Interview with Bruce Johansen

 

On June 1, 2025, Rémi Caremel of the Dans l’ombre des studios blog and I had the great pleasure of sitting down with former Paris dubber Bruce Johansen for chat on Zoom. Rémi and I had a blast talking to Bruce, who regaled us with all sorts of funny and fascinating stories from his dubbing days in Paris and Rome, and here for your reading pleasure is a transcript of our conversation – lightly edited for clarity and context. Enjoy!

 

Rémi Caremel: How did you end up living in Paris and working with dubbing?

 

Bruce Johansen: I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and I was an announcer on radio when I was in college. And when I graduated, a friend of mine said: “I’m gonna go to Paris. I want to learn French. You want to go for a year?” I thought about it for about three seconds, then I said: “That sounds like a good idea.” I didn’t speak any French at all, but I went to Paris and I didn’t know how to survive. I started doing radio voice overs at the old ORTF building, and I remember I would make 75 francs a day. Which was, like, nothing. But I survived on that and then I met somebody who said: “You know, you should think about dubbing movies.” And I didn’t know anything about dubbing movies. So, I was introduced to Peter Riethof, who I came to know quite well. The very first movie I dubbed was called Landru [(1963, but dubbed into English some years later)]. Remember that? I had little tiny, tiny dubbing part where I said something like “Will you look at that!” and that was my whole part. Then, gradually, I got bigger roles until I ended up doing a lot of the major roles.

I also worked very closely with Jacqueline Porel, who was a very famous stage actress, but she was also very influential on the English dubbing scene. Her son Marc, who ultimately OD’d unfortunately, was a teenager back then I remember. We used to work in Jacqueline’s kitchen, just off the Champs-Élysées, on the Moritone, which was the editing machine where we went through all the translating. So we became partners and we wrote a lot of things together. The Jacques Demy musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) was one. We actually sang in that and it was horrible! I mean, it was just a disaster! It was a terrible, terrible dubbing job.

 

Lobby card for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, starring Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo. The English dub that Bruce worked on has faded into complete obscurity and is very difficult to find these days.

 

RC: I’ve found this lost English dub of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Even Jacques Demy’s daughter, Rosalie Varda, didn’t think it existed. And I said it does exist, because I know all of the French session singers who worked in Paris the 1960s, and one of them told me they worked on this dub. Some of the singers worked on both the original French version and in the English one. So I told Rosalie Varda that this dub does exist, but I was unable to find it. But one of my friends lived in Hong Kong when he was a teenager and he bought a VHS tape of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, thinking it was the French original version and instead it was the English dub. He has given me the tape and I have restored the English dubbing.

 

BJ: It’s horrible! I wrote that with Jacqueline. We did the translation and I also had some parts in it, too. I believe we did it for Peter Riethof.

 

RC: Yes, it was for Peter Riethof and his company Oscar Film.

 

BJ: Oscar Film, yeah. I remember his assistant Eliane. Us dubbing actors used to live waiting for a call from Eliane saying: “We have another part for you!” Everybody in the dubbing business knew Eliane very well. Peter Riethof was very funny because he had a very thick accent – I think he was Czech or Austrian – and he would try and direct us and he’d say [imitates Riethof’s accent]: “Broooz! You mest do it zis way!” It was so funny, and if we would ever repeat what he did it would be horrible.

Later, after I left dubbing, I used to run into him in Monte Carlo at the television screenings. They used to do those every January. And he actually brought me to the States one time to re-do a dubbing. I don’t remember the film, but it was in the early 70s and I had moved back to America. They had dubbed something in Paris and the producer didn’t like a voice, so Riethof came here and we went to MGM and re-dubbed it, which allowed me to get my SAG card actually. It was funny, but I can’t remember the title of that one.

Are you aware of the different types of dubbing techniques in vogue at the time? As you know, the Moritone was the basis for everything in France. And actually, Jacqueline had a big Moritone machine in her kitchen and we used to sit at that machine and you’d write on the rhythm band. You’d have the original language, which was more often than not French, but sometimes we had German films and Italian or whatever, but generally French, and then underneath we’d do the translation. So when you went into the studio, everything was cut into loops, which were maybe a minute or a minute and a half, but usually no longer, and everything was cut into those little segments. It was a very regulated system for doing it – it was very controlled.

I also used to dub a lot in Rome, and in Rome there was no rhythm band projected. It was just a music stand and the dialogue, and you would sort of say it, and then they’d be “Oh, that’s fine. Va bene! Va bene!”

Lew Ciannelli was a big dubbing guy in Rome, and he came to Paris to work with Richard Heinz. You know Dick Heinz?

 

RC: Yes, he was a beloved artistic director, even for dubbing in French language.

 

Richard Heinz directing a French language dubbing session.

 

BJ: That’s right. Anyway, so Dick Heinz had a cattle call where he had like a hundred of us come in and audition for Lew Ciannelli. And I don’t remember what the movie was, but anyway, I ended up getting the part, which surprised me, and I started working for him a lot in Rome. I remember one of the first times I was there in this big studio, and next to me there was another studio where they were dubbing a western into Italian. It was Henry Fonda and there was a big close-up of him and he said something like “Hey, partner!” and of course in Italian it was, like “Eh, allora? Che cosa fai, eh?” and so on. They would just cram all this dialogue in and they didn’t care what it looked like, whereas the French were very meticulous in trying to replicate labials and fricatives so that it looked like it was real.

And then in the States, you know, it’s a different system. You have headphones and it’s a countdown, so you hear Bom. Bom. Bom. and on the fourth, you say the line.

So there are all these different ways of doing dubbing, and of course I was most familiar with and appreciative of the French system. I think it was the best system!

And… do you know where all the studios were located in the 60s?

 

RC: I know Richard Heinz was mostly in Rue Jean Mermoz, I think.

 

BJ: Exactly right. Near the Concorde. He was the big one. Peter Riethof used various studios. He had an office on the Champs-Élysées, but we rarely dubbed there. Usually at Boulogne or at Billancourt. A lot of dubbing done at Billancourt! That was where the offices of Jacques Willemetz were located. And Jacques Willemetz did a lot of really high-quality work. I remember Lee Payant, Gordon Heath and a group of us narrated a number of documentaries for Willemetz.

And then there was Gennevilliers. I don’t know if they still do dubbing out there. You had to take the metro and then take a bus to go all the way out to Gennevilliers, and I remember once working there and meeting Jacques Tati, who was re-dubbing something or other. That was quite a busy place, Gennevilliers.

Then there was S.P.S. [Société Parisienne de Sonorisation], which was owned by a Russian group.

 

RC: Yes, Ilya Lopert. His daughter was the French actress Tanya Lopert.

 

BJ: That’s right, and Lee Payant, who was a very good friend of mine, worked very often with them. And sometimes they’d bring in Russian films I remember, and they were just awful movies! We were cranking out a lot of movies in those days. It was non-stop.

Then there was Avia Film. I don’t remember who ran that. But I remember it was a little, tiny studio and you’d go downstairs, but I don’t know where it’s located now or if they’re still in business.

 

Bruce in a wonderful mood during our interview.

 

RC: So, you wrote the English version of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with Jacqueline Porel. Did you also write translations for other films?

 

BJ: Quite a few. Most of us who were involved had dual or triple jobs. We were not only the actors, but oftentimes we directed, like Lee Payant, who did a lot of directing, and Jacqueline did a lot of directing and writing and acting. So, a lot of us did all three. But I mean in those days, I don’t think we got credits on the screen or anything, and I have no idea of the movies I worked on. I probably dubbed hundreds of movies, but I don’t know what they are. I didn’t think about it at the time – it was just a way to make a living. And I never thought of myself as an actor. It was just a way to survive in Paris. So, I went for one year and I stayed six, because of the dubbing.

 

RC: Which year did you arrive in Paris?

 

BJ: In the mid 60s. And then I left in 1970. I came back for a little bit, so I did a little dubbing in the early 70s, too. And then the business started to decline. I was just lucky I got there when there was a huge amount of volume to dubbed, and then gradually, they ran out of product.

 

RC: I know you dubbed Jean-Louis Trintignant in A Man and a Woman (1966) by Claude Lelouch. Do you have good memories from that?

 

BJ: Yeah, that is an excellent memory. I think it was the film I was most proud of ever dubbing. Anouk Aimée dubbed it together with me. She dubbed herself and she spoke very, very good English. She actually had to force a little French accent – her English was that good! And I remember when Trintignant is driving back and he has this dream sequence and is talking to himself, they actually had me ad lib that part. It wasn’t scripted. And it was off-camera so it didn’t have to sync.

Alan Adair was the director. I just thought of his name. He was an excellent director.

But Hal Brav… do you know that name? He did a lot of films, too, and he had a very gravelly voice.

 

 

The famous A Man and a Woman (1966) for which Bruce dubbed Jean-Louis Trintignant. The film was a tremendous international success and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

 

RC: And The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) by Jacques Demy… do you remember the dubbing of that, too?

 

BJ: I remember doing it. I don’t remember what I did, but I do remember that we worked on writing it and recall going to the studio and dubbing it.

 

RC: It was for Richard Heinz?

 

BJ: Yes, that’s right. We did it at his studio. He had a really nice studio there.

 

RC: We have tried to identify the English voices of Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac. For Catherine Deneuve, Johan believes it is Sylviane Mathieu. I’ve interviewed Sylviane and she didn’t recall this movie, but Johan thinks it is her, but for Françoise Dorléac we don’t know who was her voice.

 

BJ: Sorry, I wouldn’t know. Jacqueline Porel unfortunately died a few years ago. She had an assistant whose name was Brigitte Bourganelle but I’m not sure if she’s still living. But she worked very closely with Jacqueline, so if you could ever find Brigitte Bourganelle, then she would know. She would probably have records of things. She lived in Paris, but again, I don’t know if she’s still alive. A lot of these people are all gone, you know. Sally Wilson. Hal Brav. We had a core group of like twelve people.

I actually located Sylviane Mathieu a few years ago and I called her, we chatted briefly and she said: “I want to forget those years. Don’t remind me about dubbing.” It’s like a part of her life she doesn’t want to recall. Did you get that sense, too?

 

RC: Yes, she didn’t seem to have a lot of memories of her career. I learned a few things, but it was a very short conversation.

 

BJ: Yeah. But she and I worked together on many, many, many films. Often, she had the female lead and I had the male lead, and then she also was a specialist with children’s voices. In A Man and a Woman, for example, she dubbed all the kids. She always did the little kids’ voices.

 

The Spanish-Italian giallo Murder by Music (1969) was one of the many films for which Bruce and Sylviane Mathieu dubbed the leading roles. Bruce dubbed Brett Halsey, and Sylviane dubbed Marilù Tolo.

 

RC: I sent you some videos this morning of the French TV productions you appeared in: Quand la liberté venait du ciel (1967), Agence Intérim, episode “Gastronomie” (1969) and Les quartiers de Paris, episode “À Montparnasse” (1971). Do you have any memories of them?

 

BJ: Yeah, I just saw that. I haven’t looked at it, but I saw it came in. I’d forgotten about doing those. I can’t remember the director but he was very active with what was then called the ORTF – French television.

 

RC: One of them was Marcel Moussy.

 

BJ: That’s it! I remember going to Pau and shooting the first one, and then Moussy called me later when he was doing another one about food or something in Montparnasse. I don’t remember who the female actress was. There was also an actor I remember in Quand la liberté venait du ciel called Pierre Nunzi.

 

Bruce in the role of an American paratrooper in the WW2 series Quand la liberté venait du ciel, shot on location in Pau.

 

BJ: There was another big actor – Canadian – called Jean Fontaine. He did a lot of dubbing. He was very high profile when I first arrived on the dubbing scene. And then he went back to Canada to pursue a career or something, so I ended up getting a lot of parts he used to do. You’ve heard that name? Jean Fontaine.

 

RC: Yeah, because he also did a lot of French dubbing. Like Jacqueline Porel and Yves Brainville, he did both French and English dubbing.

 

Bilingual Paris dubber Jean Fontaine.

 

BJ: Exactly. And there was Jean-Paul Blondeau, who used to do a lot of the French dubbing. Blondeau was a big dubbing house in French, and I worked for them a few times when they wanted somebody to speak with an American accent in French, but I can’t remember any of the films.

 

RC: Apart from dubbing, did you also appear in plays or musicals?

 

BJ: No, I was 100% dubbing. And it was full-time. I worked almost every day. I tell people it was a period of my life when, on the weekends, I couldn’t wait to get back in the studio on Monday. I mean, I loved it so much, and it was easy for me. You know, for some people it’s easy and for some people it’s very difficult. Some very talented actors can’t do it. It’s confining, and I just happened to have a knack for it, like Lee Payant and a lot of these other people.

Now, there was a group that used to put on plays at the American Center, and Lee Payant, Gordon Heath and others were often in plays, but I was never in any of those. I never considered myself an actor, really. I just did the dubbing. That’s all I did.

 

Johan Melle: I’d like to get back to the translations, or adaptations, that you mentioned, Bruce. Because that has always seemed to me like such a complicated thing to do in that you have to change the dialogue so that it will fit the mouth movements, but at the same time try to remain faithful to the original screenplay. So I’m wondering how you went about doing that, and how much freedom you actually had. Were you able to make significant changes if you wanted to?

 

BJ: Yes. There was complete freedom. I mean, we never had anybody say “Oh, you can’t do this!” or “You can’t do it that way!” So, yes, it was a complete possibility. But it was kind of down to a science in a way, because with the rhythm band, you would first put the original language on the band and then identify fricatives and labials. The fricatives are the v’s or the f’s, and the labials are the b’s or the m’s where the mouth comes together. And then we had symbols. So you look at a sentence and you’d have all these little symbols, and it was like a bridge and you’d know where the high points and the low points were. You try and put a labial on a labial, and a fricative on a fricative, and that’s where you’d start. And then sometimes it was goggledygook. It didn’t make any sense, so then you’d go from there and you’d figure out how to do it. And it wasn’t always necessarily an exact translation of what they said, but it would be the gist, it would be the essence of the meaning, and there was a lot of flexibility in doing that. And you always loved scenes where the actor would turn their head or something, so you could then modify and fill in a lot of stuff that you couldn’t do with the actor’s face in the screen. So, there were many, many, many ways of adapting the essence of the script.

But sometimes, we would torture ourselves trying to get as precise as we could. In a way, the Italian dubbing was a little better, even though it didn’t match the lips, because it was more literal. I remember it was great working with Jacqueline Porel, because I’m the native English speaker and she’s the native French speaker, and between us we would come up with something that would make sense, but if you were a French person, for example, trying to do that, you might come up with something that didn’t make a lot of sense. So, it was good to have a collaboration with people speaking both languages.

 

Jacqueline Porel, seen here being interviewed about French dubbing for an episode of the documentary TV series Démons et merveilles du cinéma in 1968.

 

JM: Do you know how Jacqueline became so good at speaking English? Because she didn’t have English parents or anything like that…

 

BJ: I’m not sure, but her English was perfect. I mean, it was excellent! And it was more of an American English than British English. But I don’t know. That’s a good question. I never asked her about that.

 

RC: I think I have heard from a French actress that Jacqueline had an English au pair when she was a child, but I’m not sure.

 

JM: And Peter Riethof… seeing as how English wasn’t his native language, was he a dubbing director only? Did he always have others write the translations/adaptations for him, or do you know if he would work on these himself, too?

 

BJ: Peter Riethof did indeed direct many dubbing sessions, but to my knowledge he never worked on the dialogue. That was usually farmed out to Jacqueline Porel, Lee Payant, Hal Brav or Sally Wilson. He had a thick accent in English and we always joked about how he would tell us to stress certain words and phrases, but we knew it wasn’t correct. His assistant, Eliane, was wonderful to work with.

 

JM: Bruce, did you get a chance to look at the video clips that I sent you? [Prior to this interview, I sent Bruce a couple of clips of some of his English dubbing work, including one from the French comedy of errors Oscar (1967) with Louis de Funès, in which Bruce dubs the voice of actor Claude Rich.]

 

BJ: Yes, I did. Thank you for sending those. God, I kind of remember doing those. I remember that one with the rapid dialogue. I remember that one clearly.

 

JM: You mean Oscar with Louis de Funès?

 

BJ: Yes.

 

JM: Because I was thinking exactly of that, and that comedies have to be difficult to dub! Because just in that little clip there is so much dialogue back and forth, and as you say, very rapid. So that had to be difficult to do, right?

 

BJ: Yeah, that was hard. That was one of the more challenging things we did. But you know, sometimes, when you speak French, people can speak very, very quickly. Faster than we do in English. So, it sounded a little forced when I saw it the other day, but that was just the way it was. You just had to deal with what was on the screen.

 

 Here you can watch a little video clip of Bruce dubbing Claude Rich in Oscar:

 

JM: The actor who dubbed de Funès in that film was a guy called Robert Braun. Can you tell me anything about him?

 

BJ: I don’t remember anything about him. I don’t remember him at all. He must not have done a lot of dubbing at that time.

 

JM: Okay. Yeah, he actually left Paris and relocated to Rome, and continued to work there.

There was also another character actor who had a great voice: Duncan Elliott. Do you remember him?

 

BJ: Oh, yes. Duncan Elliott. I remember him. He had a great voice, but I don’t remember too much about him. He was older, and he had a very distinguished voice as I recall.

And then there was Marc Smith.

 

JM: Yes, another great voice, and he, too, ended up moving to Rome.

 

BJ: Have either of you heard of Lew Ciannelli? He was a big-time dubbing producer in Rome, and his father had a big career in the States. He played in a lot of gangster movies in the 30s. Ciannelli. I forget his first name.

 

JM: Yes, I know Lewis Ciannelli. His father was Eduardo Ciannelli.

 

BJ: That’s it. Yes, exactly right! And they had studios at the Via Margutta, by the Spanish Steps. And actually, I was in Rome a few years ago and I went there to just remind myself of what it was like, because it’s all gone – it’s all apartment buildings now. But there used to be a big dubbing center right on the Via Margutta, and Lew ran that. He was a good friend of Dick Heinz. They did a lot of collaborative work, and he’s the one who came to Paris looking to cast a role where I got picked and that’s how I started dubbing with him. But there was another whole group, as you point out, in Rome and I don’t really know those actors.

 

Lewis E. Ciannelli, who was one of the biggest dubbing directors in Rome and whose career went back all the way to the early 1950s.

 

JM: I know that many Parisian dubbers would go to Rome to dub and I’m curious about that set-up. When you went, did you go alone, or did you go a whole bunch of you?

 

BJ: No, it was just me. Ciannelli would send me a plane ticket, and he put me up in this little pensione. Now, in Paris, we could dub a whole film in seven days maybe, but in Rome it would take twice as long. It just took a lot longer, because their system took longer, and so I would go, usually, for half a month and then come back to Paris. And they would always pay us in cash, with these huge lira notes, and in those days, you weren’t allowed to take money out of any of the countries in Europe, so I would hide money in my shoes, and then go to the Crédit Lyonnais on the Champs-Élysées and change it into francs [laughs]. But it was very funny. Everything was off the books in Italy! Everything was all cash, you know?

 

JM: And that makes sense, because I know that at the time, all the dubbers in Rome belonged to ELDA – the English Language Dubbers Association – and from what I’ve been told, it wasn’t actually legal. It was all unofficial with no taxes being paid, and it didn’t become legal until several years later, so it was a bit sketchy at the time.

 

BJ: It was the opposite in France, where it was all totally legal. I had to get a carte de travail, and I had to pay taxes. And I’m glad I did, because I found out many years later that I get a pension now from France because of that dubbing work. Of course, that didn’t exist in Italy at the time.

I remember once, actually – it’s so funny because I’ve forgotten about a lot of this – that some producer came to Paris and took a whole group of us to Belgrade, and we dubbed a movie there for, like, two weeks. It was called La Bomba or something like that. They’d shot everything mouthing in English, and then we dubbed all the dialogue, but it was torture because their English was so bad! The phrasing was off, so they’d say something like [imitates awkward, staccato speaking rhythm] “Heeeee-llo-o…! How are youuu?” And then you had to try and make it work, but ahh! It was a nightmare! I remember that! We used to go out and get drunk on aquavit at night.

 

[Note: I have since been able to determine that the film Bruce remembers dubbing in Belgrade was the Yugoslavian WW2 film Bomb at Ten:Ten (1967). Bruce dubs the voice of the partisan Marko, played by Rade Marković.]

 

Spanish language poster for Bomb at Ten:Ten, which Bruce and his Parisian dubbing colleagues had a hard time dubbing into English.

 

JM: So, if I’ve understood, you would stay in Rome for some weeks then and work on several movies. Did they pay for your expenses during that time?

 

BJ: Yeah. They put me up in a pensione or something.

 

JM: Did you work together with the Rome dubbers, or were you single-tracked?

 

BJ: More often than not single-tracked. A few times I worked with other dubbers, but generally speaking single-tracked.

 

JM: Do you remember any of the other directors that you worked for in Rome?

 

BJ: I only worked with Ciannelli. He’s the only one I ever worked with, and over the years, I did quite a few movies with him. And it’s all because of that one audition I did with Dick Heinz at Dick’s studio.

 

JM: Do you remember any specific movies you did there, or specific actors that you dubbed?

 

BJ: No, I don’t remember any of them. It’s all a blur, you know, but I think I did some of those westerns. Some of the Clint Eastwood-like stuff.

 

JM: You mentioned that you were good friends with Lee Payant and Gordon Heath. Could you tell me something more about them?

 

BJ: Gordon was more serious about acting, I think, and he had quite a career in New York, even before he went to Paris. Lee was like me – he was more into dubbing as just a way of making money.

They were both singers and they had a nightclub in the Saint Germain area behind the church there. You would go downstairs, and instead of applauding – because the apartment building didn’t want noise – you would snap your fingers in appreciation, like in a poetry thing. And they would work every night in this nightclub, and then work during the day doing dubbing or whatever.

They had an apartment over on the 7^th, I think it was.

 

JM: And they were a romantic couple, too. Was that something that was only known to their close circle, or was it something everyone knew?

 

BJ: Oh, everybody knew. They didn’t hide that at all. And – funny anecdote – I remember Lee’s mother coming to visit once. She loved to cook, so she would go down to the local butcher, and because she couldn’t speak any French, she did everything with gestures, and would start clucking to indicate she wanted to buy hens and so on. So she did a funny side language in French!

 

Gordon Heath (left) and Lee Payant.

 

RC: Michel Mella told me that some of the dubbing actors lived in Château de Monte-Cristo in Marly-le-Roi.

 

BJ: That was me! Only me. I’m the only one who lived there. It’s now a museum. It was a school – the English School of Paris – at that time, and it was owned by a guy by the name of Dupont. He had another château in the Loire valley, Château du Gué-Péan. But that was a school at time, and yeah, I was living in the attic there. For about a year. That was quite a commute! It’s like an hour commute, so I loved it when we had work in Billancourt, because it was nearer. Closer to Port-Marly. Alexandre Dumas had that château built. And if you know anything about Dumas, you know that he had, among other things, a huge pot at the entrance of his house, and it’s referenced in books about him. He would have it filled with coins, and when he had guests, he asked his guests to take some money. And that pot was still there when I was living there!

 

JM: Do you know if there was a connection with London, and if people from London used to come to Paris to dub sometimes?

 

BJ: That’s a very good question. There was a connection, and I meant to mention this earlier: Jesse and Carol Vogel. They had a company in Paris and they moved to London ultimately. Actually, Sylviane Mathieu and I went there one year to dub a movie with them. I remember Hair was being shown then. But do you know Jesse Vogel? Has he come up in your research?

 

JM: Yes. And Carol Vogel, as I understand, was Peter Riethof’s ex-wife.

 

BJ: That’s correct. Anyway, that’s the only connection I know of. So, no, there wasn’t this constant flow of actors between Paris and London that I recall, but occasionally, Jesse and Carol would have me come to London to dub. I remember dubbing with the character actor Herbert Lom. He was dubbing himself and I was dubbing another part, and at first, he was furious he had to work with a lowly dubber like me in the same studio, but in the end, he was gracious and all that.

So, Jesse had really good contacts on the British scene. That’s the only time I worked in London.

 

[Note: I have since been able to determine that the film Bruce remembers dubbing with Herbert Lom is the notorious Austrian witch hunter horror film Mark of the Devil (1970). Bruce dubs the voice of Udo Kier in the film.]

 

Udo Kier in Mark of the Devil, one of his earliest films. Bruce informs me that Udo is currently living in Palm Springs, just like Bruce. Small world, huh?

 

 Here you can watch a little clip of Bruce dubbing Udo Kier:

 

JM: And they had the same dubbing system there as in Paris, right?

 

BJ: They did. They used the band system.

 

JM: I was actually a little surprised when you said earlier that you dubbed A Man and a Woman together with Anouk Aimée, because from what I understand, actors dubbing themselves usually did this alone, didn’t they?

 

BJ: That’s correct. It was very unusual. Like I said with Herbert Lom, too, in London. That was unusual, because they generally didn’t want to work with us. But for some reason, and I don’t know why, it happened, and we got along really well. And it was good, because there was a certain energy we developed that reflected the energy between her and Trintignant.

 

JM: Yeah, and I imagine maybe it’s also better to have a partner to respond to – for the sake of the performance…

 

BJ: It’s better. It’s definitely better! There’s no question about it.

 

JM: Some of the other ladies that dubbed were Barbara Sohmers, and Sally Wilson, who had a great character voice.

 

BJ: Barbara. I remember her. And, yes, Sally. She was also a director. She did a lot of directing. For Willemetz, I think. Yeah, Sally… she had a great voice.

There were a couple of French actresses, too, who spoke very good English and who used to work with us a lot, but I can’t remember their names. I don’t think they were that well known.

 

JM: Do you remember if you also used to work for Russ Moro, Ginger Hall’s husband?

 

BJ: Russ Moro, yes, I do remember him. Very tall guy. They actually came to visit me when I was visiting my parents in Napa Valley one summer. Both of them came. I think they finally got married. They hadn’t been married or something. Yeah, he had a beautiful voice. Yeah, Ginger… boy, all these memories! I haven’t thought about this in a long time!

You know, I do remember when I was living in Paris, there were several articles about dubbing in the International Herald Tribune. So I don’t know if you have access to archives there, but I did a number of interviews with various reporters about dubbing in Paris.

 

JM: Yes, I’ve actually come across an article that I think was from there. It was about the dubbing of the film French film The Modification (1970) and you were at the studio dubbing together with Maggie Brenner and Barbara Sohmers. The dubbing director was a lady named Carol Sands.

 

BJ: Oh, my! Carol Sands! Yeah, I loved her! She was great. She sadly died because she went to the hospital and got an injection of blood infected with AIDS. Very sad. Yeah, she was great. She directed a number of dubbings. I forgot about her.

 

The Modification, starring Maurice Ronet (dubbed by Bruce) and Sylva Koscina (dubbed by Barbara Sohmers), is one of the many, many French films for which the English dub is currently unavailable...

 

 

JM: Was it common that sound effects were recorded at the same time as the dialogue? I’m wondering because I read an interview with Barbara Sohmers in which she mentions getting very frustrated because she’d done a very emotional scene and then had to do it all over again because the sound effects man hadn’t been able to get the footstep sounds in sync. Sounds very impractical…

 

BJ: I recall many instances where we had the sound effects guy in the studio with us. It was something we just got used to. This was often the case in Rome, when films were shot without direct sound, so there was no control track for effects. But that was phased out by the time I left for the States.

I do recall one of the engineers at Boulogne, Jean, who worked with Jacques Willemetz. He had a keen ear and often gave us little tips to fine tune the final product. The directors often had words with him, though, because he would offer advice contrary to their direction.

 

JM: You did a lot of narrations, and I think you were very good as a narrator voice.

 

BJ: Yeah, I enjoyed doing that. It was great fun. The first things I did when we worked at ORTF, was radio dramas. In English, on discs that they would send to radio stations in America to promote French culture. So they were one-hour dramas about Louis XIV, or Napoleon, or whatever. And I loved doing that radio drama narration stuff. That was always fun for me.

 

The Oscar nominated West German documentary Chariots of the Gods (1970), which theorizes that extraterrestrials have impacted early human life and evolution, was one of many films to feature narration by Bruce...

...but in this case he shared the narrator duties with Lee Payant and Jean Fontaine.

 

RC: Do you remember other movies you worked on? Any other famous movies like A Man and a Woman?

 

BJ: No, it’s all kind of a blur. Most of them are not famous. Most of them were just run of the mill. We did a lot of German movies, we did some Spanish, but mainly French. And then every now and then we would get what was called ‘soft porn’, and often they were German movies. And you know, in those days we were paid by the line. There were a certain number of letters that would make up a line, so you got, like, I don’t know… 10 cents a line or whatever it was that would all add up. And if you were making a noise or doing something other than saying a word, they would put ‘HHH’ on the band. So, three HHH’s was a line. So when you’re doing soft porn and you’re just breathing, you get paid for that! And I remember when dubbing these movies and doing a scene where you’re having sex, and it’s like “Aaaah! Aaaah!”, and I just kept thinking “Another 10 cents! Another 10 cents!” That was so silly, but funny memories!

 

RC: When French dubbing actors do porn dubbings today, they’ll say: “We’re doing HHH!”

 

BJ: Oh, they still say that? Isn’t that funny?

 

Should a Schoolgirl Tell? (1969) was one of the numerous German soft porn movies dubbed by Bruce. He provided the voice of Ronald Nitschke, seen here with the film's leading lady Barbara Capell, whose voice was supplied by Bruce's frequent dubbing partner Sylviane Mathieu.

 

RC: So, you enjoyed your life in Paris?

 

BJ: Oh, my God, yes! I did! I’d studied French at the Alliance Française, Boulevard Raspail, and because I was, like, 20, I picked up French pretty quickly. But I never intended to stay and I certainly never had any vision of doing any dubbing or anything like that. It was just serendipity. It just happened. It was the right timing, because there was a huge backlog of movies to be dubbed for American television, and burgeoning desire for content with all the new independent TV stations. They were coming up all over the country and they were looking for product, and there were all these movies from Europe that hadn’t been dubbed into English, so I was just lucky I was there at the right time.

 

RC: Why did you decide to go back to the US?

 

BJ: I was turning 30 and a friend of mine, for whom I’d worked before, was building a television network called Kaiser Broadcasting, and he said: “You’re gonna be 30 and an expatriate. Don’t you want to come back to America and get a career?” And I thought “Okay!” And the business was slowing. It was getting harder to get jobs dubbing. So, I then launched a career in the television business, and I ran a TV station here and then I was in what we call syndication, distribution, international sales for television product, and then most recently I was president of the National Association of Television Program Executives. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it or not. NATPE. It’s no longer, but it was an international meeting place once a year for people to come and sell television product. So, quite a different direction. Very different.

 

RC: And you are also very passionate about opera…?

 

BJ: That’s my passion, yeah. I love that! We have a house near Toulouse, so I go to the Toulouse opera house when I can, and now we’re moving house to near Aix-en-Provence, and there’s a lot of opera there – the Festival d’Aix and so on. We just watched a series called Étoile, which is all about French opera. I follow opera singers all around the world, and I go every year to Pesaro in Italy for the Rossini Festival. I love the Rossini Bel Canto period, and there’s a Rossini Festival every August, so I love going to that. Nothing to do with dubbing! [laughs]

Well, great. This was a real pleasure. I enjoyed this.

 

* * * 

 

Rémi are extremely grateful to Bruce for his kindness in taking the time to share so many wonderful memories, which will no doubt be of greatly appreciated by everyone with an interest in the ever fascinating subject of English language dubbing.