On Movie Musical Dubbing and Les Miserables
by John Aquino on 01/05/13
This is an update of a previous post.
The new movie based on the Broadway musical Les Miserables which was released last week is going against over 80 years of filmmaking practice in its decision to have the actors sing their songs live on the soundstage and on location. New technology allows them to do it, the filmmakers claim. But there have been reasons not to do this, and the reasons mostly hold.
Dubbing dialogue post-filming is a common practice in movie making, as actors go before microphone and re-record lines that—either because of background noise on location or some other reason—are found not to have come across as clearly as needed once what had been filmed is carefully examined. With the early film musicals, singers performed their songs live on the soundstages. Sound recording was so new that the film studios were happy to have it recorded at all. But over the next decade, the practice of pre-recording musical vocals, pioneered by Douglas Shearer, became the norm.
There were a number of reasons for this. First, there was an economic issue. The voices of even the best singers crack or go flat on occasion. Rather than have the entire company with actors in costume stand and wait, the union clock ticking toward overtime, and, on location, the light fading while the singer did it over and over, it proved to be less expensive to deal with these problems in the sound studio with just the singers and orchestra. And there are days when a singer may simply not be in the best of voice. Rather than have the filmmakers reassemble the company and hope that the singer is in better voice, the vocals have been brought to the best quality possible prior to filming.
Another reason is that singing is sometimes a messy business. In the early days of sound musicals opera singers like Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbett showed that, up close, the singer’s face would grimace while pushing out that high note, the neck veins would bulge, and the salvia would spray. Prerecording the vocals allowed the singers to take it easier on camera. And when the singer is both singing and dancing, prerecording allows him or her not to appear breathless.
For non-singers, prerecording gave the filmmakers the opportunity to judge whether the person’s singing would pass muster. As the technology approved, the technicians could piece together an acceptable vocal by going through multiple recordings note by note and selecting the best ones. This was done for Gloria Graham in Oklahoma! (1955) and Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls (1955). If nothing could be done to help the non-singer, a professional singer could be hired to dub the vocals. In doing so, the pro would have the advantage of the non-singers’ recordings to try to mimic the style and inflection in order to sound as much like the other performer as possible.
Sometimes less care was taken with this than others. Lucille Ball’s inability to carry a tune became a running joke in her 1950s TV series I Love Lucy. When she starred in musicals a decade earlier in such films as Too Many Girls (1940) and DuBarry Was a Lady (1942), she was dubbed, and since there was a distinct disadvantage of the dubber sounding too much like Lucy, she didn’t and sang as well as she could. And yet, in 20th Century Fox’s 1956 film version of The King and I, Marni Nixon sounds like Deborah Kerr would sound if she could sing. There is some evidence that the film technicians used some of Kerr’s recordings for the lower notes and Nixon’s for the higher ones, coming close to 50-50 or at least 70-30 between Nixon and Kerr. Eight years later when Nixon dubbed Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (1964), however, the mix was said to be 98 percent of Nixon and 2 percent of Hepburn.
Performers in movie musicals were still encouraged to sing along to the pre-recordings on the set so that the throat muscles did move a bit and it looked like they were really singing. I remember the opera singer Rise Stevens, who appeared in such films as Going My Way (1944), saying in an interview that she was advised to sing along an octave lower so as not to tax the voice or cause the throat muscles to not just move but bulge. The non-singers were encouraged to sing along too, often listening to their own recordings. This double-singing didn’t matter because what would be used on film was the pre-recording dubbed in. Some dubbed performers like Rita Hayworth were, however, content to just show up, mouth the singing of others, and did not pre-record.
There have been times prior to Les Miserables in more recent years when some singing was done live. When Rex Harrison recreated the part of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady (1964), he asked to do it live since most of his numbers involved talk-singing (basically speaking to the music rather than singing) and for him to mouth himself speaking would look artificial. Harrison went on to win the Academy Award for best actor.
A less happy example was Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975), in which the singing was recorded live to accommodate non-singers such as Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd and, not surprisingly, caused many delays and problems. Bogdanovich wanted people suddenly bursting into song to appear as natural as possible, much as Woody Allen did in Everyone Say I Love You (1996). Neither film was considered a success.
As for Les Miserables, the technology is such that the filmmakers contend that singing live allows the actors to appear more natural, to look as if they are really singing, because they are. They wanted to capture the spontaneity of the performance. The actors wore ear pieces that fed the sound of a live piano played off-stage. The piano followed the pacing of the actor rather than have the actor following the orchestra, which was added in later. In a 60 Minutes interview, Hugh Jackman, who plays Jean Valjean, applauded the technique and demonstrated how it encouraged him to feel the music and lyrics more.
On seeing the finished film, it's clear that the director Tom Hooper felt he had a choice: drama or singing. He chose drama. If you want to hear "I Dreamed a Dream" sung beautifully, don't listen to Anne Hathaway. Listen to the original cast album, the 25th anniversary video, or Susan Boyle. Hathaway sobs during the song, her voice cracks. She is acting. Other performances are unbalanced. Hugh Jackman, who has musical theatre experience, does appear to be projecting to the back row. His veins push out. His gestures are large. In contrast, Russell Crowe, playing Inspector Javert, although he does not have as big a voice as Jackman, sings more naturally and is mostly on key. While Jackman and others are singing and running down streets, their voices waver and tend to go sharp or flat.
In addition, since the singers are acting their songs, musically, most songs never end--the actors speak the final word of the lyric with emphasis or swallow the word up with emotion. And since the offstage piano is following the singer rather than the singer following a conductor and an orchestra, the composer's designated time and rhythm are for the most part ignored.
The director seems oblivious to the problem and even makes it worse. When Samantha Barks sings "On My Own," which she does very well, Hooper has her do it live on the set in the rain. It's just common sense that you would sing better if you did not have water pouring down your face, or going in your nose and in your ears. As she sits dying next to Marius, Hooper turns on the rain again. When Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter sing the reprise of "Master of the House," they do so while being carried upside down and down the stairs by footmen.
The economic principle was evidently also a factor. Cohen was interviewed on the Today show by Matt Lauer who asked him about Lauer's favorite song, "Master of the House." Cohen said that after weeks of rehearsal his voice was gone, but with the crew waiting they shot him full of steroids so he could croak out the song. He said he hated what he saw in the finished film. The overidding economic issue was that since, unlike most movie musicals that have dialogue and some songs, Les Miserables is entirely sung, prerecording the singing would have meant that the actors would have basically do the whole movie twice.
Having said all this, the choral singing and Eddie Redmayne as Marius are excellent. It's an exciting story and Hooper, while he cannot direct singing, knows how to film spectacle.
But the end result does show the benefit of prerecording, and having the singing done live on the set does appear to be another experiment that did not succeed.
Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino
