Joe Franklin vists LaGCC

The one and only Joe Franklin visited La Guardia Community College on October 15th and gave a speech about his career in the media in the Poolside Café. A representative of Tallen Productions first spoke about the agency of management and productions and you have to have a good and professional personality and look about you to get cast for a part in any commercial. To become cast, you basically have to sell yourself. The representative of the agency told a story of when he meet with Frank Sinatra and Sinatra told him how much he wanted to be on Joe’s show and, low and behold, he appeared on the show four times.
Franklin has had many of today’s stars on his show when they were just starting out in their careers. In fact, Julia Roberts started out as his secretary and look at her today. He spoke about his career in television and radio broadcasting. I believe he still has a radio show called “Memory Lane” in which he broadcasts through Bloomberg radio. He had The Joe Franklin Show on TV for 43 years and interviewed people like Tom Cruise, Frank Sinatra, as I mentioned, Edward R. Murrow, Bruce Springstein when he was starting out, and many others far too long to list. He even interviewed five of our 40+ U.S. president, including Former President Nixon. But of course, when working in the media, there is the FCC to keep in mind and Franklin was the first to be fined for using obscenities in his show and was also censored for making certain comments on Camel brand cigarettes.
He listened to old radio shows as a kid and that was how he became interested in broadcast. He was born Joseph Fortgang, in Bronx, New York, but changed it to Joe Franklin because he had gotten used to be called Franklin since he graduated from Ben Franklin high school and he attended Columbia University of Media. One thing he said he never did while his show was on the air was he never rehearsed like today’s talk show hosts do. He also feels that actors these days all do the same thing it gets old, but he does have his favorites. He does stand-up, as well, and was always a fan of the late, great George Carlin.
Franklin is also a write and has many published books including Marilyn Monroe Story by Joe Franklin, and Classics of the Silent Screen, simply because he is a fan of silent films. A total of 45,000 copies of his books were sold. He has no regrets in his work and advises us that we are in the right place at the right time and only go into that field if we are “100% interested and devoted”.