NEED A VOICE TO JUST BLEND IN? SHE’S ON THE CASE
Murmur maven Barbara Harris’ stable of vocal actors supply extra audio details.
John DeMita and Regina Taufen make their living as actors without ever having to show their face. They belong to veteran voice casting director Barbara Harris’ repertory company of loopers: performers who, in postproduction, vocally sweeten the soundtracks of films and TV shows much like on-camera extras fill in the visual void.
“We create not only background for restaurant and city street scenes but also the sounds of animals, ghosts, demons, robots, gladiators in combat and people making love,” says DeMita, who’s worked for Harris on such projects as “Mad Men,” “The Jungle Book” and the upcoming “Cars 3.” “You name it, we’ve been asked to create a vocal performance for it.”
Taufen — fluent in Japanese and the mother of a 2year-old daughter — has voiced for Harris on “Finding Dory,” “Stranger Things” and “The LEGO Batman Movie,” among many others. She’s thankful she was able to work well into her third trimester.
“I was doing cues where I’m fending off some perpetrator or breathing sexily on the other end of a phone line,” she remembers. “At eight months pregnant, I never would’ve been cast as that on camera. That’s what I love about this job. It’s about your vocal performance. It doesn’t matter what you look like.”
Harris says she tends to use the same people over and over for her company, Barbara Harris Voice Casting — “proven, dedicated professionals who will show up on time with a great attitude.” (Members of her company are in the SAG-AFTRA actors union). She notes that the ideal voice actor is a master at improv, plays well with others and, strangely enough, doesn’t have too interesting a voice.
“It’s not about you,” explains Harris. “It’s about the movie or the TV episode, about blending in and enhancing it, not about stealing the show from the big star.”
Looping — also known as automated dialogue replacement, or ADR for short — is nothing new. Once upon a time, directors would enlist friends, studio personnel, crew members or extras to capture background voices on set. Hollywood lore even has it that back in the day, some loopers simply endlessly repeated the words “peas and carrots” or “walla, walla, walla.” That science was inexact, inefficient and expensive.
In the mid-’80s, shortly after arriving in Los Angeles with her own acting aspirations, Harris realized looping methods could be sharpened. “Doing advance research and coming in prepared was something I saw as a necessary thing that wasn’t being done,” says the native New Yorker. “Why be asked to do background voices in a film about a big war in Germany and not know what to say? If we’re being hired to talk, let’s know what we’re talking about and speak with authenticity.”
Harris approached studios and did a hard sell of her concept. “I just got on the phone. I mean, I didn’t know anything, which probably made me braver and bolder than I should’ve been,” she recalled. Soon her initial band of a dozen actor friends began booking. Today, that ensemble has grown to about 50 men and women of all ages and ethnicities. The average pay is $933 a day.
“Barbara has built an illustrious resume and a sterling reputation,” says “Stranger Things” co-producer Rand Geiger of the woman whose nearly 1,000 credits include Oscar winners and blockbusters such as “Out of Africa,” “Jurassic Park,” and “The Lion King” “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Fences,” and “The Fate of the Furious.”
“I was looking for specific, authentic Southern accents,” recalls supervising sound editor Alan Robert Murray — a two-time Oscar winner with seven other nominations — of his first work with Harris, on Clint Eastwood’s 1996 “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” set in New Orleans.
“I’ve worked with Barbara exclusively ever since, on movies ranging from period pieces and war epics to modern-day dramas,” added Murray. Just a sampling of these projects — each with its distinct voice needs— include Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima” (Japanese), “Gran Torino” (Hmong), “Invictus” (South African), “American Sniper” (Middle Eastern) and “Sully” (air traffic control communications).
Oscar-winning, Australian-born writer-producerdirector George Miller has also used no one but Harris — on everything from the “Babe” and “Happy Feet” films to “Mad Max: Fury Road” — since his 1992 medical drama “Lorenzo’s Oil.” “We needed something that wasn’t generic,” says Miller, who was a physician before becoming a filmmaker.
“It required a lot of medical talk. Barbara understood that immediately. If someone had to make hospital announcements over the PA system, they had material prepared that was specific, interesting and accurate. You didn’t have to sit there and write it for them. Never did I have to say, ‘No one would say that.’ It was all very impressive.”
The expert readiness of Harris’ players — who clock in equipped with words and phrases on iPads or in threering binders — starts with the boss.
“I watch the TV episode or the film beforehand,” she says. “I make notes. I speak to the producer and/or the director. We discuss what I saw, what they want, what they need, and I cast it from there, giving homework to the particular actors I choose.”
If Harris can’t find what the job requires within her core crew — an Inuit, someone who can read Sanskrit or your garden variety French Canadian (all true examples) — she holds auditions until she’s filled the role.
The seasoned pro is quick to note that hundreds of rival ADR teams have cropped up since her humble beginnings. “I suppose I should think of them as my competitors, but I have this other way of thinking about it,” she maintains. “As more groups have surfaced, the more the art of looping has become part of the landscape. What started off as ‘peas and carrots’ and ‘walla, walla’ has turned out to be, ‘We’re doing this TV show. We’re doing this movie. We need a group.’ The proliferation has allowed great actors to work. It’s not a bad thing. It’s all good.”