Accent Jim

At the beginning of May 2011, I’m pulling out of Houston in my ‘87 VW camper (Van Coover) and setting off on a dialect-gathering tour of the US and Canada, hitting as many of the accents I don’t “have” yet as possible.  Can you help?  Here are my major accent goals and destinations:

In May:
Beaufort SC for Gullah accents
Pittsburgh - yins are welcome to hook me up with some locals!
Baltimore
Philadelphia

A brief respite in Washington DC and NYC, and then June will take me to:
Nova Scotia
Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa
Upstate New York
Toronto
Detroit

Then I hope to catch friends and family in Chicago, Iowa and Minneapolis before July finds me in:
Winnepeg across to Calgary OR Fargo across to Glacier and up to Calgary and Banff
Eastern Washington State
Vancouver (the namesake of Van Coover, the VW)
Seattle
Portland
a stop in Ashland, and perhaps a bit of time going more east in Oregon
Santa Rosa & San Francisco
Yosemite
friends and accents in Los Angeles and San Diego

August seems like the perfect time to cross the Mojave without air conditioning, heading to:
Las Vegas
Moab, UT
the Grand Canyon
Albequerque and Santa Fe 

Which should all roll me into Houston somewhere around September 1.

This all, of course, depends on budget, breakdowns, and side trips.  I’ll be hitting all of the lower 48 states I haven’t hit before, a number of national parks, lots of friends I haven’t seen in far too long, and hopefully a lot of “the kindness of strangers.”

 As I travel, I’m hoping to do a good deal of editing and writing as well, so that I don’t arrive in Houston with a computer full of only raw material, which would be a little daunting…  If you have any leads on locals who might help me gather some of these more obscure accents, I’d appreciate the way into the community!  Most of these accents have very little demand, but my goal is to build a wide array of accents for actors to use no matter what comes up. 

Future travels?  I’m hoping to spend some time in Central or South America this fall working on my Spanish, and at some point I have got to do a similar trip around the UK for a number of months to pick up on more of the regional varieties.  I don’t know if it’s worth shipping Coover, though, so I may buy an old van and customize a “stealth” camper for an extended voyage…  

I’m working on the Boston accent right now for AccentHelp, so I’ve been listening to a lot of clips - both my own and online - and last night I had the pleasure of getting to see Robert Mitchum’s film The Friends of Eddie Coyle.  (It’s apparently a Mitchum week for me, catching Night of the Hunter just a few days ago.)

This is an outstanding work, darkly displaying the hard life in Boston, allowing us to care about and dislike almost every character.  (Peter Boyle is more of a monster in this than he was in Young Frankenstein one year later.)

The most surprising thing was that the Boston accents were actually quite good, especially Mitchum!  He (and most of the cast) spoke with a light Boston sound, handling most of the main Boston accent hooks that are so distinct, such as the [ɑ] as in car and the [ɒ] of Boston and all.  I think whoever coached them had a strong focus on this happening with the word for, because they almost never let it become a relaxed schwa: [fə].  It didn’t settle into the generic “New York City accent = all east coast urban accents.”

I rented it because I’d heard it was a great atmospheric Boston film, so the accents were a bonus!  This is the one Mitchum should have been up for an Oscar for, but, alas, the competition in ‘73 was Jack Lemmon, Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino.  Bad timing for Mitchum…

Even with a dialect as defined as Received Pronunciation, there is an amazing amount of variation that fits within that category.  At last night’s first read through for  Shaw’s Candida with the Classical Theatre Company, we ended up discussing possible ways to make further distinctions between classes clearer - It’s not like we can just read Shaw’s endless character descriptions at performances because it would roughly double the length of the play…

The actors, of course, already brings their own energy and interpretation to the characters, so there are already clear distinctions that come built in, but we were able to talk about a number of tiny adjustments that can further raise or lower someone’s class - or point out lateral elements, making them of a similar class, but of another social family (such as Oxford vs. Cambridge influences).  

The character of Burgess is clearly of a more working class Cockney background (the play is set near Victoria Park in East London) but even his accent seems to shift a bit depending on whether he’s talking to his daughter, or those of “higher breeding.”  Shaw does his best to indicate the dialect in his spelling and grammar:  ”Lookee ‘ere, James: do ‘e often git taken queer like that?”

Proserpine, however, is “of the lower middle class,” but there are no obvious indicators of that in her speech - Shaw’s stage directions define this.  Candida, Burgess’ daughter, also lacks any clear indications of the extreme dialect of her father.  Proserpine especially may benefit from some lower class elements in her speech, such as what happens in the modern London Estuary dialect, with some elements of Cockney seeming to cross-pollinate with RP.

We talked about a number of possibilities for making a distinction between those of the higher echelon and those with a more working-class bent.  One element involves changing the number of syllables in a word.  Shaw spells the word gradually as grajally when Burgess speaks it.  This loss of a syllable is quite common, actually.

Frederick:  Fred-e-rick or Fred-rick

comfortable:  com-for-ta-ble or comf-ter-ble

actually:  ac-shu-uh-ly or ac-shuh-ly

peculiar:  pe-cue-lee-er or pe-cuel-yer

Reverend:  Re-ve-rend or Rev-rend

The shorter version tends to be more contemporary, less precise, and therefore lends itself to the more middle-class speakers.  It’s also the version more commonly spoken by Americans.  But this shortening=lowering doesn’t always hold true, since a word like secretary can become secretry for some posh speakers, but it’s one of the possible tools for distinctions we discussed…

(to be continued)

This evening we watched the 1942 version of Jack Benny and Carole Lombard’s film To Be or Not to Be, which actually turned out to be Lombard’s last time on screen before her tragic plane crash.  The film was finished in 1941, but its release was delayed because it was too far ahead of it’s time: The US had yet to enter the war, and this film focused on Germany’s invasion of Poland.  Thin ice for the stars and the studio - Lombard’s husband Clark Gable tried to talk her out of doing it.

Benny and Lombard are Polish actors who eventually get caught up in a plot to stop an informant and eventually have some run-ins with Hitler himself!  The Polish band of actors (with a mix of American and British accents) repeatedly pull off playing German officers in front of a bunch of German officers… who tend to speak with German accents… though the Polish impersonators don’t shift accents…  Hmm.  

Luckily it’s clever and even rather funny, so who the hell cares?!  But it’s another sign of just how unimportant authentic accents used to be in film work.  Not so much the case these days…  Throw in some good Scottish accents near the end, Carole Lombard’s elevated General American, and Jack Benny’s spot-on California/Polish/Chicago accent, and you’ve got a melting pot of accents!

We added one additional T-movie to make it four in one day:  the French adaptation of Harlan Coben’s thriller Tell No One.  Excellent - all the better because it didn’t get made in Hollywood, keeping it a bit more gritty and holding the mysteries off until the end, just like Coben’s writing.  Francois Cluzet was outstanding in the lead role - think of him as the good looking French Dustin Hoffman.  It was also another opportunity to be reminded of how outstanding Kristin Scott Thomas’ French accent is when she is speaking French.  Born in Dorset, England, she moved to Paris when she was 19 and has lived there most of her life, married to a Frenchman.  So rare to see & hear someone capable of pulling off “native” dialects within more than one language.  Now if only she could juggle multilingually…

True Grit, Tron: Legacy, and Tangled - and we saw them on Tursday in a teatre, or something like that…  Not a lot of dialect work to write home about - some strong choices in True Grit that fit into the American Southern accent realm.  The young lead (Hailee Steinfeld) was supposed to be from Yell County in Arkansas, and Matt Damon’s LaBoeuf was a Texas Ranger - all of them were well done, strong dialect choices.  The dialogue was a little formal/clever throughout, and it was a little too similar for all characters - I would have expected each to speak with a more individualized voice - I see this as a script issue, and not an acting/vocal issue.  Vocally, Jeff Bridges made some gritty choices that made my throat hurt in sympathy.  Damon did an excellent articulation shift once LaBoeuf had injured his tongue.  (Side note: I actually worked on the Arkansas accent with a young actress who made the second round of callbacks for the Mattie role.  She didn’t get it.  That’ll teach her to work with me.)

The Bridges theme continued in Tron - though there was very little to note regarding voice, speech and dialect work.  Very little to note about the movie overall, I’m afraid…  Olivia Wilde stood out for her acting work.  I’m not sure that I saw much acting outside of her work, actually…  The best thing about it, including vocal work, has to be the “literal trailer” for it - “Jeff Bridges!!!”

Tangled was a pleasant surprise - my favorite T-movie of the day, I almost hate to admit.  (Sorry Coen brothers!)  Donna Murphy made amazing vocal/acting shifts from moment to moment and was outstanding as the voice of Mother Gothel.  The non-vocal work for the horse and the chameleon steal the show, though.

My main discovery today is that I will actually go see the new Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides movie when it comes out:  Penelope Cruz is in it!  She’s on my “marital hiatus” list - I have permission to cheat with her if the opportunity comes up. My wife is okay with that, but then Johnny Depp is on her list, which is why we’ll both want to see that film.  As long as I don’t have to pretend the movie’s good, I’ll be okay…

Undertaking Betty (2002) takes place in a village in Wales and includes quite a few big names, learning the Welsh dialect.  Alfred Molina, Brenda Blethyn, and Naomi Watts all do good work overall, but the smaller roles in the film, as well as the ever-amazing Lee Evans, are perhaps the best examples to base your dialect work on.  Evans was born in Avonmouth Bristol, which is very close to the Welsh border, which may have helped him further.  Christopher Walken played an American undertaker, but his New York City accent - he was born in Queens - didn’t come off as anything like a Milwaukee accent, where he claimed to go to mortician school… but his hair made me forgive him.

I can’t help but use the term “Nice Person Voice” sometimes…  This is the voice you likely put on when you answer the phone, not knowing who it is - so you damned well better be nice, just in case it’s someone important!  

One way to describe this Nice voice is that you probably go up slightly in pitch, and you leave behind almost any trace of your chest resonance.  In addition to your phone voice, you probably use this when you are greeting someone meaninglessly:  ”Hi, how are you?”  ”I’m good - how ‘bout you?”  Nice Person Voice.

A few years ago, I was in the holding room waiting to go in to audition for a commercial for which they had called in faaaaaar too many people, so I ended up with plenty of time to stare off into space.  (I’d have worked on lines, but there weren’t any - it was an improv audition.  At least it was MY bad writing that way…)

While I was waiting, the casting director’s assistant came out for a moment, and she happened to recognize me - she’d taken a workshop with me in Colorado a couple of years before, so she happily remembered my name.  I happily was able to hear the check-in person call her by name.  That’s why she was employing and I was auditioning…

When I came into the room with the casting director, she introduced me as a voice teacher, and the casting director groaned, “Oh, we could have used you today!”  ”Oh, yeah?”  ”Yes.  Nobody’s using their real voice; they’re all so breathy and high pitched!”  ”Nice Person Voice?” I asked.  ”Exactly! Ugh!”

We went on to discuss it further, but the issue was that - especially because it was an on-camera audition in a small room - people were using their tiny voice that lacked the low-end, the chest resonance.  There’s soooo much more to be said about chest resonance, the enemy of Nice Person Voice, but that’s for another time, and a little video and audio explanation.

But I didn’t get the commercial.  Bastards.