Left Undone?

Steve Daly of Entertainment Weekly posts this update on Heath Ledger's work for Dark Knight:

Questions linger about whether his post-production work as Joker is complete...

...debate is ripping through Internet fan sites about what will stand as Ledger's last completed film, the Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight (due to open on July 17th). The burning question is, how complete was Ledger's post-production work on the maniacal character of the Joker?

On Jan. 25th, E! Online gossip columnist Ted Casablanca posted an item quoting a "studio insider" saying that Ledger had done "zero" post-production looping on the movie.

(Typically, an actor re-records many lines for a film long after principal photography wraps, in a process called "automated dialogue replacement," or ADR. It's an especially extensive process when many shots have been filmed on location, since all kinds of incidental noise can interfere with the dialogue's clarity and can require up to three-quarters of the lines to be re-performed on a dubbing stage, with the actor looking up at the film images and matching his or her own mouth movements.)

But Ledger's vocals are perfectly clear in the bits of footage so far released—trailers and a prologue bank-robbery sequence shown with Imax prints of I Am Legend. Fan websites like Ain't-It-Cool-News, Superherohype.com and Batman-on-Film.com are full of assertions contrary to the Casablanca report, saying that in fact Ledger was done with all significant looping. Ledger himself, while promoting the Todd Haynes film I'm Not There last fall, had said he was finished with his work on Dark Knight.

Still, given the way post-production schedules usually run on mega-budget superhero films, it's not out of the realm of possibility that director Chris Nolan might have wanted to call on Ledger for limited additional sessions with more than six months to go before opening weekend.

Directors often decide to insert new bits of dialogue in post-production for the sake of clarity and economy. Doing anything like that now with Ledger's Dark Knight role would require hiring another voice actor to emulate his speaking voice, or creating a complicated mash-up from Ledger's existing dialogue tracks...

...Nolan and execs at Warner Bros., the studio releasing the film, were not available for comment, and have not issued any public statements about the status of the movie. EW placed a call to Oscar-winning sound designer and sound editor Richard King, who's handling the Dark Knight audio work, but he declined to comment. According to several other sound-mixing experts who also declined to speak on the record, there's no way to tell what the situation is with Dark Knight from the outside, since the amount of ADR required, and the timetable for doing it, varies wildly between films...

Warner Bros. has temporarily pulled back on some of the promotional material centered on Ledger's creepy whiteface makeup as the Joker, keyed to the tagline "Why So Serious"? It remains to be confirmed whether the film's technical wrapup will require a new game plan as well.

In my opinion, the source that spoke to Casablanca, sounds suspect given Ledger's own words, while promoting I'm Not There. But until either the studio or Nolan speak to the issue--There's no way to know for sure...

Those associated with the film may be mum on the film at this point (and rightly so) But Nolan did take time to pay tribute to Ledger in Newsweek Magazine:

Showbiz Spy has excerpts...