Pioneer in Movie Industry Sounds Off About Today’s Fare

The man who has put words in the mouths of hundreds of film actors summed up today’s movies in one word Wednesday.

“Lousy,” said Eugene DeRue, the film pioneer who is credited with inventing the dubbing process that has salvaged actors’ voices and sharpened sound tracks in thousands of films.

“They’re lousy. We used to spend six months to make one and now they make them in a few days. And the kids are doing and saying things in the movies we were told not to do.”

DeRue knows a good movie when he hears one. His 55-year studio career included acting in early silent pictures and directing films after “talkies” revolutionized the industry in 1927.

Revolutionary Technique

But it was the “lip dubbing” technique that DeRue concocted after that period--to add foreign-language voice tracks to MGM films--that revolutionized sound pictures. His process involves the re-recording, or “looping,” of sound tracks to eliminate unwanted background noises or actors’ garbled dialogue.

Looping is routinely used to erase such things as the sound of a passing airplane from cowboy movies and muffed lines from nervous performers in love scenes.

“He’s been a great influence on our profession,” said Irvin Rosenblum, president of the Motion Picture & Videotape Editors Guild. “He’s one of the guys who made our business and invented the techniques that those of us today apply.”

200 Honor DeRue

Rosenblum was one of about 200 people who gathered Wednesday at the Motion Picture and Television County Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills to honor DeRue on his 100th birthday. Most had worked either in front of DeRue’s microphone or behind it.

“Actors dread dubbing,” said Ernest Mims, a retired Universal Studios vice president who worked as a film editor with DeRue. “But they’d come out happy after spending several days redoing their lines for Gene. Even the temperamental stars loved him. They knew he was improving their performance.”

Alex Golitzen, a three-time Oscar-winning art director, credited DeRue with helping popularize Hollywood films abroad by dubbing them with such skill that audiences in France, Italy and Germany readily accepted them. Colorado-born DeRue is fluent in five languages.

“Gene goes back to practically the earliest days of this industry,” said James Bacon, a syndicated Hollywood columnist. “He’s a genius. He’s been a sound editor and done just about everything. I brought him a bottle of champagne. What the hell do you give to a guy on his hundredth birthday?”

DeRue’s movie career got started inadvertently in 1913, according to his daughter, Carmen Schrott, 76, of North Hollywood. Schrott, then a 4-year-old actress known as “Baby DeRue,” had a role in “The Squaw Man,” Cecil B. DeMille’s first picture. Her father was baby-sitting her on the movie set.

Offered Interest in Studio

“He was working for a newspaper then but they offered him a job as an extra,” she recalled. “They ran out of money before the picture was done and one day, driving back to town from the set out in Calabasas, C. B. DeMille offered my dad quarter interest in Paramount Studios if he could come up with $5,000.”

DeRue liked the sound of that. But he managed to scrape together just $3,000, and a career as a studio mogul slipped from his grasp, Schrott said.

But he had enough to get hooked on the industry and he eventually left his job with the Los Angeles Times to take bit-acting parts and behind-the-camera jobs.

Despite his pioneering movie sound work, DeRue said Wednesday that he feels the development of color has been the motion picture industry’s greatest accomplishment during his lifetime.

Challenge From Rock Hudson

His personal accomplishments have included bringing such stars as Rock Hudson to audio life on film after their voices have failed to register on original movie sound tracks.

Labeling Hudson his toughest challenge, DeRue said the actor often read his movie lines in a voice so low that “you really needed a microphone down his throat” to pick up his voice.

And, if he doesn’t care much for what today’s actors say, he admires the way today’s film technicians handle what they’re saying.

“Sound has improved greatly over the years,” DeRue said. “The quality of sound today is very good.”