Jason Klamm's Blog

Hiring Managers Hate When You Do These Five Things!

Don’t know what a Hiring Manager is or does

Research their lives and habits and gently dox them to their face (it’s just as bad as doing it online!)

Act like you’re challenging them with something you think they’d hate for some reason even though you’re, like, there for an interview or something (do hiring managers interview people or do they more just organize interviewers? Is “interview” a job you can have?

Eat a sandwich during your first meetup (they HATE sandwiches; Hiring Managers are quiche people, I think)

Say “I’m the Hiring Manager” and wait for them to leave their chair before you take over the Zoom or the emails they were working on (again, I’m really not sure what a Hiring Manager does)

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Couch the Penguin

All Hail Richard. The Exit and the Lifeguard. Call me Plutonium. Solid band or improv group names all. For me, during a two year-plus period of my life, these were eras. These were eras not dictated by where I was in life, or even what was happening around me – certainly not by anything over which I had any willful control. These were eras determined by the will and whims of one Chad; a performative illustration of both the youthful need to, and pure expression of the right to, say anything and everything that comes to your head.

I first met Chad when we became roommates during my second semester at Columbia College Chicago. I’d spent the first semester – a summer semester – in the dorms on South Plymouth Court. While I wouldn’t discover this immediately, so afraid was I to communicate with the person with whom I’d share an apartment for at least the next several month, Chad would turn out to be one of the two most prolific authors I’d ever meet, and one of the fastest typists, to boot. This, made all the more impressive by the fact that Chad has only six functioning fingers to type with.

This is Chad’s story to tell in detail, but as a kid, he’d had two aneurysms and a stroke by the time he was nine. This meant his left hand turned into what he called “The Claw,” his pointer finger the only real functioning digit. Outside of calling it “the claw,” Chad would frequently refer to the fact that he was “crippled,” getting out in front of any potential comments or annoying questions. In the beginning, though, I didn’t know any of this about him, and because he also liked to bullshit, I didn’t believe most of the things he told me. For instance, he once told me he was Paul Newman’s cousin, and that Paul had given him his first beer. When he let me participate in the bullshit, though, that was when we started to relate.

Over the course of that first semester, we slowly got to know each other. The first real things of any substance we said to one another were over AOL Instant Messenger, despite usually sitting about fifteen feet from one another in our little studio apartment at 1212 South Michigan. Slowly these turned into actual words, and eventually we’d go on outings together. Sometimes it was just walking up Michigan Avenue, or going to see movies down the street together, or maybe checking out a bar where there was some kind of music I didn’t really care for, because my musical tastes have always been pretty pedestrian.

Transportation was as close to free as you could get. For $70, you got a season pass for the CTA, so buses and trains were unlimited. Even though the big city freaked me out because it was so big, I explored. My first semester I walked around talking pictures of filming locations for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and High Fidelity, slowly realizing how many of my favorite films – like Wayne’s World took place in, and in some cases were actually shot, right here.

Since transportation was cheap, I spent my student loan overages on things like DVDs and CDs and the occasional meal; Chad would end up being more adventurous with his money. One day he came home with a light-up blow-mold penguin Christmas decoration. You might have seen the kind, they still sell them every year. Ours – and yes, we co-parented – came with a bowtie.

These were still the early days of ordering things online, which was how I finally got myself a (sort of) functioning computer for my time at Columbia College Chicago. Chad actually helped me source the parts for building my own PC, which never quite worked right. I eventually learned how to use Adobe Premiere on his computer when he was out of town or didn’t feel like writing. Chad, again master of the unconventional, decided he’d search the internet for a couch for us. Neither of us was rich, though, so he settled on a mid-way option for us. A nice fold-out couch to sit in front of our entertainment center.

The couch, by the camping company Coleman, was, as you might now imagine, inflatable. Not only was it a comfortable option for what became our “living room area,” but it also fit in the elevator just fine, so we would occasionally bring it down to the building’s pool and use it as a flotation device. Eventually – and I don’t know how or why, though I’m sure he does – Chad decided that the couch was so important to our lives that it should also be what we name our blow-mold penguin. Couch the Penguin not only became the mascot of apartment 1204, he became a character in at least one of Chad’s student films.

Columbia College Chicago was, at the time, the film school with the largest enrollment. After years of the concept of independent film saturating our airwaves, the idea of being a filmmaker seemed approachable and exciting and, in the case of Columbia, cheaper than the other options, and more central. Chad and I both leaned toward writing comedy, specifically satire, even if we both had dreams of making films about subjects important to us, like retelling the story of Santa Claus. Indeed, one of the many things we found common ground on was loving Christmas and Santa and the stories surrounding them. Couch did start his life as a Christmas penguin, after all.

Hanging out on our Coleman inflatable couch in the pool one day led to Chad deciding that he was The Lifeguard – there was a sign on the wall reading “no lifeguard on duty” – and that, in kind, I should also have a sign-based nickname. I became “The Exit.” Again, if kids in the early 2000s had been calling things “random,” Chad may actually have fit that definition. This was his way of exploring, and I loved it. After all, a lot of brilliance came out of it, and I, for the most part, was a comedy snob and a stickler about what was and wasn’t funny, until Chad basically decided that he was an inevitability. I’d grown up on silliness and loved it, but now I was trying to be a grown up. To my great fortune, Chad was the keeper of a specific, helpful form of arrested development. The kind that freed me back up to create.

From the very beginning, my film school experience was less than ideal. I have never considered myself a “story teller,” and on hearing that I had my first teacher ask me why I was even in film school. I mostly meant “I’m not good at this verbally,” but, well, let’s just say that was the beginning of a downward spiral that made me question – and sort of forget – a lot of the things I had learned on my own before film school. Many of those thing centered around the freedom to write not toward a grade or a deadline, but the sheer act of creation. I won’t diminish Chad by making him a mere symbol of that, but there’s no doubt his abandon helped bring me back from the brink.

Similarly, the TA in my Production II class – where we finally got to shoot stuff on color film! – Scott Pettis, reintroduced me to improv/introduced me to real improv. I’m self-taught, so I tell myself, but there is one night that is kind of critical to how much of an improviser I became. We were recording audio for The Couch Diaries #532, a contemplative, weird little short film starring myself and Couch the Penguin. I provided the body, face and voice of Lime the Wizard, with Couch playing himself, but Scott dubbing his voice in. I’m guessing this is because humans can’t hear Couch’s true voice – I’ll ask Chad later and see what he says.

During a break in recording, Scott, Chad and I decide we’ll try to improvise something. It starts out as an NPR parody but within seconds becomes its own thing, Scott playing the host, Dickie Allenstar, Chad as Gerry the producer, and me as the guest, Richie Delwasp. It’s rough, and I am nervously mono-syllabic for portions of it, but in the room with someone as in love with comedy and the rules of comedy as Scott was, and, well… Chad, I was caught in the middle, which was exactly where I belonged. We recorded a few that night, and then occasionally over the next few years, all the same plot, some great, some duds.

I eventually released those as a record entitled Do You Enjoy Chicken at Meal Time? Chad decided that that phrase was the perfect pickup line because, “Even if it doesn’t work, you still have some chicken.” It still makes little to no sense, but it also still brings me delight. The group was called The Richard Trio, because Chad had decided that his personal god was Richard, and if I remember correctly, Scott and I both had to swear some sort of allegiance to Richard.

I spent my final semester at Columbia not in Chicago, but on a studio lot in LA, beginning an 18-year adventure that I’m still making sense of. Chad joined me the following semester, sharing a room with me (there were eventually three people in this one room, and nine people in this three-bedroom apartment at once). During the period where it was just the two of us again, Chad and I would occasionally take the bus from where we lived in North Hollywood out to Santa Monica every weekend to enjoy the beach. There we’d swim, then I’d get something to eat, and end up with some sort of distressing indigestion that ruined the whole vibe.

One such weekend, I woke up to what felt like Chad staring at me. “What do you want, Chad?” No response. “What do you want, Chad?”

“I am not Chad. I am Plutonium.” It was then expected – for the next several days, if not weeks – that I would refer to Chad as only Plutonium, because that’s all he would answer to. Don’t get me wrong, shit like this would usually drive me crazy for a brief period, but the lesson, I eventually learned, was that I cannot control what Chad does, I can only control how I react to what Chad does. The secret, as it turns out, was just to play along with whatever Chad’s game was at the moment.

Chad continues to write like an absolute beast, usually under the name Grizzly Moose. One of the books contains poems for penguins and the other, as it happens, was co-written with Couch the Penguin. Chad and I both have a penchant for creating entire universes that only we inhabit until it finds its way onto paper. The depth of canon and lore to the absolute nonsense I create, much as it might have always been a part of me, was unintentionally nurtured by a kid who, apparently, actually was Paul Newman’s cousin, and who one day pitched a website “idea” to me.

 “We should by stolendress.com, so the slogan can be ‘Did we steal yours?’” he said to me, apropos of nothing. Yes, part of me was pissed off at him yet again spraying an arbitrary string of words at me when I was writing some all-important to-remain-unsold screenplay. The other part of me, though – the part that refused to grow up – bought that stupid domain name, and made the graphics to support it, and started writing essays for it. It is now, for better or worse, the banner under which I produce just about everything I make. Chad had done it. He had made his impact. The Chad Era, as it seems, would stay with me.

The Porcupine

In 1997, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in my area of Upstate New York with any internet connection beyond dial-up. Personally, I didn’t even have that, and I had to go to my best friend Dan’s house to watch images download line-by-line. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know exactly what kind I wanted to be, and I wasn’t publishing anything on the internet, yet. In fact, once Dan did have high-speed internet, we skipped blogs altogether and went straight to putting up funny videos and sketch comedy albums before I would’ve even considered writing on the internet in any form.

Imagine the excitement, then, when my English teacher, Mike Newell, announced to my alternative school, Upward Bound in Hartwick, New York, that we were going to have our works published. I mean, really published. On paper. On top of that, we were going to get lessons from a beat author named Fielding Dawson, a rebel without a pause, who eschewed the necessity of punctuation - especially the comma - whenever it suited the narrative he was writing, many of which were anxious and thoughtful and poignant and which immediately made me comfortable with my own writing.

This didn’t come from any sense of disdain, but rather recognition of the power this man had, to not only write, but to have published several books of often hard-to-follow semi-prose that, sure, wasn’t a recipe for mainstream success, but nonetheless supported his bohemian lifestyle. I could handle the basics of punctuation, I thought to myself, so if I listen closely to this gentle maniac, maybe I’d have a chance of doing more with my writing. Fielding’s job was to catch lightning in a bottle - to turn our teenage alphabet soup brains into something that not only resembled actual words, but which retained the essence of the brain that brought it to life in the first place.

This could mean anything from lengthy edits, to only polishing a piece until it made enough sense to be on paper, to actually putting some note-and-scribble-addled pages in the anthology we were putting together. It was to represent the creative process while also being the final product, just as much due to the seemingly staid and strict Mike Newell as it was to the traditionally counterculture Fielding.

Fielding would come to Upstate New York up through the year 2000, right before I planned to leave Laurens, New York for Los Angeles, or some sort of in-between location I would eventually decide was Chicago. In between helping troubled kids pour their hearts out, he was doing much the same thing but for death row inmates at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Instead of last meals and last rights, he was giving these prisoners the gift of expression. A staunch opponent to the death penalty, he was doing what he could, and I can only imagine felt a little relief knowing that, at least with us, he was using these same tools but sending us out into hopeful pastures.

We spent a short amount of time with Fielding, who was coming up from New York City to do this. Maybe one or two weeks, if memory serves. It was to be our best work, the most representative of who we were, and he would also, if I recall, do similar work with the community of Hartwick, because this was a community anthology, after all. It was a whirlwind of an experience (one of many reasons I don’t have a handle on the time it took to work on this), with our local paper, the Daily Star in Oneonta coming by and taking a photo as I read a draft of my short story, Bob is Nosy. It was my first taste of anything even approaching notoriety, but the real deal was when The Porcupine finally arrived.

I wasn’t at Upward Bound the year something crazy happened at the year-opening schoolwide camping trip that involved a porcupine, but they all agreed that their shared history made it the perfect mascot for the anthology and for the school. Our school paper was already called The Quill, so this was more than appropriate. With financial help from The Kenyon Review, we got a full-color cover, and everyone got a copy of the 64-page book that was now part of the community and our short-lived school’s history. We may have done a reading that year (we did in subsequent years), but I’m not sure. If we did, I am certain I shook in my shoes. I was only 16, with absolutely no self-confidence but a belief that I could be whatever I wanted. I had, for the moment, picked writer, and the power that book held in a time where no one had the power of self-publishing was immeasurable. Any time from then on that I found an avenue to self-publish, I took it - I wanted to be undeniable, at least in terms of existence.

I submitted something every year for what would eventually be renamed (for reasons known only to Mike Newell, I think) The Porkypine. I did a couple of the covers, as well, and my submissions got a little better each time, including this short story about WWII that came from my personal experience with war, where I watched the movie Saving Private Ryan a ton and was obsessed with the sound design. I combined that with a family story about a great uncle who played dead during the battle of the bulge, and I remember actual stunned silence as a read it, feeling a little guilty that I was just working out the emotional impact that film had on me.

I was digging through some notes recently and realized I’d forgotten that Fielding had taken my piece and sent it along to a publication called First Intensity, along with his own stuff to get it bumped up for consideration. I have no idea if it ever got published, but I recall this being flattering, and an honor, but on looking back I clearly could not appreciate what a big gesture that was. Fielding and Mike had both been infinitely supportive, even as I told Fielding I was planning to leave Upstate New York to get into the film industry.

“But it’s so competitive,” I remember him telling me. I was shocked - this guy, of all people, who managed to get published despite the hell of that business, couldn’t grasp that I’d want to throw myself in the lion’s den. Of course, he was absolutely right, but that twenty-year lesson did end up yielding some of the best moments of my life, most of which were responsible for me finally living part of the dream and getting published by someone other than myself.

I’ll still self-publish. That’s inevitable. Most of my ideas are not remotely marketable, and yet - thanks partially to Fielding and very much to Mike - I must make stuff. If I have an idea that I must see in print, I have that option now, and it’s an affront to that whole experience not to make that happen.

I’m hoping one day to bring The Porkypine back, in honor of both Mike and Fielding, who we’ve lost in the last few years. In the meantime, I’m putting the old ones up online, with the first issue here: https://is.gd/porkypine1997, including my short story Bob is Nosy, along with a semi-poetic recounting of a dream which I’m not embarrassed to say is a dud. To me, at 42. To me then, it was a pure expression of who I was and what I thought mattered, and putting it in print was just proof that someone else agreed.

We're Not Worthy - My New Book

I have been waiting so long to officially announce this. My book, We’re Not Worthy, releases September 12 from 1984 Publishing. It’s the history of 1990s TV sketch comedy, featuring interviews with 150 people, including Bob Odenkirk, Carol Burnett and Mike Myers. You can find more information and pre-order links at SketchComedyBook.com. Pre-ordering can really help the book early on, though I’m also hoping to find a way to do a mini book tour in early September to support the book.

The book’s foreword is by the incomparable David Wain, who I also had the incredibly good fortune to interview during this process. The cover illustrations are by Adam Koford, who I’ve wanted to work with for over a decade since I first saw his drawings of John Hodgman’s 700 Hoboes, and fell in love with his Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.

As a lifelong lover, writer, and performer of sketch comedy, this book is a labor of love. The ’90s are the decade where I first learned what sketch was, and almost immediately started improvising and eventually writing with my best friend, Dan. For most of last year, and a few months this year, I interviewed so many people who informed my sense of humor that I probably won’t really start feeling this until I have the book in my hands. While I’ve self-published before, this is the first time I’ve had the support of an amazing publisher the whole way through. Not only did I get to write the book I wanted to write, but I’m also getting to promote it in my own way.

Here is the first of several book trailers, each in the style of popular commercials (it’s a sketch comedy book, this was unavoidable). This one is in the style of James Patterson’s book trailers.

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Kelvin Can Wait

I sometimes design t-shirts that you can buy at Redbubble. They’re usually based off of things I love, like NewsRadio and Star Trek. Like the shirt above (the J.J. Abrams movies are in “the Kelvin timeline,” and a less-than-desirable bunch of canon changes) that mixes my love for Star Trek and my awareness of Kevin James properties. I’ve got Trek on the mind a lot lately, given how brilliant Picard is, and I thought it might be fun to show some gentle disdain for those just-ok movies. Though, if you visit the page right now, you won’t find this design. It’s currently under review - probably because I tagged it with #StarTrek and it uses a freeware version of the classic Trek font, though it doesn’t use any real IP.

The most recent episode of Picard really got me, somehow managing to pull off something I never thought I’d see in the universe again, and it made me bawl. These shows mean more to me than even I sometimes remember - they were the one thing most of my family could enjoy together as a group, and it brought in my best friends, too. Not a lot of things could do that, if I’m honest. And a show about a family coming back together, and where it all happens, well… it was poignant.

This is one of many reasons I think corporations being IP sharks is silly. You aren’t going to make me hate Star Trek, but the relationship with the corporate side is less than fun.

That said, enjoy some of the goofy NewsRadio shit I’ve made over the years. This is what happens when a corporation doesn’t care about a thing you hold as dear as I do that show.

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Hayseed in a Needle Stack

(I wrote this story, originally titled "Detective Therapy: How Podcasting About an Unknown Comedian Changed My Life," for the now-defunct website The Doe at the beginning of 2022. Their format was all anonymous, so important details were originally left out. I've added crucial details here but tried to retain most of the original essay otherwise.)

In 2011, at the start of a boom, I started my own podcast. Plenty of people had already established themselves in this space, and many popular shows with celebrity hosts wouldn’t begin until much later. Eleven years ago, however, you didn’t need a theme for your podcast to set it apart—you just needed to be funny.

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I’d been doing comedy for years, recording just about everything I did, but I assumed that the world didn’t want to hear undeveloped comedy (I’ve since been proven wrong 10,000-fold). Still, I didn’t have to think for long to decide what my show would be about. Not only did my two best friends, Dan and Mike, grow up doing comedy as a group with me, but we listened to comedy records together, mostly on cassette tapes and many on vinyl. I decided that’s where I’d start (and likely end) my podcasting career: vinyl records.

I spent the first year or so becoming an increasingly voracious comedy album collector, building up the guts to speak with some of my heroes. I could end this here and tell you that I recently interviewed my white whale, Weird Al, the comedian at least partially responsible for my friendship with Dan, as the show’s final episode. The thing is, though this episode was massive for me, it didn’t change my life or why I podcast. It would take a genuine mystery to do that.

This mystery had many stops and starts. I first interviewed a comedy historian about a stand-up whose true story was almost entirely unknown. He was a white guy from Arkansas named Dick Davy, who did race-positive humor in the ’60s, and that was about all anyone knew about him. I soon became obsessed with finding out why he had disappeared, but within a couple of weeks of research during my day job, I threw up my hands. I didn’t know where to start.

Over the next three years, I’d publish my second book, sell my first movie and make hundreds more podcasts. The latter was an absolute compulsion, the easiest and quickest way I could let myself feel like I’d created something. I was churning out discussions and rarely editing (I didn’t need to, since my guest would discuss liking a specific record at length - that was part of the charm). Then, in early 2018, amidst the normal blur of back-and-forth emails with comedians’ agents, I got a message that had nothing to do with comedy records.

Mike had just been reported as missing. In fact, he’d been missing a few months after I’d first heard of this unknown comic. I spent the next few weeks in a fugue, searching no longer as someone with the fervent, distracted interest of a guy who didn’t care about his day job but with the passion of someone who didn’t want to believe the worst. I hunted down every lead I could online, doing the best near-forensic work I was capable of. I analyzed photos of this and that and checked out social media that might hold clues, desperately hoping to get in touch with Mike, to find out where he’d gone to and why he’d cut off contact with everyone.

I didn’t entirely process my guilt over our mutual lack of correspondence; instead, I turned it into dread. Mike was the reason I’d become a director. He taught me the joy of telling childish jokes well past childhood. He reminded me to find the absurd in everything; I think he would appreciate knowing that I accidentally walked a few miles out of my way to go grieve at a bowling alley the following week.

A few months later, we got the news that Mike’s remains had been found buried on his own property. I collapsed in on myself, unable to do much for my own good or those around me. There was no more searching to do to try and keep my soul afloat. My friend was no longer missing. He’d been found, just not at all in the way we’d hoped. It was no longer a mystery.

Shortly after, I started a miniseries on the podcast interviewing the family members of comedy album creators who were no longer with us. This was my effort to start using the show to tell the stories behind these records. These were mini-mysteries that could be solved in the room. In the quest to make busy work for a trauma-addled brain, I was satisfying the need for something good to come from loss. No one else was going to tell these stories if I hadn’t called them up to talk.

Still, these were not much different than other podcasts. They were fun discussions about people who were almost lost to time. I wasn’t processing my need for them yet. Toward the end of the year, though, something suddenly clicked. I thought back to my hayseed in a needle stack, wondering if my skills in finding these other obscure names might help me find this country comedian.

The worst that could happen was finding zero leads on this comic. The best I could hope for was that he’d be alive, want to speak with me and tell me his whole life story. He became an even stronger obsession than the search for my lost friend; there was no way I could be in denial about whatever was at the end of this tunnel. As for podcasts, this time the journey would have to be the episode, regardless of the outcome.

I recorded what I did every step of the way, including my phone calls, and read newspaper clippings out loud. I kept writing physical letters to people who shared the comic’s stage name. I abused free trials to research websites (which only help you when the information you have is accurate to begin with) and kept coming up empty. I’d even found some information that told me this Arkansas comic was actually the son of a rabbi from New York City. But even then, no one knew his real name.

One website said (in small print that I almost missed) that one potential name, Richard Hoffman, “may go by” the very stage name I had been searching for, Dick Davy. It was too simple to be true, but I dug further. I found a brother, but I had to write another physical letter and wait for one back. It never came.

Fortunately, though, I did get a phone call. The comic had passed away, but his family remembered him fondly. When I said earlier that the journey would have to be the story, I meant it. Even if the journey had sucked, I still would have published it. This phone call led me to finalize a script, something I’d never needed to write for a podcast.

I included many interviews in this episode, but it primarily contained narration and royalty-free music to serve the story. I took years of album and film editing and used them to express my love for comedy and my passion for untold stories at the same time.

It wasn’t obvious then, but Mike was part of the reason I had even learned to edit. Now he’d become the reason I had to edit, even if the story wasn’t his. The comic’s family loved it, especially his niece, who shares a name with Mike’s mom. She recently found two unreleased records of his, from his early days, which an archivist friend of mine digitized and cleaned up. They brought tears to my eyes. Not from laughter—funny as they were—but from knowing his story hadn’t ended.

Archiving the lives and works of unknown comics is now my passion, even though I’ve ended the show. I’ve started searching for other comics to research, all in the name of preserving laughter, art and toil. As I write this, I’m helping to put together Dick Davy’s first vinyl release in over 50 years, working as his estate archivist and researching a book on his life, despite never having met the man.

All this effort has made me realize I have more stories in me and more to find. I continue to search for the next comedy mystery to explore, in honor of the comic, my late friend and my own sanity.

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Not A Paleontologist Episode 6

From the StolenDress Podcast Network (StolenDress.com)

Read by the author.

©2022 Jason Klamm

Relaxing Piano Music by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song...
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

A Voice-Over Dream Come True

Ever since I saw Saving Private Ryan, after which I suddenly cared about WWII, I've cared about WWII.  To be fair to me, none of my grandparents served in the military directly during the war (though my grandmother, Loraine Funk, was in training to be a nurse before the war ended), so I guess that was something I lacked an understanding of.  Both my parents served in the Air Force, neither in any sort of fighting capacity, so the stories I got from them were mostly too-much-information-style stories about the swinging seventies, so seeing the most visceral portrayal of non-stop violence I'd ever seen was bound to make an even greater impact.

From that point on - for a while - I was probably at least slightly convinced that I understood war.  I used my "experience" of watching that film to write a pretty good WWII short story, based partially on a family rumor that my Uncle Pete had played dead at The Battle of the Bulge, that one of my mentors absolutely loved, comparing it to The Red Badge of Courage.  I don't know if that was accurate, but it carried me for quite some time.  I spent my first entertainment industry paycheck on a vintage WWII uniform, in the hopes of one day making my own WWII film.

I spent a good chunk of my summer before film school shooting black and white photos of my best friend and comedy partner, Dan, in the WWII uniform.  Insisting these were his grandfather, we posted it in various versions online over the years, recently settling on them as a glut of material for the WWII era of my project, The History of Dan and Jay's Comedy Hour.  

A few months into my second semester at film school at Columbia College Chicago, I'd shaved my waist-length hair and ever-present beard, looking for a change and keeping in mind possible acting roles.  I was convinced I'd only be a writer/producer, however, in full denial that I still wanted to be on camera.  I'd actually done plenty of short parts in other folks' short films during my time there, but a lot of this had to do with the fact that you were expected to participate in some way, and I was chosen numerous times to act in things.

If anything, I'd have maybe admitted that I still wanted to do voice over, but the dream was always to do a voice alongside Phil Hartman, who had died a few years before.  Beyond that, unless requested, I didn't seek out or endeavour toward anything too actor-y.  That said, I've never been one to forget a dream when a strong reminder comes along.  After shaving my head, a friend of a friend asked me if I'd like to be in his WWII short film.  I had my woolen WWII uniform, I looked more the part than I did with my long hair, and stood on the corner of Roosevelt and Michigan one hot summer day, only for the friend of a friend to not come by and pick me up, as I roasted in 100-degree heat.  In wool.

In 2006, when I was still doing extra work for money, I got my chance again.  I was to be a sailor in Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers.  At the time, I also had a vintage sailor uniform, though the fitting was with the film production's uniform, of course.  Just before we were to shoot, though, I got a full-time job working on America's Next Top Model, and a couple years later, when I found myself back in the extra game, I did end up working a day on 2008's The Pacific.  You can see me, and I got to watch William Sadler give a great WWII speech, after being trained on how to look and act like a Marine by the TV movie's military advisor.  It was a fun time, but not 100% what I'd hoped for.

Cut to January 2020.  I had quit my only source of income because of a terrible situation, and I had been trying out extra work yet again and finally started producing audiobooks, fulfilling at least a small part of my "doing voice over for a living" dream.  I was also auditioning for voice parts, but getting zero hits.  One part I tried out for was a radio announcer and some pilots for a Japanese language film entitled Gift of Fire.  Surprisingly, my audition (which included one down-to-earth take and one slightly more stereotypical Mid-Atlantic-accented version) did the trick, and myself and one other actor went to a home in the valley in LA and recorded the same two parts, with a little riffing.  They'd pick the takes that worked best.

It took some finagling, but I recently was able to get myself a digital screener of Gift of Fire, and, true-to-form, I doubted every time one of my parts came on screen.  I kept asking my wife "is that for sure me?"  I know my voice.  I know my inflection.  I know my training.  The two radio announcers were definitely me, but I couldn't let myself believe it.  Perhaps because of seemingly endless disappointments, I needed to be 100% certain I had heard myself.  I ran it by friends and family, who agreed I was being silly.  Eventually, I took a breath and enjoyed the fact that I'd lived a long-running dream - two of them, in fact, since I'd always wanted to do old-timey voice in something.  This was also the first time I'd seen my name in the credits of a feature film, with a role, where I hadn't produced it.

The film is, quite honestly, something I’m really honored to be involved in at all, even in this small way.  It’s the story of Japanese scientists trying to develop an atomic bomb before anyone else does. I don't know where/when it will properly premiere in the US, but fingers crossed it will get a little more exposure, soon.  Some dreams take a long time to come to fruition, but it helps to remember all those little dreams, so you can properly appreciate them when they come along.

Talk at ya later,

Jason Klamm
linktr.ee/jasonklamm

Originally published at Patreon.com/StolenDress

Not A Paleontologist Episode 5

From the StolenDress Podcast Network (StolenDress.com)

Read by the author.

©2022 Jason Klamm

Relaxing Piano Music by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song...
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I Can't Escape Fake History

For the last several months, I've been endeavouring to chronicle the history of my sketch group, Dan and Jay's Comedy Hour (danandjay.com) using an interactive timeline I found.  This history, found at history.danandjay.com, is almost entirely bullshit, pulling in elements from past fake histories (going back to 2001 we have created innumerable impossible backstories) and all of the new elements that get pulled in on our weekly podcast, usually through time travel or interdimensional travel.

It got so that, by this last Christmas, as I recovered from COVID, I realized that I'd written nearly 6,000 words of fake history for this website experiment that I hadn't yet publicized.  That doesn't sound like a lot of writing, but when you consider that this is essentially a conglomeration of what should be one-off bits, it's not bad.  In fact, if it reaches over 50,000 words (it will) I'm going to be forced to self-publish it.

I've talked about this on numerous podcasts, but whether it was All You Need is Cash (the Rutles mockumentary) or The Three Musketeers, I've always loved a piece of art that does the footwork of insisting the truth of the piece in question.  My first two books are that format, I've directed two mockumentaries, and some of my earliest writings, ever, at least took a small cue from the fake history genre.

Attached to this post are a few photos I've put together for various eras of Dan and Jay's Comedy Hour, who are, according to the history, Dan and my fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, etc.  This whole project is just another experiment, though a photoshop-heavy one, to see what people will question and what they won't, with the full knowledge (hopefully) that it's all bullshit.  I say "hopefully" because I've had more than a few people question my dry satirical style in the past, so you can never be sure.

Talk Soon,

Jason Klamm
linktre.ee/jasonklamm

Originally published at Patreon.com/Stolendress