Welcome to the insular world of background voice actors, where major players can rake in up to $1 million a year and 'no one gives up their spots, you have to kill someone to get in.'
. “I have friends who do looping occasionally and think I do really well, but they don’t have a clue,” notes Brooks about how lucrative her career has been.“It’s a very small community, and it was kept that way on purpose. It was an unwritten agreement. A lot of people kept it quiet because of the money, and they didn’t want to share it,” says Brooks, who has been looping for more than 20 years. “It’s very competitive to get these jobs.
There are about 20 coordinators who make up Big Loop, and their ways of limiting the community of walla providers are manifold. Loopers who are not hired by the coordinator, but added to the group by a producer, are sometimes not spoken to by the group for the entire session. Or not informed of their recording time and location until the night before. Or not told about specialized jargon they need to prepare.
Part of the reason for the maneuvering is that, on any given project, it’s unclear who is in charge of hiring. One showrunner told me he will never show up for looping sessions no matter how important the episode might be. “Loop groups have a lot of drama because these are the extras of the audio world — and as such attract desperate performers who think that this is their chance at breaking in, when in fact being this close to the action is actually the furthest away,” this person says.
Johnny Gidcomb has been looping for about 30 years and runs Loop De Loop, one of the most successful looping groups for films, having done most of the Marvel films,. The former CEO of the Groundlings, he rebelliously teaches a $350 four-session online looping class. “People were like, ‘Why are you teaching people how to take our jobs?’ I said, ‘It’s because we’re all aging out. It’s time for new blood.’ If it’s the same people over and over again, it gets stale,” he says.
But usually, it’s a less sympathy-inducing request. Often, it’s someone who isn’t right for the parts, can’t improvise or doesn’t know how to sync to the screen. Nickie Bryar, who does looping on animation, including all of Seth MacFarlane’s shows, says it’s all about who you know: “Unless you are the cousin or nephew of the postproduction supervisor or the executive producer, you’re not going to get hired.”, a producer asked him out to lunch. “I was romanced by a producer of a-type series because she wanted me to hire her daughter and her husband on my show,” he remembers.
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