Interview with Paul Goldfield

 

American musician and writer Paul Goldfield moved to Rome as a young boy in the 1960s, and during his teenage years, he became a good friend of Andy and Steven Luotto, the sons of the great Gene Luotto, who was one of the best and most respected of the English dubbing directors in Rome. Before long, Paul was asked to join them in the dubbing sala and ended up working on a number of films dubbed by Gene Luotto during the 1960s and 70s.

On September 13, 2025, I had the pleasure of joining Paul, who is still living in Rome, for a chat on Zoom, during which Paul reminisced about dubbing spaghetti westerns, horror films and Fellini classics with the Luottos, his career as a musician and a lot of fascinating details about the more technical intricacies of the dubbing process back in those days.

 

Johan Melle: Can you tell me a little bit about your background? Where are you from and how did you and your family end up moving to Rome?

 

Paul Goldfield: I’m originally from America. I was born in Phoenix, Arizona. My mother and father decided to move to Israel in 1960, and so we lived in Israel for a while, and then we moved to New York, and then we ended up in Rome. My father was, shall we say, an adventurer, so we just moved around a lot. I’ve been all over the place! I was in Rome from 1962 till about 1969 when I went back to the States for school. Then I came back over here, and then I went to live in Los Angeles in 1976, where I worked in the recording studios until about 1989. Then I came back here. So I started out with dubbing and then went into music.

 

JM: You attended the Overseas School of Rome, didn’t you?

 

PG: Yes, I did.

 

JM: Is that where a lot of young dubbers were recruited from?

 

PG: Yeah… actually, I got into dubbing because I was friends with Gene Luotto’s son, Andy, and he went to the Overseas School as well. So, yeah, there were a lot of young students there. Dubbing was a funny thing because it took a lot of time sitting there and watching it for a while before they would let you try it, and just because I was friends with Andy and later with Steve, I ended up spending a lot of time in the dubbing studio. So that kind of helped me figure out how to do it.

And Gene did a lot of films. He was always dubbing something! Nick Alexander was another dubbing director who was always doing a lot of things, and Geoffrey Copleston was another one. There were several other ones, but I can’t remember their names – this was a long time ago!

Gene was first of all very good at writing. He could write things that came out of people’s mouths, which made it a lot easier. He was very erudite and very funny, and he just kind of let us be crazy. We were young boys and he’d always let us go nuts and then he’d rein us back in and say: “Okay, now we have to do this!” Then we’d slowly go through it and actually do the job, but it was a lot of fun. It was a very enjoyable thing to do.

 

JM: Do you remember your very first dubbing job and how that came about?

 

PG: You know, I don’t actually remember the first film I dubbed, but I do remember the first dubbing session I watched. I don’t remember the name of the film but Gene and Andy were working together. Gene was a horticulturist and Andy was his assistant, and I remember Gene’s line: “It’s Aftalana Purpurea. It’s difficult to find one with the colors so gaudy.” And I remember I was just hooked. It was a funny line and I loved it! [laughs]

Andy and Steve were just brought up in this, but I needed a little more help, and Gene taught me how to make my voice younger by speaking in my nose, and older by speaking from my chest. Gene was very good in setting up the dubbing session in that he used to put stripes in the film, so you knew when your line was supposed to start. Once it was written correctly, it was actually not that hard to do. If you just knew when to start, it generally fit right in somebody’s mouth, and then Gene could advance it or delay it by a frame or so if he needed to.

The hardest part of dubbing was coming up with the character. You’d have to listen to the original Italian actor and then create your own characterization from that.

There were a lot of horror films, and some of them you’ll know, like the Mario Bava and Dario Argento films. I remember doing those. And the Fellini films were the best ones. Amarcord (1973) is the one I remember coming out the best. That was a wonderful film and Gene did a fantastic job with it.

 

Gene Luotto (1925-2011), shown here being interviewed by Istituto Luce during a dubbing session in 1986.

 

JM: Yeah, tell me a little more about the dubbing of Amarcord. You, Andy and Steve all did several voices in it?

 

PG: Yes, we did several voices in that, and Gene would kind of parcel it out: “Okay, you do this guy, you do that guy”, and then we’d go through and mess around with it. The thing that was so wonderful about Gene was that he took great care with the script. So as long as you knew where to start and how you were supposed to do it, it was fairly easy to do, so it moved kind of fast with Gene. Some of the other directors were a little more improvisational and you had to kind of figure it out as you went along.

 

JM: I know that Federico Fellini was one of the few Italian directors that actually cared about the English language versions of his films. Was he present during the dubbing sessions?

 

PG: Fellini was there at the Amarcord dubbing sessions, but he never came out of the booth. He observed but he didn’t really participate in any way. He just let Gene do what he was doing. But that particular movie came out so well in English that very often it’s projected in English still! The original was something that wouldn’t really have resonated with Americans in any way. It’s about growing up in a small Italian town, and Fellini gave Gene a lot of license to create something that would mean something to Americans and foreigners. So that was Gene’s doing, but Fellini was overseeing the whole thing, though he never came in and he never spoke to us.

 

JM: So you didn’t have to audition or have your voice approved by Fellini, then?

 

PG: No, I never auditioned for a dubbing. There were some things where we would dub something and then the director would look at it, but as far auditioning like an actor would audition for something… no! That was pretty much left up to the dubbing director, who cast the roles and then brought people in.

The different types of films were kind of interesting. I mean, those were the days of spaghetti westerns and we did a lot of those! And then the Trinity films came out with Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, which were more comedic takes on the spaghetti western.

 

JM: I know Gene did both of the Trinity movies. Did you work on both of those?

 

PG: I worked on two Trinity movies, I think, yeah. I think I also worked on some Sergio Leone film, though it wasn’t The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). But there were a lot of cowboy films being made in those days! I mean, they actually had a cowboy village where they were shooting those things and it looked pretty much like a far west village.

 

Paul worked with Gene, Andy and Steve Luotto on the dubbing of the famous Trinity films.

 

JM: What types of roles would you typically do in those westerns? Were you bad guys, supporting roles, or…?

 

PG: The whole thing pretty much cut down to getting the accent right. Dubbing isn’t really acting. There’s only so far you can go with it because of what’s already there on the screen. So basically, your voicing is probably more like cartoon work in a way. Once you get the character right then you just have to keep zoned in on it and then the dubbing director keeps you in character with what it is.

Some of the dubbings were done in large groups where people would come up to the microphone, then sit down and go back and forth, while some films, like the more romantic ones – I did a bunch of Edwige Fenech films – were done with pretty much just two people in the studio, and more attention was paid to the interaction.

 

JM: Oh, so you did those movies about horny young schoolboys getting seduced by Edwige Fenech, then?

 

PG: There you go! I was the horny young schoolboy! [laughs]

They were also doing Hercules films, and some of those were a riot! They lent themselves to be really funny, and Gene used to let us be really funny and then get serious. I remember some crazy accents that came out of those. I think it was Steve at one point who had a line like “Down with the wicked queen!” and he did it with a New York accent. It was a riot!

 

JM: Did you typically have to do many takes to be able to get the lines down right?

 

PG: The ones where there were a lot of interactions took a little bit longer. Yeah, it took a few takes. But if you’re doing it one-on-one it went quicker. It was most difficult to figure out where the line started. If there are several people interacting and people are talking over each other then that could get difficult, but Gene was good at figuring out how to make that obvious on the screen. “Follow the red line, Paul!” he’d say. “Follow the green line!” So at least we knew when to start. When it came across the screen and it hit the right side of the screen, you started talking.

And some of the ones where there were relatively few people doing a lot of parts took a little bit more time because you had to come up with different characterizations. But, you know, some films were more important than others. They took more time with the Fellinis than with, say, the Enrico Montesano films and things like that.

But also, for a lot of these films, the dubbing into English was only the beginning of the process. They would then be subtitled, so some of these things were almost impossible to watch by the time they got done subtitling, because it’d be Italian dubbed into English with, like, Turkish or Greek subtitles. You can hardly read that on the screen! But you know, Italian films were going all over the world, so they had to make them understandable somehow.

 

JM: About Montesano… the kind of comedies that he starred in typically had a lot of machine gun speed dialogue exchanges back and forth. Wasn’t that very difficult to dub?

 

PG: Well… the interesting thing about dubbing is that you’re not only dubbing the language. It’s a big part of it, but you’re also dubbing the culture. And it does no good to have a wonderful English script on top of Italian culture. It’s very jarring! So, the people who were really good at this would figure out a way to make it culturally work! And that was something that was kind of a grey area that was very interesting. It was one of the things that the better directors were really good at. Gene could take a Fellini film, which was strictly an Italian cultural experience, and turn it into something that was a little bit more universal.

Now, the horror films were different. That was more a question of getting the emotions right and the terror on the face and all of that stuff. With those you could move pretty fast once you got good at them. They were all fairly similar in that you were frightening people. But, yeah, with the Italian comedies, some of them came out better than others. A lot of it is getting the language right, because Italian can go much faster than English. Again, it’s a cultural thing. English is very synthetic and it can be more rhythmic. It lends itself more to cynicism and violence than the Italian language does. So it’s interesting the way they were able to get that across. Sometimes, the films came out very different!

 

JM: Of course, Gene was Italian-American, so I guess he had a bit of an advantage with that stuff.

 

PG: Yeah, he definitely had an advantage. Gene came over during WW2. He served in the military during WW2 and he stayed. Andy and Steve were born back in the States, because he was back there for a while. Then he came back to Rome, and Andy and Steve came over later. Andy came in 1967 or so, which was when I first met him, and then Steve came a year or so after that. We all graduated from school around 1969/1970.

Gene had Andy’s cousin, Clementina, work as his sala assistant, so she was always there and she kept all the records. There was a lot of paperwork with this because a lot of things were done multiple times and somebody had to keep track to take the first part of this and attach it to the second part of that and so on. Clementina was good at keeping all that straight.

 

JM: And she was also in charge of the sync?

 

PG: Yeah, she was in charge of the sync and also a lot of script stuff. People would need different scripts and sometimes things changed. They generally wouldn’t start dubbing until the movie was over and done and edited, but sometimes they would do some dubbing before the final edit for whatever reason, so she had more to do with those types of situations.

 

JM: But Gene also dubbed a lot of voices himself, doing accents and funny stuff. How did he become so good at that? Did he have a background in acting?

 

PG: You know, I don’t think so. Gene was really, really good at coming up with voices. He had an incredible range and could very often dub something for you just so that you would understand what kind of voice he wanted, but I don’t think he really had too much of a background in acting. It was more voices. But Gene’s father, André Luotto – Nonnu as he used to call him – was in radio advertising in New York City, and I think that may have been where Gene began with the voices. As a matter of fact, Gene could do rapid fire advertising voices really well. And Andy and Steve were around it constantly and they were really good at it.

And then there were a bunch of other actors, but it’s been such a long time that I don’t remember many of the names. But there was a huge dubbing community. Everybody belonged to the English Language Dubbers Association – ELDA – and I don’t know if any of the records are still left, but there were probably a whole bunch of names in those. And then there were some guys that Gene used to import from other places. I can’t remember the names, but some of these guys were really good at certain things, and they would kind of build some of the sessions around these guys. Those guys generally dubbed by themselves.

 

JM: In fact, I know that the lead in Amarcord was dubbed by an actor named Robert Lydiard, who was brought in from the US, but I don’t know if you ever met him…

 

PG: I can’t remember. We were pretty much just like a group of animals for Amarcord. [laughs] There was Andy, Steve and I and there was another one… From what I remember there were four young guys, and then there were some girls, too, one of whom was Clementina. I don’t know if there were hundreds of English language dubbers, but there were at least 20 or 30 or so people that Gene could call on. So, he could put together a pretty wide range of voices at any given time.

 

Paul's good friend Andy Luotto, shown here being interviewed about dubbing by Istituto Luce in 1986.

 

Steven Luotto in a rare on-screen appearance as a bad guy in the action thriller Top Line (1988), starring Franco Nero.

 

JM: But young voices were usually you, Andy or Steve?

 

PG: For young voices there were fewer options, but then again, women could be used for younger voices, too. And you know, not every part is so important that it’s necessary to have somebody that looks and sounds exactly right for the part. There are a lot of parts that are just a line here and a line there, and sometimes women would be used for that. We used to get thrown these things, like: “Figure out something for her to say there!” So it wouldn’t make that much difference if it was a woman or a man saying it. The process in some ways was pretty disorganized!

We also had a lot of crowd scene dubbings – brusio – where there’s a huge group of people with a voice or two sticking out, but it’s basically, like, twenty people in a room talking all at once. We did a lot of those.

The art in the dubbing was in the script, and that’s what Gene was really good at. He was really good with language, and in war movies and stuff where you had to sound German, Gene could just come up with three different German accents at the drop of a hat. He could do a lot of this stuff himself, and he did! But for young guys, I think there were probably six or seven of us that did most of the young people.

 

JM: There was a guy named John Thompson. Was he one of those that did younger voices?

 

PG: John Thompson was more of a director. I remember him. There were a bunch of American actors here at that time. Even Clint Eastwood was here. They were all doing spaghetti westerns.

 

JM: Roger Browne, who was president of ELDA for several years, told me that Gene often worked at a studio called Safa Palatino.

 

PG: Safa Palatino, yes. Above the Colosseum. We worked there, and also a lot at Fono Roma. There were a lot of dubbing studios in Rome in those days! There were about five or six dubbing studios at Safa Palatino. And there were a bunch of studios at Cinecittà.

 

JM: Were the studios basically the same in how they were equipped, or were there some that were more prestigious where the bigger films would be done?

 

PG: As far as the studio itself, they were all fairly similar. You don’t really need a big room to do dubbing in. It’s basically a projector and a screen. The microphone technique was interesting because the better sound engineers would use more than one mike. So, you could get like a room mike, which would allow the audio engineer to place people on the screen. Now, there wasn’t stereo in those days, but they could make it feel like people were further or closer to the mike, which could follow what they were seeing on the screen. That was another thing that Gene was very good at, moving people in an out of the mike. Which is another radio thing, and that’s why I think Gene kind of started from radio. The beginnings of radio were just all people moving around all the time, closer and further away from the mike. Mike technique was very important! In dubbing, it wasn’t so much, because they were recording everything to 35mm magtape – it wasn’t going out live! It was harder to do radio than it was dubbing, I’m sure.

 

JM: You mentioned Nick Alexander earlier. What do you remember about him? Did you work much for him?

 

PG: Yeah, I worked for Nick somewhat. But you know, the directors were all fairly the same. The better ones were the ones that were good with language. There’s a lot of technique in dubbing and getting it to look like it’s coming right out of the mouth, and that was all sync, and advancing and delaying the film and all that. But the language part of it was more important. Nick was really good at the American films. Things came out sounding more American with Nick, whereas Gene was more… well, it’s not that Gene wasn’t American, but Gene’s films had little bit more of an Italian tinge to them than Nick’s did.

I can’t remember the names of the films I did with Nick. Do you know the names?

 

JM: Well, he did a lot of the Dario Argento movies if you worked on those. Like Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) and Deep Red (1975).

 

PG: Hmm… it could be.

 

JM: And there were also many similar types of films that were not done by Argento himself. One was of course Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971) that you worked on for Gene. I sent you a video clip and you recognized yourself as the voice of that guy who ended up being impaled by a spear while having sex.

 

PG: Oh, yes, yes! The Duke! I think the character I dubbed in that was called the Duke. “The Duke at your service!” I remember that line for some reason. And we had fun with that because I wanted to say “The Duke at your cervix!” and Gene said “Yeah. Yeaaah… NO!” [laughs] We had a lot of fun with those things.

 

Paul dubbed the voice of Duke (Guido Boccaccini), one of the many ill-fated characters in Mario Bava's famous giallo A Bay of Blood.

 

Check out the video below for a few clips of Paul’s dubbing performance in A Bay of Blood: 

 

 

JM: How did you and the other dubbers generally feel about the films you worked on? I understand that many considered them to be bad.

 

PG: Well, a lot of them were pretty bad! I mean, all the Italian romantic comedies were really bad. [laughs] I was lucky enough to be involved with some Fellini films and those were all wonderful. And there were a lot of spaghetti westerns. I don’t remember how many spaghetti westerns we dubbed, but they were just shoveling them out, and most of those were pretty bad, too.

I’m trying to remember some of the other directors, because there were a lot of dubbing directors! There was one who had a Latin name. He was an actor who ended up doing some dubbing, too. He acted in horror films. The Incredible Melting Man (1977)!

 

JM: Oh, you mean Alex Rebar?

 

PG: Alex Rebar! Yes!

 

JM: Was he around for long? Did he do a lot of directing?

 

PG: I don’t know about a lot, but he did dubbing. Most of the actors did… no. No, that’s not true. Most of the actors did not do dubbing directing. That was a difficult thing to do. The directing part of it was pretty difficult. The dubbing part of it could be done with a little bit more leeway, but the script had to be right or it just wouldn’t fly. And Nick and Gene, and also Geoffrey Copleston were good at it, and those are the three I think I remember most, but there were a lot of them!

 

JM: Yeah, there was Lew Ciannelli. Ted Rusoff. Frank von Kuegelgen.

 

PG: Lew Ciannelli. I remember that name, yes. I did some work for Ted. And I worked quite a bit for Frank von Kuegelgen as a matter of fact.

 

JM: Then there was Larry Dolgin.

 

PG: Larry Dolgin, yes! I remember Larry very well! He could learn anything from a book. [laughs] Excuse me, I’m a musician, so I just remember this. Larry decided that he wanted to learn to play the guitar, so he got a book and taught himself to play the guitar. And he did a lot of commercials. He was Captain Findus in Italian commercials and was on TV all the time.

 

JM: Captain Findus…? What was that?

 

PG: Findus did frozen fish products. Captain Findus was the star in those commercials and he was played by Larry. It was dubbed into Italian but he was the face.

 

Dubbing actor/director Larry Dolgin.

 

PG: And… let me see if I remember some these others. There was a dubber they used to bring in from Paris all the time who was really good.

 

JM: Marc Smith maybe? Or Fred Neumann?

 

PG: Could be. I think it’s lost to me. But I remember Gene used to bring him in regularly. He was good at rapid dialogue.

 

JM: Richard McNamara was another dubbing director.

 

PG: No, that name I don’t remember. But that’s what I mean. There were a lot of directors. There were really a lot! They were making a lot of films in Italy at that point and they had to go someplace, so they were dubbing almost all of them. And of course there was the whole Italian scene going in the other direction – from English into Italian. But I never really went to those films. I do remember seeing John Wayne in Italian and that was just so disconcerting that I couldn’t go back. [laughs]

 

JM: I know that several dubbers were sometimes farmed out to Spain or Germany for dubbing jobs. Were you ever sent abroad to dub?

 

PG: Yeah, they used to bring people in, too, from other places. But, no, all the dubbing I ever did was in Rome. I think I might have taken a train to Milan a time or two, but mostly it was here, and most of the dubbing I did was for Gene. By far most of the dubbing I did was for him. And then I did some for Nick Alexander and Geoffrey Copleston. I think maybe Copleston did the Edwige Fenech films.

 

JM: And Geoffrey Copleston was quite active as an on-screen actor as well.

 

PG: Yeah, he was. And a lot of the teachers at my school did some films, too. As a matter of fact, my English teacher, Desmond O’Grady, ended up in Fellini’s 8½ (1963).

 

JM: What about you? Did you appear in any films?

 

PG: No, I never acted. I went from dubbing to music.

 

JM: You played the drums?

 

PG: I played drums and percussion, yes. I played live. I went on the road with some people. I played in different orchestras. But mostly I worked on soundtracks. I played a lot for Bill Conti. A lot of Sylvester Stallone movies – the Rocky soundtracks.

 

Famed composer Bill Conti.

 

JM: How did you get to know Bill Conti? Did you know him from Rome? Because I know he was there for a time.

 

PG: When my family ended up here in Rome in the 1960s, my father eventually opened a bookstore called the Economy Book and Video Center, and this was like a meeting place for American and British expats. Bill had come over here to do the Prix de Rome. He’d studied composition at Juilliard and then came to Rome to study at the American Academy. And while he was here, he was hired by an Australian author named Morris West to teach his son music. Bill and his wife Shelby taught Morris West’s son privately, and I met Bill through that. So, my first musical experiences were with Bill, and he encouraged me to study music. I was kind of diddling around on the drums, and he suggested that I go to the Santa Cecilia music conservatory here in Rome, which I did. And then I went back to the States and studied at the University of Colorado, and in 1976 I met Bill in Munich, where I was working during the disco period. He suggested that I come to Los Angeles to see what was going on there, so I moved to Los Angeles and lived there and worked with Bill till I went back to Rome in 1989. So, I was in Los Angeles for 13 years and I played on most of Bill’s soundtracks from that period.

 

JM: And he did a lot of great soundtracks!

 

PG: Yeah, he also did a lot of theme songs for TV shows, like Cagney & Lacey. I got to work a lot with Bill and he also did a lot of pop concerts, so I was on the road with him a lot, working with different symphony orchestras. So that was probably most of what my musical career was back there. I also had my own recording studio for a while and did voice overs and things in Los Angeles.

 

JM: And didn’t you also work with Bill on the soundtrack for The Right Stuff (1983), which won the Oscar for best score?

 

PG: Yes, as a matter of fact I played on that.

 

JM: That’s so cool that you sort of won the Oscar. Or… contributed to it, that is.

 

PG: Well… Bill won the Oscar! [laughs] I played the xylophone, though.

 

The terrific soundtrack album for The Right Stuff that Paul participated on.

 

JM: You were also part of the New Folkstudio Singers in Rome in the 1970s. Tell me a bit about that experience.

 

PG: Oh, my God! Where did you dig that up from? [laughs] Yes, I played with the New Folkstudio Singers, that’s right. They were a gospel group, and the Folkstudio was a club in Trastevere where they did jazz and folk music. And that was really some of my earliest musical experiences. From Bill I kind of ended up in clubs, and playing with the Folkstudio Singers I used to go up to Switzerland and do Swiss TV all the time. The Folkstudio Singers toured Italy pretty wide. We played in France and I think maybe even in Germany. They were a black group. One of the few black groups here in Italy at the time.

 

JM: There was also an earlier incarnation of the group, and I think only the Hawkins brothers remained from the original group, yes?

 

PG: Jesse and Eddie, yes. Oh, Eddie was a character!

 

JM: Another vocalist in the group was Nat Bush, who also used to play small roles in films, including some Lucio Fulci horror movies. Do you remember him?

 

PG: Yes, I think he used to sing with that group, too. I remember his presence more – I don’t remember him singing very well. And there was a really good female singer, Hazel Rogers. I remember the guitar player was Roberto Gardin. I played drums, and I think Roberto played guitar and bass at different times. And Mario Di Stasio was someone else who played for them. Oh, my God, you’re taking me back in time, Johan! [laughs]

As far as music goes, if you want to talk about that, there was a lot of jazz going on here. Jazz was big in Europe in general. There was a huge jazz scene in Paris, and there was a pretty good jazz scene here in Rome, too, and once again, everybody played at the Folkstudio, so that’s where I met most of those people. Gato Barbieri was playing here in Rome and I got to play with him a bit. I played drums with Romano Mussolini. And I played with a trumpet player but… the names are pretty much gone, sorry. But there were many clubs where there was a lot of jazz going on, and a lot of American jazz musicians who were living in Paris were coming down here. Some of the bop guys had like a bit of a reincarnation in Paris in later years and I got to play a bit with them. But most of my musical activities began with bands in the 60s, playing for dances and normal things like that and then I got lucky enough to meet Bill and end up in Los Angeles. I was also in Munich for about a year and a half, playing with Ariola. When disco hit big, that was a big German thing.

Paul playing drums with the New Folkstudio Singers during a 1976 television concert.

  

JM: Getting back to the dubbing… if you were to make a very rough estimation, about how many films do you think you worked on?

 

PG: Hmm… Probably not all that many. I mean, I worked on most of Gene’s films, but that wasn’t like nearly all of the films being dubbed. So, I guess maybe I was on some 20 or 30 films. Something like that.

 

JM: And about how long would it take to dub a film?

 

PG: Well, I don’t know, because they would bring people in and it’s not like everybody did all the dubbing in one go. Most of the recording sessions that I did were generally four- or five-hour sessions. Some of the films where we were doing more complicated things might have taken a little longer to do, but I don’t think most films went on for more than four or five sessions. It’s really hard to say. Some of them they just went so fast on. They did terrible jobs on some of these films! A lot of the Italian comedies were almost impossible to dub, because the difference in language makes a good dubbing very difficult to do. So, some of these were done really quickly. But with the Fellini films and the De Sica films – I did a few of those, too – they took more care. Almost all of those were done by Gene.

 

JM: Yeah, he got most of the big movies, didn’t he?

 

PG: Gene definitely had the best reputation, so he did a lot of the good films, yes.

 

JM: Do you remember many of the other dubbers?

 

PG: Well, I remember Mike Forest, who was a big, huge, strapping guy. And Larry Dolgin. And I remember dubbing a few times with an actor named Tom Hunter, who was here doing westerns. But I mostly remember him because his daughter was friends with my sister. Most of the names are gone. It was just so long ago. I should have kept a diary. I kick myself for not having done that, and I never took any pictures either.

 

American actor and dubber Thomas Hunter (on the right) in The Hills Run Red (1966), one of several westerns he made in Italy. On the left is dubbing actor/director Geoffrey Copleston in one of his numerous on-screen appearances.

 

JM: Some of the most prolific male dubbers during those years were Ed Mannix, Frank Latimore, Bob Sommer, Tony La Penna (who was also a director), Bob Spafford (another director), Dan Sturkie, Edmund Purdom, Rodd Dana, Ken Belton and Frazier Rippy, and some of the ladies were Susan Spafford, Carolyn de Fonseca, Linda Gary, Silvia Faver, Pat Starke, Cicely Browne, Sally Amarù, Yvonne Pizzini and Joan Rowe. In case any of those names ring a bell.

 

PG: I do remember working with Bob Spafford, Yvonne Pizzini (she went to the Overseas School with us) and Joan Rowe, but I don’t remember any specifics.

 

JM: Yeah, realize this was indeed a very long time ago, and many of the dubbers from those days have unfortunately passed away.

 

PG: Well, we’re all getting older, that’s for sure. And also the moment when Italian films were popular has moved on, too. There probably aren’t as many Italian films being released in English anymore. But those things are constantly changing anyway.

The last dubbing I ever did was for Linda Davidson, who is the wife of an English teacher at the Overseas School, and that was after I’d come back from Los Angeles, so must have been in the early 1990s.

 

JM: Now, how did that come about? Because that was quite a few years after your initial dubbing days…

 

PG: Well, Linda called me. And I wonder if maybe she found out about me from the ELDA records, because that was probably the only way she could have gotten in touch with me. I don’t know if she knew Gene. He was still alive, so that could have had something to do with it, too. But I remember she called me and asked if I still did dubbing, and I said “Well, I haven’t done dubbing in many years, but I’m sure I could still give it a shot.” And that was a single session that lasted four or five hours, and it was the last dubbing I did. That was a long time ago, too.

 

JM: Was the technique still the same, or did you find that it had changed a lot since you last dubbed?

 

PG: Well, the technology of it was very much different. In the days when I started out, the problem with dubbing was syncing it. In other words, how do you get the audio in sync with the film? And the only way they could do that back in the olden days was to have sprocketed film. They had audio tape that looked just like 35mm film – the same width and the same amount of sprockets. So, the film and audio was actually physically synced. The motors were running synchronously and the machines were huge and very ungainly, and the big problem was driving them with the same amount of current in very often the same motors. Then later on, by the time I did my last dubbing, the SMPTE code had come along, so they could sync things digitally. You put a code on an audio tape and another code on another audio tape and you could sync those two machines together. You couldn’t do that in the old days of dubbing. They had to do it with sprockets. And then they would advance or retard the film or the audio by sprockets to get them to be well in sync. That was another thing that Clementina was very good at doing – keeping track of what gets advanced and what gets retarded as far as frames go. That was a headache!

 

JM: And you always worked in loops, right?

 

PG: That’s right. Yeah, that was another interesting part of it. They cut the 35mm film up into loops and then they cut audio tape exactly the same length. So that was another way that they would physically sync together. You’d hit play on the projector, and the 35mm mag machine would start as well, so they were always going backwards and forwards together. And that was just an incredibly cumbersome machine-oriented thing. That’s really why they had dubbing studios, because you needed space for all this equipment! You needed a 35mm projector and then you needed at least one, if not two, mag recorders. So that already was a lot of equipment, and then a lot of these things had exterior motors that were running different things. It was a technological nightmare and it’s amazing how they could get it to work!

Later on, when they started syncing 24-track recording machines together it got a lot easier. By the time I did that last dubbing for Linda Davidson, they were already using a normal multi-track recorder, so they were no longer using magtape.

 

JM: But the loops were pretty short, weren’t they? Like a minute or so in length…?

 

PG: Maybe more than a minute, though I don’t think anything was ever more than three or four minutes or it would start to get unwieldy. But just imagine the headache there. I mean, you’re cutting up a film into loops and you have to cut the audio tape into the same size loops, and then you have to put it all back together again!

 

JM: Yeah, couldn’t things go wrong when you did that?

 

PG: You bet! [laughs] Things could go really wrong! That’s like kind of a housekeeping thing. You know, somebody like Gene couldn’t keep track of both that and what people were doing on the screen. So, that’s what Clem was good at. Gene would tell her “Okay, we’re gonna have to retard that by three frames there,” and then Clem would make a note of it. And when I say retard by three frames, I’m referring to when they put the audio loop together with the film loop, and they’re going to retard or advance the audio by a number of frames. They had to do that physically. You couldn’t do it electronically. You had to count the frames and physically retard it, and then mixing it that way. And only at the very end would you see how it worked out. So that was painstaking. Really painstaking! But they did it, and they got really good at it. The Italians were really good at that, which still kind of amazes me because organization is not an Italian strong point. But they really pioneered that stuff.

 

JM: Do you remember if there were screenings of the finished result that the dubbers could attend?

 

PG: Yes, sometimes. For most of the better films, they would do a screening. And sometimes they did a screening before we dubbed it, for us to see the film. And I remember the Fellini films all had a screening afterward and we got to actually see the film. But that wasn’t done so much for the dubbers. That was done more for the director or the producer, but if he could invite people in, Gene would have us come in and be able to watch.

 

JM: I see. You know, this is all very fascinating to me. From what you’re telling me, it’s actually quite incredible that these films could turn out so well!

 

PG: You’re right. It’s actually amazing that it worked. Dubbing was my first exposure to recording, and I was used to these enormous machines that were used, so then when I got into music, all of a sudden it became 24-track unsprocketed tape, and I couldn’t see how that could possibly work. [laughs] But The Beatles did all kinds of incredible things with 4-tracks, so people do learn how to deal with limitations.

Another thing that they ended up doing with magfilm is going from single mono film, they managed to get it so that you could have six different tracks on it. That made things a little bit easier in that you could overdub things. But I don’t remember doing too much of that when I was dubbing. I remember doing multiple takes of things, but they combined them some other way. I never did see how that was done. They never did that with the dubbers there.

But, yeah. It’s amazing how well it worked. Just imagine cutting up an entire film of very often ten reels of 35mm tape. That’s a lot of tape! And to cut that all up into loops and keep it in order. And they’re using scotch tape to tape this stuff together, and then they had to take it all apart – get all the tape off the film and put it back together! It was amazing that they could do that! I mean, cutting the film into loops is one thing. That was just a question of sitting at a Moviola and cut it here and cut it there. But then how do you get the same amount of audio film? You know, it sounds like, oh sure, just measure it, but how do you measure it? It’s like five minutes of visual film. That’s hundreds of feet of magtape! You can’t do it by measuring it! They had these special machines that you’d roll them off and it would roll the same amount of tape and… oh, God! I was never involved in any of that, but I could just imagine what a headache that must have been.

So, yes, it was incredible that it worked, and it was because they had really good people doing it. Gene was phenomenal! He was a very erudite gentleman. He was funny, he was intellectual, he was well-read, and all of that made a big difference in the product that he turned out. I appreciated him. He was a wonderful man. I was also a friend of the family, so I’d go and spend my summer vacations with Andy and Steve. Gene had a sailboat and I learned to sail with them, and ended up doing some of that in my life as well. Yeah, Gene was just a wonderful guy. He was truly inspiring.

 

JM: Have you watched Amarcord in its English version in more recent times?

 

PG: I think the last time I saw it was in a theater in Los Angeles, so I don’t think I’ve seen it since the 1980s. But that last time I saw it, I was amazed. It did hold up! And that wasn’t so much for anything that we dubbers did, it was for what Gene did. That he turned it into something that meant something to an American audience, which is really quite an accomplishment.

 

Fellini's Amarcord.

 

JM: Yes, I think it plays very, very well in English, and it’s really funny!

 

PG: Yeah, that was kind of the feeling I got when I saw it. I said: “I can’t believe that this worked out so well!” And from what I’ve heard, it gets projected even now in English very often.

 

JM: And that certainly isn’t always the case with these films. In fact, when many of these more important films are being released on Blu-ray today, the English dubs are often left out, so I’m glad the English version of Amarcord remains widely available.

 

PG: Yeah, that was good. I remember that long after ELDA had disappeared, there was a meeting where they called a bunch of ELDA people together and we all gathered and talked about the history and just remembering some of the films and the directors that did them and things. And the film that everybody was most proud of was Amarcord, because it came out so well and seems to have had the most impact on people. But a lot of that isn’t so much for the dubbing – it was just a great film! I mean, you take a great film and you do a good job with the dubbing, then you know, it works! But that was Gene. I can’t take that much credit for anything I did, because Gene was telling me what to do. He made it very clear what we had to do!

 

JM: Yes, but still… not everyone can do dubbing well. Someone can be a very good actor, but not be able to dub well.

 

PG: No, no absolutely. You’re right. It’s a different technique. Acting is more creative in the sense that you’re actually creating the character from the beginning. You have a restriction with dubbing because the performance is there on the screen and you have to fit your part into what’s on the screen. That’s a different technique than acting, but you know, it’s like a muscle – you get good at it. And also, with a lot of the dubbing that you do, you get called back to do the same actor again. You become the voice of this Italian actor, and you get used to their timing so it becomes easier to do the more that you do the person. I mean, Oreste Lionello does an incredible Woody Allen in Italian. He gets it all and manages to get Woody’s timing and everything just right. It’s just a different language coming out of his mouth, which is bizarre beyond comprehension, but yeah.

 

JM: Did that happen with you, too, that you dubbed the same actor on several occasions?

 

PG: Oh, yeah. Often. I mean, for me it wasn’t so many of the famous actors, but there were a lot of actors that kind of did the same thing over and over again. And so you’d very often get called on to do that same person again. Which made it easier for the people who were dubbing, but also for the people who were doing the dubbing directing because that was one less thing they had to worry about.

 

JM: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, well, thank you very, very much for taking the time to do this, Paul! It’s been fun and really interesting to listen to your memories.

 

PG: It was a pleasure. I’m glad to be able to talk to you about this, and to remember some of it, because it was a long, long time ago!