Why Do Actors Act Like They Can Sing?

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From director Scarlett Johansson comes Eleanor the Great, a warm, witty, and deeply human film about aging, family, and the fine line between fiction and truth.

Now playing only in theaters.

For the last 20 years, Jack Hamilton has had a bugaboo about a certain kind of film.

Yeah, it's kind of an odd one.

It's pretty specific.

It all began when Jack, who was Slate's pop music critic and a professor of American studies and media at the University of Virginia, watched a movie called Walk the Line.

Walk the Line starred Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny Cash and June Carter, later June Carter Cash.

Spoiler alert.

I got to ask you how you came up with that sound.

What sound?

That sound everybody's talking about.

Steady like a train, sharp like a razor.

Yeah, I guess it just come out like that.

The movie traces the arc of Johnny Cash's life and career, his tortured childhood, his rise to fame in country music, his descent into drug addiction, and his years-long courtship of June Carter.

Rule number one, don't propose to a girl on a bus.

You got that?

Rule number two, don't tell her it's because you had a bad dream.

June?

What?

Marry me.

Walk the Line made nearly $200 million and it got good reviews.

Phoenix and Witherspoon were nominated for Academy Awards, and Witherspoon won.

But all this acclaim totally mystified Jack.

It's like Johnny Catch is probably one of the most iconic singing voices of the 20th century, that really rich, deep baritone.

That iconic voice is not the one you hear in Walk the Line.

Instead of using Johnny Cash's own voice, they allowed both Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, neither of whom are singers, to perform the vocals themselves with some generous helping of auto-tune, at least to my ears.

And I just found this completely baffling.

I just remember the whole movie thinking it was so weird that, like, you would make a movie about Johnny Cash and not use the the voice like to like withhold that from the audience.

It's literally why we care about Johnny Cash.

I mean, the fact that Johnny Cash was like a raging amphetamines addict for a while, like that's kind of interesting, but like anyone could do that.

He had a tumultuous romantic life.

Again, anyone can do that.

Only one person can sing like Johnny Cash and it's not Joaquin Phoenix.

He sure did try though.

As was well documented by the media at the time, Phoenix and Witherspoon both went to great lengths to learn to sing and play instruments for the movie.

It was six months of every day just really trying hard to do something I had never done before.

I learned to play an instrument and I worked with voice coaches.

And it's the most humiliating process I've ever endured.

Because you do these exercises, all these vowels, and you do like the

up and down.

Walk the Line was not the first music biopic to star actors with little singing experience, but its success helped open up the floodgates for many more.

The past two decades have contained so many films like this that you might think Jack would have gotten used to it by now.

But nope, he's still mad.

It's not just that they're being asked to sing, they're being asked to impersonate these incredibly iconic, distinctive voices.

You know, that this is like the reason we care about these people, the reason we're going to a movie about them is because of the art that they left, art which revolves very, very heavily around their own voice.

Guys, this is a layup.

Just use the recording.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Loretta Lynn, Jim Morrison, Hank Williams, Elton John, Judy Garland, Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Amy Winehouse, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen.

These are just some of the beloved vocalists who have gotten the biopic treatment, treatment, but with their voice, the very quality that has made them indelible, lasting, important, replaced with that of an actor.

This has become so normal that most of us don't think about it, but it's actually a very strange state of affairs.

And in this episode, we're going to figure out why on earth, or at least in Hollywood, they do things this way.

The answer is entangled with who sings in all kinds of movies, not just biopics, goes all the way back to the dawn of the talkie, and involves a complex and muddled understanding of what exactly constitutes authenticity.

A notion bound up in time, taste, and as you'll also see, national borders.

So, today on decodering, how do we decide who sings in the movies?

This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab.

Choiceology is a show all about the psychology and economics behind our decisions.

Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like: can we learn to make smarter decisions and the power of do-overs?

The show is hosted by Katie Milkman.

She's an award-winning behavioral scientist, professor at the Wharton School, and author of the best-selling book, How to Change.

In each episode, Katie talks to authors, historians, athletes, Nobel laureates, and everyday people about why we make irrational choices and how we can make better ones to avoid costly mistakes.

Listen and subscribe at schwab.com/slash podcast or find it wherever you listen.

You know those little check-ins like calling your grandmother to say happy birthday or texting your friends just to gossip?

Feels good, right?

It's those shared moments that matter most because staying connected matters.

That's why in the rare event of a network outage, ATT will proactively credit you for a full day of service.

That's the ATT guarantee.

So take a moment to connect, make the call to your parents you've been putting off.

Send a quick message to an old friend and do it all knowing you've got ATT behind you.

Credit for fiber downtime lasting 20 minutes or more or for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers.

Must be connected to impacted tower at onset of outage.

Restrictions and exclusions apply.

See att.com/slash guarantee for full details.

ATNT.

Connecting changes everything.

Chances are that in just about any movie made in the last few decades, when an actor opens their mouth to sing, the voice you hear will be their own.

But this is not some unchanging static fact of film.

What you're supposed to hear when an actor unhinges their jaw is a matter Hollywood has been negotiating since the dawn of sound.

Wait a minute, I said it.

You ain't heard nothing.

You want to hear Twitchy Tricky?

All right, hold on, hold on.

The first widely distributed feature-length film with synchronized sound is famously the 1927 musical, The Jazz Singer.

It's actually mostly a silent film, title cards and all, but it does have a handful of songs, some of them performed in Blackface by the movie's star, Al Jolson.

Jolson was a major force in vaudeville and on Broadway, and the opportunity to see the world's greatest entertainer sing sing at the local movie theater turned the jazz singer into a sensation.

Movie studios immediately rushed an avalanche of other musicals into production.

The musical for a good two or three years became the primary genre in Hollywood because it was so commercial to show off the fact that you could synchronize sound and pictures with dancing in particular.

Dominic Broomfield McHugh is a musicologist and editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical.

During this period, there's remarkable creativity and it's all about the technology really and studios figuring out how to make it work.

They tried all sorts of things.

Action.

Sometimes studios brought an entire orchestra on set and recorded everything live.

The voice of the girl singing is caught by the microphone above her head.

But that was expensive and time consuming.

And as filmmakers started using more sophisticated camera work, it became a hindrance.

Because you don't want to just watch it static like you're in a theater.

You want to see them in different angles for different verses or different lines.

So if you're recording the singing live on set, it's very hard to join all of that up so that it sounds acceptable.

By the mid-1930s, they'd landed on a solution.

Playback.

Our love affair.

Playback means the songs are pre-recorded in a studio, and then those recordings play back while the actors lip-sync on set.

This became standard practice and remains so to this day.

Once actors and musicals were all lip-syncing anyway, Hollywood quickly realized that it was possible to make any voice you want come out of an actor's mouth.

Don't you get it?

Use Kathy's voice.

Lena just moves her mouth, and Kathy's voice comes over singing and talking for her.

That's wonderful.

This is the plot of Singing in the Rain, one of my very favorite movies and an all-time classic released in 1952 but set in the early days of sound.

In the movie, Debbie Reynolds plays a chorus girl named Kathy with a gorgeous voice who is drafted to dub a silent film star whose voice is grating.

What's a big idea?

Can't a girl get a word in edge-wise?

Lena, you're a beautiful woman.

Audiences think you've got a voice to match.

The studios gotta keep their stars from looking ridiculous at any cost.

So to avoid that ridicule, Hollywood Studios kept the Kathys of the world secret from the public.

So much so that they became known in the industry as ghost singers.

By the 1940s and 50s, ghost singers were everywhere.

Which is also to say that actors lip-syncing to voices other than their own had become commonplace.

These technicolor films start coming in.

Everything becomes bigger, bolder.

If the visual standards of beauty are going up, if you're gonna make your actors and actresses look ever more perfect, you've got to match the makeup with the vocal makeup.

The biggest musical stars of the era didn't need help.

People like Gene Kelly and Judy Garland, who could act and dance and sing.

But triple threats were expensive and rare.

So studios started building musicals around different kinds of stars.

Terrific dancers like Sid Sharice and Rita Hayworth were always dubbed by someone else.

Put the blame on Mame,

boy.

Put the blame on Mame.

They might also use a ghost singer if they cast a non-singing movie star like Ava Gardner.

And even stars who could sing, but not in every style, might get one too.

He holds

in his arms.

This is why even Debbie Reynolds, who played the ghost singer Kathy in Singing in the Rain, ironically ended up dubbed herself for the movie's ballads by a ghost singer.

Would you

they met

as you and I?

The fictional Kathy would be outraged to hear that none of these real-life ghost singers, like the two you've just heard, Anita Ellis and Betty Noise, ever received screen credit.

The studios kept their names out of the press.

Soundtrack albums went out with the movie star's name on them, even if they'd made essentially no contribution to the record.

And there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Everyone on a set was on contract.

The studios could do with them as they liked, constructing and controlling the narrative around them.

And they were far more controlling of some of their talent than others.

More famous actresses were dubbed by ghost singers than men were.

There are men who were dubbed, but in so many cases, the men were allowed to get through songs however they liked.

And the women had to have acceptably feminine, maybe feminized singing voices.

Say

a prayer for me tonight.

I'll need every prayer.

The effect was not always seamless.

Moviegoers might have noticed, for example, that the dancer Vera Ellen sang with an entirely different voice from film to film.

Or maybe that Vera Ellen in White Christmas sang with the same voice as Kim Novak in Pal Joey.

Or that the black movie star Dorothy Dandridge was dubbed by a white opera singer in Carmen Jones.

Jones.

But in general, ghost singing was a kind of open secret, and studios and the audience alike seemed united in wanting to keep it that way.

The thing about an open secret, though, is that it's precarious.

It's always just a matter of time before the secrecy drops away and the matter at hand is out in the open.

And that's what happened when one ghost singer finally burst into the spotlight.

The whole job of really doing a good dubbing job is if you don't detect that there's any timbre or any difference in pronunciation, that it looks like it's the actress.

Marnie Nixon is the patron saint of ghost singers.

She died in 2016, but you'll be hearing from her in various old interviews.

She's the one person who finally managed to parlay her career as a ghost singer into its own kind of fame, and in the process, revealed that the ghost singer's days were numbered.

She started out as a male girl at MGM when she was a teenager, but she was a singer and they knew that.

Stephen Cole co-wrote Marnie's memoir.

So one day she ran into a composer

who looked at her and said, Marnie, can you sing in Hindi?

And she said, yes.

I was a big faker.

I mean, how did I know I can sing in Hindu?

But I thought I could do anything, you know.

The film was The Secret Garden from 1949.

It was not a musical, but Marnie was hired to dub a lullaby sung by a child.

She had a great, great ear and perfect pitch.

She could imitate anybody.

She could imitate accents.

And so that started it.

After that, Hollywood regularly began calling on Marnie for dubbing jobs.

She never thought of that as her career, though.

Her true passion was for classical music.

She did concerts with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.

She did operas all over in LA and New York.

But she had a family to support, so she also recorded radio jingles.

She sang in the chorus on Broadway, and she continued to pick up ghost singing gigs.

She even sang a few high notes for Marilyn Monroe and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

And then in 1955, she got her biggest job yet.

The King and I had been a big Broadway hit for Rogers and Hammerstein.

For the movie version, they cast Deborah Carr, a very popular performer, to play the lead.

She was the perfect actress for the role, but she was not a singer, and so they hired

On a typical dubbing job, Marnie would go into the studio, sing a piece of music, and be on her way.

They'd later play her recording on set for an actor to lip-sync to.

But the king and I was entirely different.

Before the cameras rolled, Marnie and Deborah rehearsed together for six weeks, one week for each song they had to record.

That was very well planned, the whole thing.

Marnie Nixon told the story to Fresh Air in 1978.

So I would stand next to her so that she could take from me the body tensions and energy thrusts that I would do when I actually would sing.

She would also be singing, and I would be looking at her, how she would pronounce her words.

You know, what happens to her mouth when she does certain notes.

Our hands were in the same position.

Our head was in the same position.

You know, it was just those little subtle things.

When they got into the studio side by side at microphones, they were able to go from one person talking to the other person singing seamlessly.

But if all this effort was being made to get a seamless, unified performance on screen, one where viewers couldn't tell that Deborah Carr wasn't really singing, you better believe the studio wanted to maintain that illusion off screen too.

Marnie was paid paid just $420 and received no royalties for the soundtrack album and no credit whatsoever.

And she was forbidden to talk about it.

Actually, the studio, 20th Century Fox, called me and they said that if anyone ever knew that I did any part,

any part of the dubbing, that they would see to it that I wouldn't work in town again.

Can you imagine?

I was scared to death.

It was embarrassing to Deborah Carr, they felt, to say, oh, she can act, but she can't sing.

It just, I think they thought it would taint the film.

And it wasn't just the studios who were concerned that a ghost singer might reflect on an actor's talent.

Some actors were starting to find it insulting and unnecessary, too.

They didn't just want credit for the singing.

They actually wanted to do the singing.

This was the case on Marnie's next two dubbing jobs.

In 1961's Westside Story, the rising rising star Natalie Wood was eager to sing the part of Maria for herself.

The producers told her she could try and then later had Marnie re-record the whole thing.

I feel pretty, oh, so pretty.

I feel pretty and witty and gay and I pity any girl who's in me today.

Something similar happened on the job that finally made Marnie famous in her own right, a job that also exposed exactly how fraught ghost singing, or really having a ghost singer, had become.

The movie was 1964's My Fair Lady.

The role was Eliza Doolittle, played on screen by Audrey Hepurn.

I want to be a lady in a flare shop, set up sitting at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.

But they won't take me unless I can talk more genteel.

Hepburn, like Natalie Wood, wanted to sing the part herself.

But within the studio system, even a bona fide movie star like Audrey Hepburn didn't have the power to make sure her voice would be used.

All she could do was try to sound as good as possible.

So she was taking voice lessons.

Marnie would help coach her, in fact, and wanted her to be as good as she could be, not knowing how much they would use and how much they would not use of her vocals.

But in the final film, it's mostly Marnie.

In fact, the only song Audrey sings a substantial part of is Just You Wait.

Until Marnie steps in anyway to take the high part.

I find it a little jarring when you really listen to it now and even watch it.

It is like two different voices.

And this time, the sometimes jarring nature of ghost singing did not go unmentioned or unnoticed.

See, Hepburn's casting had been a bit of a scandal to begin with.

The studio had passed over the actress who'd originated the part on stage.

That actress was none other than Julie Andrews.

Andrews was not yet a movie star, but obviously she could have sung the part of Eliza Doolittle on screen for herself.

So when the movie came out, audiences were primed to listen judgmentally.

It was clearly not Audrey Hepron singing in the movie.

She'd sung a little in the past, but nothing like this.

So who was it?

Finally, the word got out about Marnie Nixon.

Have you heard, my dear, that this lady was the voice of Audrey Hepburn?

And this revelation did seem to taint, if not the film, the reception of Hepburn's performance.

People said in the press, they finally said, well, if it's not her voice, it's really not her complete performance.

If you're not singing, are you really acting?

My Fair Lady, the movie, was a juggernaut.

It was the second highest-grossing movie of the year and won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

But Audrey Hepern wasn't even nominated, and the person who won Best Actress that year was Julie Andrews.

It was ostensibly for Mary Poppins, but was widely regarded as an industry make good for the whole My Fair Lady casting debacle.

There was starting to be an irreconcilable problem with the whole ghost singing practice.

If the ghost singer was known, it was a kind of knock on on the actor.

But there were still high expectations for singing in films, and some actors really couldn't sing as well as trained professionals.

My Fair Lady may have been somewhat humiliating for Audrey Hepburn, but it was good for Marnie Nixon.

She went on tour with Liberace, she performed in stage musicals, she appeared on screen as one of the nuns in the sound of music.

She even made TV appearances, like on the game show To Tell the Truth.

Will the real Marnie Nixon please stand up and sing a sword?

But she remained best known for dubbing other actresses.

It was a double-edged sword.

I became well known as

Time magazine said the ghostess with the most is bad rhyme.

People all over the world knew that, but they thought that I was a

show singer when in actuality that really wasn't what I had been.

Now I feel like I'm being

haunted myself, even though I was a ghost.

When Marnie gave this interview in 1978, it had been a long time since she'd been a ghost singer.

My Fair Lady was both the peak of her dubbing career and her very last dubbing job.

Not just because she started to become known in her own right, because there was less and less dubbing to do.

Hollywood was changing.

Acting was changing.

And all the tensions inherent in the ghost singer would soon make it all but extinct in American films.

Why that happened?

How we got from Audrey Hepburn's snub to Reese Witherspoon's triumph after the break.

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You know those little check-ins like calling your grandmother to say happy birthday or texting your friends just to gossip?

Feels good, right?

It's those shared moments that matter most because staying connected matters.

That's why in the rare event of a network outage, ATT will proactively credit you for a full day of service.

That's the ATT guarantee.

So take a moment to connect.

Make the call to your parents you've been putting off, send a quick message to an old friend, and do it all knowing you've got ATT behind you.

Credit for fiber downtime lasting 20 minutes or more or for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers.

Must be connected to impacted tower at onset of outage.

Restrictions and exclusions apply.

See ATT.com/slash guarantee for full details.

ATNT.

Connecting changes everything.

So during Hollywood's golden age, it was very normal for the studios to prioritize having great singing in their musicals, even if that meant some of the stars didn't sing for themselves.

And in the early 1960s, two lavish movie musicals doing exactly that, Westside Story and My Fair Lady, which both featured the voice of Marnie Nixon, earned box office bank and Oscar Glory.

But this is almost impossible to imagine today.

A musical can still be a commercial and critical hit, but one with ghost singers?

No way.

So what happened?

I reached out to someone I knew could explain.

And this is good, my volume-wise?

That was perfect and great.

Hello.

Isaac Butler is a culture writer and frequent contributor to Slate.

Do you know what you're here to talk about, She?

I'm here to talk about why we want actors to do their own singing in movies.

Yes.

Okay, cool.

Isaac has written extensively about Hollywood in the 1950s and 60s, Marnie Nixon's heyday, but also when American acting starts to change.

And it's changing because of this new generation of younger actors who are all studying with various teachers who are following in the footsteps of this Russian theorist and actor and writer and director named Konstantin Stanislavski.

And Stanislavski's ideas are all about truth.

They're all about realistic human behavior, recognizable emotions.

They want to demonstrate their verisimilitude.

They want to convince you that this person is real.

To really tell the truth, not to pretend, to not act as though I feel bad, but to feel bad.

The most famous version of this new brand of acting is the method.

You may remember we did a whole episode with Isaac about his book on the method.

At its best, it's a new level of electrifying reality and truthfulness that people had really never seen before.

Over the course of the 1950s and 60s, these ideas seeped into and spread throughout Hollywood.

At the same time, the old studio system was slowly disintegrating.

And when it finally gave way entirely, it was thanks thanks in part to the movie Musical.

After a few big hits like Westside Story and My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, the studios went all in on musicals.

But most of what followed were bloated bombs.

Movies like Dr.

Doolittle, Camelot, which is a huge boondoggle and loses one kabajillion dollars, if I remember correctly.

Camelot.

Camelot.

I know it sounds a bit bizarre.

By the time you get to the late 60s, the studio system collapses.

And then out of that arises this thing called New Hollywood.

Limping along and out of ideas, Hollywood handed over the keys to the kingdom to a younger generation of directors and actors who were steeped in the ideals of the method.

Let's make this as authentic as possible to the human experience.

That's what we are trying to do in our movies.

That really takes over.

And the most exciting movies that are coming out of that time are doing that.

Now I'm going to fuss your ass for those three bags and I'm going to nail you for freaking your feet for capital.

You're totally full of shit.

You're all full of shit.

And as those norms conquer everything,

I think they do also conquer the way we think about music in movies.

That it would be best if the music is actually played by the actor actually can play their instrument and they can actually sing.

And this thinking didn't just apply to musicals.

This was also the approach in dramas like Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, in which Ellen Burston stars as an aspiring singer.

We looked at each other in the same way then,

but I can't remember where

or when.

Who cares if the person's a great singer?

Maybe the character isn't a great singer.

Let's just have them sing.

And soon this philosophy comes to movies about characters who are great singers.

Some of the greatest in living memory.

Basically, once it's deregur for actors to do their own singing, they're gonna sing, even in a music biopic.

With a song in my heart.

Music biopics are old.

They've been around almost as long as the movie Musical.

It's easy to see the appeal.

Show business loves to tell stories about itself, and audiences love to learn more, or at least think they're learning more, about their favorite stars.

In the early years, these movies tended to take one of two approaches to the vocals.

They cast one famous singer to play another famous singer, or they had the movie's subject re-record their own songs for an actor to lip-sync to.

But in the 1970s, actors who were not singers began going to great lengths to try and sound like famous musicians.

Every day,

it's getting closer.

In 1978, Gary Busey lost 32 pounds and learned the guitar to play Buddy Holly.

And when the country star Loretta Lynn hand-picked Sissy Spacek to play her in the 1980 biopic Coal Miner's Daughter, it was not because of Spacek's singing ability.

I'd never seen one of her movies, I had never seen her, or I read about her.

And I picked her out of a big stack of 8 by 10 pictures and I said to my manager, I said, this girl right here, Sissy Spacek, will be the coal miner's daughter.

The filmmakers planned to have the actress lip-sync to Lynn's voice, but Spacek insisted that she sing for herself, that she couldn't do the part, couldn't capture Loretta Lynn's character without singing.

There is something to be said for learning how to sing like that person, just like learning how to walk like that person, learning how to shave your face like that person, whatever it is.

You will learn something, maybe it can't even be expressed in words, but you will learn something mysterious and special about that person.

Space did have some singing experience.

She briefly tried to make it as a folk rocker before becoming an actor.

And now she immersed herself in Loretta Lynn's music, singing along with tapes until she could nail the voice.

She also spent two months in Nashville rehearsing with Lynn's actual band before filming the movie.

To make it even more real, the music was recorded live on set.

Well, I was born to cold money's daughter

in a cabin on a hill and butcher holler.

SpaceX's commitment paid off.

She won the 1981 Academy Award for Best Actress.

This was the same year that Robert De Niro won Best Actor for another biopic, Raging Bull, for which he famously reshaped his body twice over to play the boxer Jake LaMada at his peak and at rock bottom.

I recall every fall, every hook, every jab.

A voice where a guy can get rid of his flab.

I said, no, my life wasn't drab.

SpaceX and De Niro won in the same year with two biopics and two transformations.

Learning to sing and play an instrument is not known as going method, the way gaining 60 pounds is.

But the rewards for both could be just as sweet.

And so, for decades now, dozens of actors have put a tremendous amount of very public effort into becoming musicians.

That's Austin Butler as Elvis Presley.

He got so far inside the king that he supposedly couldn't shake the accent for months.

Last year alone, we got Angelina Jolie singing as the legendary opera diva Maria Callis.

Marissa Abella as Amy Winehouse and Timothy Chalamay as Bob Dylan.

Where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

And we got copious media coverage of them all.

In the lead-up to these movies' releases, and then as part of the seemingly inevitable Oscar campaign, there's typically a ton of attention paid to how much the actors prepared.

I was a non-guitar player, I was a non-harmonica player before the movie started.

Really?

What would have been a months-long, structured process became a years-long side passion?

It just gave me a lot of time to to live in this space, to live in this role, and to soak in the embers of the 1960s.

As viewers, we seem to lap it up.

So, part of why you're going to Elvis is to see Austin Butler become Elvis, right?

Like, it's like, oh my God, this is so wild.

I mean, that's sort of what the biopic is often predicated on.

We're going to put this actor in a whole bunch of prosthetics, you know, and they're going to like kind of imitate the way they talk.

That's my

Meryl Streep is both Julia Child and Margaret Thatcher.

And then, you know, we're just going to be so wowed by that transformation.

Obviously, there is this seems like this very obvious connection to sort of like the Robert De Niro gaining 50 pounds, which is like, it's a showing your work thing.

So like, even if you don't aren't great, like the effort, we want to see the effort.

Yeah, totally.

I think part of the popularity of that, particularly with awards voters, is that very showing the work thing because acting is so mysterious and hard to describe and it's hard to know when it's good or not, but you can tell whether someone has convincingly become Johnny Cash or not, right?

And you can tell all the work they did to convincingly become Johnny Cash or maybe they didn't.

And all that work does something else too.

It helps keep the actor in the spotlight.

On screen, they may be trying to disappear, but off screen, the focus is squarely on all their labor.

And so these movies get the benefit of appealing to fans of the biopic subject and its star, to fans of Bob Dylan and Timothy Chalamé.

This arrangement benefits so many people, stands, movie studios, the owners of a musician's back catalog, that maybe it doesn't matter that it may not be the best way to get to the truth.

Which, if you recall, is the whole reason that actors started singing for themselves in the first place.

I just want to dig into this

because it's actually just very muddled, specifically the singing thing.

So, like, okay, you are trying to put on weight or lose weight or train as a cobbler because you're trying to be more

like the person.

Yes.

So it's like, if all of this comes out of a desire, an urge to be more real, to more accurately reflect the character,

we have somehow taken that into a situation where to more accurately reflect the character, one of the greatest musicians that has ever lived, almost definitionally, we will most accurately represent that character

by singing ourselves?

Yeah, yes, it's very odd.

I mean, and then I'll go one more for you, right?

Most of the time, they're lip syncing anyway.

They're lip syncing to their own vocal track, but they have recorded that vocal track elsewhere.

And that vocal track is sweetened and there's a lot of isotope post-production software put on it so that it sounds really amazing and the breathing is at the good right time and all sorts of that stuff.

And it's probably edited together from multiple takes.

So they are already lip-syncing.

It's just they're lip-syncing to their voice.

Now, to be fair, sometimes they're not lip-syncing.

They are actually singing live.

Like Sissy and Coleminer's daughter, Timmy in the Bob Dylan movie, and Renee Zellweger's Oscar-winning turn as Judy Garland.

There's just no let up

the live-long night

can do.

You know, I feel it's important sometimes on the camera to catch the sort of physical exertion of performing.

That's Rupert Gould, the director of Judy, explaining why he wanted Zellweger to do her own singing.

In the interest of realism, replicating Garland's voice was less important to him than capturing the immediacy of live performance.

You know, the sweat that pours off the performer, the way the sinews move on the neck, the dilation of the pupils.

It's sort of like a very

gladiatorial, like dream state that they're in.

And I'm sure there's a way of capturing that with someone else's music, but I felt it was going to be more visceral.

But having the actor do their own singing can also backfire and make the effect less visceral, less real.

And for an example, Jack Hamilton, the music critic you heard from at the beginning of this episode, would direct your attention toward last year's Amy Winehouse biopic, Back to Black.

It was really dreadful.

I mean, even by the standard of music biopics.

I don't wake up in the morning and bang out 10 by lunch.

I need to live my songs.

Jack blames a lot of that on having the movie star Marissa Abella do her own singing.

She sounds like an amateur, like a talented amateur.

And however you feel about Amy Minehouse's music, she had a phenomenal singing voice.

So you're dealing with this weird thing in the movie where you've got this woman who's on stage at like a small jazz club and she's singing and she sounds just kind of like someone who would be doing karaoke out at a bar.

And everyone within the world of the movie has to act like it's the greatest voice they've ever heard in their life.

Amy, you've got a voice.

It's right up there.

It's one of the best I've ever heard.

I mean, you gotta know that.

It's a total failure of storytelling, I think, because you're like, why is everyone acting like this person's the greatest singer they've ever heard in their life?

I can hear them sing and they're not that good.

For this very reason, there often seems to be a kind of carve-out for biopics about particularly virtuosic singers.

No one tasked an actor with mimicking the voice of Whitney Houston or Freddie Mercury or doing the distinctive rasp of Ray Charles.

A music biopic that I actually think is pretty good as far as these things go is Ray,

the Ray Charles biopic that stars Jamie Foxx.

Jamie Foxx, who is actually a good singer.

And they made the smart choice of not forcing Jamie Foxx to do a Ray Charles impersonation.

They just used Ray Charles' own recordings.

And, you know, initially, it's a little bit jarring because you are aware that you're watching someone lip-sync, but then you get a whole movie of getting to listen to Ray Charles' music.

And so it's like pretty great.

Jamie Foxx, for what it's worth, won an Oscar for Ray.

And so did the actors who played Freddie Mercury and Edith Piaf, parts that relied on a mix of original recordings and professional impersonators.

So it's not necessarily a knock against your performance if you're lip-syncing to someone else's voice.

But this approach definitely gets less attention.

The stars who sing for themselves take up more and more oxygen every year.

Right now, the hype about Jeremy Allen White learning to sing like Bruce Springsteen is everywhere for a movie that hasn't even opened yet.

I saw like a headline that was like Bruce Springsteen was listening to Jeremy Allen White's performances of his material and like couldn't tell the difference between what was Bruce's own recording and what was Jeremy Allen White.

And like, first of all, I'm like, that's bullshit.

Like Bruce Springsteen, I'm sure could tell.

But like also, who cares?

Like it's like, I don't think that that's,

it's a silly thing to be impressed by to me.

And certainly a silly reason to go to a movie.

It's a very weird moment that we have arrived in where sort of all these different trends and norms are kind of coalescing in this one genre.

That we want authenticity, we want the star, we want to see the truth, we want to be lied to, you know, we want to hear the singing, but we don't actually want to hear, you know, the singing of the actual person.

We want to hear the singing of this person doing an impression of them because we want to be so wowed that they were able to do it.

We go through all these contortions because we want above all to see something authentic, that impossible to pin down god of American acting.

The highest praise we have for an actor is that we really believed they were their character, and every effort should be made to achieve this effect, even if it results in movie stars singing when maybe they shouldn't.

But as you've already heard, this ideal we now have is not set in stone.

It's subject to trends and changing norms.

At one point during Hollywood's golden age, actors' voices in musicals were routinely replaced by those of ghost singers, and it was fine with filmmakers, actors, and audiences.

In other words, whatever's driving actors to sing for themselves is not correct.

It's merely a convention.

And when you start to look beyond the West, you see that it's a convention that for many people simply does not exist.

When we come back, we fly from Hollywood to Bollywood, where the professional ghost singer is not a ghost at all.

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This episode is brought to you by Saks Fifth Avenue.

Saks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to get creative with your personal style and find the best arrivals for fall.

Transitioning from summer outfits to a fall wardrobe is always a little bit of a hassle.

And I find looking at Saks.com helpful.

They make it easy and fun to browse the latest fall fashions and find pieces that fit together and that fit me.

They have some really great chunky cardigans, some from Polo by Ralph Lorenz, that look extremely comfortable and fashionable.

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Musical biopics are at least in conversation with with things that really happened.

They are movies about people who sing for a living.

Whether an actor is challenging themselves to do that singing themselves or lip-syncing to an icon, whether they're effectively doing karaoke or they're a puppet for the original recordings.

When they sing, it's in settings and situations in which a real person sang.

In other words, these movies aspire to be realistic.

And yet, strangely, the same norms and expectations of realism that have prevailed in music biopics now also rule the day in a genre that is absolutely and intentionally fantastical.

The good old movie musical.

For the last half century, but especially the last two decades, we've been treated to a procession of movie musicals with stars whose singing is serviceable at best and often just goofy as hell, like Pierce Brosnan gamely braying his way through Mama Mia.

Whatever happened to our love,

I wish I understood.

It used to be so nice, it used to be so good.

But in a film business that prioritized actual vocal talent over quote-unquote realism, you might get something different.

So now we're going to turn to the Indian film industry, the most prolific in the world.

India produces around five times more movies than Hollywood per year.

And in Bollywood, that is to say Hindi language popular cinema created in the city of Mumbai, all movies, in a sense, are musicals.

You see when you say musicals, there are no Indian popular films without songs and music.

Nazreen Muni Kabir writes books and makes documentaries about Hindi cinema.

She also curates Indian movies on Channel 4 in the UK.

Since the very beginning that the sound came to Indian cinema, which is 1931, you have songs.

These musical sequences appear in every genre, and in every genre, the on-screen actors are not the ones singing.

This is the case in this romantic crime drama from 1951.

And this 1975 action-adventure comedy.

And this 2001 historical sports epic.

And in all these examples, spanning genres and decades, the voice coming out of every one of these actors' mouths belongs to the same person, Lata Mangeshkar.

She was called the voice of the nation.

She was called India's nightingale.

Or she was known wherever Indian cinema was known.

Nazreen knew her personally.

She wrote a book based on their extensive conversations.

Lata is one of the most popular stars in the history of Indian film, despite almost never showing her face on screen.

In other words, though her job was very similar to that of the uncredited singers of the Hollywood studio era, Lata was no ghost.

She was a playback singer.

In the beginning, just as in Hollywood, there were no playback singers.

In the early days of Indian cinema, cinema, the actors would be called singing stars, so they could sing their own songs.

But with a couple of exceptions, they were better actors than they were singers.

And Indian audiences can forgive bad acting, but they cannot forgive bad singers.

So over the course of the 1940s, dubbing the songs became standard practice, not just for a few movie stars, but for almost all of them.

This is when Lata Mangeshkar got her start, when playback singers were still something like an open secret.

Known about, but not really known.

Letta started as a child, 12 and 13 years old, because she needed to earn money for the family.

She was so good, she would be singing four songs a day.

So she'd go from one studio to the other by train, hardly have time to eat or drink or whatever, and she worked so hard.

In 1949, she sang for the movie that would change her life and the industry, Mahal, a horror film featuring one especially haunting melody.

A very popular song of hers called Aiga Anewala.

The song was a huge hit on Indian radio, but Lata's name was nowhere to be found.

The record album had the name of the character of the movie.

So there was an actress called Madhubala.

She played a character called Kamini and on the record label you had Kamini credited as the singer.

Then a lot of people rang up the radio and said, who is this person Kamini?

There were so many letters that they couldn't hide it anymore.

And they had to say, no, it isn't Kamani at all.

It is Lata Magishkan.

Lata herself, only 20 years old at the time, pushed for her name to be included on subsequent pressings of the record.

And from that time, she became more and more famous.

Over the course of the next decade, Lata turned into a household name as the most in-demand playback singer.

Lata was never pinned onto one actress.

She was all of the top actresses.

Everybody knew that all the best actresses of the 50s onwards, like Narghes or Madhubala, or Minakumari, everybody knew that it was mostly Lata Mageshka singing for them.

She was part of a small group of virtuoso playback singers who became famous by dominating Bollywood Bollywood from the late 1940s into the 70s and beyond.

There was Rafi, Mukesh and Kishur Kumar.

These three were it, and there was Letta and there was Asha Busle who was Letta's sister.

So there was a monopoly for years, for decades.

They didn't want any other voice.

And this is different from how things were done in America.

When the old Hollywood studios used ghost singers, they tried to preserve the illusion of a unified performance.

The singer was supposed to sound like the actor.

That's why they put effort into voice casting, trying to find the right singer to match the actor's speaking voice.

And that's why Marnie Nixon and Deborah Carr work so closely together on The King and I.

But in Bollywood movies, there was no such illusion.

There's an actor called Dilip Kumar.

He could be singing in one scene with Rafi's voice.

Everybody knows it's Rafi.

And then 10 scenes later, he he could be singing Mugesh's voice everybody knows it's Mugesh this was a detail that did not matter it didn't matter as long as the song was good and the words were good and the music was good it really didn't matter

Think about stunts.

Most of them are stuntmen.

Everybody in the audience knows that.

You think James Bond would still be alive if he didn't have a stuntman?

The audience knows it's a stuntman, but they still love the action movies.

And the audience knows it's a playback singer, but they still love the songs.

And they love the singers too.

They are as familiar in terms of their names and their music and songs as any star in India.

Don't forget one thing: that for many, many years, there was no other pop music.

There weren't bands releasing albums and so on in India.

So what was the popular music?

The popular music was film music.

It was the popular music.

It was played on the radio.

People would buy the records.

Film music is everywhere.

Not just in India itself, but across the Indian diaspora, including where Nasreen grew up.

We had lots of records at home in London.

And it was our connection to India.

It was the connection which a lot of people of Indian origin had to the homeland was that music.

If I spoke Hindi at all, it was thanks to those songs.

On Sunday mornings, when there were no British or American films playing at the local cinema, they'd show Indian movies.

This is where Narzareen first came to understand that the voice she heard on the record and the face she saw on screen were not the same person.

It was a split performance.

There's a singer singing the song and there's this actress miming.

But you're so used to seeing the actresses on Indian cinema screen who were miming that you didn't really ask yourself.

I mean as a viewer I never asked myself.

I never separated things.

It was all one.

It felt like a one dream.

The total dominance of Lata's generation ended in the 1980s, after some of the most beloved male singers died young.

But Lata herself kept on going well into the 21st century.

She remained the queen of melody for generations, the go-to singer for powerful music directors to call.

You don't have to coach her.

She would come, she'd hear the tune, and she'd sing it in one go in three takes.

So you're saving money on musicians, on studio time, and God, what have you.

Lata sang thousands and thousands of songs in 18 different Indian languages.

She kept recording almost right up to her death in 2022 at the age of 92.

She sang over five decades and she sang for many actresses of different ages.

Deta was singing for teenagers when she was 60 years old.

Consider the now classic movie DDLJ from 1995 starring a 21-year-old actress named Kajal.

On screen, Kajal dances around her childhood bedroom in nothing but a peach-colored towel, while Lata's 65-year-old voice comes out of her body.

For some critics, this kind of thing is complicated.

Lata's decades-long dominance may be impressive on its own terms, but it also meant that for half a century, one woman's voice, a voice praised for being particularly pure, sweet, and eternally adolescent, defined the ideal sound of Indian femininity.

But today, there are many more playback singers with different backgrounds and styles, and without a doubt, Lata paved the way for them to be recognized and well compensated.

Over the last few years, though, music has started to take a back seat in Bollywood as action movies have become all the rage.

But Nazrien sees reason to hope that songs might be making a comeback.

Now, the big hit in the past month is a film which is a love story with newcomers and the music is what's popular.

The name of the film is Sayara and there's unbelievable popularity of that music and it's film music.

Is the film song using playback singers or are the actors singing?

100% playback.

You know, 100% playback.

When it comes to movies, we all have our bugaboos.

We all have the things that immediately snap us out of a story and make us shout, what are you doing?

Maybe it's when an actor tries to imitate a beloved musician.

Maybe it's when a beloved actor mows along to a famous singer's voice.

Maybe it's when the singing on screen isn't that good.

Maybe it's when the singing on screen is too good.

But whatever your bugaboo, if you take nothing else from this episode, it should be clear that there is no right way for movies to handle singing.

There's just the priorities of each film, the cultural and historical context in which it was made, and how you like it.

And if you really sit with that,

well, it might just free you up to like a whole lot more movies.

Hey, get a rhythm.

When you get the blues, come on, get a rhythm.

When you get the blues.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you're interested in hearing even more about the intricacies of ghost singing and biopics, I have three recommendations for you.

The first is Jack Hamilton's great slate piece about all of this.

It's the full articulation of his bugaboo, and it's called The Problem with Music Biopics is Bigger Than Just the Clichés.

And we'll link to it on our show page.

The second is the Slate Culture Gab Fest episode called Chalamet Goes Electric.

A great discussion about, yes, Timmy Chalamet's turn as Bob Dylan in last year's A Complete Unknown.

And the third recommendation is our own bonus episode, available right now only to Slate Plus members.

It's all about something we referred to in this episode, but did not get into in detail.

The drama surrounding Marnie Nixon's vocal work on Westside Story.

Natalie Wood absolutely did not want to be dubbed.

She really believed she could do it.

To hear more, sign up for Slate Plus.

You can do that from the Decodering show page on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.

Or you can visit slate.com forward slash decodering plus to get access wherever you listen.

This episode was written and produced by Max Friedman.

It was edited by me and Evan Chung, our supervising producer.

Decodering is also produced by Katie Shepard.

Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

We'd like to thank Jason Beester Jones, Robert L.

Friedman, Nitish Pawa, Shruti Rajagopalan, and Gabriella Steinberg.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com or call us on our Decodering phone number.

That is 347-460-7281.

We'd love to hear from you guys.

And we will be seeing you in two weeks.

This episode is brought to you by Saks Fifth Avenue.

Saks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to get creative with your personal style and find the best arrivals for fall.

Transitioning from summer outfits to a fall wardrobe is always a little bit of a hassle.

And I find looking at Saks.com helpful.

They make it easy and fun to browse the latest fall fashions and find pieces that fit together and that fit me.

They have some really great chunky cardigans, some from Polo by Ralph Lorenz, that look extremely comfortable and fashionable.

And I can imagine wearing them all around my house and also out on the town.

But that's my experience with Saks.com.

There's so much more to explore based on your personal style and what you're looking for.

So this fall, whether you're trying out the latest fashion trends or curating a closet that stands the test of time, Saks has you covered.

If you're looking for shopping to be fun and easy, then head to Saks Fifth Avenue for inspiring ways to elevate your personal style every day.