my first in an intermittent series of salutes to one of "those guys"

You likely don't know the name of the man in the above picture.

He's one of "those guys." You know, those actors who are familiar somehow, but you can't place the role, and definitely can't place the name.

James Hong is perhaps the greatest of "those guys" simply because he's been in a few things you may have seen over the years. Like the Chinese Restaurant episode of Seinfeld. Bones. Kung Fu Panda. The King of Queens. The X-Files. Big Trouble in Little China. Miami Vice. Blade Runner. Dynasty. The Dukes of Hazard. Dallas. Airplane! The Rockford Files. All in the Family. Chinatown. Hawaii Five-O. Mission Impossible. Perry Mason. Bonanza. Dragnet. Godzilla. (Yes, he dubbed a part in the U.S. release of the original Godzilla. Doesn't count for facial recognition, but still.)

According to Wikipedia he's had over 500 roles in his career, and a scan of Hong's IMDB page tells me that he has literally worked every year since 1955.

1955!

He has worked consistently for 55 years as an actor.

Other people have been acting for a long time, but they have gaps of a few years here and there; the phone stops ringing and it takes you a few years to get onto a daytime soap, or a sitcom, or if the mortgage is really late, a reality show.

Not James Hong. I've never seen a résumé anywhere near as consistent as his; a few credits each and every year, some in front of the camera, some voicework, some big roles, some small, some villians – but every year.

He seems to have been one of the few Asian actors that Hollywood casting directors of the '50s and '60s called on, year after year, like Jack Soo, Mako and Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, for the standard Asian roles: laundry owners, bellboys, restaurants owners, gangsters, Chinese Communists. And while Hollywood's caricatures may have slowly disappeared over the years (or not), the writing and the roles seem to have gotten a little more interesting for him, or at least provided some variety and consistent income while he did things like helping to found one of the first Asian-American theatre companies.

Today James Hong runs an acting school and is still working: he has two films in post-production, and one TV series shooting, while I write this.

That's pretty amazing. We should all be so lucky to do what we love that much, that consistently.

just one more word, it's waffer thin

Was recording a :30 radio PSA this afternoon and our voice talent, who we've worked with several times before and who is fantastic, reminded me just how fantastic she is. (Not of course literally by telling me, but by... oh, just keep reading.)

The script was too long; our client wanted to say a lot and at the last minute added three or four extra "clarifying" words that actually made the difference between a tight but doable script and one that just sounded rushed all the way through. (Surprising how small that difference is.)

So, I apologetically warned our voice talent about all this as she stepped up to the mike, and she was game. And on maybe the second take she nailed the script as it was written perfectly. That is, as perfectly as she could. Because she sounded like she'd been sped up by the sound engineer. She was rushed, and there wasn't a drop of space or emotion in it; it was clogged with words for 30 seconds solid. 

Crap.

It was the kind of thing you technically could deliver to a client and say, hey, we did everything you wanted, here you go. But in the real world you can't do that. It's just bad work with excuses, it's bad for your spirit, and in spite of the fact that you've caved on every single thing asked for, you still end up with an unhappy client.

As I stared at the board and the sound engineer thought about how dumb I was, the producer suggested losing the word in the call to action that was repeated from two lines before. At first I resisted, because I liked that particular bit of repetition and thought that there had to be some brilliant alternative. Then after a couple of bonus minutes of floundering, I realized that she was right. (Hey, the script was less than 24 hours old, and the last client changes had come through only an hour before the session. Lighten up, okay?) The repetition in the CTA was gone. Same with two wonderfully descriptive adjectives that until that moment I'd thought were vital, but were in fact just adding precious time. And this is going to sound funny, but these adjectives were long words; they were words that naturally wanted emphasis when they were read.

So, by deleting them and that repeat in the CTA – literally just three words – we actually gave our voice talent room to breathe. She nailed take after take running between 28 and 29 seconds. (Try it some time; it's got to require an internal metronome.) She repeatedly nailed the subtle but necessary inflections that gave the script not just some human feeling, but actual meaning. All it took was us (okay, me) giving her room to do her job, by extracting a few of those waffer-thin words that couldn't possibly make a difference.

That's how she reminded me just how fantastic she is.

Now, it's not an award-winning spot. It's a straight read of a serious message that needed to convey a lot of information.

It's just a nice example of the craft that actors, and specifically voice actors, possess. They have skills. They have knowledge. They can save your butt when you cross the line between too much and waaaay too much.