Interview with Lawrence McCormick

 

Throughout the years, a great many people have worked with English dubbing in Rome. Some made it their livelihood and worked in the business for more than 40 to 50 years, whereas others only did it on the side for a certain period of time, but the common denominator with most of these people is that dubbing is something they fell into by chance. Not for everyone, though. For some, dubbing was what you might call a family affair. Such was the case for Italian-American voice actor Lawrence McCormick, whose mother, Giulia Patriarca, was a prolific dubbing actress in the 1960s and 70s, and whose stepfather, Christopher Cruise, was one of the town’s most important English dubbing directors all through the 60s, 70s and 80s. Lawrence himself got in on the game at the start of the 1990s and quickly rose through the ranks and became a prolific voice heard in hundreds of films, cartoons and documentaries from the 1990s and 2000s. Check out the video below for clips of a few of Lawrence’s most high-profile dubbing performances:

 

 

In July 2026, I had the pleasure of chatting with Lawrence about his career, and in this interview, he recounts a lot of great memories from his fun-filled days in the Roman dubbing salas, working for such iconic dubbing directors as Nick Alexander, Ted Rusoff, Gene Luotto and Frank von Kuegelgen. Enjoy!

 

Johan Melle: Can you can tell me something about the life and career of your stepfather, Christopher Cruise? I don’t know much about him, but I do know his voice very well, however, and would recognize his delightfully glass-sharp RP accent anywhere!

 

Lawrence McCormick: Christopher was born in 1933 and was classically trained at Stratford in England, his friends included Michael Caine and Vanessa Redgrave. Chris used to joke that he tweaked his back carrying Laurence Olivier during a play in his early days. He moved to Italy in the 1950s and lived his life in Rome. He first met my mother Giulia Patriarca – who was also a dubber – in the 1960s while he was working as both dialogue director and dubbing director.

He worked with Luchino Visconti and was a good friend and collaborator of Federico Fellini. While he did more than a few acting jobs, most of his career was as a writer of many English adaptations, dubbing director, and dialogue director – most notably, he worked with Jean-Jacques Annaud on the movie The Name of the Rose (1986).

Chris stopped directing around 1990, but kept writing for the movies for a full decade after that. He spent the last 15 years of his life in Todi (Umbria), writing a novel on the life of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. The book is called The Edge of the Nest, and was published a decade ago.

Christopher passed away in 2023, and unfortunately, I don’t know much of the vast body of film work he did.

 

JM: Please forgive my ignorance, but I’m not entirely certain about what the difference is between a dubbing director and a dialogue director. Is a dialogue director someone who is present on the set to help the actors with their English during shooting, kind of like a dialogue coach...? Does that mean Chris was present during the filming of The Name of the Rose and Fellini’s movies etc?

 

LM: As far as I recall, a dialogue director is indeed akin to a dialogue coach, but they usually also have a say on the script itself, and actually provide direction during the shoot. Chris rewrote/edited several sections of that script, and he was indeed on-set during the shooting of The Name of the Rose. He is credited with helping Jean-Jacuques Annaud make changes and refine the English script, which was so important in that movie as the monks came from many different geographical areas. He was also a dialogue coach on Fellini’s Casanova.

 

Lawrence's stepfather Christopher Cruise (1933-2023).

 

JM: What about your mother Giulia’s background? Is she 100% Italian? And McCormick… is that an Irish name?

 

LM: My mom married an American whose name was McCormick, yes, and my blood is originally Irish. I was born in the States, but my parents divorced when I was four years old, and my mom moved me and my brother, who was two years old at the time, back to Italy. So, I grew up in Italy, and I did all my schools and college and everything there. I moved to the States when I was 40 in 2008.

My mother was born in Italy and has lived all her life there, with the exception of those five years where she moved to the States and married my dad – in 1967, I think, and then she moved back to Italy in 1972. Her father is Italian – 100% Roman, but her mother on the other hand is half Irish and half Belgian, so there’s a more cosmopolitan side to the family there. The Belgian side of the family had a house in the south of France. So definitely more international English and French were always spoken in my mother’s family. She began dubbing in the 1950s, when she was just sixteen years old, and worked a lot in the 60s and 70s.

But what got you into this research for dubbing and voice over acting? This is surprising to all of us.

 

JM: Yeah, I can imagine you were surprised to be contacted by a guy from Norway about this. The thing is that Norway is not a dubbing country. We subtitle basically everything except cartoons and children’s movies. So, I haven’t grown up with dubbing, but I’ve always been a film buff and especially fond of horror movies, and as a teenager, I began to discover Italian horror movies. I watched all the Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava movies, and they were all dubbed into English. And at first, I found it a little strange to watch movies that were entirely post-synchronized as it’s rather different than what I was used to, but I quickly got used to it and I really, really liked a lot of the voices. I mean, there were just so many good and really characteristic voices that helped to elevate and bring a lot of the on-screen performances alive. Great, great voices, and let me tell you, if you have seen a certain amount of Italian movies, you start to recognize a lot of these voices.

 

LM: Absolutely! The company in Rome that I worked for, and then was president of, was called ARA – Associated Recording Artists – and it had its independent operation up until maybe the end of the 1990s and then it merged its operation with the CVD – Cine Video Doppiatori – which is one of Italy’s biggest dubbing cooperatives. They do almost exclusively Italian voice over acting, but we shared their offices for a while and I can confirm to you that it’s a small silo of a few dozen actors who are very protective of their roles and very skittish at including or expanding job availability to anybody else. There’s a lot of work, but there’s not infinite work if you think of it, so you really hear the same voices over and over, especially in Italian voice over.

I don’t know how interested you are in small anecdotal things, but the voice actor that dubs Robert De Niro in Italian [Ferruccio Amendola] is the same voice actor that also dubs Al Pacino. I don’t know if that has changed now, because those guys are both old now, but I remember clearly this episode in which the American film director wanted to change the voice, because Al Pacino was playing a much younger character and so he asked for the Italian voice over actor to be a different one, and it caused a huge issue in Italy! Because this actor was, like, “I’m the voice of Al Pacino and nobody else can be Al Pacino’s voice!” and all that. It’s kind of weird, because everything in Italy is dubbed, so if you’ve heard Al Pacino’s voice for the past 35 or 40 years, and it’s always the same guy, then to the Italian audience it would be awkward to hear a different voice. Whereas from the American director’s standpoint, it was, like, “What’s the problem here? This is a movie. I decide. I cast the actors, I cast the voices.” So, it was a big debate and, in the end, the director bowed and had the original actor do the role, but I thought it was uniquely interesting at the time, because I personally agree with the movie director. I think it should be cast by them, and who cares if you have your own little walled garden of privilege and you’re considered Al Pacino’s voice?

 

JM: I think that’s very interesting what you said there, and I think it highlights one of the biggest differences between Italian and English dubbing: namely, that in Italian dubbing, the dubbers are often quite famous as the voice of this or that star, whereas the English dubbers were more anonymous, because from what I understand, the point was that they didn’t want anyone to know these films were dubbed into English.

 

LM: Absolutely! It became a big market. I mean, a lot of this started in the 1950s, when my stepdad Christopher moved to Italy from England, and those were the glorious days of Cinecittà. There were a lot of big American productions and when Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas and all these big American stars were there shooting films there, they all acted in English, of course, but many of the extras and all the smaller roles were hired locally. They were dialogue coached to act with a faltering English so that at least the lips moved more or less in the right direction and then everything was post-produced and dubbed over by English speaking actors. So, as you correctly say, we were mostly anonymous, because top roles were hardly ever dubbed – it was always the smaller extras and supporting roles.

 

JM: The only ones who were sometimes credited were the dubbing directors. Very often in movies from the 1970s, the ending titles have a credit for Nick Alexander as dubbing editor. And Nick was tracked down and interviewed by a couple of publications in the late 90s and early 2000s and that’s how a lot information on who the big English dubbers were first came to light, and it’s how I learned about people like Ted Rusoff, Carolyn De Fonseca, Pat Starke, Frank von Kuegelgen, Bob and Susan Spafford and so on.

 

LM: Oh, my. Frank von K! Yeah, these are all friends of my parents. I know some of them. Nick was my mentor. He actually gave me my first dubbing voice over turn and we’re talking about probably 1990 or 1991, I’d say. Something like that. Nick was a really good friend of Christopher’s, and they were two of the big dubbing directors in town who did most of the work. Ted Rusoff did some stuff, and Gene Luotto did a lot of stuff at the time, too, including many of the bigger movies. Christopher was always the more classically educated of the group. He went to acting school in Stratford-upon-Avon and acted with Laurence Olivier. Then he came to Italy on vacation and fell in love with the country and so he moved there. And that was sort of the end of his acting career, because who needs an English actor in Rome? But that’s when he started figuring out another way to use his talents locally. Nick was a really good friend of his and I’m almost the same age as Nick’s daughter, Jane, who is a good friend of mine. She became somewhat of a TV personality and an actress in Italy, but she has this family love for voice over acting and dubbing, so she still today, even though she doesn’t need to, will be doing some adaptation or dubbing direction herself sometimes.

 

Iconic dubbing director Nick Alexander (1940-2004) photographed in a London pub in 2002. This picture was featured in Alan Jones' tome on Dario Argento called Profondo Argento - The Man, the Myths & the Magic, for which Nick was interviewed.

 

JM: So, you and Jane both basically grew up around dubbing then?

 

LM: Well, you know, I grew up in a family where my stepdad was doing this all the time, but I was in high school when he was doing The Name of the Rose and all these bigger operations. I was just a kid. Then I went to college and I remember two or three years out of high school, my mother told me “Oh, if you’re going on that side of town, could you please drop by the offices of ARA and pick up a check for me?” There was a check waiting for her for some job that she’d done, and so I dropped by the office, and it must have been 1990-1991, I think, and the office of ARA was in the Parioli area of Rome. I remember walking into the office and Frank von Kuegelgen, who was the president of ARA at the time, was there. I kind of knew him because he was a friend of my parents, and we shook hands, and as I was leaving, he said: “Hey, have you ever considered doing any acting yourself?” I was, like: “No!” And he asked: “Would you like to do some?” And I thought why not? I was in college and I needed to make some extra money, and just literally a week later, I got a call from him, saying: “There’s a small role with Nick Alexander. He’s happy to coach you through it.”

And so I did my very first dubbing turn with Nick, and he was just a great guy. He taught me everything and coached me through it. He used to correct me all the time, because my English is kind of a weird English. I was born in the States, but having moved to Italy when I was four years old, I come across with a pretty mid-Atlantic and nondescript accent, and some of the nuances of American speaking are, or at least were at the time, a little bit foreign to me. So he would always correct me on some of those things, but I guess he liked me. I used to play in his house with his daughter when we were kids, so it was almost like being with family, and I started doing a lot of work. As my voice is higher pitched, I was often cast as a young adult or a boy.

At that time, it was mostly cartoons – endless amount of cartoons! In those days, I remember a lot of the cartoons were animated in Korea or the Far East somewhere, and in order to commercialize and sell these productions, they needed them to be in English. So, they were looking for a place to do the dubbing, and the Italian voice over and dubbing market was incredibly well-developed and very highly professional. Everything in Italy was dubbed and we had a big, big operation because of the 50s and 60s and the industry that started in those years. Italy actually had some of the best sound directors and sound recording studios in Europe at the time. They were all developed through 60s because there were these huge American productions happening there – not in France, not in England, not in Germany, but they were in Italy. There was a lot of acting, there was a lot of sound directors, and a lot of studios, and because of the competition, the costs were relatively low. Way better and more convenient than dubbing and voice over in the United States, where almost nothing was getting voiced over in English, as you can imagine. A lot of these productions came through Italy, before going to be sold in the States. All these Cocco Bill, Spaghetti Family and endless other cartoons we did – sometimes acting multiple characters or making “funny mouse voices” and things like that. Those were good, fun years! Most of us don’t… or, well… most of us remember some of those cartoon series, but of course, we were always eager to recall and remember the more important roles that we did for bigger movies. Since you like horror movies, I voiced over a German horror movie called Anatomy (2000), so you can check that out.

 

Lawrence dubbed a bunch of animated series for Mondo TV, such as Sandokan - The Tiger of Malaysia (1998), in which he provides the voice of the young Indian boy Kammamuri, one of the main characters in the series.

 

Lawrence is the voice of computer whiz Silvio Spaghetti in the well-received animated comedy series Spaghetti Family (2003). It was one of those rare instances where the voice actors were actually credited.

 

In the video below, you can watch some examples of Lawrence voicing various cartoon characters:

 

 

JM: Yeah, I haven’t seen Anatomy, but it looks like a very interesting film. And of course, you mentioned to me earlier that you had dubbed Chang Chen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which was very surprising to me. I had no idea that film had been dubbed in Rome!

 

LM: There was actually an interesting backstory to that. As you know, subtitled movies in the United States have a struggle, because they’re seen as a very elite kind of high-end product that does not really fit to the American broader public. They don’t like reading. Americans are not particularly smart and not particularly educated. And, yeah, feel free to just say it: we’ve actually institutionalized that ignorance with the current president and his administration. England is more sophisticated, and they’re used to receiving a lot of German, French and Italian movies with subtitles, so there are a lot of people there who are used to watching subtitled movies. In the United States there really aren’t, and there’s always been that fight, so when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came out, the American production insisted on doing an English dubbed version of it. Frank von Kuegelgen directed the dubbing, but he passed away a few years ago and I don’t know all the details, but there was a problem there. The actors and the director, Ang Lee, were not told that the movie was getting dubbed into English, so the very first time it came out dubbed, I was told there was a big fight in the production with the director, the actors and everything. Which is the reason why it’s very hard to find the English version today. I have a DVD that came out at the time, which has several language options, including the English, but if you go and rent it on a streaming service, you will not find the English version. The director was not happy with who had cast the voices, they were not happy with the English version in general, they wanted it all subtitled, and so, eventually, when it became a huge film and it won the Oscar, they pulled or at least minimized the distribution of the English version. But, yeah, that was a fun operation. That was probably the most important one I ever did. I still see that sometimes when I’m flying, and they show it on some screen.

Other than that, I really didn’t do many big films myself. Anatomy is other one I remember. I moved to the States in 2008, and almost immediately I got a call from Frank von Kuegelgen in Rome, and he connected me with Ron Howard’s production of Angels and Demons down in California. I don’t know if you remember, but Ron Howard directed a couple of movies based on the Dan Brown books: The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. Angels and Demons was entirely shot in Rome, and again, they had a lot of extras and a lot of police and radio chatter and military stuff that had to happen. They were doing post-production in Los Angeles at the Sony studios and Ron Howard really wanted something that was truly accurate that would pass the test of the foreign market. I had served in the Carabinieri and was a police officer when I was a kid, so they actually asked me to come down and consult for them, and so I did some of the extras myself for that movie. That was probably the last big thing that I did in terms of voice over. So, unfortunately, not a lot of interesting things for you. [laughs]

Lawrence dubbed the voice of Chang Chen in the meticulously prepared English version of the renowned Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Lawrence is also the voice of Benno Fürmann in the German horror film Anatomy - another English dub directed by Frank von Kuegelgen.

 

JM: No, I think all of this is really interesting! But unfortunately, there aren’t too many Italian movies from the 1990s and 2000s available in English, because the industry was kind of dying out by that point. They didn’t have all these genre movies like back in the 60s and 70s.

 

LM: Well, you should look at some of the movies of Tinto Brass, who was a very famous Italian erotic movie director, considered a good director even though he went off the mainstream there. Most of his movies were dubbed in English. I think the dubbing director was Gene Luotto, and I remember dubbing a couple of roles in those movies. But I agree there weren’t really many big Italian movies that were dubbed back then. I think most of the stuff that still came through in the 90s were either foreign produced and shot in Romania or somewhere in Asia, or cartoons, and that’s because I think the animation world in the Far East is way more developed than it is anywhere else in the world.

 

Lawrence dubs the voice of Matteo, the jealous boyfriend played by Jarno Berardi in the Tinto Brass film Transgressing (2000).

 

JM: I hope you don’t mind me asking this, but I’ve heard that another thing you guys used to dub in the 90s was porno movies.

 

LM: Yeah, absolutely! [laughs] I did a couple. I remember receiving this call about doing a turn – and a turn of dubbing is considered a three-hour session in a studio, and at the time, it was very well paid, because we were getting paid maybe 150-160 Euros, which was a lot of money for that time. But, yeah, I got a call from Frank at the office and he said: “Hey, you wanna do a turn? Oh, by the way it’s a porn. Do you have a problem with that?” and I was, like: “No. No problem!” So, I showed up in this decrepit and run-down studio where I’d never worked before. It was an awful place with bad smells, old worn carpets on the floor and cigarette butts everywhere, and the director was Ted Rusoff, who was sitting in the corner. And I mean, Ted looked like he was a homeless person when he was 45, so you can imagine what he looked like later on in his life – big chain-smoker and all. The entire situation looked like we were in some brothel in the outskirts of Vegas. It looked awful! But anyway, there was this young girl there that I’d never met before, and her name was Eleonora Baldwin. She’s gone on to become a food critic and has a very important blog online, and we still talk every now and again. So, we met there and we had not worked together ever, and that can get awkward with this type of film, you know? And I still remember what Ted Rusoff told us: “Okay, guys. You can just improvise and say whatever you want, because you know how it is. When we see their lips, they’re busy doing something else anyway.” Which made us all crack up, because the essence of dubbing is lip syncing, right? But in porn movies, you don’t have to. When they’re showing the faces, the faces are busy doing something else! [laughs] All the talking happens off-screen, so you can basically say whatever you want. And that was somewhat of an embarrassment at the beginning, because if somebody has written the dialogue down, you just read and act, but if you’re actually making it up yourself… well… that can be embarrassing in front of somebody you don’t know! I mean, what do you say? So, yeah, that was very awkward at the beginning, but then we kicked it off and it was really fun.

But of the two or three porn movies I did, that was actually not the worst. The worst experience for me was, thankfully, a single-track, so I wasn’t in the room with the other actress, because the gal who was playing the woman role was Pat Starke, who is an old friend of my mom’s! She had just walked out, and that was really awkward! Because it’s one thing to act with a young girl who’s about your age, but it’s another thing to act in a porn movie with a friend of your mother! That’s just really weird! [laughs]

 

Legendary dubbing actor/director Ted Rusoff (1939-2013).

 

JM: Back in the older days, there was this really cumbersome process to dubbing where they cut the films into loops, recorded on magtape and had to physically link the audio and the video and so on. But in the 90s, I believe things had evolved a bit. Can you talk a bit about how the process was back then?

 

LM: At the very, very beginning in some of the very first dubbing turns I did – though I’m not sure if it was with Nick, or in the studio watching my stepdad a few years earlier – I remember watching these sound technicians working with the director with literally scissors and tape. They were cutting the tape and hand aligning it with the sound directly on the film, which I thought was just incredibly analogue. But you’re correct when you say that in the 90s things changed. By the time I started dubbing, the video and the soundtrack were separate but the machine and the mixer aligned them automatically, so basically, we could do endless takes, and while the cutting and editing didn’t happen in Pro Tools or some other advanced software like we do now, it still happened digitally and so it was much faster to do the post-production. So, yes, by the time I started doing it, it was all recorded digitally.

We used to record in front of a big screen, and we’re talking about maybe a 12- to 15-metre-wide screen by 8 metre tall, so it was a big movie screen. And first they would run the original with the sound for us so we could see the original actors acting in it. Then they would run it without the soundtrack so we could just see it, and the third time we would practice it with no mike on. That was a big debate! I mean, I understand when they were doing this on film that they wanted a practice run with the mikes closed, but when it became digital, there was really no reason not to record. So, soon enough, the sound technicians in the back started always keeping the mikes open, because, you know, it’s Murphy’s Law – usually your test run is the best one of the entire series and then you can’t ever match that.

The best directors and the best actors, even though it took more time, did multi-tracks, so we would act together in the same room. I would be with Eleonora, say, and we both act together. The interaction between the two actors becomes more authentic that way – there’s more dirt to the recording and it just feels more real. Directors don’t particularly like that, because it’s already hard enough to get one actor to do it right and sync correctly, but if you have two actors overlapping, then you have one getting it right and one getting it wrong and you end up wasting a lot of time. Most actors and directors now single-track the recording, so you’ll go in alone and do all of your thing, and then she’ll go in alone and do all of her thing. The final result is… well, you can imagine, it’s a little sterile. It’s a little cold. It feels like the two actors are not aware of the temperature of the room, because they’re recording on single separate tracks.

But usually, that’s the way it used to work. We’d go in, they’d show us the scene, we would practice our lines and we always had the lines in front of us – we were reading – and then there was always some additional input that came from the sound technician, who may have wanted a little bit more feel or less feel, a little more directional sound to the mike etc. It was an art! The quality of what came out in those years in terms of sound recording was, I think, really high, compared to what I’m hearing right now. A lot of the acting now doesn’t even happen in studios anymore. I still try to do a few things online, but you don’t even go into the studio. They just send you the script and you have to record it in your own home recording area, and then they stretch it, compress it, clean it and put it into their thing. Yeah, it’s changed a lot since those days. The cost has also dropped a lot for them that way. For instance, there are services like Voices.com, which I subscribe to and I get endless job offers for advertising, movies, small video spots, voice over AI training and stuff like that. Anybody in the world can basically audition for that job.

 

JM: So back then, you were basically never more than two dubbers working at the same time, then?

 

LM: Never more than two unless we were doing background extras. Like, sometimes, if we were doing cartoons, there would be two, three or four actors at the same time, and Nick would call in one, then he’d call in the other, then he’d call in two together, and he’d call in everybody together because we’re doing background noises, or a crowd. They’d direct us to do the background sounds and then they’d do two tracks of that and double up the tracks, so four people became twelve people and then they had their background crowd. I’m sure if you try to listen to some of those cartoons or movies and you find those background noises and slow them down and split them up, you’ll hear everybody’s voice is still there – the same actors. Often, we’d do different characters, but Nick was always very good at making sure that the voices were not too close, so that people wouldn’t recognize that.

 

JM: You know, Nick is someone that most of the dubbers I’ve talked to have held in very high regard. But I’ve also heard he was very meticulous and would often insist on doing a lot of takes, whereas Ted Rusoff, for example, was more fond of spontaneity and didn’t want to do too many takes.

 

LM: I can’t tell you much about Ted. I only did two or three things for him and one of them was that porn movie. But I can tell you that it’s true that Nick sometimes made us do, like, ten takes, eleven takes, twelve takes – to the point where we weren’t even aware of what we were saying anymore. None of us could really understand what he was after in the end, because after the twentieth take, it’s like, come on, man! [laughs] But, yeah, he was pretty meticulous in that. If you talk to my mother, she’ll probably have some jokes about that. She’ll probably have plenty of stuff. I remember Christopher joking about when he did Fellini’s Casanova and how Donald Sutherland was spitting into the mike when he re-recorded a lot of his dialogue in post-production. He really had a way of spitting his P’s and they always came with a lot of moisture. [laughs] They always told us to be very careful with our P’s, because the P’s create a peaking sound. If you’re spitting it’s even worse, and apparently Donald Sutherland was famous for that. I think Fellini, who used to be a sketch artist, even gave Christopher a really nice sketch he designed of Donald Sutherland spitting into the mike.

 

Donald Sutherland and Federico Fellini on the set of Casanova.

 

JM: And Christopher basically did everything himself, right? He dubbed voices, but he also did the adaptations and directed the dubbing. Do you remember how he did the adaptations? Did he do them with the help of a Moviola?

 

LM: Most of these directors, from Frank to Nick, to Christopher to Gene – they all did the adaptations as well. They hardly ever worked with somebody else’s script. They did the adaptations themselves.

I don’t remember Christopher ever working on the adaptations on the screen. He did it in his head. He would read the Italian script and he would visualize in his head how the lips would go and come up with the right structure. I saw all of the directors I worked with do that. It was a talent that they had. I never had that. You could just see them close their eyes a second and think, and they’d imagine the actor moving the lips and then would try their own text and words and say: “This is gonna work.”

 

JM: Do you know how much creative license the adapters had? Because, obviously, it was necessary to make some changes to the dialogue for lip sync, so do you know if they basically had free reins, or was there someone who would check and approve the scripts before the dubbing could start?

 

LM: It depends. When it came to important movies, by Fellini or Jean-Jacques Annaud, then absolutely. They always wanted to have final approval of the scripts and everything. But for most of the work that I remember doing, the adapters had a good amount of creative license, and the reason is that there was nobody else who had the actual tools to judge. Because to actually have an opinion about it, you’d have to be familiar with the original script. So, there would be plenty of changes, and sometimes, it was very challenging, because you can’t really get the meaning, and sometimes, even when you see English movies dubbed into Italian, one of the big things is that no matter how good the dubbing is, it’s just not gonna be that good. It’s unnatural. The necessity of lip syncing, maintaining the same length and using words that work inevitably damages the overall perception of the original script. Good dubbers and directors will do their best, but it’s never gonna be perfect.

On some of the big movies, the Italian director was present in the recording studio. For instance, when I went down to do the extras for Angels and Demons, I remember Ron Howard being in the room. He was there approving or not approving – and for just extras! I think the big directors who have a lot of reputational value at play with the movie want to make sure that what is sometimes a $100 or $150 million production doesn’t end up tripping at the very end. One of the things that Christopher and Nick always used to tell us is that you have to understand that voice over dubbing and fill-in sounds happen at the very end of everything else. And so usually, there’s no more budget left and they’re rushing because they’re already late, and so they’re asked to do this work with very little time and very little budget, and there’s really not that many people involved anymore, because all of the big production has moved on to other things. So, I think Ron Howard in that case was a good director who wanted to make sure that what was six months of his work and hundreds of millions of dollars spent didn’t get judged or falter because of some stupid mistake made at the very end.

Not every director had that ability to keep the rudder straight and follow through till the very end. While a director is directing a movie, he’s reading the script of the next one and is already scheduled to work on something else as soon as the other one is finished, and so they’re under a lot of pressure and have producers breathing down their necks and telling them to save money and to cut and to cut. I’ve often seen this. At the very end with the dubbing, the extras, the sound and so on, the directors are left with almost no oversight at all. Which is kind of a pity, because even today, you’ll see some really big productions, even in English, where you might think: “How is it possible these guys spent $200 million making Dune and there’s that’s small detail that’s wrong, or this didn’t work out?” Well, it’s probably because it was done at the very end and there was nobody who was interested anymore at that point.

 

Hollywood director Ron Howard with Tom Hanks on the set of Angels and Demons.

 

JM: You mentioned you were also the president of ARA for a while. How did that come about?

 

LM: At some point – I think around 1995 – I was very active. I worked a lot, did a lot of movies and was very much in demand. Frank at that point had been president of ARA for 20 or 25 years, and it was a little-paid job if I remember correctly. It was a cooperative, so there was no profit or anything to be made there, and he wanted out. He was tired of it and he wanted to find a replacement, so he asked me if I wanted to do it. And he said: “You know, you’re making a lot of money and doing a lot of roles, and you speak Italian.” I’m Italo-American and all of this crowd was mostly English and American, couldn’t speak Italian very well and were definitely not familiar with the Italian bureaucracy, and managing a company requires the ability to interface with accountants and offices and tax people and all that. I was young – I was 25 – and I thought: “Well… why not?” And so I accepted to do this. It didn’t take up a lot of my time, but then I also didn’t do much to promote it. I was managing current affairs, basically. It was my job to make sure that everybody got paid on time and that we turned in the right tax documents to our lawyers, so everybody got their pay checks. That was all I did. I never did active marketing for any of this. ARA was hardly ever contacted directly. It was almost always the directors that were contacted directly by the productions or the client. They took care of hiring ARA actors for the jobs. We didn’t really market ARA to big international productions ever. We were just there to pick up the phone when they called us.

 

JM: Do you know if many of the directors either had their own companies, or at least a company they were associated with? I know Gene Luotto had his own company called Filmatix, but I’m not sure about the others. I do know that very often when Nick was listed in the credits, there was also a company called Cinitalia credited.

 

LM: I remember Filmatix. Gene would bill all his work through his company. But most directors, as I recall, worked as individuals. I can’t remember Cinitalia and I can’t tell you if it’s connected to Nick.

 

JM: Who were the really big and most prolific dubbers during that era?

 

LM: In my time? Ooh… I wish I could help you more here. I remember working a lot with Jane and Eleonora, and with Cristina Moglia. But there was always an in and out crowd of people who would appear in the studios and then disappear – Americans who were in town for a couple of years and they were looking for a way to make some money and then they left. I can’t really remember any more names. I don’t know if I still have anything from those days, but I can try to dig in some of my old papers, because I should have a list somewhere of ARA members and actors. If I do, it’ll be the complete list of the actors who were part of the cooperative – about 120 of them at one time. But honestly, I think out of those 120, there were probably about twenty who were working, and of those twenty there were probably about ten who were really working a lot. Work became scarcer and scarcer, and we got fewer and fewer jobs in the 90s. I ended up resigning as president, I think in 1999. I got a different job and I just couldn’t follow up with it anymore. And I’m not really sure if I was actually replaced. At that point it may very well be that it all went through CVD. That we just dissolved the company into our Italian parent partner, and they must have run everything at some point, but I honestly can’t recall.

 

Lawrence's most frequent dubbing partners were (from left to right): Jane Alexander, Eleonora Baldwin and Cristina Moglia.

 

JM: But you guys didn’t keep a record of all the stuff you dubbed, did you?

 

LM: God, no! [laughs] I mean, I have a few things, because at some point I thought I would pick up the career again when I moved to the States, and I remember telling myself how stupid I was never to keep track of any of this stuff. At the time, I just didn’t care. It seemed like not the job I was gonna do the rest of my life and it was just an easy way of making money. Jane, Eleonora and Cristina may have kept better track than me. Especially Jane, who is one of the only ones that has actually kept working in that world, and she has a passion for voice over dubbing.

 

JM: Yeah, she and Leslie La Penna.

 

LM: Is Leslie still around!?

 

JM: Yes. He’s still very active in Italian language dubbing. He’s the Italian voice of Brian in Family Guy, for example.

 

LM: Oh, wow! That’s so cool! I didn’t know that. It’s good to hear that he’s still around. I haven’t seen Leslie in, I don’t know, 30 years, but I remember him well. I did a few things for him.

 

JM: Did you work with all of the big dubbing directors of that time? Because there was also John Gayford and Lew Ciannelli. And Geoffrey Copleston, but I’m not sure if he was still directing at that point.

 

LM: I never worked for John Gayford. Lew Ciannelli I don’t recall. Copleston I do remember but I didn’t work with him – at all actually. But I did work for Leslie La Penna, Gene Luotto, Ted Rusoff, Frank von Kuegelgen, and I did something for Mike Billingsley – maybe one or two turns. And an infinite amount of work for Nick. Those are the big names that I remember. Maybe I’m forgetting somebody here. For some of the older ones, like Richard McNamara and all these guys, you’d have to ask my mom. She’s more dialled into the earlier phase.

You have to understand that dubbing directors are a little bit like movie directors. They are very peculiar about what they want, what they’re after, the kind of tone, and sometimes they have a problem getting through to the actors and explaining. Because… well, if Nick heard me say this, he’d shoot me, but dubbing directors are not necessarily good actors themselves. They have an idea in their mind of what they want, but then when they actually try to act it out for you, it doesn’t really work. All this to say, directors establish a pretty tight relationship with actors, and the more the actors work with them, the more they’re familiar with what they really want. And that sort of chemistry is hardly ever natural – it’s almost always built with time. And this is the reason why Nick would always work with those five or ten actors that all knew him and he knew them, and they understood what he wanted. And the same went for Gene and for Ted and so on. They tended to always pull from the same pool of actors, which is why you’ll find that when you talk to me, I’m completely focused on Nick because I did probably 80% of my work with him, whereas if you talk to somebody who’s worked for Gene, you’ll probably find that they were part of a small group of actors that worked mostly for him. Familiarity, you know?

 

JM: What about Christopher? Did you ever actually work with him, or had he stopped directing by the time you got started?

 

LM: No, I never worked with Christopher. He was mostly working on adaptations in the early 90s and his studio work became scarcer and almost non-existent when I started acting.

 

JM: Back in the earlier days, I think everyone of the dubbing directors used to have a so-called sala assistant, or sync assistant, but it’s my understanding that, eventually, most of them disposed of the sala assistant and chose to do everything by themselves, yes…?

 

LM: I did a few movies with a sala assistant, and I can understand the need for that role, especially when they were recording on film. Every additional take took time – it needed to be hand-coded, because they needed to sequence the film and re-attach it manually. So, it was very important to have a sala assistant who had all of the different scripts split up with the correct times and frames, and kept track of which take was right and where all of these sound pieces needed to be stitched together in the final product, so that the director could focus on directing. As we switched to digital, that role became sort of a hybrid and taken on by the sound technician. The sound technician would digitally record and he would have, I don’t know, 64 tracks to record on, so they could basically record endless versions of a take, and it was easier for him. Sometimes, they would stich it directly, or in other cases, he would just make a quick note, but it was a lot easier since there was no physical cutting involved. And so, to your point, I did a few movies with a sala assistant, but almost all of the work in the early 90s was with just the director.

 

JM: I guess Gene was the only director who continued to use an assistant then.

 

LM: Gene was an old-fashioned guy, and I remember he got some of the bigger, more important movies to dub, so he tended to have a better budget, probably. And from what I recall, there was also a profit issue involved, so I believe cutting the sala assistant also made more margin for the director and that they made more money that way. But Gene, like I said, was an old-fashioned guy and he was a little bit older than Nick and Christopher, and my guess is that he might have kept the sala assistant, because… second opinion in the studio, right? But I can’t tell you too much about Gene, because I did maybe less than a dozen things for him in my entire career.

 

JM: And since you usually didn’t work more than two dubbers together at the same time, I suppose you didn’t know many of the old veterans too well, then? Guys like Bob Sommer, Susan Spafford and Pat Starke…

 

LM: Well, these are people who were friends of Christopher and of my mother. They’re their generation. I know their names, of course, and I saw them on and off, but I never really worked a lot with them. I think we did some things together, but I can’t remember.

 

JM: And what do you do now?

 

LM: Well, I went to architecture school, but I was never an architect. During college, I was working for a public relations company and before I was even finished with college, I got a job doing external relations for a TV network. Then I went on to work for a couple of big PR companies in Italy, and started a little company that was controlled by one of these guys – I was building websites, and it was in the early days of the internet. And then I started a consulting firm with another partner, and we merged that with another PR agency, and so we had a big marketing communication consulting firm, basically till 2008, when I moved to the States. My wife and I were just tired and we wanted to do something different and have an adventure. And our kids were small enough that they would not oppose a big drastic move – when children are older, they become enemies of any big change. [laughs] So we moved to the States at that time. After that, I kept working in marketing and that’s still what I do today.

 

JM: You’ve really done a lot of different things! I’m impressed!

 

LM: Well, it doesn’t sound like that many, but yeah, I guess so. [laughs] I miss those years in the studios. It’s funny how when we live through our lives, we’re not really aware of some of the most unique and interesting experiences we have until later on. When I was there, I didn’t realize it was a unique situation, but now going back and telling you about it, it does hit me that some of this stuff was pretty fun, yeah.

 

My most sincere thanks to Lawrence for taking the time to share his memories with me, and for the kindness and encouragement he has shown me.