Actors May Have the Last Word in Strike by Italian Dubbers

Roman homemaker Michela Sportelli tuned in to “The Guiding Light” and struggled to follow the tangled plot: Will Reva escape her shipwrecked companion? Will Josh, after giving her up for dead, take Reva back? What will Josh do with the other Reva--the clone of his missing mate?

But what really baffled Sportelli was this week’s unscripted twist in her favorite soap opera. Because of a dubbers’ strike, the characters raged, pouted, gossiped and lied in their native English--too fast for most viewers to keep pace with the little Italian subtitles on the screen.

“The show is my companion while I eat or iron,” said Sportelli, who is not used to reading along. Tuning out after two episodes, she joined an outcry of confused soap fans in support of the dubbers--those invisible actors whose voices are more popular, pervasive and powerful in Italy than elsewhere.

Viewer protest helped the country’s 1,050 unionized dubbers win a long-sought measure of professional respect--the promise, six months from now, of a nationwide contract with minimum pay scales and employee benefits. They voted Friday to accept the deal and end nearly 10 weeks of silence.

Their compromise with television and cinema bosses came in time to avert havoc in Italy’s fall movie schedule that would have cost Hollywood studios millions of dollars in lost revenue.

The walkout had already delayed the release in Italy of “Saving Private Ryan,” Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster, and several other American movies, including “Small Soldiers” and “Out of Sight.”

But real panic set in this week when Italy’s Mediaset network ran out of dubbed TV episodes of two popular afternoon soaps. It continued airing both--”The Guiding Light” with subtitles and “The Bold and the Beautiful” with an unprofessional Italian voice-over that clashed with the original English soundtrack.

Thousands of callers jammed Mediaset’s switchboards, demanding the return of the actors’ dubbed Italian voices.

“For viewers, hearing our voices is like having close friends at home,” explained Mario Paolinelli, a strike leader. “If the characters speak a different language, they’re not friends anymore.”

Dubbers could never cause such a stir in the United States because fewer than 2% of all movies in the U.S. are in foreign languages. But the strike was a threat to Italian show business, which dubbed 240 of the 350 films released here last year. The lion’s share were American movies, which have 1.8% of their overseas audience in Italy.

Italian television also is heavy on American fare, with shows such as “E.R.,” “Law and Order” and “X Files” opening here each October and usually running a year behind those shown in the United States.

Work for dubbers is growing worldwide with the popularity of imported home videos, which sell better dubbed than subtitled.

The art of dubbing is most deeply ingrained in Italy, where it has developed since the earliest “talkies” into a $50-million-a-year industry with more than 80 companies and its own annual awards bash.

During World War II, fascist dictator Benito Mussolini ordered dubbing because he wanted to drown out his enemy’s language.

Subtitles put up a brief challenge after the war, flooding Italy on reels of American comedies and Westerns. When Italy’s low-literacy audiences had trouble reading them, the studios recruited Italian immigrants to dub the films in Hollywood, but their southern Italian dialects proved equally opaque to audiences in Rome and Milan. The dubbing moved to Rome.

Italian dubbers often boast of improving the original performance. The best are stars in their own right--with the added ability to recite dialogue in sync with the screen actor’s lips and create the impression that Dustin Hoffman, for example, is speaking Italian.

Hoffman was said to be so impressed with Ferruccio Amendola’s dubbing of “Little Big Man” that he felt a need to tell the actor, “Bravo, Ferruccio, but don’t forget: I’m Dustin Hoffman.” Laurence Olivier, on the other hand, was appalled to hear his performance of Hamlet in Italian and threatened to sue.

Dubbers, explained actor Pino Colizzi, better known here as the voice of Warren Beatty, “are like surgeons who doctor a film. The patient is never quite as good as his old self, but at least he survives.”

Talent has been passed down through the generations--as from Oreste Lionello, the high-pitched Italian voice of Woody Allen, to his daughter Cristiana, who does Sharon Stone. But the strikers complained that industry standards are slipping.

Under the current industrywide agreement, dubbers are supposed to earn a minimum of $56.50 per three-hour shift and work at a pace that requires about a month to script and dub a feature-length film.

As demand here for dubbing has grown, however, so has the number of freelance dubbers willing to underbid their rivals.

As a result, the agreed-on pay scales and benefits are routinely violated, union leaders say, and dubbers are under constant pressure to sacrifice quality for speed.

“If I were Steven Spielberg, I’d be a little nervous to think that one of my films, which cost $80 million, can be destroyed in Italy for the sake of saving 18 million lire [about $10,000],” said Paolinelli, who heads the dubbing screenwriters union.

Strike leaders say the proposed collective contract, to be negotiated over the next six months, would make pay and schedules enforceable. They are also seeking a share in royalties--a right that actors, but not dubbers, now have under Italian law.

Such a contract, though promised, is not a certainty.

In the event of an impasse, the Italian studios can always threaten to resort to subtitling films or dubbing them with nonunion labor.

Some Italian directors, notably Bernardo Bertolucci, have lobbied in favor of subtitles to neutralize the appeal of imports. They argue that Italians will make more films and win a bigger share of the home market if local actors spend less time dubbing for the competition.

But director Franco Zeffirelli, who shares that position, acknowledged that Italy’s mass audiences will never tolerate an assault on dubbing.

“It’s a devilish operation--a monstrosity--to put the voice of someone into somebody else’s mouth,” he said. “But that’s a purist’s view. It’s a lost battle. In the end, Italians don’t want to read subtitles. They want to relax and hear all those terrible lines.”