They Call Me Baba Booey by Chad Millman & Gary Dell'Abate

Author:Chad Millman & Gary Dell'Abate [Millman, Chad & Dell'Abate, Gary]
Language: zho
Format: epub
Tags: #genre
ISBN: 9780679604433
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-02T13:49:43+00:00

I COULDN’T STOP with the internships, actually. One summer I worked at a recording studio in the city. It was a jingle house and I was the token gentile. They had no idea how to handle an intern, which is to assign them the crappy work and then show them how to do cool stuff. All I did for them was empty garbage; none of the bosses talked to me. But it did teach me about making your own opportunities and building skills as you go.

I befriended a young sound engineer who taught me how to set up microphones in the studio. I saw how to deal with clients. I learned how talent can fix anything. We were once doing an ad for Champale, a lowbrow alcoholic drink, and the corporate suits kept poking their heads in, complaining that the jingle wasn’t working. Our engineer reassured them, saying, “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine when Grady gets here. He’ll bring it to life.” I didn’t know who Grady was, but I knew the jingle sounded like crap. Finally, at four in the afternoon, after we had been there seven hours, Grady Tate showed up. He was an old black guy, a well-known club jazz singer, who swaggered in looking as cool as could be. He had a gravelly voice, but it turned the jingle from ridiculous to radio-worthy.

I also learned how talent controlled a room, no matter how minuscule the talent. At night the jingle shop transformed into a second-rate recording studio for would-be artists. Once, they handed the keys to a guy named Meco, who recorded a million-selling disco remix of the Star Wars theme. When he came around everyone kissed his ass and I couldn’t figure out why. Sure, he wore nice wide collars and kept his shirt unbuttoned, but with his side part, high forehead, and oversize wire-rimmed glasses, he looked like an accountant doing karaoke. Besides, all he did was put a disco beat to someone else’s song. But it made the studio some money, so he was the big shot.

Even the last internship I had, in the Adelphi film department, proved invaluable. The film teachers there had started a business shooting educational movies and used the students as free labor. One of the movies, commissioned by the ASPCA in New York, was called Sam. It was fifteen minutes of point-of-view shots in which you never see the subject of the film, just the world from his perspective. Here’s Sam being abandoned on Fire Island. Here is Sam finding his way to the mainland. And here he is walking the streets, looking for food. The way it’s written you’d think Sam was a boy, then comes the big reveal: Sam is a dog.

I worked on another film called Intimate Companions, which was about the human/animal bond. We interviewed this tough truck driver who was a real fuck-you kind of guy with the voice of someone who spent his life smoking cigarettes in the cab of his truck.

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