LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) - Perfectly written, eloquently spoken, gracefully read - Barry Bernson cares deeply about words.
“Words are sacred, they deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you nudge the world a little,” Bernson said, quoting the playwright Tom Stoppard.
For nearly five decades, Bernson has used words to gently nudge television viewers at WDRB, WHAS and WAVE in Louisville and WMAQ-TV in Chicago.
His words became the cleverly crafted glue that held together his one-of-a-kind feature stories about unusual people doing bizarre and wonderful things. Behind the anchor desk, a more serious Bernson delivered the information that kept us in the know about road closures, house fires and impending snowstorms. He’s also worked with words in newspapers and radio.
“My entire career has been reading and writing. No arithmetic, thank you very much,” Bernson said, noting that it never hurts to add a splash of humor to your word choice.
Now, after 47 years of dishing out true stories and must-know information, Bernson’s world of words is going through a transformation. The career journalist has reinvented himself as an actor in major movies and commercials, and this month, he is appearingin the thriller “Dark Waters” alongside Mark Ruffalo and Academy Award-winning actress Anne Hathaway.
That’s not the only place you’ll be able to catch Bernson this month. He is also producing a radio adaptation of Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” for WFPL.
“I was 11 years old when I first heard this memoir by Dylan Thomas, and I never forgot it,” Bernson said. “It’s a reminiscence about his boyhood around Christmas time growing up in Wales in the 1940s.”
Under the direction of podcast editor Laura Ellis in the Louisville Public Media studios, Bernson narrates the project, which will air on Christmas Day on WFPL. He is joined in the reimagining of sights, sounds and smells of ” A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by students from Lincoln Elementary, local actors and Bernson’s wife, Andrea.
“This is my gift to Louisville. It’s something I have thought about doing for a very long time,” said Bernson. “I finally got up out of my chair to do it and it’s been great fun.”
As has been his stint in movies. The 74-year-old newsman turned motion picture actor is excited about the Oscar buzz surrounding “Dark Waters.” The movie tells the real-life tale of attorney Robert Bilott’s (Ruffalo) legal battle against DuPont over the release of a toxic chemical into Parkersburg, West Virginia’s water supply, which ultimately affected 70,000 townspeople and hundreds of livestock.
In the film, Bernson plays an elderly and hard-of-hearing corporate attorney.
“In one scene, I am seated at a private dinner party with Hathaway and Ruffalo and can’t understand anything they are saying,” he laughed.
For sure, his clumsy role in “Dark Waters” is a departure from his previous part as a high-functioning neurosurgeon in “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” alongside Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman.
“There was a scene where I am actually hugging Nicole Kidman,” said Bernson. “I told everyone, ’You are going to see me hugging Nicole,’ but unfortunately they cut that out of the movie. It’s on the cutting room floor.”
Scenes that did make the final cut are far less intimate. Dressed in his white lab coat, Bernson performs a neurological exam. In another, he rattles off a long list of neurological disorders.
“I had a tough time keeping all that straight,” he laughed. “I don’t know how people memorize entire movie scripts, but then again not everyone has to play a neurosurgeon.”
For anyone familiar with Bernson’s work in Louisville television, it’s exciting to see him make the bigger-than-life jump onto the movie theater screen - and perhaps a bit ironic.
The idea of a TV anchorman switching gears in his 70s and embracing the challenges of acting in major films might have been a topic for one of Bernson’s own television features.
Similar to the late Charles Kuralt’s “On the Road” segments on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, Bernson’s features were a delightful break in an otherwise serious newscast.
Known as “Bernson’s Corner,” his stories shined the limelight on regular people who at first glance may have seemed like oddballs, outcasts or regular folk doing something out of the ordinary.
In one segment, Bernson featured a man who took the art of tossing a toilet plunger to extremes. In another, we were introduced to a guy could audibly mimic nearly any type of diesel engine, from a lawnmower to a semitruck.
Whatever the topic, the beauty of Bernson’s storytelling was how he exposed the curious without poking fun. His endearing stories about peculiar people remain a testament to his observational skills and his management of words.
You might guess that four dozen years telling remarkable stories in front of the camera would be Bernson’s legacy, but you’d be wrong.
“More people stop me and say they remember me reporting from the Second Street Bridge during Thunder Over Louisville than all my years of news anchoring or feature reporting or anything else that I’ve done,” said Bernson.
What started as a one-time schtick with Bernson reporting from the bridge where tons of fireworks are launched during the finale of the Kentucky Derby Festival’s Thunder Over Louisville extravaganza became a recurring “stunt” that viewers looked forward to each year.
Like the year the camera broke away from the last of the fireworks only to find Bernson emerging from a port-a-potty - as if he’d missed the entire show. Another time there appeared to be nothing left of Bernson but a mound of smoldering clothing.
The “bit” became an annual challenge, and Bernson did not disappoint. His most elaborate, and without a doubt most memorable, Second Street Bridge segment required a road trip to St. Louis.
“We recorded a segment under the St. Louis Arch which made it look like the fireworks had blown me there all the way from Louisville,” he said.
Bernson laid on the lawn under the arch and asked some visitors in the park to help pull it off the prank.
“They ran over to me lying there and said, ’Hey man you just fell out of the sky what happened?’ to which I replied, ’I’m not sure. The last thing I remember, I was in Louisville watching Thunder Over Louisville on the Second Street Bridge. I must have gotten blown all the way to the St. Louis Arch.’”
Although Bernson hasn’t been tasked with designing hilarious video segments for Thunder Over Louisville coverage for many years, he’s never stopped creating.
Today, as he scoots around town from one job to the next, Bernson makes it clear to everyone he passes exactly what he finds important. Attached to the rear bumper of his burgundy Toyota Avalon, onlookers will notice his license plate with W-O-R-D-S proudly displayed.
Most days, when he’s not hustling off to a movie set or a radio studio, he’s taking a creaky elevator down to the basement floor of the American Printing House for the Blind, 1839 Frankfort Ave.
“It is the oldest and largest producer of materials for people with visual impairment,” Bernson said.
Since the 1970s, he’s visited the Talking Book Studio a few times a week. Here he steps into a small square audio booth the size of a clothes closet, pulls his chair close to an old desk covered with a terry cloth towel for sound muffling and begins reading whatever book he’s been assigned.
“I have probably read 700 books. I don’t get to pick what I read, it’s assigned by The Library of Congress, who runs this program,” said Bernson. “Today I am reading ’The China Syndrome’ by Karl Taro Greenfeld. It’s about the SARS outbreak. Scary stuff.”
Reading in two-hour shifts, Bernson says narrating audiobooks is a satisfying profession but far more challenging than simply reading a book aloud.
“My idea is to be a pane of glass, which is harder than it sounds,” he said. “When people are finished listening to the book, I want them to have gotten the book and not me, so I would say I try to channel the author of each book.”
A 5-year-old Barry Bernson could never have known that reading the daily announcements over the P.A. system at summer camp would lead to a career behind a microphone.
And how could he have guessed when he was 7 years old that snooping around his New Jersey neighborhood and pounding out the news of the week on a typewriter for his own pint-sized community newspaper would launch a life-long love of words?
Every few years, Bernson reinvents himself or stretches himself, but he never moves too far from the microphone and words.
“I was always going to be in newspapers. I never planned to be in radio but I took a chance, same with television. I never thought I’d be in that - I just go where the doors open,” he said. “I always think you should be open to anything, as long as it’s legal and it doesn’t hurt anybody, you should take an opportunity.”
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