wanted me to sound more ‘black,’ but she couldn’t come out and say it. Finally, the engineer blurted it out,‘Can’t you sound like a black woman with attitude?’ ”

The unfortunate experience notwithstanding, Baker continues to think promos are a great field with plenty of opportunity for those who “smart, savvy but not slick; and enjoy connecting with people. Everyone likes working with those who are fun and good-humored.” Baker’s been doing promos for 14 years.

For more information on getting started, finding classes, agents, and studios that produce demos, log onto to the Internet for a host of voice over guides.

—Backstage
June 24, 2005