Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1061972
87 Q4 2018 / CINEMONTAGE FOLLOWING IN THE FAMILY BUSINESS Back home in New York, he joined the US Coast Guard Reserves before going to work for Dichter Sound Studios full-time in 1964. "I wasn't sure what I was going to do," Dichter comments. "My dad was doing the mixing on commercials. I was still just working in the back room, doing copies and transfers, and setting up the machines." On the advice of his older brother Mark, who had also worked at the studio before striking out as a location sound recordist, Dichter decided to branch out — as an assistant sound recordist (and actor) on Joseph W. Sarno's Flesh and Lace (1965) and as an assistant editor on Sarno's Moonlighting Wives (1966). Neither job took. "I didn't like it at all when I was on location," Dichter concedes. "I'd be sitting there for an hour while they're setting up the shot, the lighting and the whole thing. I ended up reading the paper half the day. I'm more of an active guy. So I asked Dad, 'Could I come back into the studio?' It wasn't even a question; 'Absolutely.'" In 1966, on the heels of financial challenges at the company, Dichter Sound Studios joined forces with Photo-Mag on East 44th Street. The following year, Dichter, like his father had, joined Local 52, which had the re-recording mixing jurisdiction in New York. It was at Photo-Mag that Dichter began to mix for the first time. "I learned more and more about what sound actually was and how to deal with the intricacies and different sounds coming into me," he says. Dichter worked on TV commercials — straightforward jobs that offered valuable experience. "I started with narration, music and one dialogue track," he explains. "My dad wouldn't give me anything that was complicated since I was just learning. But there came a time when the clients started asking for me. Once I worked with somebody, they wanted to come back." During the late 1960s and early '70s, TV commercials remained the company's bread and butter, but Dichter started to work on low-budget documentaries and feature films, including Peter Davis' The Selling of the Pentagon (1971) for CBS and a series of low-budget films for director Don Schain. "All through this time, I would do one movie, but that was it," he comments. "I would be doing 11 months of commercials, and occasionally I would get a film." Dichter's desire to move on from advertisements and expand into film caused a bit of tension within the family business. "My dad was not pushing for me to do feature films at all," Dichter recalls. "If I did one feature, it would take me two or three weeks. With commercials, I could do eight a day, so you had a much larger client base, which made them happy." Yet Dichter savored the creative challenge of working on features. "That's where I really felt that I could contribute more to the overall project," he explains. "You can only do so much in a 30-second or 60-second commercial. Every word has got to be heard. Everything has to be out in front. You can't really have the subtleties." Indeed, Dichter was drawn to non-fiction films due to the content of the material, as well as the often dodgy location sound he was tasked with mixing. "Actually, documentary was my first love because that was taking sound and making it sing; many of them didn't have good sound," he says. "I was able to really go for it as far as equalization was concerned. I could really dig in and learn how to grab a track and work with the dialogue to bring it alive." Dichter's documentary credits during these years include such acclaimed efforts as the Maysles brothers' Grey Gardens (1975), Barbara Kopple's Harlan County, USA (1976) and George Butler and Robert Fiore's Pumping Iron (1977). Into the 1980s and '90s, even as Dichter's career in features had taken off, the re-recording mixer continued to keep a hand in docs, mixing Kopple's 1990 film American Dream, which went on to a win an Academy Award. The film, which chronicles a strike that unfolded the previous decade at a Minnesota meatpacking facility, directly concerns the labor movement. "There was this one little sequence that I'll never forget," Dichter stresses. "There was somebody talking upfront who was muffled, and someone right behind who Lee Dichter in 1952. Photo by Murray Dichter