Fountains Of Wayne

Lip-Synching Feeling
Musician Down About Unsung Movie Role

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
October 08, 1996

So, just who does do "That Thing You Do!"?

Folks seeing the new film, written and directed by Tom Hanks, about a one-hit rock band called the Wonders may be excused for thinking that the song is sung by the actor Johnathon Schaech, who plays Jimmy, the Wonders' moody singer-songwriter.

There's nothing in the credits for the film, or its attendant soundtrack on Epic, to indicate otherwise, even if there's also nothing to suggest that Schaech is the singer. Adam Schlesinger, who wrote the song, is clearly identified as its author. But the artist whose voice is heard singing the song 11 times in the film is buried deep in the listings.

Only after a cast list of 100 and a production list of 200, after a rundown of the film's songs and 20 "Additional Musicians," does there appear this credit: "Additional Vocals by . . . Mike Viola."

"My experience is that when you do something, you get credit for it," says Viola, half of the New York pop-rock duo the Candy Butchers. To add insult to anonymity, Viola is listed after the "First Aid," "Catering" and "Animals Supplied by" credits.

"There's one horse in the movie and I came after that, so it just bummed me out."

Viola's hardly the first singer to labor anonymously in Hollywood. In the '50s and '60s, Marni Nixon had an uncredited career covering for Deborah Kerr in "The King and I," Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady" and Natalie Wood in "West Side Story."

Viola, however, has not been silent about the situation. "No one ever said `Please be hush-hush,' " Viola said Wednesday from New York, where he's working on a Candy Butchers album for early next year.

Gary Goetzman, who produced both the film and soundtrack with Hanks, concedes that the promotional campaign for "That Thing You Do!" does try to present a studio-generated mythology about the Wonders' origins and achievements.

"Everybody knew going in what it was all about," Goetzman says. "Mike's a royalty artist on the album and he got paid to do it, so I don't understand why he has this problem. We've always liked Mike's vocal on `That Thing You Do!' He sang the song great."

Let's step back in time.

Last year, Tom Hanks sent word to a number of music publishers that he was looking for a Beatlesque song with a specific title: "That Thing You Do!" Among the 300 submissions was one from Adam Schlesinger of the band Fountains of Wayne (whose debut album was released last Tuesday).

"It had to have an upbeat sound that would sound like it could have been a hit in 1964 by a band that was obviously influenced by the British Invasion, so they narrowed it down stylistically," Schlesinger recalled Wednesday from Los Angeles, where he was promoting his new album.

So Schlesinger called in his longtime buddy Viola and together they made a demo, Viola on vocals and guitar, Schlesinger on bass and drums. "We did it one afternoon and tried to keep it as low-tech as we could: a drum set with just a couple of mikes, all of us singing backup around one microphone. We actually mixed the demo onto a cassette and slowed the cassette down just a little bit so it would sound warbly, like a vintage seven-inch record."

"It was a gas," Viola says. "Just for fun, never thinking we'd actually get the song in the movie. There was a certain energy -- actually I had a hangover and my voice was all rough, but there was an enthusiastic energy that's hard to re-create."

Schlesinger had enlisted Viola because "his voice was perfect for this kind of hit. The day we recorded it, I said, `Don't be surprised if this isn't the last you've heard about this.' "

And that's what happened.

The song was accepted by Hanks. Viola went out to California to re-record the vocals for three different versions of "That Thing You Do!" and to do leads on two other Wonders tracks ("Little Wild One" and "All My Only Dreams"). "My main concern was getting the vocal," Viola says. "I wasn't really thinking about credits and contracts."

Viola even did a later session, dubbing a scene in which actor Schaech works on the song with the band in their garage just before a talent show. "It was weird since the tables were turned, and I had to follow the action on screen and he was taking breaths at impossible moments in the phrases, not knowing any better because he's not a singer.

"You know, I thought I'd be more blown away seeing someone lip-synching to my voice, but it's such a happy, innocuous film, it just oozed out of the screen."

Viola insists he's not setting out to create problems for Hanks and the film. "I was involved in a major, major project, and I'm just telling it like it is," he explains. "I have a career to think about and this could be a nice impetus to get into the mainstream and I can't let it go by."

Of course, it's frustrating that Viola's uncredited voice is likely to be heard a lot over the next few months: The single from the soundtrack is beginning to pick up steam at radio stations, and if the movie becomes the hit everyone expects, there will be some major video exposure on MTV and VH-1 -- the kind of exposure most artists pray for. What they don't pray for is the opportunity to compete against themselves.

"If they want to know who sang `That Thing You Do!,' people can find it if they look for it," Gary Goetzman says. "Mike Viola will always get credit for the fabulous vocal he did."

As for Schlesinger, he admits the timing -- Fountain of Wayne's album last Tuesday, the film Friday -- is "pretty uncanny. I wish I could say it was planned a year ahead of time but it was sort of a happy accident, and I'm not sure the audiences for the two things overlap all that much. I don't think we're gonna rise or fall based on `That Thing You Do!' We may be one-hit wonders in our own rights, but it won't be for that song."

Back to the Interveiws & Reviews page