Dubbing Willow

My first time out to Lucas Skywalker Ranch was 1988 for a dubbing, or looping job on the movie Willow. The ranch is in the rolling hills in Marin County north of San Francisco. There were about fifteen of us for the Willow job. Mostly men and three or four women. I don't recall if they had any scenes with kids in that one, but they weren't doing any kids that day. Most of us were talent from the same San Francisco agency, or one of the top two agencies, and all the actors knew each other from doing work together over the years. There was no audition. We were just picked based on our abilities and reputation.

That day we were to do various voices for people in different scenes in the movie. It was clean up work for the film. With this kind of job you never know what you're doing until they tell you at the job what you're going to do. They took us to one of the large audio studios where we'd do our work. We were all professionals and were there to do the voices, so no scripts were necessary, we’d make it up as we went along. Now and then there were a few set lines given for specific scenes if a face stood out and it looked like it needed a line. Although most of it was ad lib crowd stuff.

I remember when we did the bar scene. There were microphones, of course, set around the studio where we were, and a large screen was on one wall. The lights lowered and the projector rolled and we saw the villagers sitting and standing, crowded in a bar. There was no sound from the film. We made noises like breathing, clearing of throats, grunting and did the general crowd talk. The engineers would mix it into the film later.

So we started as folks sitting around talking to each other in this bar. The director cued us by saying, “more talk”, or “less talk”, something like that.
A while into the scene soldiers burst into the bar and began to raise hell and beating on us. We were surprised, terrified, moaned and cried and wailed at the soldiers. Once in a while one of the funny guys like Jim Cranna would say something stupid or off color then we’d laugh and have to start over again.

The director who was in the control room had us do it again a few times. After a while the voice from the booth said, “Okay. That was fine. Men only this time and we're going to do the same scene, only this time you’re going to be the soldiers.”

The same clip started again and again all was silent in the studio as we watched the same scene, until the soldiers burst in, that was us now, and we began yelling and mildly cursing in anger as we attacked the people in the bar. The same people we just played before. We had fun beating ourselves up.

The last scene in the movie had Willow walking away and we were the general crowd again, all saying goodbye to him. If you listen carefully you can hear me yell somewhere in the mix, “Fare thee well, Willow. Fare thee well.” Hey, even ad libbing you have to make up a good line in order to make the final cut.

We all got our session fees, of course, a days pay I think. Maybe it took us two days. But now years later they still send me a reminder – a seventeen dollar check each year for use royalties.