Re: randy cohen, former LN writer

ronnie wrote:
Donz5 wrote:
NUVO: Do you have a backstage at Late Night story?

Cohen: I once had to fire Richard Roundtree. I fired Shaft. I had done
a show, the idea of which was to dub the show from English into
English. I took an episode that had aired and stripped all the audio
off it and then hired skilled actors. I had transcribed it and they
relooped it and put every single word back in, but with different
voices. Not comical voices. Just perfectly plausible voices. It made
every one of our hacky mannerisms reveal themselves just by skewing the
show slightly out of context like that.

And so, the next step I thought was to do that visually. I transcribed
another show and recast it. We were going to shoot it word for word,
but with different actors. Larry Pine, this wonderful New York actor,
was Dave. And Richard Roundtree was Paul. We were going along taping
this in small chunks. On the elevator one day, Dave said he didn't
like it. The upshot of this conversation was, I had to fire Richard
Roundtree. Not fun.

There was an English-to-English overdub show that aired September 25,
1986 (a rerun from February 17, '86); the paid voices were Peter
Fernandez (as Dave), Earl Hammond (as Paul), Corinne Orr (as probably
Raquel Welch), Maya Danziger (as probably Sandra Bernhard), and Randy
Cohen (I'm guessing as Barbara Gaines' rant from behind the stage).


So it's possible that Dave just didn't like the Pine and Roundtree
voices but was still ok with the overall concept.

From the way it was written in the article, it sounded to me like there
was a second attempt with a different kind of dubbing - using the real
voices, with different actors actually sitting in. So R ichard
Rountree would be standing there as Paul, but Paul's voice would be
coming out. Did I totally misread that? Sounded like that one may
never have aired, or did it?


Your take rings truer. Found more information: one segment only of the
Roundtree/Pine (and others, it turns out -- it included other musicians
replacing the WMDB) was prepared to air on February 26, 1987, but it
was bumped that night and never rescheduled.

.