IFH 783: Phil Proctor: A Journey Through Comedy, Resilience, and the Art of Reality
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You are listening to the IFH Podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting podcasts, just go to ifhpodcastnetwork.com. Welcome to the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, episode number 783. Cinema should make you forget you're sitting in a theater. Roman Polanski.

Broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood, it's the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, where we show you how to survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker in the jungles of the film biz. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, welcome to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I am your humble host, Alex Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by Rise of the Filmtrepreneur, how to turn your independent film into a profitable business.

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If you want to order it, just head over to www.FilmBizBook.com. That's FilmBizBook.com. Enjoy today's episode with guest host, Dave Bullis. On this episode, I have a hell of a guy. He is just full of life. He honestly, he just brims with life, and I love having people like this on. He is a founding member of the legendary Fireside Theater. He is a voice actor in movies like Monsters, Inc.,

Toy Story, Inside Out, TV shows like The Rugrats. He was Phil and Lil's dad, Howard. He does video games like Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. He's even embedded into the Apple OS. Can you believe that? He actually pulls out the phone, and we're going to go over that too. I didn't ask if he gets free iPhones, though. I probably should have asked that. Damn. Without further ado, with guest, Phil Proctor.

Well, thank you very much. It's really good to be here. Well, actually, it's always good to be here because I'm at home today here in Beverly Hills adjacent in nice overcast Los Angeles weather.

Isn't technology wonderful, Phil, where you can do interviews from the comfort of your own home now? It's amazing, right? Yeah, not only that, but you can do auditions from your laptop, which I do regularly now for voiceover work or animation work. And I've actually, which we can talk about, I've actually done jobs for movies from other parts of the country on my laptop.

Which is unheard of, you know, like five, six years ago. You'd have to go to a studio and have a link up with the satellite to be able to do, you know, a commercial or something if you were in New York and they wanted and they cast you from California. But the technology has really taken over the industry, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the worst.

You're very right, Philly. Technology can be a double-edged sword sometimes. And, you know, I do want to talk about, you know, obviously doing things for movies from across the country because I've kind of gotten to that point as well where maybe, like,

You know, I can help out somebody from like, for instance, and I'm not to segue too far off, but I've been able to actually help friends of mine. Not even, you know, not even just like, you know, maybe recording something, but actually being able to help them. And they're across the country filming a movie. And, you know, we kind of like, you know, do a FaceTime chat or something like that. I'm able to actually do stuff like that.

Yep, that's very true. A lot of actors audition now by not Skype, but they'll record their audition using the camera built in to their machine and then send it to the casting director. I just had lunch with a fabulous friend of mine named Jim Meskamel.

who, if you know his career at all, is a master of a million voices. Jim Meskimen, if you want to Google him, you'll be constantly surprised and amused. And he got a job doing a Johnny Carson imitation in a film about Gore Vidal with Kevin, not Kevin Costner, with a famous star whose name will come to me in a minute.

And he did it, you know, remotely by sending in a tape. They cast him off of the tape and he flew to Rome and did, you know, two and a half days in this film. So all those wonderful things can happen now. And here comes the garbage. Yeah.

I hope they don't recycle me. No, Phil, you're a treasure, Phil. They won't take you away. Can you hear the wonderful sounds of the garbage truck in the background? Oh, I absolutely can. This is funny. See, this is kind of like Steve Allen's Man on the Street. It's raw. Anything could happen. I often feel as though my whole career is recycled.

I've been in the business for 60, about 65 years. I started as a child actor on a television show in New York called uncle Danny reads the funnies. Elliot Gould was also on that show. And we basically would improvise in this little kind of a closet of a studio with a big old Dumont camera with three lenses, uh,

on it and we talk about the cartoons in the New York Daily News, okay? And there'd be a girl and a guy and a guy and a girl and that's how I got my start on local television, local live television.

So anyway. Well, I mean, that's something I wanted to actually talk about too, Phil, was you have this illustrious career. I mean, you've been in the business for over 50 years. And I mean, you've seen all sorts of things, seen the ups and the downs. You've seen how things have evolved. Where, you know, let's just, you know, like Uncle Dudley reads the funnies. You know, that was...

I mean, there's probably, I don't know how many channels when that started. And now, you know, going to now, now there's Netflix, YouTube, and then there's all, there's like, you know, you turn on your TV and there's like a thousand and one channels. Remember Procter and Bergman predicted that in TV or not TV in like 1973 or something like that.

that. We predicted hundreds and hundreds of channels. We didn't think that there'd be thousands and thousands of channels, but then we didn't account for inflation. So there you go. For those people who might not know who I am talking about and who you are talking to, I'm a member of a group called the Firesign Theater, which was a four-man satirical comedy group. Sadly, two of our members have now left us for parts unknown

And only I and another partner named David Osman remain. So we now call our group the Firesign Theater or something like it, which is a parody of our first album, which was Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him.

Okay. And the next time that the, uh, what's left of the group, which had a 50 year career is going to perform will be on September 28th at the library of Congress, where David and I will be doing the history of the art of radio followed by, uh,

some excerpts from our home movies, which have been released on a two DVD set called Everything You Know Is Wrong, the Declassified Fireside Theater. And then we'll have a Q&A with all of the people who are there. We're happy to say that our appearance sold out in like three days, which of course was helped for the fact that it's free.

But nonetheless, we were pleased to see that there was enough demand for us that the tickets went very quickly. And it'll also be, I believe, simulcast and archived because, after all, it is the Library of Congress. They inducted another one of the Fireside Theater albums called Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers into their historical recordings back in 2007.

And so they are now in the process, we hope, of acquiring our archives, the Fireside Theater archives. So if you don't know the Fireside Theater, go to firesidentheater.com or just Google us. And somebody just did. And you'll find out all kinds of crazy things about us. And you'll be able to see stuff that we've done and hear stuff that we've done on the Web.

And it is, oh, and there's also a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week Fireside Theater radio site you can go to where there's a constantly, again, recycled playing of our radio shows and records and things and excerpts from our records. We also have a book which you can get at our site called Duke of Madness Motors,

which contains an mp3 of 80 hours of our radio shows and it's a very colorful book with interviews and pictures and collages and things about our radio years we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor

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Because that's how we got started. We started on local radio, KPFK, listener-supported radio, in Los Angeles back in like 1964 or something like that. And that led to a career in recording with Columbia Records and touring and films and, oh, 50 years of tomfoolery and fun.

You mentioned the prediction, Phil, of all the different TV stations. Did you ever think that there'd be so much like reality TV? You know what I mean? I don't think that that is something that came out of left field for me. Yeah, it's true. Now, I was the announcer on Big Brother for three years in the

In the early years of Big Brother. I think it was in their fourth season, fifth, fourth, fifth, sixth season, something like that. And to me, that was the best of reality television. Because before, it's gotten very kind of convoluted and more produced.

these days, although it's still a fun show, but in the, in the early days, it was more about real people, you know, who wanted to put themselves into this game like situation and compete with other people. And it was a lot. And, and they were all isolated in this wonderful, crazy house with the cameras all hidden behind it. I could walk around and look through the two, the two way mirrors and see what they were doing in there. It was really a gas, uh,

But reality television has indeed taken off to the extent that we now have a reality president. We have a reality TV president. And that is the most unreal thing of all.

Right? Yeah. You know, the lines between entertainment and reality have become a news and you name it. You have become more and more and more and more blurred so that they're the Fireside Theater asked in one of its very earliest albums, I think, and don't crush the dwarf. I mean, the pliers, the question, what is reality?

It's the major question you should ask yourself every day when you get out of bed. What is my reality today?

For me, what is reality? And that's become an increasingly difficult question to answer in the face of the media overload, the world of the internet. Our second album is called How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All? And that's exactly where we find ourselves now. In fact, you and I are representing it as we speak.

Yeah, very true, Phil. And you touched on something, too. I often find that comedy as a whole, it can be so philosophical, but sometimes during award seasons and stuff like that, comedy sort of gets pushed aside for the drama or something of that nature. But somebody, by the way, somebody that you mention in your book, by the way, you mention Mel Brooks. And he has taken that, too, the same way you have, where it's like if you want to – you can –

make a really great philosophical statement, but also if you wrap it in comedy, I think the message just gets through so much better. You know what I mean? Yes, certainly. And of course, Woody Allen is another classic example of that. But Mel Brooks is more of a surrealist.

Alan is. In Blazing Saddles, he absolutely exploded all of the precepts of the classic Western movie, you know, to make all

all kinds of wonderful social and satirical points. And that's what endeared me to him, certainly. And of course, the 2000 year old man is another classic example of that kind of wonderful, surrealistic comedy that he and his dear partner, Carl Reiner, put together. We, Firesign Theatre,

have been nominated for Grammys three times for best comedy recording and we lost to the 2000 year old man and one had one of the ceremonies but hey good we've lost to to Weird Al who's another great surrealist and a friend and to to Mel Brooks and Carl Reiter so you know it's where it's not exactly chopped liver it's okay I did a film with uh with Brooks

which was an overdubbing of a very famous French comedy called The Visitors, Les Visiteurs, which was a hit for Gaumont, a production company in France, the biggest grossing comedy in the history of French cinema back in, what, the '80s maybe, early '90s. And they decided to overdub the film in English. So they hired Mel Brooks,

and he cast a bunch of people, a lot of my friends and myself, and he thought it would be funny if we overdubbed it with a French accent because, you know, of course, the French accent is very funny. You know, Clouseau, it's not my dog.

you know, it's a funny accent. So we all are speaking like this with a French accent. The problem is that you are putting word into the mouth of character on the screen what are all ever talking, are already talking, you see.

And in this particular film, the French that they were using for the most part was a very fast Parisian French. And so everything was very fast. So we had to speak very quickly with the French accent in order to make it match with the moving of the lips. Well, when they finally finished the film, they showed it to a test audience in Encino.

And they thought we were speaking French. The film was never released. It's Bell's only failure. My only failure. But it sure was fun to do. God, it was fun working with him.

So how, for instance, Phil, how would you go about even being approached for something like that? Does Mel find you and say, you know, Phil, we've got to work together on something? And then you just sort of go and you basically, of course, you're going to say yes. And you just go from there? Or was there like a whole audition process for that? There's always an audition process. Yeah.

It's humiliating, debilitating. It is seldom... I wouldn't say it's not... Now I think it's a little different. But back then, even if they knew the Fireside Theater and knew my capabilities as a voice actor, there are other people in the chain of command who may say, the Fireside what?

OK, so Mel said, oh, you know, you should. This guy is great. He can be great for it. So we'd have to do an audition. And then they could Mel could play the audition for the producers and producers say, OK, Mel, I got it. You hire him. OK. And that happened more often than not. Now, for instance, I was in a film called The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

OK, which what was his name anyway, which was directed by a fellow who hired me, Des McAnuff. That's his name. I was hired to read the part of Boris Badenoff.

with various actresses who were auditioning for the role of Natasha. Okay? So I am doing Boris Badinov and reading the lines from the script, you know? And these famous actresses were coming in and reading for the part. I mean, top-notch,

A-rated actresses. Renee Russo finally got it and she was hysterical in the part. I think that she was probably the best thing in the film. But I was astonished that I was reading with these tremendous actresses. Some of them came in and they'd memorized the material. Some of them came in with just the script pages in their hand. Some of them came in with the script pages written out.

in their own hands so that they could read it more easily, you know, but they were all reading for the role. And that's the nature of it, you know.

Yeah. It's amazing, though, when you just, you're part of that audition process, and you don't know who's going to come through that door sometimes, you know what I mean? And I've actually, you know, I've been on both sides of that as well, too, Phil. You have, yeah. And it's just, you know, sometimes you're like, oh my, this person's auditioning? Well, my God, why aren't they in more stuff, you know? And so... Listen, there was a time, now, first of all, I have to say, I don't know if you know this, but yesterday, Dick Van Dyke...

performed at a club out here in the Valley called Vitello's with a band of his own assembling. And he's 92 years old. Okay. Dick Van Dyke. But there was a time maybe 30 years ago when I went in to read for a television show.

which had, you know, like 12 lines or something like that. And Dick Van Dyke was sitting in the hallway with the other actors reading for this tiny role. So you see, it's indiscriminate sometimes. But as everybody says, what's the secret to being a success in our business? Persistence and confidence, right? I have that first part down, Phil, but that second part, that's very elusive.

Well, it's like Groucho Marx used to always make wisecracks all the time, wherever he was. His brain— We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.

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American Public University. Value for the whole family. Learn more at apu.apus.edu slash military. Over the last 75 years, over 10,000 chemicals have been introduced to our food supply. Yet the EU only allows 300 food additives. But at Thrive Market, we bring our members the highest quality brands and restrict more than 1,000 ingredients found at conventional grocery stores.

Making the switch is easy with our Healthy Swaps scanner, which finds better versions of all your favorite pantries, snacking, and home essentials without the added junk, dyes, and fillers. Plus, it's all delivered straight to your door. So if you're looking to shop at a grocery store that actually cares about your health, go to thrivemarket.com slash podcast, and you'll get 30% off your first order and a free gift.

This is Scott Campbell from the Stupid Things for Love podcast. I have a seven-year-old son and the biggest mountain I climb every day is trying to put shoes on this child.

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He was always in the comic groove and he was always, in effect, trying out material. And his excuse for this was, you know, like being always on, was that he, even though maybe 60% of what he said fell on deaf ears, wasn't funny, that 40% that worked was his trade.

OK, it would go into a show or into a movie. Right. And so in a way, you have to just kind of let it let it flow, let it happen and be confident that eventually somebody is going to hire you. I remember when I was a commercial act.

And I did a lot of TV commercials and scores and scores of radio commercials at the height of my career. But the television commercials were the hardest because you'd have to go in and physically audition. And the people who are casting you would say, OK, you have to come in dressed like a fisherman or you have to come in in your pajamas.

You know, because it's a and you go, why? Why? Why can't I come in looking like a fisherman or, you know, looking like I'm in my pajamas? But no, no, no. You know, the casting director, our agents would say, no, no. They want to see you in character. OK, so you're doing all the work for them. Well, at a certain point, I got burned out. I said, I just can't do this anymore. It's humiliating. And I wasn't getting any jobs. So I look back at my date book.

And I looked at how many commercial auditions I had to go on camera auditions. I had to go on before I got one. And it was something like, oh, I don't know, let's say 23. And I looked at how many I'd gone on and I'd gone on like 21. So I said, OK, I'll go on a couple more auditions. And wouldn't you know it, I got the next two jobs I read. So you see, it's a question of attrition as well.

You see, if you go in and you read for something, the guy who is perfect for the part, the guy who is always in his pajamas and looks like he just got out of bed,

He's going to get the job. He's also going to get a job as a you know, I'm talking about guys who are either character actors or all American looking guys and gals. Right. They're going to get a car commercial, fast food commercial, a breakfast food commercial, you name it. They're going to get it because they look the part and everybody loves them.

All right. But but then they can't do that anymore. They've got a car commercial. They've got a breakfast commercial. They've got so and so and so and so. So when you go in, if you're second, their second choice, you become the first choice because they're out of competition. And that's how it happens. You see.

That's a great way to think about it, Phil. See, because you've been around for so many years, you know those secret ingredients, you know, persistence, confidence, and think of it as a war of attrition. I'm going to keep that, Phil. That's a really great way to think of it. Since I know your show, you get into the nuts and bolts of various aspects of the business, the film business, you know,

from editing to acting to lighting and you name it. But the other little secret about it is you have to know how to use a variety of skills to get the work.

I would find, for instance, when, let's say, the acting gigs dried up for me because maybe the nature of television had changed and I wasn't getting as many guest starring parts on shows like All in the Family, which I did, and other top rated shows. I would say, what the heck am I going to do? And that's when I turned my attention to voiceover work.

I'll concentrate on the voiceover work. I'll get myself an agent and I'll put together a tape and I'll go out and I'll aggressively pursue that line of work. And then that paid off for me. And when that dried up, I'd go, well, let's see what's happening in the acting business. And maybe I can get on stage in a play. And I got on stage in a play, another skill I have. A musical, I can sing. So I get seen in a musical singing and I get a musical commercial.

OK, so one, you must use as many skills as you have and juggle them and feel free with it. When one area dries up, turn your attention into another. That's why I've never really had a manager, which is a good thing and a bad thing.

But because it's good because I get to keep most of my money. It's a bad thing because managers can do a lot for you, especially in a film career. And I regret the fact that one point in my career I turned down management. But I managed my own career.

And being a renaissance man, I was able to apply my skills and focus my skills to the various areas of the business that seemed to be opening to me at the time during my long career. And also, too, Phil, something I've noticed, too, is

You've taken the bull by the horn, so to speak. If there wasn't an audition happening, you worked on your own material in maybe the Fireside Theater. Basically, you casted yourself. There was an episode, episode 99, I had on Morgan J. Freeman. He has a great saying, green light yourself.

He goes, if you have a script, greenlit it yourself and don't wait for anybody else. Just take the bull by the horns and just go for it. Absolutely correct. I saw a wonderful movie, which I recommend everybody called In Search of Fellini, which is written by Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson. And Nancy, it is a film which is based on a true story that she is a young girl in Ohio.

became enamored of the films of Federico Fellini and decided to go over to Italy on her own, supported by her mother, in order to meet the great man. And this extraordinary film, which is both beautifully made, funny, and heartbreaking at the same time, tells the story of that adventure. Well, Nancy

First translated this into a one-woman show maybe 25 years ago, okay? And then based on that show, which she taped and studied and everything, she decided to make this movie.

And now because of the great success of The Simpsons, she's able to she was able to create her own production company, Spotted Cow Productions. And she was able to put the financial energy as well as her brilliant artistic energies into the creation of this movie. An absolute example of what you just spoke of.

In terms of fire sign theater, one of the reasons I became, I committed myself, so to speak, to the lunacy, to the madhouse of the four other fire signs, I'm a Leo, two Sagittarians, and an Aries, was because we could be our own boss. We were our own producers.

basically. We'd hire a producer for ears and to help us with the work we were doing. But we were writing it, we were acting in it, we were doing almost all the voices except for a lot of the women when we could cast women. We did a lot of Monty Python women's voices too as you know. And we could control the budget, lay out the budget. We could hire the studio we were working in. We could control the sound effects and the music. All the elements of the production.

So that there wasn't anybody from the outside telling us what we had to do. We were creating our own movies for the mind with all of our own skills.

And that was very satisfying. And that's one of the reasons why I gave up other aspects of my career, like a movie career and more television and more of stage, because the fire sign ultimately kind of satisfied all of those cravings.

Since we toured, we performed all over the country, and then later, as Procter & Bergman, a two-man act, half the witch of the Fireside Theater, we were able to tour even more easily and play places like Canada and Hawaii. Because in our group, one of the members, Phil Austin, who is unfortunately one of my late partners, he didn't like to fly.

So he would put his dogs and his wife into a van and they would drive from one venue to another when Firestone Theater was touring. OK, and that meant that the rest of us, the other three guys, we could fly into a venue, go on a radio show, promote. OK, and then Phil would catch up with us in time to do the show.

We made it work, but it's still, it limited the, the range of success that Firesign Theater could have. So, and now if you, if you were to have like started something like Firesign Theater today, you know, as we talk about technology, it's almost like what some others have done where you could actually just, you know, record an episode, upload it to your website or,

or, you know, uh, stuff like all that, you know, stuff like that, that they, I see more and more artists doing so, uh, the guys from mystery science theater, they've done stuff like that, but, but, you know, but as you, you know, as you toured, you know, all, all around, you know, all around the country to, and then as you tour around, we, I mean, what was your, your, your reaction to, to the response of everything? I mean, were you, were you, were you like just blown away about how, you know, how big this had become?

We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. When you're part of a military family, you understand sacrifice and support. At American Public University, we honor your dedication by extending our military tuition savings to your extended family. Parents, spouses, legal partners, siblings, and dependents all qualify for APU's preferred military rate of just $250 per credit hour for undergraduate and master's level programs.

American Public University, value for the whole family. Learn more at apu.apus.edu/military. And now back to the show. Well, that's a good question, Dave. Yes, we were, because we didn't, your question actually has created several little paths I'd like to touch upon. And I may have to ask you to ask the question again, but basically our success on records

We were given a spoken arts record contract after our first album, Waiting for the Electrician or someone like him, by a producer at Columbia named John McClure, very respected producer.

because they were going to drop us from the album. You know, four guys doing crazy, surrealistic comedy. What's that all about? And he said, these guys are geniuses. They're revolutionizing the recording of comedy in the industry, and we've got to keep them on. So I'll give them a spoken arts contract, which meant that we got three unlimited studio times.

And that's what allowed us to write our albums, go in, record, go back and write some more, go in and record. And that's why we could make these layered, complex, surrealistic albums. Surrealistic in the style of the goon shows. And later, Matty Python, who were also surrealistically oriented, but were lucky enough to be able to do it visually. So when we started to tour, because we became successful,

People were playing our records uncensored in their own homes, right? We never expected that we'd be broadcast because we were using, you know, obscene language and things, sweet language, I should say. And our albums were very revolutionary and sometimes, you know, touched on social issues that were touchy during the Vietnamese War period. But all of a sudden, a little thing called FM radio came

appeared and suddenly in college stations all over the country kids could play a 40-minute side of our record without commercial breaks

And people started listening to us in the college dorms and saying, who are these guys? Then they go out and buy our records. And, you know, and and and we became famous because of that. And that's what allowed us to tour and to meet people.

our our audience okay so it was a conflux a confluence Congress if you will of technology that allowed us to reach a particular audience which I call a bad head cult basically you know hip pockets on the backside of America

Because we were also the only comedians who were reaching to a higher level of comedy. Nobody else was doing what Bergman used to call college boy comedy, arcane comedy. And even though we would shamelessly stoop to punning whenever we possibly could, most of our albums were

in the storytelling were redolent and redundant with many, many, many levels of meaning and understanding. So you could put our records on and play them over and over again and get different messages and different meanings and different jokes out of them.

And this is even true if you played the record in a group of people, because there were people in that group who would get certain jokes that other people wouldn't get. And somehow through the brain meld of being in their presence, it became funnier for you as well.

See, so that's why I always consider what we do to be kind of mind manifest of mind, mind manifesting comedy or brain exercising comedy, because we're making funny connections in the comedy that we're that we're writing in the writing itself that exercises your brain to make synapses. That is the way the brain works. The brain works by making unconscious and conscious connections.

to everything. And that's what we did in our writing in Fireside Theater. Bingo. Yes.

it's that, you know, comedy and you're able to put that idea, like we were saying earlier, that's what I really liked too, Phil is, you know, you're, you're, you're able to make a joke, but people say, Hey, you know what? There's some truth to that. There's some truth to what they're saying, you know? And then they sort of, you know, they start thinking more and more. And, you know, as we talk, you know, there's, you know, stuff about the, you know, Fireside Theater, or even as we were discussing Mel Brooks, you know, a lot of, you know, there, there was, there was that satire. There was a surrealism where, um,

On the surface, it made you laugh, but then as you started to sort of dig a little deeper, you're like, oh, there's a lot more going on here than meets the eye. One of the other things that we did very consciously was to parody regular commercial radio, news radio, or I should say news broadcasts, and standard forms of entertainment, films and television. The album that was our breakthrough album was Nick Danger, Third Eye.

Okay, because it was a parody of a noir detective radio show. And everybody in our generation who grew up on the radio could identify with that format.

OK, but what we were often doing in all of our albums, including I think Robozo's on this bus, which predicted, by the way, the computer revolution and was and was and picked up as a fan Steve Jobs. And I'll demonstrate something bizarre that came out of that. We were actually deprogramming you.

we were unbrainwashing you because people who have been raised in the commercial society at that time in the sixties particularly sixties and early seventies were you know we're taking for granted in a way that everything that we heard on the radio that was selling us things was true you know we we had bad breath we had under our we stank

Our feet didn't smell. They smelled bad. We needed a fancy car and we needed a new refrigerator with an ice maker and all. So we'd use those forms in order to kind of say, no, you don't.

No, you don't. You might need something more important than that, like maybe a good marriage, you know, or a girlfriend, you know, or a boyfriend. I don't know. But it's yours. What is reality? What is your reality? Now, in the terms of the of the album, I think we're all bozos on this bus. I'm going to I have in my hand an iPhone and I'm going to ask a question of Siri. Here we go.

Here we go. Or I'm going to make a statement to Siri. This is worker speaking. Hello. Hello, Clem. What function can I perform for you? LOL. Hello, Clem. What function can I perform for you? Lots of laughs. This is a reference to a character that I created in this album. I think we're all bozos on this bus, which is a character named Clem.

And I am a this. The back story is I was a worker at this future fair, which is a government fair that is designed to sell people on the idea that everything is going great. There's no unemployment. And, you know, there's going to be a job for everybody in the world of the future. Everything is going to be great.

And it's like a Disneyland that the government creates with holograms walking around, making you happy and all kinds of rides you can go on. And I come in because I've been fired and I become a hacker and I plant a virus in the mainframe computer, which is the direct readout memory computer, Dr. Memory, and I bring the whole system down.

1971 we predicted all that okay now Steve Jobs

I met him. He was a fan of this work and it helped to inspire him to continue to develop the home computer. OK, and I met him when I did voices for it's a bug's life, which Dave Osman did voices for as well. Pixar, because he bought into he bought stock in Pixar and I met him at the opening night party up in San Francisco. And he came up to me or I came up to him to say, Mr. Jobs, nice to meet you. And he said, I'm a big fan of yours.

And that's when I learned he was a Fireside Theater fan. So he put this, hello, Aklem, what function can I perform for you, answer into Siri as an homage to the Fireside Theater. Talk about cultural impact.

I was just about to say that, Phil. I've never – if anyone had been on this show, I've never had anybody who has been embedded into the Apple iOS or – I mean that is freaking phenomenal. That is mind-blowing. It is. And the other thing, the virus that I planted in our album is a question that the computer can't answer with a yes or a no.

And the question was, why does the porridge bird lay his egg in the air? Okay. It's a Zen question. If you buy my book, where's my fortune cookie, which will be on Amazon after the 28th, you'll find out the reason behind that particular Kuan. But if you say that to Siri, she will often say to you, you can't shut me down that easily. Okay.

We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. When it's PCS time, you know the drill. Pack, research to new base, get the kids in school because family supports family. At American Public University, we support military families with flexible, affordable online education that moves with you. As a military spouse, your tuition rate is the same as your partner's, just $2.50 per credit hour. American Public University, education that moves with you.

Learn more at apu.apus.edu slash military. And now back to the show. So it's really exciting, you know, to be a part of the culture like that.

Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely amazing. Do you show that to any, I don't know if you have grandkids, but I don't know, do you show that to them? I show it when I go into a Mac store anywhere in the world, you know, to get a battery or something. I always show it to the person who's waiting on me.

Okay, I share it with one of the workers at the mag store. My grandkids, I have two grandkids, Bowen who is eight and Audrey who is six. And they live real close to me now, which is wonderful. My daughter Kristen, Kristen Proctor was an actress. She's been raising her kids now. But you can Google Kristen Proctor. She was on The Wire.

and even topless. She's a beautiful, beautiful girl and now an even more beautiful woman. My Norwegian wife, so she's, you know, a honey blonde.

But anyway, those kids, they know much more than I do. Their faces are in these machines all the time, so much so that Jeffrey and Kristen have to wean them away from the iPads or from the games. Their favorite show that they like to watch is

online, I guess it is, is a show where these two characters, Jen and Ben, I don't know who they are, are talking while they're playing video games. Do you know about that?

Yeah, I've actually, I do know about that. Okay, that's their favorite show. That's their favorite show. Besides playing video games, they like to hear these two imaginary characters, these two people, reality television, okay, playing the games and making comments on it.

So reality television has even invaded that area. Now, the other thing is, of course, I've done voices for all kinds of video games. And my longest run was as Dr. Vidic in Assassin's Creed. And what was fun about that was that I would wear this helmet that was developed in Montreal that has, you know, feature capturing, you

capabilities, computer capabilities. And so my facial expressions, as I'd read the lines for Dr. Vidic, the villain in Assassin's Creed, would be translated into a computer rendering of my head and my face, and then they would lay the character's face over my face. So when you play that game, all the expressions that Dr. Vidic is making are my expressions.

That's another what is reality for you. And I guess the thing that most people out there would know me best for is that I was Howard on the Rugrats for 14 years. I'm the father of Phil and Lil.

Okay. And we did what, three movies and, and, uh, and 14 years or we had a little break. So maybe seven or eight years of, uh, of cartoons on Nickelodeon. They're still being aired and they're aired all over the world. I get a request for autographs from China,

from Poland, from Russia, from South America, I mean, England, Australia, so many countries where unexpectedly they're showing this cartoon. And I speak seven languages, so it's really fun for me to be able to write back in Russian to these people and communicate in all these different languages.

or to learn a little bit from a new language so that I can communicate to them in their own tongue. And it's just really fun. And I got a stack of residuals today from Rugrats. Now, the residuals, because it's not a network program, are like $1.56 today.

10.59, 12.30, 62 cents. But, you know, it does add up. And it's thrilling to see that I get a stack of these residuals showing that it's still playing in the United States and all over the world.

I was a big fan of Rugrats growing up, Phil. I do remember you actually playing the dad of Phil and Lil. Lots of other parts, too, that you probably don't know of. The same Nancy Cartwright. She plays Bart, but she plays a slew of other parts as well. They take advantage of our voice talents as often as they can and give us multiple fun roles to play.

Yeah, very true. I've noticed that too with Ken Kazari, who's also on The Simpsons. And obviously, you've done work on Finding Nemo and a couple of Disney films. And I mean, again, it's just – you never know. That's why I always say, Phil, that's why I was familiar with your work. And I was like, you know what? Phil, you've done more than I thought you did. I was like, I'm not even paying attention. You're showing up everywhere, and I'm not even noticing it.

Well, the fun thing was, besides getting a chance to do the first the first Disney film I did was the what's it called? The something down under the not the remainders down under the the. Oh, anyway, you know what I'm talking about? This the Dunedin is down under. Oh, I can't remember. Anyway, it was followed by Beauty and the Beast.

And Beauty and the Beast was the breakthrough computer animation movie. And it was astonishing to work on that film. And then the Pixar movies started coming in. Toy Story and, as I mentioned, well, I'll just mention a bunch of Monsters Incorporated, Finding Nemo.

Later on, the most recent film I did for Disney Pixar was Inside Out. But my days doing all kinds of animated voices and voices for movies and television ended about, I'd say, five or six years ago.

You can hear my voice is tired today, but that's just because I'm talking a lot. But for the most part, it's okay. I had a terrific run doing voices. I started actually on a show in New York called, I think, Here and Now. No, it wasn't called You Are There, something like that. I did a Russian-accented voiceover for a segment about the Second World War. And I was 22 years old.

Fresh out of college, I was playing a juvenile delinquent on a soap opera called Edge of Night. OK. And then later went on to understudy Rolf, the singing Nazi on the sound of music. But I go into a studio in New York and I worked for 15 minutes and I made three hundred and sixty five dollars.

And that's when I first went to myself, hmm, there's something to look into here. But it took me many, many more years before I was able to really get into the voiceover industry seriously. And it happened pretty much after the Firesign Theater.

But I'm very grateful for all those wonderful years that I worked with great improv groups adding crazy voices and different languages and different accents to the Muppets movies. My goodness, if you go and see my list of credits, you'll see that. You can also visit me at planetproctor.com.

where I post a weekly, a monthly blog now, but I've been doing that for 20 years. And it's one way of keeping up with what I'm doing. I'm also on television right now, I should mention, on a PBS documentary about Francis Scott Key by Philip Marshall called Francis Scott Key After the Song. It

It's a three-part documentary done in an interview style with the ghosts of famous people who lived in Francis Scott Key's time, including a character named John Randolph of Roanoke, who is the character I play.

and Marshall interviews us as ghosts in our own words. We're speaking pretty much our own words. John Randolph had a very high voice, almost annoying, and he was quite a character. He was a senator in Virginia for many years, and he would hold forth on the floor of the Senate with his two white Afghan hounds and his black

serving boy, his black servant, dressed in Chinese, in a Chinese costume. And you'll get to see all of that in this amazing documentary. I can't tell you when it'll be on your local PBS station, but if you go to the website, F.S. Key, after the song, you'll find out. And it's really something to see. It's a revolutionary documentary.

Yeah, and I'll be on the lookout for that, Phil. And, you know, I am going to link, by the way, everybody to all the things that Phil and I are talking about, all the websites, everything in the show notes, by the way. Wee!

I'm always very good at that, Phil. I'm always very good at linking everything in the show notes. Thank you, Dave. My pleasure, Phil. And I know we're starting to run out of time, Phil. So I just want to ask, you know, obviously your book is coming out September 28th of this year, 2017. Where's My Fortune Cookie? You have quotes on the back from Weird Al Yankovic, Penn Jillette, and I'm just wondering

Of all these great people giving you all these quotes. And Tom Hartman, too. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.

When it's PCS time, you know the drill. Pack, research to new base, get the kids in school. Because family supports family. At American Public University, we support military families with flexible, affordable online education that moves with you. As a military spouse, your tuition rate is the same as your partner's. Just $2.50 per credit hour. American Public University. Education that moves with you.

Learn more at apu.apus.edu slash military. And now back to the show. Yeah. Yeah. Politically, one of my heroes. And I know all these people, which is great.

Yeah, that's actually what I was going to ask you was, you know, of all the things in the book, you know, I mean, you touch on so much because like for one, I mean, I had in my list of notes to talk about, but I know you had Amish upbringing. And I was going to try to touch on that. But we, you know, see how quickly these interviews go. It's like a blink, Phil, and they're over. Well, I'm 77 years old. I've got a lot to talk about because I can still remember it.

That's the good part. And yes, I'm of Amish Irish ancestry. And if you want to read about that, you can go online and find a book called Rosanna of the Amish, written by my great uncle, Joseph Yoder, which tells about the roots of that Amish Irish connection back in the 19th century, which is very unusual. And I guess that's why I'm so unusual. Yeah.

Yeah, there's always amazing tie-in, Phil. There's always amazing tie-ins. And about the book, too, is there anything, is there any story, you know, just as you talk about the book, as we sort of wrap up this whole interview, is there any sort of one story that really stands out that you really, you just couldn't wait to retell? Sure. Well, the fact is the book is called Where's My Fortune Cookies?

It has on the front cover a picture of Peter Bergman and myself hiding under a restaurant table with Chinese food on top of it.

It relates to the fact that Peter and I survived the Golden Dragon Massacre in San Francisco. Five killed, 11 wounded back in 1977, I think it was. And that particular gangland shooting that we were unfortunately in the middle of and hiding under the table occurred when

On the same day that I learned that my Norwegian wife, Barbro, was pregnant with my daughter, Kristen, who is living nearby now. And the really weird thing about it, which is all recounted in the book, is that it was psychically predicted to me by a friend about a month and a half before it happened. And all of this is in the book.

And it's called Where's My Fortune Cookie? Because when Peter Bergman, who died of leukemia about five years ago, at one of his memorial services, a friend of ours, one of the patrons of the Fireside Theater, made it, passed out fortune cookies to everybody with Peter Bergman's date of birth and death and a line, a title of one of the Fireside Theater albums.

And I asked her, I said, Gretchen, that was really sweet of you to do the fortune cookie thing. And I said, you did that because of the Golden Dragon Massacre, didn't you? And she said, what? I said, you know, Peter and I survived a Chinese gangland shooting. She said, you did? I never heard of that. I said, well, why did you make the fortune cookies then? She said, Peter came to me in a dream.

And he told me, I never got my fortune cookie. And it's all true. That the book is filled with stories like that. Things like that have happened to me my entire life, and it ain't over yet.

You'll have to come back on, Phil, when you write this sequel for the next 50 years that you're in show business. Well, listen, when the book comes out, I'll be back in town probably at the end of October. Yeah. So maybe when we get into the holiday season, we can figure out another excuse to talk together again.

Phil, I would love to talk to you anytime because, like I said, there's a bunch of questions I didn't get to ask you, but I would love to chat again. And just in case people didn't hear it the first time, Phil, where can people find you at online? Planetproctor.com.

is the best way. And if you like what you see there and you want to subscribe to the newsletter, it's free. You just send me, there's my email address there, and you just send me your address and say, I want to become a planeteer, send me the planet, and I'll see that you're in a mailing group.

And everyone, I will link to that in the show notes along with the link to pre-order Phil's book, Where Is My Fortune Cookie? out September the 28th of this year, 2017. Phil Proctor, it has been an absolute blast, sir. Thank you very much. I hope I didn't talk your ear off. No, not at all. Not at all. Great talking to you, Dave.

Oh, thank you so much, folks. Great talking to you as well. And, you know, I'm going to be on the and whenever you're in town, everyone to come back, please let me know. Thank you. We'll do it again. OK, bye for now.

I want to thank Dave so much for doing such a great job on this episode. If you want to get links to anything we spoke about in this episode, head over to the show notes at indiefilmhustle.com forward slash 783. And if you haven't already, please head over to filmmakingpodcast.com, subscribe and leave a good review for the show. It really helps us out a lot, guys. Thank you again so much for listening, guys. As always, keep that hustle going, keep that dream alive. Stay safe out there, and I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at IndieFilmHustle.com. That's I-N-D-I-E-F-I-L-M-H-U-S-T-L-E.com.

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