I’d like to get something off my chest. The success of the program Good Eats was made possible by two factors. First, I had an excellent crew, many of whom stayed with me through the entire run. Second, I rewired my brain.
Or, more exactly, short-circuited it.
When Good Eats happened (301 painstakingly handcrafted episodes over twenty-one years), I knew I’d need some technology to lean on. The show was 100 percent scripted and I was far from being a professional presenter or actor. Though I had kinda-sorta memorized the scripts for our two pilot episodes (complete with lots of “ums” and “nows”), there was no way I was going to be able to memorize an entire season’s worth of pages, approximately 270 of them, especially considering my habit of rewriting until the last second. (Yes, I have a theater degree, but come on, the entirety of Macbeth is only 130 pages.) Adding to the challenge, we’d decided, for stylistic reasons, to shoot single camera, meaning we wouldn’t have multi-camera “coverage” to help cut around mistakes and fold time the way most shows do. What’s more, we had to fit three commercial breaks into fairly specific time windows. Oh yeah, and we were on a very, very tight budget. All this is to say that, when in front of the camera, I needed to be able to deliver the scripted words reliably, and at a very specific tempo; foul-ups meant extra takes and takes eat time and time is money. Constant camera movement and relatively extreme “Dutch” angles ruled out the use of teleprompters, which I hate anyway because I can always tell when someone is looking at the words rather than down into the lens… where the eye of the viewer resides. Some news anchors can pull it off, but only when the camera is kept at a fixed distance and the lens is relatively “long,” that is, greater than 50mm. Besides, teleprompters require operators and that just wasn’t in the budget. As for cue cards, they may work on Saturday Night Live, but not when the meat puppet (my term) is staring down the pipe and the camera is floating around.
Now, flash back to 1985, one of the years I spent cutting my production teeth on industrial and corporate films with boring subjects and minuscule budgets. During one such shoot for a water ski manufacturer, I worked with an actor from Atlanta who had the amazing ability to just walk in and deliver paragraph after paragraph of technobabble and nail it every time. Between setups one day I asked him how he managed to memorize it all. He smiled and pulled a microcassette recorder out of his back pocket (this is before digital recorders existed), into which a wire was plugged that disappeared into his shirt. He pulled the plug, hit play, and out came his voice reading the script. Turns out the wire was connected to a loop he wore around his neck, under his shirt; an induction antenna that beamed his voice the short distance to a tiny, hearing aid–like device hidden in his ear. He was feeding himself his own lines. I asked him how he could possibly listen and talk at the same time. He told me, “The trick is learning not to listen.”
“But if you don’t listen, how do you know what to say?”
“By teaching your mouth to bypass your brain.”
Brain blown.
Back to 1999. Recalling this marvel of technology, I phoned around (so few people were on the internet at the time), and found a company that sold such systems, bought one, put on the loop, recorded some lines (still only on microcassettes for a couple more years), shoved the bean-thing in my ear, pushed play, and… it was literally like trying to translate at the UN in a language I didn’t speak, even though the voice was mine. It was utterly useless, money down the drain. In desperation I hunted up the actor who’d first shown me the system way back when. He didn’t remember me (understandable), but he was willing to give me a tip: “Drive around with the news on.”
Thus began my training. I would drive around with NPR on, or whatever daytime news I could get on AM, trying to mimic the words of the newscaster. The point of driving was to keep the cognitive part of the brain busy so it wouldn’t get in the way of the words moving from ear to mouth. It took many meandering miles, but I got pretty decent at it. After that I checked a book of speeches out of the library and recorded a bunch, from Shakespeare to Lincoln, into my recorder, then tried executing basic tasks around the house, orating all the while. By the time shooting started, I was good enough at whatever this skill would be called if it had a name to squeeze all the scripted words into the required time, keeping takes to a minimum. If you’ve ever seen an episode of Good Eats, odds are I was looking at you but listening to myself, usually through my left ear, a habit that has left me, after decades of use, with permanent hearing damage. But, hey, that’s showbiz.1
As the years unfurled, this odd ability, the closest thing I’ve ever had to a superpower, proved useful on many other projects, especially Iron Chef America (see page 159).
Okay, I feel better. Confession really is good for the soul.