by Anna Winger
7
“You’re brilliant, you’re good-looking, you are handsome.”
The original English feedback played into Walter’s earphones. On the cinema-size screen above his head, Tom Cruise’s toothy smile collapsed backward into the serious expression that preceded it. His character in Vanilla Sky was having a conversation at a party that involved many non-verbal cues: raised eyebrows, widened eyes, licked lips. He gesticulated with his arms. His spoken contributions were each cursory and precise, the hardest kind of dialogue to dub accurately into German, which requires more words than English to say the same thing. The translations kept running on too long, so that Walter was still speaking over the grin-finale of the scene. He worked at the words like a masseur kneading a knot in someone’s back, pushing and pulling until tight muscles relaxed into the limited space between two shoulder blades. Tom Cruise made the same movements again and again above Walter’s head.
“Du bist intelligent, du siehst gut aus, du bist—” Walter stopped midsentence and swore under his breath, “Scheisse.”
He was standing in complete darkness at a lectern with a microphone. A spotlight shined on the script.
“I’m going to kill You’re good-looking,” he said to the darkness. “It doesn’t fit. It’s expendable.”
“Actually, let’s discuss it.”
The director was sitting in a mixing booth up a spiral staircase. The six studios at Deutsche Synchron were all the same: large screening rooms downstairs where the sound was recorded, and mixing cabins upstairs where engineers synced it with the precision of air traffic controllers. Dark purple carpet and confetti-flecked wallpaper ran throughout the entire facility. Fluorescent lamps cast the sun-deprived employees in unflattering light. But the unfortunate décor belied the fact that Deutsche Synchron was the most successful dubbing facility in Germany. In the long hallways separating one studio from the next, the posters from Academy Award winners and Hollywood blockbusters hung proudly in plastic frames.
Walter turned to look up over his shoulder at the window into the cabin above. Dubbing actors usually covered scenes together in repertory, standing around a semicircle of microphones with the director in the middle. But it infuriated Walter to wait through other actors’ more frequent mistakes. When Klara renegotiated his contract after Mission: Impossible, he had elected to record his lines alone. The director, until now, had been Rainer Brandt, voice of Tony Curtis and famed translation dramaturge, an industry legend who treated Walter like a favorite son. When Walter suggested changes to the German translation, Brandt never said, Let’s discuss it. He said, Fine. He said, Do it. But Brandt had backed out of Vanilla Sky last minute, pleading exhaustion.
“I’m leaving you in good hands,” he told Walter. “The latest Wunderkind. He’s full of energy, this one. Going places.”
Walter had met the wunderkind this morning, a skinny young man wearing leather pants, an I LOVE NY T-shirt, a red bandana at his neck and pink-tinted sunglasses. It was almost completely dark inside the studio.
“Orson Welles,” said the kid to Walter, holding out his hand.
Walter shook it limply. He wished he could go back to bed.
“Orson Welles?”
“You know, Rosebud.”
“Right.”
“It’s my nom de plume. I want to keep my money work separate from my real work. Only use my real name where it counts.”
“Your real work?”
“I’m developing my first feature at the moment. Start shooting next month. That’s why I’m doing this now.” Orson rubbed two fingers together in the air. “Good money, this dubbing racket. Pays the rent. But as a filmmaker I think all films should be seen in the original. Did you know that in Mexico there’s a law against synchronization? Their native industry is huge since all the foreign films are subtitled. Call it the upside of illiteracy.”
“Most Germans can read.”
“Maybe, but the work we do here, in this studio, is so good that audiences can’t distinguish between what is original and what’s dubbed. They feel like American films are German films. It’s killed the local business because we don’t have the money to compete with this Hollywood crap, I mean, how much do you think this movie cost?
“Vanilla Sky? I don’t know. Fifty million dollars?”
“My film is going to cost twelve thousand deutschmarks. It’s a great story, believe me, but it’s been a bitch to get it made. Sometimes I really feel like I’m shooting myself in the foot here.”
They retreated to their separate quarters and Walter wiped a thin film of sweat from his forehead with a napkin. How many times did he have to listen to a novice dismiss dubbing as a money job? Orson Welles? The kid talked about making a feature with the casual assurance of someone planning to mail some letters at the post office. We’ll see about that, thought Walter. No one went into dubbing with his eye on a lifelong career. Actors, directors, sound technicians, everyone at Deutsche Synchron was supposedly saving up to get out of dubbing and into something else. But when they were still there ten years later, they didn’t mention their real work anymore. Walter adjusted his headphones and tested the sound. He had gotten into dubbing for the money too, of course. But after Rain Man he’d learned to respect it as a craft. He’d recorded almost every scene with Joachim Kerzel, who’d been doing Dustin Hoffman since The Graduate. The autistic brother’s genius was only believable because of the voice that Kerzel gave him (the irritating monotone, the perfect repetitions, the funny little moans). His performance raised the bar. When Walter took the Top Gun job, he’d never intended to spend the next sixteen years at the dubbing studio. But after Rain Man he decided to be good at it, and it still gave him a certain satisfaction to know he could do one thing better than anyone else.
Two hours had passed since his introduction to Orson and they had only made it through four lines of the movie. Let’s discuss it. Walter looked up impatiently as Orson came out at the top of the staircase.
“I feel like Rapunzel,” he joked, shaking his long ponytail over the edge of the banister.
“What do you want to discuss?”
“Well, if we have to make it shorter, keep You’re good-looking and kill You are handsome. They mean essentially the same thing, but good-looking is slightly more complex. It has an inside-outside quality that really points to the theme of male vanity in this film. It’s more emotionally accurate to the character’s story in the end than handsome.”
Walter willed himself to argue with Orson, but he could not muster the necessary energy.
“Have you ever actually been to New York?” he asked instead.
“Once, why?”
“The T-shirt.”
Orson looked down at himself.
“I’m selling them to help raise money for my film. They’re really popular right now, you know, everyone here wants to be a part of 9 ⁄11. People were ordering them over the Internet from New York so I had some made up at a T-shirt place in Friedrichshain and now they can buy them from me. You want one? I’ll give you a good deal.”
“I’ve never even been to New York.”
“That doesn’t matter. Show your support for the American people.”
I am American, thought Walter.
Orson shrugged. “I’m pretty damn suspicious of the whole situation, myself. I’m just wearing the T-shirt to promote sales. You have seen the original film, haven’t you?”
“Which film?”
“Vanilla Sky.”
“No,” Walter admitted.
“Didn’t they send it to you? How are you supposed to anticipate the tone of the dialogue if you don’t know what happens next?”
The truth was that watching the original with Tom Cruise’s real voice in it ruined the illusion not only for millions of German-speaking fans, but also for Walter. He liked seeing the film first in segments in the studio, watching the story build in fragments of dialogue like a crossword puzzle coming into focus.
“I was out of town last wee
k,” Walter lied. “I only got back last night.”
Orson gave him a long look and went back into the cabin upstairs.
“Du bist intelligent und du siehst gut aus,” Walter said into the microphone, eliminating handsome, as directed.
But when he read the new few lines on paper and listened to the English playback, he was infuriated.
“Excuse me. The German translation here is totally off. When Tom Cruise’s friend tells him he has a shit-eating grin. That’s a fantastic term in English. The translation just says he’s smiling. It misses the point.”
“The point is that he’s happy.”
“No, it’s more than that. Smiling doesn’t come close to the true essence of a shit-eating grin.”
“Describe it, then.” Orson was standing on top of the stairs again.
“What?”
“That essence.”
Walter thought it over. “Pleased with oneself, as a child might be after eating his own shit when he knows he shouldn’t.”
“That is unbelievably disgusting.”
“That’s the genius of American English right there.”
“No. That proves Americans are as crazy as everyone said they were when I was growing up in East Berlin. But have it your way.”
They moved on to the next segment, a long voice-over spoken in retrospect, while on screen, Tom Cruise flirted with a beautiful brunette. Alone in the darkness, Walter closed his eyes and let the English feedback form patterns on his brain, elaborate plaids of syntax, breath and emotion— so that the German translation coming out of his mouth would follow the same contours; when it worked, he felt like he was speaking in tongues.
“Moment mal,” Orson’s voice boomed over the speakers, interrupting Walter’s concentration. “Cruise’s character is wearing a mask when he’s saying this voice-over. And he’s had some damage to his mouth, which makes him talk differently. Of course, you wouldn’t know this, since you haven’t seen the film.”
Orson paused here to make sure his point was understood.
“But we have to make your voice sound like his does.
How about you stick one finger in your mouth, and put your other hand over the whole thing, while you speak.”
Walter inserted one finger into the corner of his mouth and pulled delicately at the edge of it. He held his other hand against his nose. As it rubbed up against his nostrils he smelled coffee and the residual rank of the old lectern’s years in use. His finger tasted sour and leathery, like the wheel of his car. He tried the first line again.
“Too much,” Orson’s voice filled the room. “Hold your top hand a little further out. And stick the finger deeper. Really pull at the side of your mouth. Make it difficult to speak.”
Walter moved his hands around, trying the line different ways, but it either sounded too muffled or not muffled enough.
“I have an idea.” Orson came down the stairs, untied the red bandana around his neck and shook it out. “Try this.”
He folded the bandana in half diagonally and reached one arm back to tie it tightly around Walter’s mouth and nose like a surgical mask. Then he took Walter’s left hand and hooked the forefinger over his bottom lip, pulling it down till it turned inside out. The finger still tasted bad and now it was wet with saliva, but the bandana smelled lightly of patchouli oil: better than the scent of his own unwashed hand. Orson patted him on the back and came around to face him in the darkness.
“Okay. Hold that. Can you do that for me? Now imagine that underneath this mask your face is damaged and your heart is heavy and you’ve lost the woman you love. Try again.”
When Walter said the line again, through the pitch-perfect muffle of the bandana, he had to blink back real tears.
Work progressed in the afternoon. The dialogue picked up and they moved through it beat for beat. Tom and the woman left the party, went back to her place and circled each other fully clothed. It was nice, Walter liked imagining what might be around the next corner instead of seeing the usual panting climax laid out for him immediately. For a full half-hour he didn’t even think about Heike, until the original voice-over called Tom’s woman the last semi-guileless girl in New York. The opposite of Heike, he thought, turning off the spotlight at the lectern and walking into the middle of the studio with a portable microphone. At first he’d been pleasantly surprised that his long-faded celebrity could still win favor with a beautiful young woman, but quickly he worried that it was not enough to sustain her interest over time. In bed, early on, when she would shake her hair across her face and moan dramatically, as if her orgasm were a performance and the mattress were a stage and a packed audience of men were watching her from the footlights with their hands down their pants, he had been jealous of those imaginary men. He had been unable to believe that the performance was meant for him alone and so he criticized her wild abandon until it turned him off. In recent months he had had to fantasize about the strangest things to keep his erections going midstream: foot rubs, cuddles on a sofa, a delicate hand pressed against his own through the window of a train. The dark studio enveloped him and Walter looked up, trying to focus on the screen. This one looked like New York, but Tom Cruise’s America was the same wherever the movies took place. Even an airplane turning tricks over the Persian Gulf became a world of possibilities. Walter was already counting the days until the premiere. He spoke his lines into the microphone, perfectly in sync with the mouth on screen, and tried to conjure the famous actor in the flesh: the two of them chatting at the after-party, exchanging war stories from their shared filmography, patting each other on the back. Tom Cruise’s confidence would be contagious.
In the week since the idea of returning to Los Angeles in December had suggested itself, a plan had been emerging in Walter’s mind. He had checked his schedule and the balance of his bank account. He had inquired about flights. He would stay in Berlin until the premiere and leave the following day. It was far-fetched to expect guidance from a major American movie star, yet so much of his life had been the result not of hard work or canny design, but of a series of unlikely boons. Tom Cruise’s acquiescence thus seemed, at the very least, plausible. Walter had made no concrete moves yet but the possibility of escape was already there, blossoming tentatively on the otherwise bleak horizon. The first time he’d left Los Angeles prematurely, he told himself. He’d taken a detour and everything had gone terribly wrong. Not this time. In Tom Cruise’s America, things only went wrong if it served the script for dramatic purposes. The air trapped inside the studio was stifling and still. The structure of Vanilla Sky was confusing, switching between scenes in the present and the past. Walter had trouble keeping track of when the voice required distortion and when it didn’t.
“Last line of the day,” Orson called out. “This one’s straight. Hold on to the bandana, though. You can use it again tomorrow.”
Walter pulled the damp cloth quickly from his face and removed his hand from his mouth. He used the bandana to wipe off his fingers. On screen, Tom Cruise was looking at photos on the beautiful woman’s fridge. The sound technician rewound the bit of film to the beginning and played the English original into Walter’s headset.
“I like your life,” said Tom Cruise to his date.
“Ich mag dein Leben,” enunciated Walter in German.
As he mimicked the intonation exactly, he envisioned himself again at the premiere with Tom Cruise. But this time, they didn’t stay in the crowd of local well-wishers, they floated out the door of the party above the winter roofs of Berlin and over the Atlantic Ocean, like two linked helium balloons. They crossed the wide, flat states in the middle of the country and kept going, over the Rockies, until they reached a full-blown sunset on the lip of the Pacific. There they were: somewhere in Malibu, toasting to success with champagne, laughing together like friends. It could happen, thought Walter, still looking up at the now black screen above his head. Because Tom Cruise’s America was the place he had meant to go in the first place. He had been distracte
d by unfortunate circumstances last time, blown off course. This time he would get there.
8
It was the spring of 1983 and Walter was having his makeup done when a production assistant came over to tell him that his father had died. The set of Schönes Wochenende was in a large hangar in the Bavarian countryside, and his dressing room consisted of a chair behind a folding screen and a shared electric heater to warm his feet. The production assistant waited for a break in the conversation to make her announcement, as the actress who played Walter’s mother on the show read aloud from a magazine about Priscilla Presley, who had just joined the cast of Dallas.
