Barry Morse: Remember with Advantages

Most television audiences think of British actor Barry Morse as either one of two characters: Lieutenant Philip Gerard, the man obsessed with capturing Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen) in the classic TV drama The Fugitive (ABC, 1963-1967), or as Professor Victor Bergman in Space: 1999 (ITC, 1975-1977), a show that remains hugely popular among sci-fi viewers throughout the world. And while those two particular roles remain important to Morse, they also represent just a small fraction of the hundreds of other different characters he’s brought to life on stage, screen and television in the course of his 70-year career. Morse’s vast body of work in the theatre covers everything from Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, to Gore Vidal and A.R. Gurney, to his own critically acclaimed one-man show, Merely Players. He’s also appeared in a host of television shows in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada, including such classics as The Twilight Zone and The Untouchables and groundbreaking miniseries like The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, and Sadat.  I first came to know Barry Morse in the early ’90s, when I interviewed him several times for my book The Fugitive Recaptured.  He’s a marvelous storyteller with uncanny powers of recollection, great warmth and compassion, and a cheeky sense of humor (no surprise there, folks… he is, after all, veddy, veddy British). He’s also as refreshingly down to earth as any actor I’ve come to know. Talk to him just once, and he’ll make you feel as though you’ve known him your entire life.  That’s part of the fun of Remember with Advantages, Morse’s memoir of his long career in stage, film and television, which he co-authored along with Portland-based author/playwright Anthony Wynn and Canadian writer/artist Robert Wood. In many ways, it really is like catching up with an old friend… an old friend whose life and career, as Oscar and Emmy winner Martin Landau writes in the book’s Foreword, “is a virtual history of the twentieth century, through the peaceful periods and the wars, the very beginnings of television, his vast experiences in film, and his beginnings and enduring love affair with the theatre in England, Canada and the U.S., [and which] deserves to be read by everyone on the planet, theatre folk and civilian alike.”  Barry Morse and his book will be the subject of our next two editions of Talking Television with Dave White, the program I co-host along with Dave White on global radio station KSAV.org. This Tuesday, May 1, beginning at 11:00 pm ET, 8:00 pm PT, we’ll talk live with Wynn and Wood about their work with Barry, which in addition to Remember with Advantages includes writing and staging many theatre productions featuring Morse over the past decade, including Bernard and Bosie, a two-act play (written by Wynn) based on the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw and poet Sir Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.  Throughout the program we’ll also play excerpts from an hour-long interview Dave and I recorded with Barry earlier this spring from his home in London, England. 

Then next Tuesday, May 8, also beginning at 11:00 pm ET, 8:00 pm PT, we’ll play the interview with Barry Morse in its entirety. As you might imagine, because the name of the program is Talking Television, much of our conversation with Barry focuses on his work for the small screen, which dates back to the very first television broadcasts originating from the BBC in the mid-1930s. But we also touch on topics ranging from his work as a stage director to his predilection for all things George Bernard Shaw, from his fluency in many languages to his penchant for American accents. (Long before Hugh Laurie on House, Morse was the first British actor to play an American character on an American network television series, which he did for four years as Gerard on The Fugitive.).  Talking Television is a weekly 90-minute call-in program that discusses all aspects of television. We stream live every Tuesday night, but if you should miss our live broadcast, all of our shows are available 24/7 on the archives page at KSAV.org. I hope you’ll join us for both our programs on the career of Barry Morse. They promise to be a fitting tribute to a distinguished actor who has entertained so many of us for so many years.    Ed Robertson  www.edrobertson.com, edsweb.wordpress.com 

Roscoe Lee Browne

Roscoe Lee Browne passed away last week at the age of 81. He was an accomplished actor with a vast body of work in film, stage, and television, and he possessed one of the most distinctive voices an actor could possibly be blessed with. Among his many credits, he co-wrote Behind the Broken Words, an evening of poetry and dramatic readings celebrating the works of such artists as e.e. cummings, Dylan Thomas, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, which he produced and starred in along with his friend Anthony Zerbe (a distinguished actor in his own right). Browne and Zerbe originally conceived the show in Los Angeles in the early ’70s, and performed it in theaters throughout the country every year for over three decades. I met Browne briefly in April 2001, after watching he and Zerbe perform Words at the Luther Burbank Performing Arts Center in
Santa Rosa.  It was the second time I’d seen the show – I’d not only seen them perform it at Stanford in 1998 (after learning about it the year before, in the course of interviewing Zerbe for a magazine article), but wrote about it as a special piece for New Media Review. It’s a marvelous evening that, as I’ve said before, continues to remind me of why I became a writer in the first place. Browne was kind and gracious, and as I shook his hand I thanked him for stirring so many memories.May he rest in peace.

 Ed Robertson 

www.edrobertson.com, edsweb.wordpress.com 

Numbers, Numbers, Numbers

“Platform” is among the most bantered-about terms in publishing today, and it’s particularly important for writers of nonfiction. 

Once upon a time, you’d send a proposal to an editor, and if the editor liked the project and strongly believed in it, he (or she) would buy it on the spot.  Alas, that’s less and less the case today.  With few exceptions, marketing departments often have the final say on whether a deal is made.  An editor may still want the book, but may end up passing on it because the folks in marketing feel that either the market for the book isn’t big enough, or that the author’s marketability isn’t broad enough. 

That’s why platform is so important.  Publishers today want to know how many readers your book might have, how these readers can be reached, what the author can do to help reach those readers, and how visible the author is.  Oftentimes, the answers to those questions come down to numbers, numbers, numbers. 

If you’re a first-time author with an established speaking platform, how many talks do you give a year?  How many cities do you travel to?  How many people come to hear you speak, who might also buy your book at the end of your talk?  That’s your audience, that’s your platform.  If you’re an established author, how many books have you written and how many copies have you sold?  What publications do you write for, and what’s their circulation?  If you have a website, about how many hits do you get per day, and how many unique visitors?  If you happen to do a lot of radio or TV appearances (or better yet, host a show or podcast of your own), what sort of audience do you have? How many markets are you heard in, and about how many listeners tune in? 

Publishers like it if they can market a book around an author or expert with an established audience.  An established audience is a built-in platform.  

Now … what if you’re starting off and don’t have a built-in platform?  Not a problem.  You can create an audience for yourself with a little research and ingenuity. 

I’ve done a lot of speaking and radio appearances in my career. But 15 years ago, when I shopped my first book around, I had no platform at all.  I compensated for that by coming up with a detailed marketing plan that outlined all the different markets for the book and how I proposed to reach them.  The publisher who ended up buying the book said that my book proposal was “one of the best he’d ever read.” If it worked for me, it can work for you. 

Let’s say you’re a yet-to-be published genre writer with a presence on MySpace. You have x-number of MySpace “friends,” plus you belong to several different MySpace groups related to writing and publishing in general, as well as your particular genre. By the time you add up all your friends, plus all the members in the groups to which you belong, you could be looking at anywhere from several hundred to several thousand people. That’s several hundred to several thousand people you have ready access to, that may be interested in buying your book.  That’s not a bad platform for starters.

Now that you have x-number of people potentially interested in your book, it’s time to think like the folks in marketing. This is where ingenuity comes in. Come up with a plan to reach those readers in creative ways … through the web, through a blog, through chat groups, through the library, through groups and organizations, through special markets (i.e., conventions, talks, and other non-bookstore ways of reaching people), or through a virtual book tour.

Virtual book tours can be especially helpful for first-time authors or authors of genre books, because they target blogs, chat groups, and podcasts and other specialty forums on the web whose audience belongs to the same demographic as that of your target readership. So be sure to mention a virtual book tour in your proposal as part of your marketing plan.  

Platform may not be everything in publishing today, but it’s certainly a very important thing. If you can think in terms of who your readers are and what you can to do reach them, you’re more than on your way.  

Ed Robertson 

www.edrobertson.com 

edsweb.wordpress.com