![]() I walked it around to every ad agency in San Francisco and I started getting work for ads. I wasn’t an actor at that time, so I made a comedic CD of myself talking in about 15 different accents, telling people how unreliable and unhirable this guy Peter Coyote was. Peter Coyote: I was broke after ten years in the counterculture and I needed a way to make some money. Peter, how did you get into the narration game? Vulture spoke with both men about Coyote’s unequaled voice, their unique recording process, and how they handle political disagreements. These days, he’s also an ordained Zen Buddhist priest.Ĭoyote has lent his voice to a plethora of ads and documentaries over the decades, but his decades-long relationship with Burns is something special. “Men and women who were broken by lies the government was telling.” As a young man, he was invited into Kennedy’s White House after staging a protest against nuclear testing during the Cuban missile crisis, threw himself headlong into a decade of drugs, Hell’s Angels, and commune living, narrowly escaped being drafted to Vietnam by pretending to be a cold-blooded marauder, helped run the California State Arts Council for eight years, and then decided to become an actor. “I saw grown-ups weeping in my living room,” he says. Growing up as a secular Jew with communist relatives during the McCarthy era, Coyote was an early convert to political activism and the counterculture. the Extra Terrestrial - but the man himself has lived a Zelig-like life. ![]() Generations of kids first met Coyote as the embodiment of authority - he played Keys, the head scientist in E.T. What would a Ken Burns documentary be without its measured, authoritative narration? In The West, The National Parks, Prohibition, The Dust Bowl, The Roosevelts, The Vietnam War, The Mayo Clinic, and now Country Music, actor Peter Coyote delivers hours of often dense, complex text - full of facts, figures, quotes, and grand unifying ideas - in a manner that Burns refers to as “God’s stenographer.” His calm, cowboy-around-a-campfire timbre is basically the voice of America, at least within the orbit of PBS.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |