Hollywood Confessional

Speaking Out: Survival Stories from a Voiceover Actor

• Ninth Way Media • Season 3 • Episode 10

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How do you pursue a career in an industry where even your "advocates" are keeping you down?

That's the story of this week's confessor, a voiceover actor who successfully navigates many typical obstacles to a creative career, only to discover their agent is stealing from them.

As they try to figure out what to do about it, our confessor learns how to be their own best advocate and learns some fantastic tips for up-and-comers in all arenas. Join us for a discussion of what it's really like to work behind the mic, and how to speak out for yourself no matter what challenges the industry throws your way.

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Hollywood Confessional is a Ninth Way Media production, produced by Meagan Daine and J.R. Zamora-Thal.

Sound Effects and Music provided by Zapsplat and Pixabay.

Keywords: filmmaking podcast, film podcast, screenwriting podcast, entertainment podcast, Hollywood, filmmaking, writerslife, actorslife, setlife

Speaker 1:

In nomine Cinema e TV, Espiritu Streaming Amen.

Speaker 2:

Hello, hello Hollywood, faithful Welcome back. I am Megan Dane, your favorite podcast priest or second favorite, depending on how you go and it's a very important distinction.

Speaker 1:

I am JR Zamorathal, the other podcast priest, and today we've got a really cool story. We're reaching into the vault here a little bit for a story about voice actors and voice actor agents.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's an interesting one for me right now, actually, because I have a little bit of a confession to make my own. I guess I've been thinking about looking for an agent.

Speaker 1:

Please step into the confessional and burden yourself.

Speaker 2:

Why, thank you. Um, maybe you're my favorite podcast. Um, yeah, it's, it's weird. It's like I had a wonderful experience working on Cross and I'm kind of at a stage. You know you hit stages right.

Speaker 1:

In your career, it's like yeah, I remember talking about this with Sam and Jim on the writer's room, with Sam and Jim how they were telling us how you get over one wall and then you don't realize that Hollywood is just a series of walls that you get over.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. Or as another friend of mine always puts it, there's always another velvet rope.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

Like you get past the first velvet rope and you're like, yeah, I'm in. And then you're like, oh shit, there's another and then. And then you start thinking like who's going to help me get over this wall, right, or can I get over this wall by myself, or do I need help? And I'm in that phase right now of like, oh, there's another wall, now what do I do?

Speaker 1:

And so I'm thinking maybe agent, but also maybe not. You know, so many people probably that listen to this podcast really want representation. It's not so much a question of agent or not, it's when can I get an agent? Why do you have questions about whether or not you want an agent?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think the confession coming up is going to answer that to some degree. But the thing is that it's just, it's very often not what you hope it's going to be. In some ways it is. I have been very, very fortunate to be with the same manager for about seven years now. He's a wonderful guy, great partner.

Speaker 2:

But then you know, there's always like people that could be out there hustling in different ways to get you more work, but also they could not be hustling and they could be hustling you. And that happens so often. And I think I may be wrong about this, but my impression is that for people at my level, um, or at our level, that it happens to us more often than not because we're kind of, you know, small fish and like they don't have to do anything for us because we're so hungry, we like, desperately, want them on our side and all they have to do is say yes and all of a sudden we're so grateful to them and then you know you end up in a relationship where basically they're not doing anything for you and then you start making money and they just take their cut you know.

Speaker 1:

So even if they don't get you the job, they still take their cut if they're representing you.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's tough.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, and I mean a lot of people will say that for your first couple of years you get most of your own jobs, and I don't know how commonly that is the case, but I've sure heard it a lot, and so you know, I guess I feel like I've been in an abusive relationship or something, and I'm like I just don't want to get hurt again, but you know it's stories like the one we're about to hear that give me pause.

Speaker 1:

Why don't we give our listeners a little context and hop into the confessional booth?

Speaker 2:

Let's do it.

Speaker 3:

In the beginning I was young and foolish. I was an on-camera actor in Hollywood and I wanted to try voiceover work. Everybody said it was difficult to get into. They told me the people who do it for money have been there for years and it's not going to change. But as I got started I saw my voiceover career making more money than my on-camera career and I was happy because I was being creative.

Speaker 3:

The actors on camera are pretty much the bottom of the totem pole so they don't get treated very well. Unless you're a director or writer or celebrity. The actors are pretty much overpaid extras. In the voiceover world you have a skill that's valued and they can't do the job without you. So the actors are valued a little bit more and if you can hone your skills so that you're able to compete, it can be a really great career.

Speaker 3:

Pretty soon I saw an opportunity to grow in voiceover I met my agent Was a charmer, that's all I can say. He was the type of person who always picked up the phone. He seemed really nice. We got along so we started working together. I did a lot of jobs for him, but the last year of my working with him my money went down a lot. So I started looking at it going down a lot. So I started looking at it going. What's going on In voiceover? The agent gets an audition for a client and sends it out to the actors 10 or 20 or so, depending on how many they have on the roster. Hopefully somebody books it. There is always supposed to be a contract when you work with a legitimate agent. You get a contract, you sign it, you send it back so you know how much you are getting paid for what you're doing. I started realizing that this it was like.

Speaker 2:

Oh, there were no contracts on that. No, no, we didn't get a contract on that.

Speaker 3:

So basically, the check would come from his company, but he would never send the pay stub with it or how much money he got. So was this happening with the other actors as well? Pretty much, and the way I know that is that came to LA and threw parties with all his clients, so eventually a bunch of the people started to get together to compare notes. This is what we think happened. He was writing his name so he could get paid, and he wouldn't tell the actor how much he was getting. Basically, he was getting paid as an agent or a manager, on top of putting his name down as either a producer or maybe even the talent, and then he would pay the talent out of his company, obviously for a lot less.

Speaker 1:

Holy shit, that's fully criminal.

Speaker 3:

And it's even worse than it sounds. Imagine you sign a contract for a year. The next year, when they call to renegotiate, how does the actor know that the client is using their voice again when the actor's name is nowhere to be found in any contract? Another actor told me that she had done a big campaign and realized it was up for renegotiation. She had to call and say hey, this campaign is up for renegotiation and said oh oops.

Speaker 1:

I forgot, oh man, yeah, I'll send you the check.

Speaker 2:

So basically he forgets to pay.

Speaker 3:

My experience was that he booked me for a demo session.

Speaker 1:

He said it's only a demo. There's no contract. Go and do it and if they pick it up I'll get a contract, if it goes on the air.

Speaker 3:

And the demo session is usually not full out, you say, ok, let's try this, let's try that. Then I get there and I'm like this is not a demo, this is a session, and when you do a full session it's the final product. So at the session I asked for a contract repeatedly. They sent it and I figured out the was making 80% of my money. What he said the session was 250 and that was it. The actual contract said the session was 750 plus the usage, it was like 5,000. And his words to me were oh, I negotiated a little higher.

Speaker 3:

That's not negotiating a little higher From 250 to 5,000, that was completely blatant theft.

Speaker 1:

Okay, okay. Don't they need the actor's signature to have a legal right to your voice? Is he signing your name on the contract?

Speaker 3:

That's what I'm thinking. No-transcript. Other actors have proof. We figured out that he was doing this to at least half his roster. Oh my.

Speaker 2:

God, okay, so you said there was this year when you noticed that your money dropped. Why do you think he all of a sudden started stealing from you?

Speaker 3:

He was stealing from other people before he started stealing from me. I didn't notice it at first because he was so charming. It was very hurtful that he did that. It was such a stab in the back. I heard from some Latino actors that he had been doing this for years. I think he targeted Latino actors because they are a little more scared to lose the work. They're not as established as American actors.

Speaker 1:

All right, this one hits close to home. I'm also Latino and what he's doing is doubly nefarious. He's taking advantage of our people because he can, because we have fears that, quite frankly, white people don't have. He's tapping into that to take advantage of us.

Speaker 3:

As Latinos, you have to be three times better to be considered an equal. Actors are pretty much the bottom of the barrel. They feel like they have no power and I think that they fear they're not going to get another job with him or they're going to get blacklisted. Did you try reaching out to the union about this? Yeah, only 3% of actors in the union actually make a living off acting. The union has dropped the ball a lot. I don't think they understand what voice actors do. If you look at the history, the union is pretty much geared towards celebrities. Voice actors are not the majority of the money coming in. It's the celebrity money that's the majority. So they were not crazy about the merger with SAG-AFTRA. It's a big union now, but they're not interested in extras, voiceovers, and they're certainly not interested in other markets that are lower than that. They keep dropping the ball because they don't realize they have to move with the times.

Speaker 3:

Now everything is being translated and people are getting paid peanuts. Translating falls under voice acting work. You, you're translating a Netflix TV show or movie and I think it's $30 an hour, whereas commercials it's $500 a week and you get residuals. When you dub a TV show, you put the words into a different language from the TV show or for a movie. You get $30 an hour. So if you're a dubbing actor and that's all you do, it's good money. But you don't work every day for $30 an hour, eight hours a day. You have to audition, you have to book it and with AI coming in, they can have a voice that sounds like a human. So why is a company going to pay thousands of dollars to get a voice actor with all the nuance if they can get AI actor with all the nuance, if they can get AI?

Speaker 3:

What's happening right now is companies are paying actors to use their voice to teach AI and to grab pieces from their voices to create a human sounding voiceover and get the actors out of a job. These actors are going in for $1,500 a session and they're never going to get work after that. There's a company in Canada that works on a pay-to-play system. They have a contract that says they own your voice and nobody knows about it because actors don't read their contracts. They own the voices. So if you ever work for a company like that, they can turn around and sell your voice to AI and you don't get a penny. All creators, illustrators, photographers they're all going to be out of a job unless they can find a way out. In 30 years, the entertainment industry is going to look completely different. I don't think we're going to have a job in 30 years.

Speaker 1:

Especially not with people like your agent out there. Toxic people lead to a toxic industry.

Speaker 3:

Exactly, and there are loopholes everywhere for these people to keep getting away with it. Agents are only supposed to take 10% of what they get you. My agent had the agency for 10% and then he had the management company. He would put his name on the non-union gigs and send you the check from the management company and I never saw a pay stub or the contract.

Speaker 1:

I know an actor who caught him saying oh, that thousand dollars that was taken out of your check. That was for taxes. Who caught him saying oh?

Speaker 3:

that $1,000 that was taken out of your check. That was for taxes. It wasn't for taxes. Taxes were already taken out. That actor told me they called the union and the union said if he pays you the $1,000 back, we can't do anything. Paid the $1,000 back because he got caught. What about the times he didn't get caught? I tried to do more. I talked to a lawyer. The only thing I can do is take him to court, go out there, get a forensic accountant to look back through all these years and at the end of it all it's going to cost me more money than to just stop working with him. So I stopped working with him. I sent him an email asking for the contracts and all he sent me was his contracts with me. There were zero contracts for anyone else. I called him repeatedly and he never picked up. He still works with a ton of people. A lot of them are big time voiceover actors. They're still working with this person, knowing he steals, which is mind boggling.

Speaker 1:

Why do you think they're still working with him?

Speaker 3:

He's banking on the work of the actors who are afraid to call him out because they're not going to get the next audition, but he's cheating them out of their work. The minute I stopped working with him, my money doubled because I found another agent to work with who was legit.

Speaker 2:

This is reminding me of another confession we had recently called Class Con, where the answer to these problems a lot of times is not to get involved in the first place, because if you've gotten screwed, there's kind of not much you can do about it. There's kind of not much you can do about it, but if you have advice for somebody who's coming up about how you can avoid getting screwed in the first place, what?

Speaker 3:

would your advice be Read your contract. There is always a contract. Ask for the contract and read every single word. Make sure you are getting paid for what you're doing and not getting screwed. Are getting paid for what you're doing and not getting screwed. You have to make your own way. Don't let them deny your talent. Be the best at what you do. Thanks to all the people who told me. No, I am who I am today. It's difficult at any point, but that's why you have to be the best, so they consider you an equal.

Speaker 1:

That's so true. You have to carve your path in this industry and you have to know your value and, like we talked about with ClassCon, if somebody who's trying to scam you is giving you an opportunity, it's not actually an opportunity in the first place.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for fighting the good fight and for sharing your story with us. Go create in peace. Wow, I really, when we first started to hear this story, um, I really thought that it was just going to be a story about a dirty agent. And then it was so interesting because it turns into this sort of journey through, like voiceover as a field and kind of the state of that particular part of the industry. And this is, by the way, it was gosh almost two years ago or something when we recorded this episode, maybe a year and a half. It was quite some time ago.

Speaker 1:

It was before the writer's strike and before the SAG strike.

Speaker 2:

It was well before the strikes and we had planned to air it but then didn't because we were, you know, standing in solidarity with SAG-AFTRA and not working with actors during the strikes and you know. So scheduling things and whatnot, and ended up landing here. But it's so interesting how many of the things that the confessor was concerned about have kind of come to pass.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and now with the recent video game voice actor performer strike, I think we're seeing a lot of these problems coming to the front lines and I think that you know it might seem dark now, but we saw what solidarity could do when the writers and actors went on strike last year and I think solidarity is really the way forward.

Speaker 2:

This is our industry and not only do we have to work in it, we have to protect it, and this is what we do to protect it our industry and I think that's really important for us and our listeners to all kind of remember together that we create the world that we are going to be living in. We create this.

Speaker 1:

That's so empowering God. I love that.

Speaker 2:

So we're going to leave it on a high note. Listeners, that's going to be all we've got for you this week. Thank you so much for joining us and please come back in two weeks. We've got a crazy story about someone who was trying to get a person fired and For cause. Yeah, serious cause and ran into all kinds of obstacles along the way. It is insane what goes on behind closed doors in HR, so please join us for that.

Speaker 1:

Please remember to follow us on social media. At FessUpHollywood, on X and Instagram, we are very active.

Speaker 2:

I'd like to say why, thank you, we try.

Speaker 1:

And by we I mean Megan James.

Speaker 2:

And hit us up, subscribe. Let us know if you have some stories to share or, by the way, some shout-outs for people who you want on the Happy Hollywood list. We would love to hear about it.

Speaker 1:

And until then, go create in peace. The Hollywood Confessional is produced by Megan Dane and Jair Zamora-Thal. Joelle Garfinkel is our co-producer and AJ Thal is our post-production coordinator and editor. Our cast today Vicki George, timothy Wardell. Special effects provided by ZapSplat and Pixabay. Hollywood Confessional is a Ninth Way Media production. Follow us on socials at FessUpHollywood.