‘SuperLoopers’ Have the Right Background

The two producers putting the finishing touches on the pilot for Steven Bochco’s new ABC series, “Doogie Howser, M.D.”--about a 16-year-old genius who is a pediatrician--were, of course, anxious that it be just right.

TV is a business of hitting your marks and closely following the script. But the actors assembled to dub in background dialogue--called “looping”--before “Doogie Howser’s” producers in a sound room at 20th Century Fox could make up their lines as they went along. That’s what they were hired to do.

They’re the SuperLoopers, a group of improvisational actors not seen on camera, but who have been regulars, nonetheless, on TV shows ranging from “The Wonder Years” to “L.A. Law.”

In contrast to regular “looping,” the SuperLoopers work without scripts. In their own invisible, unsung way, they have helped give television a more realistic edge.

How they work was probably shown best in “Hill Street Blues” with its then startlingly new sound of overlapping dialogue and the cacophony of voices in the Hill Street precinct house. Aside from the dialogue of the principal actors, most of those voices belonged to the SuperLoopers.

As the group’s founder, Dee Marcus, recalled: “Steven (Bochco) wanted a new sound, really hot and exciting and so personal that people would think they were in the middle of a squad room.” One of Bochco’s associates on the show, Gregory Hoblit, knew Marcus as a writer, actress and improvisational acting teacher. (She also founded the Off the Wall improv troupe, which is still performing after nearly 14 years. )

“Greg convinced Steven to let us do the ‘Hill Street’ pilot,” Marcus said, “and we wound up working every episode of the show.” Marcus and her group were shown a rough cut of each scene with its principal dialogue already laid in. On the spot, they improvised background conversation to fit the mood of the scenes and the actions of the extras moving through the precinct house.

“It was always a different situation--the squad room was under siege, or a new electrical system was being done or it was full of reporters,” said David Anspaugh, a former “Hill Street” associate producer who went on to direct the films “Hoosiers” and “Fresh Horses.”

“You can never underestimate the contribution these people made to the success of the show,” Anspaugh said. “It is a very specific skill and one that very few people can pick up on immediately and do. You have to see a scene only once, or maybe two or three times if you’re lucky, and be able to think on your feet quickly and creatively, constantly ad-libbing and mimicking the scene’s movement and action. So you’ve got about six balls in the air at once.”

Though the group had worked on features, miniseries and made-for-TV movies before “Hill Street,” it was “Hill Street” that paved the way for their success on episodic television.

The series won four Emmys for sound design, and “the SuperLoopers made an enormous contribution to that,” said Anspaugh.

For example, when “Hill Street” detectives moved cautiously through the hallway of a tenement, recalls SuperLooper Ed Cook, “to keep the tenement sounds and apartment sounds alive and the impression that there were people there, we developed a whole repertoire of TV shows and radio shows that we would do, depending on whether the scene was day or night. So we were the soap operas, the children’s shows, the radio call-in shows that you’d hear when the detectives would be walking down a corridor to break down a door.”

In the “Doogie Howser” pilot, SuperLooper Gracie Moore employed the same technique, making herself sound like a cartoon show, and a child laughing at it, while Howser had a talk in the hospital children’s ward with a dispirited young patient. “Here are these people having this really sad conversation,” Moore said, “but life is still going on, and the background cartoon sounds and laughter are reminders of that.”

Moore, who gives her age as “twentysomething,” is the youngest member of the group, who range in age up to Marcus’ “fifty-something.” As Marcus put it, “I play between 48 and 100.”

There are 12 core members in the group, but Marcus sometimes hires others to fill in--including children and, once, an actor fluent in Swahili--depending on the nature of the job. According to the SuperLoopers, former Off the Wall member John Ritter inadvertently gave them their name at their first session, which was working on Ritter’s movie “Hero at Large.” The story is that Ritter remarked “You guys are super loopers.”

There are other similar groups around, and competition for jobs is brisk, as is the competition to join the SuperLoopers. “Every time we run an ad in the trade papers, (for every) six calls from producers we get 150 calls from people who want to loop,” Cook said.

Each looper earns the Screen Actors Guild minimum of $414 per person for a day’s work, whether that amounts to a single line or a full eight hours. In flush times, the “SuperLoopers” have had as many as six or seven jobs a week. Like other actors, they also earn residuals.

“It definitely pays the rent and keeps you going so you can be pursuing other things,” said Andy Goldberg, an original member of SuperLoopers and Off the Wall. The improv background is helpful in SuperLooping because “you need to do different voices as the day is going on,” he said, “so you can just click into a character that you think is appropriate for whatever is taking place on screen.”

“We’ve worked for, I think, everybody who worked on ‘Hill Street’ and has gone on and done other things,” said Cook.

Producer-director Hoblit used them for his recent made-for-TV film “Roe vs. Wade.” Anspaugh used them for “Fresh Horses,” and the SuperLoopers have been called in for all of Bochco’s series. They recently worked on “Orleans,” a pilot starring Alfre Woodard and produced by Bochco’s former “L.A. Law” partner, Terry Louise Fisher. And they will be heard on the upcoming films “Blue Steel” and “Nightmare on Elm Street V.”

To be helpful, and hence, used regularly, the SuperLoopers have to know when to turn up the volume on their performing skills, and when to keep it low. It’s a fine line.

“Every show is different,” Goldberg said. “On ‘L.A. Law,’ we know we can’t say anything that pops through the main dialogue, but on ‘Hill Street,’ they would look for those kinds of lines and they loved them.”

The alternative to SuperLoopers and groups like them are a number of sound libraries where producers can purchase sounds called “walla,” a term dating back to the theater where background stage performers meant to sound like a murmuring crowd were instructed to say “walla, walla, walla.”

“The libraries are pretty complete,” said Anspaugh. “You can get courtroom walla, crowd-on-a-street walla, restaurant walla, but it’s very lifeless and pretty dull, really, and unrealistic.”