![]() Indirectly, he taught his son how not to manage a career. Joseph, though, always believed that he was built for better things. ![]() Joseph Cranston acted on TV in Space Patrol, Dragnet and The Red Skelton Hour and wrote B-movie scripts for films I haven’t seen (The Corpse Grinders, The Crawling Hand). His father, he tells me, had been a Hollywood workhorse himself. The book of my relationship with my father is missing seven or eight chapters. It was OK, he insists, because he was making a living and paying the rent. Cranston has been acting since his early 20s, but spent several decades as a jobbing foot soldier, toiling away in TV sitcoms and little-seen movies. His CV, after all, is a testimony to heavy lifting. I am guessing that he is speaking as an expert. “Frustration is inherent in any production,” he says. There were days on Asteroid City when he felt himself lagging, struggling to find the right balance. Comedy is a good deal harder than drama, he thinks, because the genre is more fragile and therefore more dependent on tempo and momentum. He hopes that he nailed it, but occasionally on set he had his doubts. I don’t think there was any actor on set who didn’t get the same response: ‘Yeah, that’s good. “In Wes’s movies, everyone talks very quickly. He took his cue, he explains, from the newsreaders of his youth and studied footage of Walter Cronkite and Edward R Murrow to prepare. It makes the most of Cranston’s velvety voice, his air of authority and his confident swagger, like a riverboat gambler. The narrator is your classic elder-statesman role.
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