Rogelio Hern�ndez. What a guy.
People love him and it's not hard to see why. He's a man with no end of witty one-liners. He's a man for all people. He's the voice of the nation. This man, this man is Paul Newman, Michael Caine, Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson all rolled into one.
This man is also predictably chubby and middle-aged, but it doesn't matter because we never see his face. Such is the weird world of dubbing.
Dubbing first made it big under Franco, who soon realised how easy it was to make, well, anyone a mouthpiece for the state, given the separate nature of soundtrack and film reel. Popular movies containing stirring speeches could be censored with ease - considerably more ease than the poor souls who had to paint vests onto boxer�s naked torsos and mutate the stories of passionate lovers into ones of chaste siblings. No really, you could make it up but it wouldn't be as weird.
Though Franco's power eventually dripped away, that of the dubbing unions didn't and a highly selective breed of actors now specialises entirely in work that involves them replicating the tension of celluloid's most epic dramas by gazing at a small screen in the confines of a recording studio.
Growing up in Britain left me spoilt. Until recently, anything vaguely foreign sounding was instantly relegated to the homely arthouse fleapit, where dubbed tracks were neither affordable nor desirable. Anything dubbed was either a Ferrero Rocher advert, Swedish porn or Gerry Adams, and all seemed faintly ridiculous as a result. (All three combined, however, might just have been a winner.) As a fast reader, I've always liked subtitles and reading a good movie is a lot more exciting than watching a good book. This predilection for transcription was only increased when I had the misfortune of seeing Jurassic Park II: The Lost World. I watched it in eastern Malaysia, where two layers of subtitles - one in Chinese, one in Bhasa - fortunately obscured much of the screen. Even more fortunately, I couldn't understand either and I remained blissfully unaware of the awful film hidden underneath.
No danger of that happening here. Only three out of about 30 cinemas in the centre of Barca show films in VOSE (Versi�n Original, Subt�tulos Espa�ol). The vast majority, and all films on TV apart from those on from 2am - 6am, are doblaje.
Of course, this phenomenon isn't by any means unique to Spain, but with Latin and Central American audiences to satisfy as well (though they usually get different versions featuring actors who have that 'hey gringo' thing going on), dubbing into Spanish is the biggest voiceover-man industry of all.
Places behind the microphone are highly prized and fiercely guarded. The key, apparently, is to spot an up-and-coming actor and to grab dibs on their first film, no matter how poor it might be; for in order to maintain consistency, the same actor is used to vocalise their Hollywood counterparts throughout their career.
It certainly changes the experience. Arnie becomes someone you can take seriously. Children are voiced by actors 20 years their senior. Background noise depends on what sound effect CD they have to hand.
Also, because dubbing doesn't pay as well as movie stardom (the stunts are certainly a lot easier), you inevitably get a lot of doubling up and almost always without changing the tone of their voices in the slightest. Some of it, such as the above list of Rogelio's non-lipsynched stars, is unexpectedly broad. His wife is Meryl Streep and his daughter both Demi Moore and Melanie Griffith - not a combination you'd want to meet on a dark night. Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner and Willem Dafoe also come from the same unfortunate larynx. Never has a voice suffered so much since Chris Eubank tried Tom Waits at karoake.
The plots too tend to lose something in the switch. As Hugh Grant here speaks with a normal Spanish accent, and so does James Caan, the 'Forgeddaboudeet' scene in Mickey Blues Eyes becomes an entirely pointless and bizarre temporary speech defect. Having Al Pacino and Robert De Niro voiced by the same man was fine until Michael Mann made Heat, about which local cinemagoers complained that De Niro "didn't sound right" as the film company had used a different stand-in. The man in Hungary who dubs both Woody Allen and Eddie Murphy is reported to be "worried" by this turn of events.
There are also some strange anomalies. The Dancer Upstairs, for instance, was a slightly odd Spanish film directed - in English - by John Malkovitch, starring a host of Spanish actors who then in the main did their own dubbing (just as Chow-Yun Fat did in the English dub of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - even more impressive given that neither Mandarin nor English are his first languages).
Rumours have also been spread about a small booth at Albania TV where a solitary man sits reading translated scripts and playing all the parts himself with increasing boredom. Sir, we salute you. And if you can write Albanian phonetically and ever need the high-pitched voice of a true Yorkshireman, you know who to call. I always fancied myself as the James Earl Jones type, you know...
More on dubbing, for those that want to hear it, (as well as the links above) shamelessly stolen from here and here.
I saw a couple of films in Poland a while back. The volume of the actors' voices was kept down low, although still vaguely audible, and there was this one guy doing the dubbing for all the characters. The gravelly voice doing the female speaking parts was rather unsettling.
Posted by: Jez at April 19, 2003 12:07 PM