SHE 1983
Sandahl Bergman (She), David Goss (Tom), Quin Kessler (Shanda), Harrison Muller (Dick), Elena Wiedermann (Hari), Gordon Mitchell (Hector), Laurie Sherman (Taphir), Andrew McLeay (Tark), Cyrus Elias (Kram), David Brandon (Pretty Boy), Susan Adler (Pretty Girl), Gregory Snegoff (Godan), Mary D'Antin (Eva), Mario Pedone (Rudolph), Donald Hodson (Rabel), Maria Quasimodo (Moona), David Traylor (Xenon)
Directed by Avi Nesher
"I didn't write [SHE] the way you do normal, conventional, well-organized
cinema. I didn't even think it would happen. It was so far from the
original novel, and it was so far from the way these movies are normally
shot... I thought the producer would look at it and say 'that's
bullshit' and it would never happen... and they greenlit the movie, much
to my astonishment."--Director Avi Nesher, SHE blu-ray interview
Fresh off her success in the big budget CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982) opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sandahl Bergman takes center stage in the smaller scaled, futuristic barbarian flick, SHE. A bone-headed reworking of H. Rider Haggard's popular novel, 'She: A History of Adventure', Nesher's wildly out of control interpretation has as much familiarity to its source material as it does adherence to narrative cohesiveness.
The plot is virtually non-existent and episodic in nature. It's a
'capture and rescue' tale to find a kidnapped sister who has no lines,
being held by a lead villain whom we never learn anything about. We discover as much about the protagonists as well. Even the title warrior woman has
very little revealed about her.
Bergman headlined another Trans World production in 1987 titled PROGRAMMED TO KILL (aka THE RETALIATOR), a film that was essentially remade as the nearly identical EVE OF DESTRUCTION in 1991. After FATAL ATTRACTION (1986) and BASIC INSTINCT (1992) were huge hits, the market for erotic thrillers exploded and Sandahl found herself cast in a slew of them and a number of television appearances.
In those days, both Continental and Trans World produced and distributed a handful of Drive-in style pictures that got frequent airplay on television and, whether through them or another company, theatrical and video distribution with titles like WARRIOR OF THE LOST WORLD (1983), CREATURE (1985), and ALIEN PREDATORS (1986); SHE (1983) being among them.
A CONVERSATION WITH GODAN: GREGORY SNEGOFF ON FILMING SHE AND HIS CAREER IN DUBBING
VENOMS5: Tell me a bit about yourself and how you got involved in the film industry.
GREGORY SNEGOFF: I'm a 3rd generation actor. I've always been in the film industry. When I was 23 I moved to Rome. I ended up staying and continued working as an actor. I discovered I had a knack for dubbing which didn't really exist in America at the time. We're talking late 70s-early 80s. Rome was the dubbing center of the world. Not just for Italy but for films all over the world. So there was quite a lot of work. I did work on thousands of radio commercials and acted and directed commercials and in mid-1984, I was shooting a six hour mini-series called CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. It was the first of a bunch of mini-series about Columbus. I came back to the states in 1985 and started a dubbing business in LA and worked in dubbing animation. In 1991 I went back and forth and in 1992, I moved back to Rome and stayed.
V5: Was it more difficult being an onscreen actor versus being a dubber?
GS: Some actors are better at dubbing than others. Some may not be able to see sync. In film and TV when an actor has to loop his own lines, some actors are terrible at it, nevermind dubbing other people. They don't have a musical ear. It's like dealing with rhythm. Dancers do it quite well. If you're a good actor and you know how to dub you'll be good at it. It takes a certain ability to put emotion into your dialog when you're standing in your jeans and T-shirt and you don't see the script ahead of time. It's broken up into loops, requiring some serious memorization skills. In America now we cut the loops down really short. When I first came back in 1984 I hit up some of the dubbing studios. I had learned from the Italians don't cut up the loops like that, because you'd memorize a page at the time. Here, it was annoying so I'd do a page at a time and ended up making a name for myself. We've gotten a bit lazy now for chopping up the loops so small. The ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement) systems are much more accurate today, though. The perks for dubbing versus acting in front of a camera is not sitting in a chair for hours in makeup and you don't have to dress up for the part. A lot of people think being famous is great but it ain't necessarily so. You think about Stallone and Willis on the street and being approached a lot; but when you're a voice actor nobody bothers you so long as you keep your mouth shut (laugh).
GS: Italy was never terribly big on auditions. It's still rare for them to do auditions. If they like your face, you get the job. In this case, I may have read for Avi, I can't recall. Godan became the big baddie in the film. I still may have a Godan poster from the movie, too; the ones you see plastered everywhere. I had one in my apartment and when people would come over it would scare the shit out of them (laughs).
GS: Avi was good to work with, but I didn't think much of it, actually. It wasn't a terrific film then or now. It was Sandahl's movie and she'd just come off a successful Broadway show and then she did CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982).
V5: What was your experience working with her?
GS: A very nice lady and a good sport. Very pleasant to work with. A low budget isn't terribly easy to work in. The script wasn't great and she made the best of things. David Traylor had it the easiest with all the silly lines.
GS: He and I arrived in Rome at the same time. We both went on English language radio and did separate shows and he became insanely famous over there. Unfortunately, he made a poor career choice. He wanted to be a standup comic so he quit his show and wanted to come back to America to be a comedian. He went to LA and got as far as doing an act on the Tonight Show. David's an extremely talented man, but his comedy is limited in the sense that if you're an American who speaks both languages then you'll love it. He tried to do stuff here and I had gone back to Rome and was working on a new satellite network called Orbit for the Arab countries. On one of their channels I was the voice of the network there called The Fun Channel, which was for kids. I told them you have to see this guy he'd be the perfect mascot so he became huge on that network for a while. As for SHE, Traylor ad-libbed his role. He made up most of that. Ask him to do any voice or character and he's astounding. That wasn't Nesher's doing, that was all David. He's a compendium of television trivia and he'll throw it at you 24 hours a day if you let him.
GS: A week or two, maybe? It wasn't a particularly difficult role, it was all shot in Rome in an abandoned villa. I remember Goss and Kessler, sitting in the dressing room with them. With Quin, I recall her being really concerned that her top would drop off and her breasts would fall out. She was constantly adjusting her top. That's why she was hired for the movie, actually. As for David, he would talk for hours about what he was going to do. He'd gone to acting school and would tell me how he was going to do this and do that in front of the camera, and this is my subtext, and so on. We'd go to filming the scene and I kept waiting for all that stuff to come out of David and it never did. He didn't seem nervous, he was very serious--and ended up with just two expressions like what Leone said about Eastwood's expressiveness--one with the cigar and one without.
V5: Gordon Mitchell?
GS: I didn't see him much on the picture, but Gordon Mitchell was a character and had an interesting face. Rome is a small town and the acting community is even smaller. Gordon was well liked so in Italy, if the word got around you're easy to work with, not fussy about money, you'd do an extra day, then they'd throw you in a film and he did a lot of them over there.
V5: Did you ever meet Roger Browne (you can read our interview with Roger HERE)? He was president of ELDA (English Language Dubbers Association) from 1966 to 1975.
GS: I did, although I didn't know Roger well. When I arrived in January of 1979, the Italian film industry was bottoming out of a ten year slide after producing over 500 films a year. Hollywood wasn't doing that. I might be stretching it, but most of their output was of a pornographic nature. It's a pity because they're very talented technicians over there and that industry disappeared.
V5: You did an episode of CHEERS in 1985.
GS: That was the first thing I did when I returned to the US. I come back and they cast me as an Italian bellboy (laughs).
GS: (laughs) Yeah, that's me on those. For some odd reason during my career I have re-voiced or imitated the voice of pretty much all the muscle guys. We're talking about Miles, Reb Brown, Stallone, Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Schwarzenegger, and others. I could imitate all their voices and the producers would oftentimes call me for that reason; particularly with Schwarzenegger because of his heavy accent. Producers would call and tell me he had all these coaches on set and they'd be concerned about his acting. So they'd call me in to help with the lines. And the producer would say, "but for God's sake don't tell anybody!" (laughs); but I re-voiced about a third of his lines on some of his films; this being after CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982). For Stallone I did the grunts and groans during the fights. These guys would sometimes be so busy they couldn't come in and do the looping so they'd call me in to do it. I often dubbed Franco Nero, too. He speaks perfect English, but he has an accent. He knew I was dubbing him and he didn't mind it. I saw him recently in Italy at an event where we both won an award. Other actors think they should dub themselves and they shouldn't (laughs). During the big boom of Italian cinema, nobody dubbed their own voice. Even Marcello Mastroianni was dubbed and he had a beautiful voice. It wasn't till later that you'd hear the actor's real voice.
V5: Do you know Michael Forrest? He was a voiceover artist as well; famously as being Maurizio Merli's English dubber.
GS: Michael is wonderful. A funny story about him: he's the dead guy in the bed in Madonna's BODY OF EVIDENCE (1993). That's Michael Forrest. He made a crack to me once that he'd made love to Madonna the night before. He's made a great living going back and forth between Italy and America and selling his autographs. He did it for years.
V5: When you dub these movies do you ever have any input or problems from the filmmakers?
GS: No, not really. Dubbing pornos was the worst, though. We'd dub the entire film minus the sex portions. When I'd be asked to adapt these things they wouldn't even have a guide track. Some of them would take place in different time periods. I'd desperately try to make them more interesting by playing around with the dialog and they'd come back and tell me, "you can't do that" (laughs).
GS: That was when I came back to the US and went to NY to visit friends and I walked around some sound studios and I asked about dubbing and got word about studios in LA. So I went to LA to Intersound and that's where I got onto ROBOTECH (1985). It is still on the air and Sony is about to do a live-action feature of the property. I wrote, directed and supervised ROBOTECH and most of those people are still working and that's been since 1985 when we started that. We're into our third generation of fans. Every once in a while I'm in a store and I put down my email which is Khyron13 and sometimes a 35 year old man will snap up all wide-eyed and ask about it and get really excited. We did CAPTAIN HARLOCK and other oddball feature films. I did a lot of films for Carl Macek of Streamline Pictures. I'm not tooting my own horn, but the reason you have the anime phenomenon today is because of us. Japanese producers tried to give it away back then but nobody wanted it. Carl knew the potential was there and he said, "Look, give me this film, that film, give it to me free, I will pay for the dubbing and distribution, and if it makes any money we'll split it 50/50". And because of the success of things like ROBOTECH, we did CRYING FREEMAN, FIST OF THE NORTH STAR, WICKED CITY, and many others. Everything that said written and directed by Carl it was actually me. Carl did not write till much later. Also, the Japanese will insist we dub their films literally. We'd argue back and forth that you can't say this in English; one example being this title from 2019 called SCIENCE FELL IN LOVE, SO I TRIED TO PROVE IT. They want us to keep all the Japanese stuff in even if you don't understand it. The distributors have bowed down to the hardcore fans who sent us hate mail after taking issue with us for changing things to suit the market. If you give me a film to write and direct I want do it my way because we care about the product. I do a quality of dubbing that nobody else does. I charge double the money. My productions cost twice as much as everybody elses because I spend twice as much time in the studio because ours looks like it's originally made in English. A lot of people think it's an American production.
We dubbed movies from all over the world including Hong Kong and the Philippines. We did the dub for CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN TIGER (2000). They made a bad decision in wanting Chinese accents but the sync is there and it looks like it was shot in English. SO CLOSE (2002) is another. Dubbing Asian movies in the past, they did not give a rats ass. They would pick whoever they could find off the street, from a bar, or wherever, and put them in front of a microphone. I did an animated Korean series THE LEGEND OF BLUE (2002), which was a 26 episode series and we did the first 13 episodes. For the rest, it sounded like they had guys from a bar and that's what it was. We also did the dubbing for THE WORLD OF YOR (YOR, THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE [1983]). I dubbed Reb Brown, a California surfer who got into acting. It was shot in English. That scene where he and his woman are coming out of a desert heading towards the ocean, and for some reason Yor knows the sea water is poisonous. She doesn't. She's running towards the water and he yells out, "Don't go in the water it'll make you dead!" We tried for an hour to come up with any phrase to replace that line and couldn't do it.
GS: Actually there's a TV series I dubbed I'm proud of called SQAUDRA ANTIMAFIA (2009-2016). It's a good copy of an American cop show. I put it on Free TV dubbed and we did a very good job. Nobody has a clue that show was dubbed. When the studio brought it to the lab to make the master copy they were waiting for it and the engineer running the machine said there was something wrong, that in some places it looks like a frame was out of sync. He had no idea it was an Italian production dubbed into English.
Something I wish I hadn't done... I'd say any of the Italian exploitation things were pretty bad. If you can at least finish the film it can generally make its money back. There was an Italian producer who made the worst, most ghastly exploitation films who went out of business. That's how bad those were. He produced lots of things shot in the South American jungle; didn't want to pay the crew nor the cast and some would walk off the set. Some of these guys would have an allergy towards payment. I did a bunch of films for another guy, and after the third job I'd say, "I'd like to get paid now". And he'd start shaking like he had no intentions on paying us. Another producer was paying people to steal copies of films. He'd pay for the dub and distribute the film, but they were films he did not have the rights to. When we found that out we dropped everything and fled. This guy is still in the film industry in a different capacity, still working, and never went to jail.
A huge thanks to Mr. Snegoff for giving his time for this interview. We wish him continued success in all his future endeavors.
A huge thanks to Mr. Snegoff for giving his time for this interview. We wish him continued success in all his future endeavors.
***ADDENDUM: A few weeks ago, David Traylor (Xenon in the movie) got in touch with me and did an interview where he discussed his career including working on SHE. You can read that interview HERE.***
This review is representative of the Kino Lorber blu-ray. Specs and extras: 1080p 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen; interview with director Avi Nesher; theatrical trailer; running time: 01:44:53