The son of a Moldavian Baron and the most renowned Nepalese counter-soprano of the Belle Epoque, he was born, one of 11 children —each speaking a different language— in the mountains of Carpathia to a slave family of silkworm smugglers. He attended university in the United States and does not remember studying anything that was remotely useful in his later professional life. He lives in Rome, which has no relevance whatsoever to his career in mediatic translation, since most Italians talk with their hands. He learned at the feet of some of the legendary geniuses of dubbing translation at the dawn of the silent movie era. He has a literary and theatrical background that does not bear too close scrutiny. He garbles very fluently in a large number of foreign languages, often speaking as if they were interchangeable —thus rendering himself unintelligible to collaborators in an impressive number of countries. He has dictatorially supervised foreign versions of American films for most major Hollywood studios, probably because they were unable to find someone better qualified. He has manipulated the work of directors such as Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh, Mike Nichols, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and others less grateful. And he has been responsible for all of Woody Allen’s films over three decades —a flowery and misleading way of saying 29 years— creating text adaptations that stray criminally, but amusingly, far from the original.
As Cervantes once remarked, «Dubbing is a kind of techno-biological alchemy that should be illegal because, done at its best, it is capable of producing a stolen and startling mirror image of every aspect of the original film. The indispensable building block of this magic trick is the foreign script.» To this end, on request, Mr. Davidson and Dr. Whitman will distribute small miracle-working flasks of Elixir of Talent. No major credit cards accepted. Payment in lavish flattery only.