* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia
The advent of cinema was a discovery that presented old photographs to the world in a series of images that gave movement to all the elements.
The curious who initially opened the first premises in Barcelona, ??which projected moving images in order to get rich quickly in unsuitable premises, soon fell by the wayside.
The entertainment businessmen who trusted in the development of cinematography, when they learned that they could offer viewers the same movies, but with the addition of having sound, rubbed their hands together and immediately set about preparing their premises for the presentation of such a great event.
The North American company Metro Goldwyn Mayer, seeing the possibility of business, decided to establish itself in Spain, opening a branch in 1927 in a chalet on Calle Mallorca 220 in Barcelona, ??from where it could control the advertising and distribution of its products.
The fever that occurred in the cinematographic sector, with the knowledge of the arrival of sound films, caused companies that wanted to take the lead in presenting their premises as pioneers in the new system to launch themselves to install the new sound devices.
The first sound film presented in Barcelona took place on September 19, 1929, with the premiere of the Paramount film La canción de París, with Maurice Chevalier, which definitively marked the explosion of the seventh art.
Metro Goldwyn Mayer, who had been late for his appointment with the talkies, quickly pulled his strings. On October 16, he announced on page 17 of La Vanguardia, the official premiere, on Friday the 25th, in collaboration with the company Cinaes and the Fémina cinema, the gala presentation by invitation of the great sound film Sombras Blancas.
The total collection of the soirée would be delivered to María Teresa del Pino from Milans del Rosch, to benefit the work of the Teresian Association of Barcelona.
“During this soirée, different sound films will be screened before first audition that constitute the great novelties of New York, among them, magazines obtained in natural colors with a fascinating effect,” said the announcement.
The first problem encountered by both the producers and the businessmen who had invested a lot of money in acquiring the best sound equipment, was that a large part of the spectators left the premises dissatisfied. Although the music had caused a great impact on them, they left upset because, although the artists had spent the entire film talking, they had not understood anything because they were completely unaware of Shakespeare’s language.
This language problem led the Goldwyn Mayer Metro to position itself in the city in order to control the arrival of talkies dubbed into Spanish.
The solution to the problem came quickly from the hand of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which, seeing the possible failure that could be caused by the public turning their backs on talkies, in 1932 acquired premises at Calle Mallorca 201, a few meters where they had their headquarters, to build a building to install some dubbing studios.
The new headquarters was located between Aribau and Enrique Granados streets, it was designed and built by the Menorcan architect Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí, who devised a building with a modern line, very different from the constructions that were made at that time in our city. .
The building was divided into two parts, one dedicated to administration and everything related to exploitation and distribution, and another in the back designed for the first recording studio and to be able to dub the films into Spanish.
The studio began its activity in 1934, dubbing not only the films produced by MGM, but also those of those production companies for which MGM was the distributor in Spain.
The studios closed in 1962. With the coming of age of the cinematographer and the entry into the market of companies whose language was not English and the advent of television, they began to build recording studios, not only for dubbing films, but also for for radio commercials and, later, television series.
One of the pioneers in the art of dubbing was Francisco Javier Dotú Sanjuan, who in the 1960s began to combine theater and television with film dubbing, giving life to famous actors of the time: on television, in 1977, Paul Michael Glaser in Starsky and Hutch and, in the cinema, actors of the time, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Gene Wilder, Peter Sellers, Pierce Brosnan and Jean-Paul Belmondo, among others.
Subsequently, the building was acquired by the distribution company Cinesa, which demolished it, replacing it with a new one, which kept a reminder of the old Metro dubbing studios on the façade.
