I want dubbing!

I don't know about everyone else, but I'm tired of reading subtitles. I want to be able to actually look at the picture when I watch a movie. And, if the movie's not worth watching that closely, I'd like to be able to thumb through a magazine or look something up on the internet and still listen to it.

I do understand the appeal of subtitles. You get to hear the actors' real voices, but it doesn't do that much good when you can't understand the language. Dubbing only bothers me when they have men with deep voices doing the dialog for tweenage boys, or adults speaking in falsetto to dub the voices of children. I saw an Italian movie where they dubbed an old man's dialog with a cartoon-like old man voice, although the actor may have sounded that way in Italian, too.

So much stuff is post-synched now anyway. I hear they dub most scenes in American movies that aren't filmed in a studio. I walked into the living room. My family was watching Mel Gibson's Man Without a Face. There was a scene with some kids on the beach talking. They didn't get the lip sych exact. And no one noticed but me.

I don't know if Americans would come to accept it. I hear that the Japanese insist on subtitles while Europeans are baffled by subtitling. MTV took a survey and found that people in Latin America preferred Beavis & Butt-head with subtitles.

A French actress appeared on the David Letterman show. She couldn't understand why her movie was subtitled. She pointed out that one of the actors in didn't speak French. His dialog was dubbed into French---why not just dub it into English. And you have Italian movies which, for years, were all shot without sound and dubbed. What's the point of watching it dubbed into Italian and subtitled in English?

There was Jacques Tati's movie Mon Oncle. He filmed two versions, French and English. He filmed without sound and dubbed, but, in the English language version, the actors spoke phonetically correct English and the signs were in English. They used the same actors and two versions were filmed simultaneously. But only the French version seems to be available in the US. None of the arguments for subtitles apply in this case. But the petit-bourgeois rubes would rather read than watch the movie.

Which is a little like that William Shatner movie that was filmed in Esperanto. Shatner did pretty well, sounded very natural speaking it. Or like that Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ. They had English-speaking actors and they were made primarily for an English-speaking audience, but they wanted subtitles for no good reason.

And here's something else. I think they stopped movie dubbing about the time they stopped foreign accents. I wrote about this before. I watched part of The Odessa File with Jon Voight playing a German reporter. He spoke with sort of a German accent. Roger Corman argued against this when he made Von Richthofen and Brown. "Germans don't speak English with a German accent." No, but they don't speak English with an American or a British accent, either. They do speak German with a German accent. At least get that much right.

They used to dub foreign films that way----French movies were dubbed with actors speaking with a French accent. They don't anymore. Could that be what turned people against dubbing?

And I just watched Melancholia, a Danish movie filmed in Sweden. But the actors were all American and British. Foreign filmmakers are forced to use US actors to get their movies viewed in the US in part because of this aversion to dubbing. It's part of cruelty of US cultural hegemony.

Edgar Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen

The French consider him a genius

I was watching the documentary, Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen, about the B movie director. Some in the French New Wave--Luc Moullet for one--considered him an auteur.

The story was that Ulmer directed an excellent B list movie for Universal studios, a movie called The Black Cat. It should have been his ticket to keep working for the major studios, but he was sleeping with the wife of the nephew of the president of the studio and he was blackballed.

Ulmer went to work for PRC, Producers Releasing Corporation, the most impoverished of the Poverty Row studios. Ulmer claimed that they shot all their movies there in 6 days and that he was given just enough filmstock to shoot on a 2:1 ratio. He was best known for directing the noir film Detour.

The documentary seemed to see Ulmer as a sad case because he didn't get to direct big budget movies and was stuck on Poverty Row. But it's patronizing to feel sorry for someone in his position. Directing 60 low budget movies wasn't good enough? The world isn't full of would-be filmmakers who wouldn't love to live his life?

They interviewed Ulmer's daughter, Arianne, plus Peter Bogdanovich, Roger Corman, Wim Wenders, and Joe Dante.

Dante shared some advice Roger Corman gave him. When making your shooting schedule, figure out how much time you need to make the movie really great. Then figure out how long to make it okay. Then how long just to get it on film. And go with the third one.

Here's my advice: Imagine your movie the way it would look if you had unlimited time and money. Then imagine an extended skit on The Carol Burnett Show or Saturday Night Live, or Mad TV, based on your movie. Then make a movie that looks like the skit.

One of Ulmer's movies, The Island of Forgotten Sins

There was also one of Ulmer's B movies on the DVD, something called The Island of Forgotten Sins.

It wasn't very good.

Throughout the documentary, they told us that directors today could learn a thing or two from Ulmer----they should look at his work before complaining about low budgets and tight schedules. But The Island of Forgotten Sins wasn't much of an inspiration.

It's understandable that the French New Wave looked to American B movies for inspiration. They had a morbid fascination with Hollywood. They wanted to direct movies themselves, and they knew if they were ever going to do so, it would be on very small budgets. But does it make sense for independent filmmakers today to look to these terrible movies from the '30s and '40s?

Instead of B movies, look to American TV shows. Not the new ones---they cost too much. Look at old episodes of Bonanza, The Rifleman, Quincy, McMillan and Wife. T.J. Hooker. Charley's Angels.

Many of these shows were made using B movie techniques, and shows in the '50s and '60s were often directed by former B directors. Joseph Lewis directed episodes The Rifleman. William Beaudine directed episodes of Lassie and Spin & Marty on the old Mickey Mouse Club. Ida Lupino directed episodes of Gilligan's Island.

They worked on extremely tight schedules and low budgets. And they were pretty good shows. Think of what you could do using the same form but different content.