First Film, then Stage, now Conquering Radio: But First, the Table Read

On Saturday, we will be performing live MARC SCOTT ZICREE's full-length radio play version of the MAGIC TIME pilot written and directed by his wife Elaine and him. The pilot of course is based on Marc's trilogy of novels, in which all the machines in the world stop running and magic returns. It will star Armin Shimerman (STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE, BUFFY, BOSTON LEGAL), Christina Moses (Sulu's daughter in STAR TREK "World Enough and Time"), David Polcyn (Montag in Ray Bradbury's recent hit stage play FAHRENHEIT 451), Richard Tanner (STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE, JAG, NYPD BLUE, THE ADAMS FAMILY movie) and Neil Kaplan (Optimus Prime in TRANSFORMERS, POWER RANGERS).

I have a couple of small acting roles in this project. This is awesome, because I'm just embarking on an acting career, in addition to my writing career, and hence, trying to build an acting resume and gain experience, and here I am working with veteran SAG actors, like Armin Shimerman and Richard Tanner.

Yesterday, we had our table read for this project. For those who don't know what a table read is, it is exactly what it sounds like. Actors, writers, director and producers sit around a big table and read the lines. This gives the writers and director a chance to hear the words and determine if they work the way they intended. In our case, Elaine was also giving adjustments to the actors if their initial interpretations were different than she and Marc were looking for.

This isn't always the case. I've attended many table reads and some actors act out the lines -- vocally, that is, because everyone remains seated at the table -- and some just read like they are reading the phone book. The latter aren't being disrespectful; they are just saving the performance for the set so it will be fresher in front of the director. In the former group are those actors who might want to try an interpretation or a line reading that isn't readily apparent in the script and see if it flies with the writer and director. Scripts get changed based on what the writer and director likes hearing.

Me, I always like to try out my interpretation and see if it fits in with how the writer and director see the role. As I looked around the table, I was exhilarated for the company I was in.

Everything went fine in this first outing, except for the walla, which was a bit shaky.

Normally walla is recorded in the post production process, after the editor creates his cut (assembles the scenes in order into an episode or movie), the director gets his pass and the producers get their pass. Walla is all those background conversations going on in a crowd that the extras play. Typically, extras on set do not say anything because you want clear pickups of the actors' voices. But it would be pretty weird to have silent armies fighting, or silent crowd scenes, or a silent marketplace... so actual lines are recorded as needed to enhance reality.

Since the radio play was being recorded live, the walla would have to be recorded simultaneously. Hence, Elaine and Marc assigned various people to do the walla. As the table read progressed, and there were lots of places that walla was required, it became apparent that people were having trouble making it up on the spot. There are some requirements to good walla... it has to be innocuous enough that the audience hears it but doesn't hear it. For the audience needs to be paying attention to the actors speaking, not paying attention to the background sounds. So the lines can not draw attention to themselves. And yet, if they don't fit the scene, then that, too, will stick out as a sore thumb and draw attention to itself. Finally, walla can not step on the actors lines, in other words, the extra can't say a line in the background that the actor then says in the foreground.

As you can imagine, not the easiest thing to come up with suitable comments on the spur of the moment, when you have bare seconds as a scene unfolds and the actors are waiting for the background group to set the stage so they can say their own lines. It occurred to me that Marc, being the writer on several TV shows, wasn't used to writing walla lines because they were performed in post, not in principal photography and hence written independent of the script. Whereas me, who had written walla lines while I worked in the Hercules writing department, understood that the actors performing walla for the radio play needed lines written for them before we did the actual performance.

Still, one needs to tread lightly when offering advice to accomplished writers with long lists of TV credits behind them. In order to justify why I was telling Marc he should write out walla lines for his walla people, I mentioned that this is what we did on Hercules and that the reason I knew that was because I wrote them (well, I alternated episodes with another person, so I'm not trying to take credit for all of them and we weren't responsible for every year, just a couple.)

Before the words were completely out of my mouth, clever Elaine thanked me for volunteering to write the walla.

So, today, I wrote the walla and emailed it to Marc so he could make sure it was in line with what he had in mind. Though one always expects some of your lines are not going to pass muster, I was exhilarated that all of mine did, with a couple of minor tweaks.

And now we are good to go. I'm very excited to do this, especially since director Marc told me that I did very well in my roles before we left the table read. He was pleased with all of our performances, but what meant the most to me was that he was pleased with mine.