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Award-winning author Gabriel Mac reads essays from his newsletter, The Faggot-Witch Whenever. Sign up, donate, and engage at fwwhenever.com.
Hello. I'm excited to be sitting down because I haven't read this story, like, at all in a really, really long time and it's one of my very favorites. And also because I just started drinking coffee like two months ago and I had some this morning and that might be why I'm kind of sweaty. But mostly I think it's that I'm excited. Seth and I Seth my work husband he was talking about, dubbing the other day because I was saying I was watching Love is Blind Poland because as everyone who knows me knows I am always watching all of the Love is Blinds for some reason.
Gabriel Mac:I think I like that those people are making bad marriage decisions because I have done that too. So I was watching it dubbed so that I didn't have to actually pay attention and like read because it's not good enough to devote my entire attention to and also I was playing Doctor. Mario on like my handheld switch at the same time. And Seth was talking about how he refuses to watch real content in dubbed and I generally do too EXCEPT then last night I started watching The Chestnut Man, which is a Danish murder show, and the Danes make the best creepiest murder shows. Like, The Killing was a Danish murder show that was, you know, reinvented as an American version.
Gabriel Mac:And I started watching it in Danish, I assume is what they were speaking in when I started it, but then I just like got tired of reading. And so I turned it on and the people who did the dubbing I turned on the dubbing and the people who did the dubbing were so good. It wasn't like bad dubbing. It was like actually good dubbing. And that reminded me of this piece that I did in France twelve years ago because I'm old about the French dubbing industry.
Gabriel Mac:And there's more about, like, why I would have done that and was doing that, like, within the story. And so I don't think I need to say anything about that now. But I loved this story. I liked reporting it. I liked doing it when, like, actually writing it.
Gabriel Mac:I liked the way that it turned out. I just I just really, really love the story. And it was for Matter, r I p matter, which was, like a magazine platform that Medium tried to launch and was throwing a bunch of money at for a while. Hence, them paying for me to go to France and do this story and then pay my fees, which were, you know, pretty high. But the thing about writing for them was that either they made a post about it on Facebook that like somehow went viral and then everyone saw it or like nine people saw it.
Gabriel Mac:So I don't think very many people read it and like I said, I haven't read it in a really long time and I love it so much and it's about how dubbing works and how Netflix was starting to encroach upon the art of that industry in the in Europe where it is like a real art, whereas like here nobody watches things that are dubbed and so or didn't used to anyway, and so anytime something was dubbed it was like poorly. Anyway, this is what it takes to be the French Jennifer Lawrence. That's what they titled it. I never was allowed to title anything so it wasn't up to me but I'm gonna read it in case anybody wants to listen to it because there's no audio version of it in this world. Okay.
Gabriel Mac:The day I'm interviewing French Jennifer Lawrence, she is having a simpler day than actual Jennifer Lawrence. Today, actual Jennifer Lawrence has woken up to another day of people loudly publicly debating whether they should look at stolen naked pictures of her that have been made available on the internet. French Jennifer Lawrence, on the other hand, woke up, put on a sweater, and came to work at Dubbing Brothers, where she assumes the French speaking voice of almost every J Law role that comes through France's large and spectacularly meticulous dubbing industry. Her name is Kelly Moreau. No one in France could pick her out of a lineup, and at the moment, I'm the only journalist on Earth who cares what she's doing, which is consuming a pastry tart roughly equal in size to her face.
Gabriel Mac:Today, she's dubbing scenes with French Daniel Radcliffe, nay, Kellyanne Blanc, a kid with a patchy beard and jeans and an unmemorable t shirt who's been voicing Harry Potter since The Sorcerer's Stone. With their talented, consistent representation of English speaking stars, Moreau and Blanc are crucial to bringing Hollywood films to Francophone audiences. If we replaced him, one of France's most legendary dubbing director says, gesturing in Blanc's direction, it would be a big scandal. A big scandal. In France, birthplace of cinema, bastion of taste and art and cultural superiority, 40% of the programming on TV is American films and shows.
Gabriel Mac:As a result, the country was recently a target for Netflix, which furthered its plot for global domination by launching there in September. Again, this story is from 2012. Meanwhile, in French movie theaters, the French being the fifth highest consumers of cinema in the world, 50% of tickets are for features made in The US, and nearly all of it gets dubbed. Many of the hottest releases come through Dubbing Brothers. Its offices located on an industrial edge of Paris where traffic is lighter and the buildings take on a postmodern charmlessness are secured with solid iron gates.
Gabriel Mac:Behind them, the company courtyard contains many, many, many employees smoking cigarettes. Inside, a long hallway is dotted with doors to numbered rooms. A computerized schedule hangs over the receptionist's head, giving the locations for the day's dozen or so projects: The Drop, starring Tom Hardy, Daniel Radcliffe's new film, Horns, an episode from the most recent season of Revenge, a season nine episode of Criminal Minds. Behind those numbered doors, what happens is not your father's Bruce Lee movie dubbing. This, as long as the voice over actors and writers, translators, transcribers, sound engineers, directors, and everyone else involved in this process are given the time and money to make it, is art.
Gabriel Mac:You're projecting out a director hollers in one of this morning's recording sessions. Each studio inside Dubbing Brothers is large and dark with a giant cinema screen but no chairs. It's like a movie theater with the seats taken out. Toward the back, an engineer sits behind a long soundboard. Next to him stands a director, and in front of them, a waist high bar.
Gabriel Mac:In this particular studio, there's an actor leaning against it. He has some microphones in front of him. A moment ago, when everyone was ready, the engineer pushed a button, a scene played with no sound, and the actor started yelling his lines. At the drop of a hat, started yelling so hard that the bar was shaking. But then the director stopped him because he was projecting out.
Gabriel Mac:Like a French person, the director explains further. Americans contain their energy even when it's a lot. It's concentrated internally. The actor is nodding like, yeah, of course. Your energy is good, the director says, retreating behind the soundboard again, but make it more American.
Gabriel Mac:The director already stopped him once before because there needed to be more emphasis on the word hate in the sentence he's yelling. On the next take, he stopped again because he messes up his lines. He throws his head back, laughing, frustrated. This is how they do it, just seconds of footage at a time. Everyone in the room watches a few lines of English dialogue with a rolling French script at the bottom of it.
Gabriel Mac:The engineer presses stop. For movies, the actors have generally never seen the scene before, and sometimes, they can't even see it now. Hollywood is terrified of films getting leaked on the internet, so when dubbing brothers received each Lord of the Rings movie, the studio had blacked out the entire screen except for little boxes around the actors mouths, and even those closed when the actors weren't talking. So everyone watches or doesn't watch the scene maybe twice. The engineer presses rewind and it's time to record the voice over.
Gabriel Mac:The scene plays again without sound and the actor recites the translated script. The director gives notes. They go back and do it again. The French language French language script rolling along the bottom comes courtesy of custom built proprietary software that displays as well as the words symbols that denote the perfect timing of voice related actions in the movie. There's a symbol to audibly inhale, a symbol to exhale, a symbol for kissing noises which the actors must make with their mouths on their hands.
Gabriel Mac:They record, then play back what they've just done. Once in French, once again with the French and English laid over each other, perhaps a couple more times each way as needed by the director to watch and listen for necessary adjustments. His toe needs to go down to be more definitive. Okay, the actor says. He says he'll put it more in his belly.
Gabriel Mac:Blow up inside, the director says, like an American. When they do it again, the actor is yelling so loud but containing so much that his body is visibly vibrating. But then it's difficult for him to maintain that intensity all the way to the end of a sentence. The script software also has a typeset tracking function that the writers can use to indicate if the actor needs to talk fast and it seems like he always does. The term bachelor party, for instance, is just two words in English, but in French, it's an entire expression that translates to a funeral for a young boy's life.
Gabriel Mac:And the actor of today's scene cannot get through all the words in the heavily tracked, smooshed together script with all the American rage he's not projecting but containing without running out of breath and fervor. They stop to talk about alternative phrasing. They cut three words from the script. They do it again. They do it again.
Gabriel Mac:Well, the director says, and after ten minutes, they've got themselves about five sentences of top quality dubbing. Danielle Pare, the director who called Blanc indispensable, invites me into her office which has framed movie posters all over the walls. She did seven. She did Reservoir Dogs, Austin Powers, The Hunger Games, The Expendables, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Wolf of Wall Street. She was a theater director and film editor first many decades ago, but she loves dubbing and loves when it's done well.
Gabriel Mac:She is 76 years old, and she could retire but won't. She is tiny, wearing a blue patterned dress and her hair long and dyed black, and she works with the best voice over talent France has to offer. She is an actress, Piraeus says of Moreau, the French Jennifer Lawrence. Because this is art, French dubbing cultivates personae. Every time Tom Cruise opens his mouth, the same voice should come out so that the audience can experience the same sense of intimacy and attachment that the original language audience does with the real Tom Cruise.
Gabriel Mac:Sometimes changes do happen. A decade or so ago, French Tom Cruise was replaced because he smoked too much and his voice was getting too smoky, but French audiences noticed the switch and were not pleased. Kelly Moreau's breakout dubbing role was as Rachel in Glee. That got her the chance to audition for the role of Katniss in The Hunger Games, which landed her in every voice over actor's dream position the designated voice of a huge American star. If all goes well for Moreau, a 28 year old mom, she will have steady work for as long as Jennifer Lawrence does.
Gabriel Mac:Moreau is so in demand that she works every day. She does multiple actresses, lead roles on TV shows, the French audiobooks of The Hunger Games, parts in video games, cartoons, plus she's still Rachel in Glee and plays Sansa in Game of Thrones. Pare points to the quality of Moreau's voice. It has just the right touch of raspy to it, and of course, her talent. When she was younger, Moreau did on screen work, including a good part on a French TV show.
Gabriel Mac:But nine years ago, she had a kid and then she didn't have time for what the entertainment industry demanded: agents, casting calls, publicity, hair and makeup and wardrobe. Now, when French media call for interviews after each big J Law film is released, Moreau declines. I wouldn't know what to say, she says, but the lack of exposure has no negative impact on her career. She makes good money, she has a private life, she has split ends, and that's fine. Let's face it, it's a mean, exploitative, fickle, and resentful world out there in the spotlight, and not everyone has the time or the looks or the stomach for that.
Gabriel Mac:Le Dublage is Moreau's refuge. For other actors too, it provides opportunities in their medium that might not otherwise be available or palatable to them. My skin was never right, Natalie Carcenti, the French January Jones, tells me at her apartment, a 3rd Floor walk up in Paris's best gayborhood, Le Marais, she is short and not wave thin and lovely, mid-40s with shoulder length brown hair and an enviable olive kiss to her skin tone. Or enviable to me, I guess. After graduating from one of France's top drama schools, Carcenti was told in auditions that she was too dark to look properly French, but that she wasn't dark enough to play an Arab.
Gabriel Mac:My physical characteristics closed doors for me, she says sitting at her kitchen table, even if I had the talent to do it. It does seem that her talent was not the issue. She is not just January Jones she has also been French Keira Knightley, French Eva Mendes, and French Zoe Saldana. I loved it, Carcenti says of the first time she tried dubbing. I didn't have to take care of the color of my skin anymore.
Gabriel Mac:I could just work. It's better what I do than being a star as a woman and as a mom. Womanhood and motherhood quickly became a recurring theme in my interviews with dubbers. Danielle Paret, the septuagenarian director, also said that pregnancy got her into dubbing. After she took a break to have a baby, she discovered she couldn't get back into the film editing she'd worked in before.
Gabriel Mac:And that baby, now a 50 year old, followed a similar path too. Like her mother, Deborah Parray started in theater. Like her mother, she took a break to have a baby of her own. Now tall and statuesque as her mother is petite, with a low cut tank top and turquoise glasses and big brown eyes, she works in dubbing entirely behind the scenes. She dubs the voices of Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek, Holly Hunter, and Kate Blanchett.
Gabriel Mac:Is it Blanchett or Blanchett? Does anybody know? But she also writes those scrolling French scripts that the other dubbers read as they act out a part. It's partly because she enjoys writing, but also because these days she has to for financial stability. Because being invisible isn't enough to hide a voice actor from all the savageries of the entertainment industry.
Gabriel Mac:When you're an actress when you pass 40, you don't have a lot of jobs, she explains. There are plenty of old guys in movies. Cops, the bad guy, the hero, cops, cops, cops, she says. But women, you have the heroine plus maybe the mom and a hooker. I'm lucky I work a lot.
Gabriel Mac:I still work because my voice can pass for 35. DuBlage can't protect actors from sexism, not entirely, nor can it totally insulate them from racism. The industry allowed Carcenti, who is white, to get around white supremacist casting on screen, but I discover while talking to Pare that black stars roles often go to white voice actors Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Forrest Whitaker, including in the Butler. When I ask him if he thinks this is an injustice, Thierry de Rose says I'm having a typically American reaction, which is to say he thinks I'm having an oversensitive, overly politically correct overreaction. What's important is the energy of the voice, he says.
Gabriel Mac:The vibration, the quality of the actor. Des Rose is French Samuel L. Jackson. I admit that I am surprised and even relieved to see that he's Black when we meet at a crowded cafe in Montmartre. In 1994, he voiced Samuel L.
Gabriel Mac:Jackson's character in Pulp Fiction. Then in 2002, when Phone Booth came out, the French representative from twentieth Century Fox, who was Black, decided it was time to assign a Black actor to voice Forrest Whitaker, who'd been done by the same white guy since Good Morning Vietnam. There are a lot of whites doing blacks and he wanted to change that, DeRose said. So he did the casting. DeRose, a slim, handsome fellow who had been on a hit French TV show since 1999, got the part.
Gabriel Mac:After that, he became the designated voice of Jackson Sam as he calls him. He is also Wesley Snipes among plenty of others. In ER, I was Doctor. Benton, he says. I've never seen ER, I said.
Gabriel Mac:It's the black guy. I also do The Blacklist, the character of Harold Cooper. Which one is that? I ask. It's the black guy, he says.
Gabriel Mac:He says that he also voiced, quote, the black guy on Fringe. This morning, he says, he was in the studio dubbing a character for FX's Louis. Was it the black guy? I ask. Yeah.
Gabriel Mac:The white Forest Whitaker still gets most of the Forest Whitaker roles though. And Laura Fishburne, Kerry Washington, Oprah, they're often voiced by white actors. Does DeRose ever dub white guys? No, he says. I don't know why.
Gabriel Mac:He still doesn't care. For him, it's about the craft. He is an actor first, he says, and he's been dubbing for twenty years now. It's not a question of money. You make way more on screen.
Gabriel Mac:It is, he says, about pleasure. This past July, again in 2012, then French minister for the economy Arnaud Montebourg gave a speech about economic recovery. We have asked French audio visual and digital operators to unite, he said in front of the assembled ministers and parliamentarians, in order to provide alternatives to the Anglo Saxon offensive in culture and cinema. Sorry, I think that's so funny. True though.
Gabriel Mac:40% of French television content is American, yeah, with your CSIs and your Simpsons. Fun fact: French Homer Simpson and French Marge Simpson are a couple in real life and Friends and 24, but without state intervention, that number might actually be higher. 40% is the maximum allowed by law. In movie theaters where there is no such limit, France and Hollywood wage a constant war for supremacy. It's clear that France's gifted dubbers are good for Hollywood as French audiences can earn movies hundreds of millions of extra dollars, and the industry is pretty good to them.
Gabriel Mac:Kelly Anne Blanc, the French Daniel Radcliffe, makes a living working as many as 20 but as few as five days a month using his free time to pursue university degrees for fun. It's harder to say whether the flood of American films they have helped bring to the French speaking world is good for France I would argue no. The country tried in the 90s to make the relationship with American cinema more of an exchange than an onslaught. In 1993, French filmmakers thought they found their ticket to getting into wide American release with France's number one film that yearever, The Visitors. In it, Jean Reno stars as a twelfth century knight who accidentally time travels to modernity where many toilet related misunderstandings and other anachronistic jokes are waiting for him.
Gabriel Mac:The biggest comedy hit in French history is about to conquer America, the English poster read in all caps. Mel Brooks was hired to supervise the dubbing. But it didn't work, says Pascal Rogard, director of the I'm not gonna stretch my French this far. The translation is Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers, S A C D are the, initials, essentially the French equivalent of the Writers and Directors Guild of America. The dub version wasn't even released Mel Brooks' Best Efforts Be Damned and a subtitled version did Paltry Sails.
Gabriel Mac:If Americans want to watch a French movie in English, Rogard explains in his office in the SACD's decidedly regal digs. It was founded in 1777 by famed playwright and revolutionary war arms dealer Pierre de Beaumarche. They remake it. Ever heard of a little film called True Lies or The Mirror Has Two Faces, Three Men and a Baby, The Birdcage, The Tourist, 12 Monkeys, Point of No Return, The Toy, Mixed Nuts, The Man with One Red Shoe, The Man Who Loved Women? So the French studio that made The Visitors tried to beat Hollywood at its own game, remaking its own movie into English in The United States starring Jean Reno and Christina Applegate.
Gabriel Mac:It made $16,000,000 at The US box office to the subtitled version's $650,000. Then it was dubbed back into French and sold as a sequel to French audiences. In 1998, French films market share in its own country dropped to 27%. It had trailed The US as the world's biggest movie exporter for generations, but the late nineties nadir was alarming. French filmmakers rallied, and slowly, things have improved.
Gabriel Mac:So far in 2014, they're running a close race. French film has earned 46.3% of its domestic box office versus The US's 45.7%. But it'll be a miracle if they retain that lead by the time The Hunger Games, Mockingjay, and Gone Girl, and the other end of the year blockbusters have bulldozed their way through town. The first Woody Allen movie was very French, Deborah Pare tells me when we talk in her apartment. It's in a nice tree lined neighborhood, described to me by one French person as, quote, one everyone wants to get in MONOPOLY.
Gabriel Mac:But now, she says, people in France associate films, the very idea of films, with America. And like in America, it's not the artistic American films that sell big. Even among French films, the blockbusters today are silly comedies. French people aren't nerds, Deborah Pare says when she senses my displeasure that French moviegoers aren't more discriminating than we are. As an American, it is my duty to think of the French, subjects of endless jokes, imitations, and envy in my culture, as weird and dramatic, sensual and snotty and magnificent, intensely full of joie de vivre but simultaneously carrying a collective darkness.
Gabriel Mac:Full disclosure, I'm married to a Frenchman who's done nothing in our years together to dispel any of these assumptions. That's why we love or hate and are obsessed with them. That's why we're dying to know how they raise their bebeys and don't get fat. Those are book titles, just in case you don't get the reference because it was a long time ago. They are so different, the French.
Gabriel Mac:In America, in 2011, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane was criticized for making a nineeleven joke too soon after the attacks ten years later. But on 09/12/2001, France's version of The Daily Show featured a mock newspaper cover with a picture of the World Trade Center on fire and the headline, Allah one, Jesus zero. But twenty eleven's Untouchables, which in 2012 became the highest grossing French movie of all time, is a decidedly toothless dramedy. Though it is about disability and class and race and convicts and even, at one point, sex workers. It's slick and schlocky.
Gabriel Mac:It pushes no boundaries, which seems downright unfrench. French people love movies like The Expendables, Pere says. This is not her opinion, but a quantifiable fact. She gets royalty checks on the profits from the film she translates, and you better believe The Expendables brought in some fat ones. When I was young, the economy was good, so we went to the movies to reflect, she explains.
Gabriel Mac:Now life is hard, so you go to the movies to have fun and relax. Life sucks. That is a sentiment that transcends any borders. Who knows what would have happened if American films hadn't come here? She shrugs.
Gabriel Mac:She isn't losing any sleep over it. The American film takeover was inevitable and it is done. Her job is just to do the best dubbing possible. None of the dubbers I ask about Americans film influence American films influence you knew what I meant on French culture seem to care about it in general, nor specifically about their role as accomplices. Even Rogar, director of SACD, the man whose job is to protect French film, thinks the diversity American imports bring should be celebrated.
Gabriel Mac:His current concern is a different, newer incursion on the country's entertainment industry, the same Anglo Saxon enemy that spurred former minister Montebour's comments in his speech Netflix. It wasn't easy for America's largest video streaming service to break into France. Not because Netflix wasn't ready, but because the French government resisted it like the storming of the Bastille. When I arrived in France, the headlines about the impending rollout said it all. Netflix.
Gabriel Mac:The France resists This is how slow it takes me. I wrote it in French, and I'm translating it for you in real time. Netflix. France resists. The American Giant.
Gabriel Mac:There, I did it. I only had to be married to a French guy for five years to do that. In France, the special consideration artistic goods receive in regulation and trade is known as the cultural exception. French culture is exceptionally important to protect. Decades ago, it was SACD that helped lobby for the laws that protect French films.
Gabriel Mac:There are taxes on cinema, television, and telecommunications profits that go back into subsidizing their film industry money that keeps French film production viable. There are the regulations about how much content that airs on cable and is offered on demand must be French and how long providers have to wait after films theatre releases to start showing them. But because Netflix Europe is headquartered in The Netherlands, sort of the French equivalent of keeping your business accounts in the Virgin Islands, Netflix is going to skate on those obligations until the European Union can come together to write and pass new laws. It could take years. Meanwhile, before Netflix had even launched, its CEO declared the company's goal was to have a third of the households in France as subscribers within the decade, maybe half that long.
Gabriel Mac:It's not fair, says Rogard. You don't have to protect yourselves because nobody is big enough to compete, he complains of the American film industry. You protect your car industry. You have rules about car imports. And he points out The United States has a lot of private nonprofit organizations that support the arts.
Gabriel Mac:But now French people will have unlimited access to American content that will skirt regulations that all other content shown in France, no matter where it's made, is subject to. Maybe he's right. It's not fair, as French filmmakers and local video on demand services are saying. Either way, and unfortunately for those in the dubbing studios, there's a different battle they need to prepare for. Didier Brightboard.
Gabriel Mac:I am never going to out loud read something with this much French in it again. Bright Brightboard. That seems right. Brightbird. Mhmm.
Gabriel Mac:A 77 year old dubbing director suggests that the advent of Netflix could mean it's downhill from here for Le Dublage. It will change the techniques, he speculates. It will affect the quality. It won't be as good as before. Brightbird has been- can't see a French name like that!
Gabriel Mac:Brightbird has overseen the dubbing of sixteen forty eight movies plus several TV series since 1959. He's been in the industry from its nascency. He dubbed the Night of the Living Dead' the industry was already getting more digital faster, he says. Thanks to the internet, international filmmakers and dubbers don't have to send each other physical materials in the mail anymore. Thanks to computers, the dubbing process has become increasingly advanced, but at the same time, these advances put more pressures on those doing the dubbing.
Gabriel Mac:The more digital it gets, Brightboard says, the faster Hollywood makes you go. And faster is a problem because the entire process, not just the voice acting itself, is absurd and obsessive and amazing. Pere the Younger, who scripts big releases from The Hunger Games to The 100 Foot Journey, walks me through it in her home office. She explains how she goes through the English script and creates, for every sentence, a sentence that is nearly identical in meaning but also as similar as possible in length. This alone is a gargantuan task with the way French languidly weaves its way around getting an idea across.
Gabriel Mac:But in addition, and to make the dub look as realistic as possible, she must also identify every instance of a character uttering a word with an M, P or B in it in English and find a word in French with the same consonant, and the replacement word has to fit into that sentence in exactly the same spot as where the American actor's mouth makes the M, P or B face. She must also figure out what to put in the place of people's first names, which she tells me Americans incessantly address each other by in movies and even more in TV shows, but which never happens and would sound utterly bizarre in French. She also has to find words without adding to or changing the meaning of the sentence to fill the space created by all the garbage words Americans are always using. And and ah and you know and I mean When French people open their mouths to talk, they make sentences with actual words and have but one filler. It's used sparingly.
Gabriel Mac:It cannot be put in place of every American garbage word because characters would sound brain dead. Paret also has to attend to the fact that English words create more expansive, open mouth movements Why and that? While French makes a tighter, faster rhythm in the face. Don't even get her started on the Chinese films she occasionally translates. It makes her rough workdays the way Chinese mouths are always open.
Gabriel Mac:If there's a TV or a radio on in the background of the scene, she has to translate that dialogue too. And if it's JFK or the Black Panthers talking, she better be very careful to be accurate down to every nuance. If there's content in the film about a topic she doesn't know much about for kill the messenger, I have to do a lot of things about drugs, she says, and I don't use crack at all, so I have to learn how to make crack. She does extensive research to get a handle on the ideas and lingo she has to convert. She has to capture the nuance of words like lingo.
Gabriel Mac:She has to capture the spirit of English idioms that would make no sense in French, not that they make sense in English, quote, going cold turkey. British English is even worse because the comedy so often relies on wordplay, which is practically impossible to translate. She takes the periods out of English sentences and strings them all together with commas because while in English there are lots of natural highs and lows in the tone, the French will only keep that high energy animation up in a run on. And when she's done, she watches each line over and over and over and then reads what she wrote for it over and over and over out loud seeing how everything matches up, tweaking and tweaking, going back and watching the flow of a few sentences together or a whole scene and tweaking some more. Imagine doing that again and again, then trying to get it done faster and faster to cope with the influx of material.
Gabriel Mac:Wait, hold on, I have to pause. That last paragraph, BTW, the last long paragraph explaining what she does, that's one of my favorite paragraphs I ever wrote. I love it so much. The world is so weird. Okay, like I was saying, imagine doing that again and again, then trying to get it done faster and faster to cope with the influx of material brought by growing streaming services.
Gabriel Mac:It's our strategy, says Doris Evers, head of communications for Netflix in Europe, to offer more and more titles exclusively of brand new, predominantly American TV series. Penny Dreadful, Fargo, From Dusk till Dawn. New content is being dubbed, he says, content we're offering that wasn't available in French and it's going to happen more. Even when Pere's work is done, it's all checked. Twenty years ago, you wrote a script and no one checked it, she says.
Gabriel Mac:You as the writer were the first and last word on the translation. If you wanted to inject a little French edge into a line, that was your prerogative, and it happened. A lot. There's a scene in Dirty Dancing, which French children of the eighties and nineties know as least as by heart as their American counterparts, where the teenage heroine, Baby, is being scolded by her father after sneaking out for a mambo performance. And take that stuff off your face, he says, looking disdainfully at her makeup, before your mother sees you.
Gabriel Mac:In the French version that children grew up with, he says, and take that disgusting makeup off your face. You look like a whore. These days though, Hollywood studios have offices and representatives in France managing this big business and they check everything. Everything. They force the writers to tone down the language rather than turn it up.
Gabriel Mac:You can say fuck and show nipples on French television, but American distributors make parade change, quote, you're a dick to, quote, you're an idiot in a show. During Guardians of the Galaxy's dubbing, Carcenti told me there was much hand wringing on the part of Disney representatives over whether to let the phrase sticks up their butts be translated into sticks up their asses. Anyway, Pare generally has a maximum of two weeks to do all this these days. A week and a half sometimes. She used to get a month.
Gabriel Mac:Writers like her might get even less soon. I'm sure by now they do. Her promise is to bring the episodes of Better Call Saul as quickly after US broadcast as we can, Netflix's Evers says. Can it be offered within a day or two or will it take a week? He asked.
Gabriel Mac:Everything evolves, Brightboard says, matter of factly, when we talk about fast tracked production. We have to evolve with it. When he started working in film, there were analog optical soundtracks I don't even know what that means and then magnetic ones. But he, for one, is not going to participate in the revolution of ultra quick dubbing. My career is done, he says.
Gabriel Mac:He is semi retired, taking jobs when American filmmakers are prepared to spend a little more time and money hiring him to do it his way. He does a lot of work for HBO. Apart from his personal artisanal business, there are good companies and less good among France's dozens of dubbing studios, he says. That won't change. But the crappy ones get crappier all the time.
Gabriel Mac:Even Dubbing Brothers, which is among the few highly reputable ones, is starting to slide in Brightboard's opinion. They're honest people, he says, but when you want to make quantity, you lose something. They're very competent when it comes to movies, but there's less quality for TV shows because they take so many and turn them over at ever increased speeds. In Brightboard's estimation, we may have already surpassed peak dubbing. It's been at least five years that we started to lose quality, he says.
Gabriel Mac:That's the internet. Like everyone else I talk to, one of France's most famous voice over actors doesn't have many concerns beyond the quality of his own performance. I meet Alain Dorval at an uncrowded cafe in an upscale part of Paris. Dorval is a huge deal. He is French Sylvester Stallone.
Gabriel Mac:It's a role that has made him an icon. The Rocky films are rerun on French television, possibly even more than they are in America, and Dorval Stallone is marvelous. A deep voiced chain smoker, duh, he makes Sly sound magnetic and husky throated and strong. But Stallone is also significant as the unofficial representative of Americanness in French culture. On France's Daily Show the nightly satire program, a Stallone puppet appears regularly as the head of the US Armed Forces or as the head of the CIA or recently, the head of the American Medical Military Response to Ebola.
Gabriel Mac:Whatever the Stallone puppet's title du jour, the guy voicing the puppet does an impression of Dorval's impression of Stallone, who, as it happens, speaks like no Americans. I had been warned by sources I won't name that I might find Dorval too French. Like, offensively French. Possibly douchey. More precisely, I was told this with the French expression for douchey which is he farts higher than his own ass.
Gabriel Mac:But the 68 year old is warm and friendly if given to philosophizing. When I ask him what he does with his free time, he says, watch my trees grow. When I ask him if he works much, he replies, what for? He started in his career and his true love remains theater. Nope.
Gabriel Mac:He started his career in and his true love remains theater. But even he shrugs when I ask him if he thinks he had a big impact on French culture the way he brought this iconic American figure alive in it with such verve. I don't know, he says, shrugging, shrugging, brushing it off with his whole head and shoulders. He says he thinks the American influx of film probably helped increase the popularity of film in general in France and that there are some types of movies the French are lousy at, westerns mainly, and others that the Americans are lousy at. Anything in the style of a 1938 drama called Hotel du Nord.
Gabriel Mac:But he doesn't really think about such things. I just hope I did a good job, he says. Wow! A French friend will exclaim later when I tell him I met Stallone's voice and then ask, surely picturing Sylvester Stallone as we all picture him, by which I mean topless, is he fit? No.
Gabriel Mac:He isn't. Kelly Moreau said the same thing of French Bradley Cooper, with whom she obviously is the French J Law works regularly, when I asked her if he was hot. He's okay, she responded after a long hesitation. Not bad. She admitted that it was disconcerting to see him after watching his voice come out of Bradley Cooper's beautiful man mouth all the time.
Gabriel Mac:But no, that's not his problem either. Voice over actors have less money, less problems. Dorval has met Stallone twice and adores and respects him, but finds his life as French Stallone easier than being Stallone Stallone. He says he considers himself lucky. Okay you guys, I have to tell you my French ex husband texted me sometime in the fall I think?
Gabriel Mac:Pretty recently though to tell me that Alain Dorval, died. RIP French icon. Eleven days after I leave France, more stolen nude photographs of Jennifer Lawrence are released online. Nine days after that, a ridiculous and perhaps unprecedented third round of illegal, privacy annihilating, personhood violating pictures of her come out. Former reality TV star Clay Aiken, who is not really a star anymore, tells the Washington Post that she got what she deserved.
Gabriel Mac:Back home reading the news, I wonder if Kelly Moreau knows what's happening to the woman she voices. She told me that she's not much into the internet. I know Dorval doesn't know he told me that his isn't a digital life and he hasn't even read the things online about himself, though he understands there's some there. Maybe computers are going to drag the doublage down. Maybe the industry will enter a period of decline like journalism and the music industry and everything else the internet ruined.
Gabriel Mac:But for now, or at least then, the best of it remains a high art. Or even okay, I will say now, like I said, these Danes When I asked Dorval if he'd ever retire, he said that if Stallone continues to make movies, he'll dub him until death if it's still fun. He'll go on as long as he can, drinking his coffee peacefully, watching his trees grow, beloved by his countrymen, but not too beloved by his countrymen. If I get hit by a bus, he told me at our sidewalk cafe table, and Stallone still needs a French voice, they'll find someone else. You guys, this is where, like, if I had some sort of pithy podcast song, it would be like, like, the little theme song would come in.
Gabriel Mac:That's the end of that story. Thanks for going on that weird ass ride with me in lieu of any pithy theme songs. Love you. Bye.