Monsieur Mediocre by John von Sothen

Author:John von Sothen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

Following my brief stint on TV, I wanted out of show business and back into the friendly confines of magazine writing. “Paris’s Top Ten Vegan Restaurants” and “Shoes to Wear at a Summer Wedding” articles no longer seemed painful compared to the humiliation I’d just experienced. What I learned, though, was that you can’t run from your past. Soon enough, I was being offered lucrative side work doing voice-overs in English.

Doing English voice-over work in France is probably no different from doing voice-overs in the United States, except that there are fewer Anglophone actors to compete with here in France. Often, I was providing an English voice for a French commercial that was trying to win an award at Cannes or making what the industry calls a maquette (mock-up), which is a film the ad agency pitches to their client to convince them to invest in the real film with better music, 3D effects, and, of course, a better voice actor. I also dubbed a lot of documentaries for the American or British TV market, or, on rare occasions, dubbed a French film into English. What always struck me as comical was that budgets for these things aren’t small. The director, the actors, and the postproduction all cost a lot, and yet much of the product’s success rests on a guy whose voice was chosen because he played Spiderman on an unwatched series.

Once, I was asked to do a commercial for the razor company Gillette. The director met with me and another actor before the recording and showed us the film, describing its tone as “skate and thrash meets Beastie Boys.” (Since he was French, he pronounced “thrash” trash and “Boys” without the s, so it sounded funnier.) Gillette was moving into the youth market, he said, and targeting consumers who were buying their first razors. That’s why they were going with snowboarders and skaters and why the script’s dialogue featured lines like:

“Are you looking for a thrashing shave?”

“Word!”

“The Gillette so and so rocks the burn and the chaff with a two-sided system that’ll not only blow your mind but give you that ultimate swag.”

“Word!”

During the take, while half-pipes and skate parks jumped off the screen, I rattled off the lines as best I could, “Cutting action whose razor edge or something or other won’t let you down,” in what I thought to be a Southern California surfer’s voice. I was excited to try a new accent. Too often I’m asked to produce what the French call “the mid-Atlantic,” an accent European clients say is in between British and American, something refined yet approachable, something you might think Julia Child or William F. Buckley used to speak. The French love the mid-Atlantic accent, but they have no idea what it really sounds like. I’ve never spoken into the microphone and had someone scream through the glass, “John, stop! Where is the mid-Atlantic accent?”

During our recording, I noticed my coactor was having trouble with our back and forth. He couldn’t find a proper rhythm.

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