My agent submitted the script for my audiobook project ‘Rock Star Rising’ to Russ Tamblyn, and after reading it, he immediately said yes. He even volunteered to get a copy of the script to George Chakiris to play the part of a Puerto Rican gangster. It was an unplanned dream to possibly have both leaders of The Jets and The Sharks in my project.

I assured Russ that I had written the novel six years before thinking of doing this project, so I did not write the Puerto Rican part, to get the two of them together for the first time since West Side Story. It was just a coincidence. And a good one.

Russ told me about the time he was filming Robert Wise's The Haunting. He walked out behind the mansion alone at night. He turned toward the house to see the filming lights inside. He started taking steps backwards. Russ said:

"Suddenly I felt this 'brick of ice' on the back of my neck. Like someone had placed it there. The chill went down my spine. I was too scared to turn around, so I just started walking back toward the house until the chill left me."

I had to wait for Russ to attend various premiers of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, starring his daughter Amber Tamblyn, before I could set a date with him to record, but the wait was well worth it.

In the recording studio Russ was totally prepared and ready to go with all the actors he had to work with. His character is the would-be writer who goes in search of "Shane" a dead rock star (played by James Darren).

This meant that he would be the one that would meet up with all the other characters. So he had a lot of scenes to prepare for. Of course, being an audiobook, the actors would have their scripts in front of them. But I wanted this to be a performance and not a reading, so that actors had to see their lines and then "live them".

I scheduled Russ for four hours of recording starting with George and continuing throughout the day with other actors coming in and out, sometimes having as many as four actors in the recording booth. It was large enough to have four mikes set up with the actors given enough room to do whatever body language they wanted.

Russ and George had met on their own before the recording day, to go over their lines and make some changes to make the words more suitable to their ears. I encouraged this from the start, as I not only wanted the best performance possible, but I wanted to record a part of the actor’s personality as well as their character's.

Russ was calmly professional and had to task of making his easy-going character of Alan, come off strong as he meets up with many intimidating characters. Strong women as well as gangsters. In many cases his only defense is his sarcasm. This Russ did perfectly, playing strength in the midst of fear.

After I was finished recording George, I had many of the actors standing by and asked Russ if he preferred to do the remaining scenes in continuity. I was surprised when he said, "No, let's just run all the scenes of each actor at once." This saved us about an hour of re-set up time.

After we finished, I told Russ, "I really learned something today. Even though, it might help the actor to do it in continuity, it's best for energy of performance to finish the main actors’ scenes with each of the supporting actors first. "I planned the rest of the recordings with the star actors that way.

During breaks, Russ answered my questions about scenes from his movies. And when I mentioned DeMille's Samson and Delilah made when he was around 12 years old. Russ said:

“In the movie I have my sling shot tied around my head. Even now, when I get ready to leave the house, my wife usually says, 'Did you remember to bring your sling shot?'”