The Versatile Voice-over Actor

Profile On Joe Cipriano

By Scott Benjamin

The air name has changed: Tom Collins, Dave Donovan, and now, for many years, Joe Cipriano. Professionally, he has never been known as David Cipriano, the name that was on his report cards at Watertown High School (WHS) and the mail that was delivered to Sunnyside Avenue in Oakville.

He has modulated his voice to fit the venue: Youthful, warm and enthusiastic for Fox – where he helped make Bart Simpson famous - and the CBS situation comedies and Hollywood-based game shows, and low- register drama to promote NBC’s ER and West Wing.

The story, dating from his first visit to Waterbury’s WWCO radio as a WHS sophomore in the summer of 1969 to becoming one of the premier voice-over artists, is written and spoken in Living On Air (246 pages, Joe Cipriano Promos, 2013). His wife, Ann, a longtime television news producer, was the co-author.

Cipriano turned the audio book into a radio play with original music and a production team. It captured awards last November from the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences for Outstanding Audio book, Author Performance; and Outstanding Audio book Narration, Biography.

“It has sold beyond our expectations,” said Cipriano, who graduated from WHS in 1972.

He added, “We were fortunate with the book because it came out the same year” as the low-budget movie “In A World,” the story of a vocal coach who wants to do the voice-overs for movie trailers. Wikipedia.org reported that the film, which was produced for less than $1 million, took in $3 million at the box office and received “positive reviews” from critics.

Cipriano said the film - which was written, directed and co-produced by Lake Bell, who also played the lead role - created “a buzz” about voice-over. The title comes from the phrase associated with his late friend, Don LaFontaine, the Voice of God, who announced more than 5,000 movie trailers.

These days he is the booth announcer for network game shows and still voices promos for Fox and CBS as well as 20 radio stations across the country.

“You have to have a diverse portfolio,” Cipriano said during a January 17, 2015 phone interview. “If you rely on one thing then once it’s gone, you’ve lost all of your income.”

“You can’t rely on what you did five years ago,” Cipriano explained. “People have said to me that they don’t understand why I have people coaching me about my voice or that I go to seminars after I have accomplished so much. I tell them that Tiger Woods has a swing coach.”

While at WHS his primary vocation was doing the evening shift at WWCO, a Top 40 station that was then located on the Straits Turnpike in Middlebury.

“A lot of the kids at Watertown High didn’t know I was on the radio because I went by the air name Tom Collins,” Cipriano recalled. “But a lot of the kids in my classes knew about it and some of my friends even visited me at the station.”

He said he has “fond memories” of WHS. In fact, over the recent years he has corresponded with June Legge, the school’s former athletic director.

Cipriano did a stand-up comedy routine with friend Bruce Heavens for the WHS talent show and they later performed it at Catch A Rising Star. He also had a part in the school production of Bye Bye Birdie.

“We live in Pacific Palisades, which is a part of Los Angeles that has a small-town feel to it,” Cipriano said. “You want to have something that is similar to the way Watertown was as I was growing up.”

After graduation, he continued to work at WWCO and also landed a part-time position at 1360 WDRC-AM in Hartford, a Top 40 station that attracted several air personalities that later landed in larger markets.

Charlie Parker, the beloved longtime program director, created listener contests that were copied by stations across the country.

“He had an amazing mind, which was similar to Merv Griffin, in that he could invent games,” Cipriano said, referring to the creator of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy.

“Charlie used sound effects to the point a listener would hear the sound of coins going into a machine and then guess what coin was last deposited,” he recalled.

From Connecticut he went to Washington, D.C. in 1975, where he met his wife, who was then a radio news writer.

“We are fortunate that we are both in broadcasting, because we understand the demands of the profession,” Cipriano said. “Ann knows if we’re ready to go out to dinner at 7:30 and I get a call to do a spot for CBS, that we’re going to have to postpone going out to dinner until 8:15. And I know that she may not be able to do something some nights because of a breaking news story.”

He laments that local radio has become less community-oriented since the 1990s when Federal Communications Commission regulations made it possible for conglomerates to own multiple stations in the same market, which decreased competition. There also are now fewer requirements for public service programming.

“I think more stations need to get away from the recorded shows, the syndicated shows and the overload of commercials and localize their content and be part of the community,” Cipriano said.

“I think the opportunities are there to be more community-oriented,” he continued. He said a prime example is 1320 WATR in Waterbury, which has local talk shows, news and coverage of high school sports.

Over the long haul, Cipriano believes that as a result of greater Smart Phone and auto access, Internet radio will have a larger impact on the market than Sirius/XM satellite, which merged seven years ago.

To honor LaFontaine, Cipriano and other friends of the famed announcer helped establish a voice-over lab at the Screen Actors Guild Foundation in Los Angeles, which provides free workshops and seminars for anyone pursuing the profession.

He won the Don LaFontaine Legacy Award in 2010 and keeps the trophy prominently displayed in his home.

“He had a very good marketing mind, particularly with the movie trailers,” Cipriano said of his friend. “He established the model for what the movie trailers continue to be. I think it helped that he had been in production before he started doing the voice–overs.”

Cirpriano said it probably is about equally difficult to break into voice-over work today as it was more than 30 years ago when he entered the field.

“There were fewer opportunities when I got into it because it was mostly the three broadcast networks and a small amount of cable stations,” he said. “Now there are a lot of cable outlets and the Internet, and with home studios you are not confined to a region, but there are a lot more people in the field who are competing for voiceover work.”

Cipriano said he is pleased that it has reached the point that women have been the voice-over announcers at most of the major television awards shows over the last three years.

Recently, he has done less promo work and more assignments for game shows, including a brief audition as a substitute host on Wheel of Fortune in 2011. He began doing game shows in 1997 when he took the microphone for Pictionary, which was hosted by actor Alan Thicke.

Each morning he scours the entertainment trade publications for new opportunities and then contacts Rita Vennari, his agent.

“You need to be able to pick up the phone and suggest something and have them follow-up with you on it and then do the negotiations,” Cipriano said. “Generally, the agents have a lot of clients and they aren’t the ones that initially get the work for you. You need to make suggestions based on what you’ve done before and where you might fit in.”

He said getting the promo work for Fox, which began while he was a part-time air personality at KIIS-FM in Los Angeles, boosted his pay to a much higher tax bracket.

Cipriano said Fox has had a remarkable run.

“Nobody thought that a fourth broadcast network could survive,” he said. “It went on the air in 1987 and I started doing promos for them in 1988 and my agent at the time told me not to get too excited because they probably would be off the air by December 1988.”

“Rupert Murdoch had the vision and was willing to spend money even after Fox had lost a lot of money,” Cipriano said of the network president. “They stole the NFC package from CBS and put on the Simpsons and Married With Children and tried to be hip and distinguish themselves from the other three networks. It worked.”