Summer 1986
The alarm sounds. People are running. It’s my chance to escape. Wait. I’m not in prison. The bell is my phone. I run my hand across a stack of paperbacks, trying not to knock over a coffee cup or a Coke can on whatever table I had next to my bed, reaching for the phone. The digital alarm clock from the seventies that has little leaves that flip down on a cylinder says it’s 3:00 a.m. I pick up the phone. Starscream is on the line. He’s in the North Hollywood clink and needs me to bail him out. Or maybe it’s Cobra Commander in his other guise as Chris Latta. He’s done something bad and has to be bailed out. Same drill as last time, except a different place. Last time it was the regular Hollywood station. Same price. $1,250.
Rolling through my mind was, “Why is he calling me? In what universe am I the adult you call when you’re in trouble?” Maybe it was because he knew I needed him at a recording session, but more likely it was because he pegged me as a guy who a) was stable enough to have a working check-ing account and/or credit card, and b) I’d come get him and not make an issue out of it. In short, maybe I was kind of a dupe. And perhaps this is significant or even proves that point, but he was the third person that summer I bailed out of jail. It was a big summer for that.
I hit the floor and pull on whatever is nearest in the closet. It’ll hurt too much if I turn on the light, so I won’t know for a while what I’m wearing. I throw water on my face, brush teeth, spray deodorant, put on my ubiquitous sports coat, microwave yesterday’s coffee, and get my checkbook. The checkbook is mission essential. The pokey takes checks. Who’s going to write a bad check to the LAPD? I get into the Mustang convertible feeling like a cheap detective, check the Thomas Brothers map (car GPS only existed in James Bond movies), and soon I’m rolling into the night.
So what happened next?
It was 3:00 a.m. in North Hollywood or Van Nuys and the jail looked exactly like it did on all of the TV shows of the period, and the police weren’t really forthcoming about what he was in for, which was fine. It didn’t matter to me. It was the same $1,250. Chris eventually turned up rumpled with a big smile on his face. He had a removable front tooth. Sometimes it would be in, sometimes it wouldn’t. We went to breakfast. One of the times, we just hung out until the recording session, which probably started at ten or eleven. I just remember killing a lot of hours in a diner near Wally’s. It might have been the Coral Tree on Burbank Blvd. Or it might have been somewhere on Hollywood Way. Whatever it was, it was open all night. I don’t remember what we talked about, but Chris wasn’t a hard guy to spend a few hours with once you got past the heightened sense of paranoia and rage.
He would have me believe the problem was jaywalking. “In New York, nobody pays any attention to jaywalking. What the f#*& kind of city is this? Jaywalking, indeed.”
Maybe it was jaywalking. I’ll never know.
My price for the bail service was that he had to do the extended version of his “heroin enthusiast” routine. He had this great riff. I hope to hell it’s found its way to YouTube or somewhere. The memorable lines to me were, “I am not a junkie, I am a heroin enthusiast. People say we don’t work, but you try carrying two TVs down a fire escape and tell me that isn’t work…” And so on.
Chris would invite Doug and I down to the Belly Room at the Comedy Store or wherever he was doing stand-up. I’d go one time in three and make sure I clapped when he was introduced, because his gag was that he made somebody in the audience who hadn’t clapped clap alone. He had that scary edge that some stand-ups have, where part of the fun of watching them was the fear that you’d get called out. Didn’t happen to me. I stayed near the back, in the shadows.
Chris brought a whole energy with him. Seeing Chris and Frank Welker, who was to voice acting what Jimi Hendrix was to guitar, was worth the price of admission. Absolutely opposite characters. Frank is the consummate pro and can do anything. Chris was a chaotic force of nature who could only do Chris. Okay, he also played Sparkplug Witwicky, Wheeljack, Gung-Ho, and a host of other characters, but to me he’ll always be D’Compose, Cobra Commander, or Starscream.
The other voice actors all had their stories about him, too. He was frantic and he sweated a lot. Some think it was drugs. For somebody who went to Berkeley and worked in Hollywood, I was pretty naïve about that stuff. Still am. So they have their stories, and I won’t step on them, but ask Michael Bell about him sometime, or Peter Cullen, Neil Ross, or Gregg Berger. They’re voice actors, and they tell the stories better than I do.
If I had to pick somebody who gave the unique flavor to Sunbow shows, it would be Chris Latta (his name is also Chris Collins, I just always knew him as Chris Latta). I saw Chris several times after the Sunbow days on various voice things, but the time I’ll never forget was the time he showed up at my house unannounced with several thousand dollars to pay me back for various bail bonds. I hadn’t billed Sunbow for the money and just figured it was some kind of a contribution. In those days, I had plenty of money and not a lot of expenses, so it was easy to just ignore.
Apparently, he was going through AA, and one of his steps was to atone and pay his bills. Linda Woolverton was at my place that afternoon. Chris came through the door, and he was different. Clean shaven. I don’t think he was wearing black leather. One micrometer under his skin, you could see the manic, but he was different. He was in a program, turning his life around. Chris walked us through how he’d never been around sober behavior in his life. His family were drunks. His uncle was a drunk. Everybody they knew was a drunk. Everybody he worked with was on something. (Not the Sunbow voice actors, but at the comedy clubs.)
When he left, Linda was zooed. “That’s the most intense person I’ve ever met in my life.”
The last time I worked with Chris, it was doing voiceover for a trailer for Republic Pictures on a project we were doing to revoice and reedit their serials into a series. It didn’t go anywhere, but it was a cool idea that Buzz Dixon and I came up with. It was one of those ideas that had one huge fan at late night TV, and he was fired before we could present it.
Almost a decade after I met Chris, Carole Weitzman called to tell me he was dead. Neither she, nor anybody else, had an explanation or a solid story as to how or why he’d died. There was a lot of speculation, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. Raymond Chandler was right: “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.”