Would Bart Simpson be so legendary and lovable if he didn’t sound like Bart Simpson?
We’ll never know the answer, since Bart — famous for being yellow, spike-headed and forever 10 years old — is probably even more renowned for his mean sniggers and bratty snorts, his “Eat my shorts” and “Don’t have a cow, man!”
After three decades of “The Simpsons,” the longest-running scripted primetime American television show in history, it’s just starting to get around now that the sound of animated antihero Bart is provided by professional voice actress Nancy Cartwright. That’s because Cartwright has penned and co-produced a fanciful, autobiographical film that casts all the way back to long before she became Bart.
“In Search of Fellini,” which opens at the Kiggins Theatre tonight, is about a sheltered young movie lover’s first big adventure — her self-assigned mission to travel to Italy to meet the director of her dreams. Her life may have been sheltered, but 20-year-old Lucy’s first exposure to the powerfully weird and bittersweet masterpiece “La Strada” prompts her to set out in a solo search for director Federico Fellini.
If You Go
• What: “In Search of Fellini,” directed by Taron Lexton.
• When: Opens today at 7:45 p.m.; additional screen times vary.
• Where: Kiggins Theatre, 1011 Main St., Vancouver.
• Tickets: $9; Monday screenings are always $6.
• On the web: www.kigginstheatre.com
• Also showing: “La Strada,” directed by Federico Fellini. Opens today at 5:30 p.m.; additional screen times vary.
Which is exactly what Cartwright really did, she said during a telephone interview this week. She’d said farewell to her native Ohio and gone to acting school in Los Angeles, where somebody suggested she check out Fellini’s “La Strada,” from 1954, as a source of scenes to act out in a “scene study” class.
Cartwright was completely captivated by the strange, tragic movie — so captivated, she said, that she wrote to Fellini’s office in Italy to ask for a personal appointment. “I’ll immerse myself in Italian culture, I’ll eat, I’ll drink, I’ll fall in love,” she fantasized. “I’ll become Italian. I won’t seem like a foolish girl from Ohio.”
A few weeks later she got back a friendly rejection: Thanks for your fandom, but the director will be too busy to see you.
Cartwright went to Italy anyway. A friend bailed on the trip at the last moment, so she was alone there for about two weeks, she said.
“I was really naive. I made some interesting decisions and some bad decisions,” she said. “I did the trip, which was incredible, and got home and realized that telling my own story was so much better than doing ‘La Strada’ on stage.”
(Not familiar with “La Strada”? The Kiggins is also screening a remastered version, today through Tuesday.)
She started turning her tale into a one-woman stage monologue, she said, but that took a sudden back seat to Bart Simpson. In rapid succession she got cast, married and pregnant, she said; she was so busy that it was a full decade later when she remembered “Searching for Fellini” and thought, “Wow, I’d better do this.”
The stage show debuted in 1995, to good reviews, and Cartwright and collaborating writer Peter Kjenaas started picturing a movie. Twenty years, three different producers and one dozen script drafts later, it’s finally hit the big screen.
“You have to chase your own dream,” Cartwright said. “I kept the story alive for years.”
Being Bart
It’s no surprise that, when you get Nancy Cartwright on the phone, she really does sound like Bart Simpson. That funny, snarly, little-kid voice is no put-on. It’s natural.
“The Simpsons” is a fully scripted show, Cartwright said, and she’s reluctant to “step on the toes of these writing geniuses” — but because it’s routine to do four takes of each scene, there’s a little room for inspiration and improvisation.
Like the phrase “Eat my shorts!” It came from Cartwright’s high school marching band days, she said, and the senior class’ mischievous decision to replace the three-syllable chant “Fairmont West!” with the ruder one “Eat my shorts!”
It became a culture-wide catchphrase. “And I don’t get a dime for it,” Cartwright said.
Fairmont West High School, in Kettering, Ohio, is where Cartwright started down the voice-acting path, she said. Some public speakers excel on the speech-and-debate team, she said, but she found her home performing poetry and prose for laughs.
“I won first place in humorous interpretation,” she said. “It was my claim to fame.”
