Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1122868
36 S P R I N G 2 0 1 9 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y So, Lee Dichter was hired at Sound One and I had heard through the construction industry that Sound One was looking for help wiring the room. Now, while I was in the Navy, I learned how to troubleshoot, fix electronics, and all that. Because I knew how to solder, Sound One hired me to help wire Lee's room. That led to working on the ADR room and then some transfer rooms because the studio was growing. I then worked with the engineering staff maintaining gear, etc. What led to you getting behind the console? I saw that the future and the money were in the recording side of things. Because Sound One was growing, it was easy to move up if you were ambitious. The late, great Bill Nisselson was always willing to give people a shot, he loved ambitious folks. So, after about two or three years working in the transfer department doing dailies, videotaping, fold downs, etc., I decided to concentrate on ADR. This is in about 1988 or 1989. And that's what I've been doing ever since. Did you go through a training or shadowing period since you were part of the engineering team? Actually, no. In order to shadow or train, I would have had to take a pay cut since I was a technical engineer. And I couldn't do that because I had a family to support. But Bill Nisselson loved ambition, so he had me cutting my teeth on student films, low-budget projects. Of course, I'd asked the established guys about mic techniques and things like that to improve, but I had a knack for it. How did you start working on the larger budget films? Sound One was always good with accommodating projects that had little or no money in return for being a strong contender to get the post work when projects with good budgets came in. So, I'm about a year, year-and-a-half into mixing ADR, and I was booked on this low-budget, 16mm project called The Local Stigmatic. Now, we didn't know this when the booking came in, but it was produced by and starred Al Pacino. I pulled it off and Al and I have been working together ever since. That's a heck of an unknowing jump up from student films! It's always, "What have you done?" And if you say you've successfully recorded Al Pacino, that gives potential clients lots of confidence. So, it just took off from there, especially since Sound One was the main place for cinematic post in NYC in the 1990s through the 2000s. It allowed me to work on a lot of great projects. Since we had all the cutting rooms in the building as well, in between sessions, editors, actors and I would be roaming through the halls and bumping into each other. I used to call these encounters "Hollywood Moments," with these incredible directors—Mike Nichols, Martin Scorsese, Nora Ephron, etc. A lot of fun times and memories. You're now with C5. How did that come about? C5 handled supervising sound editing and were usually on the same projects I was on anyway, so it's like coming full circle. They built an ADR room, which is the second largest in NYC. We have everyone in one room and it's a really nice and comfortable setup. And we're working with our longtime clients, so it's great. Being in the business for a couple of decades, how have you seen technology affect what you do? We had the first 4-track mag recorder ("full coat") at Sound One. It allowed four selects. We would then transfer to the single track of mag ("stripe"). We eventually got to 6-track recorders and I'll always remember Pacino saying, "How many tracks do we have?" Whatever number of tracks we had, that's how many takes he'd do in a row. Now, we record to and work in Pro Tools and can keep going as needed. Paul Hsu, who is one of the C5 co-owners, is a Renaissance man and, in his spare time when he wasn't sound designing or mixing, designed the software we're using for cueing called Concierge, which is elegant and intuitive. Have you seen changes in schedules over the years as well? In the old days, a lead actor would have two to three days of ADR. Now, it's usually a few hours or a single day. A lot of this is because of advances in technology on the production side with multitrack recording on set and plugins that can help in post. For Maisel, we normally work two to three days per episode. A lot of what we're doing is rewrites and adds of dialogue that Amy and Dan have written to maintain the rapid-fire banter that's a hallmark of the show. In addition to principal ADR, we also record loop group for the show. So if we're working on a comedy club scene, we won't rehearse anything—we record the group's reactions the first time they see the bit. We find that it sounds more natural. Amy and Dan also write specific lines on most of the episodes for loop group. You also won the CAS Award for your work on the documentary Free Solo. Can you tell us a little about that project? Directors Jimmy (Chin) and Chai (Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi) are New York-based, so it was cut here. They brought Alex Honnold, who the movie follows, in. The challenge with Alex and ADR was that he isn't an actor and is also relatively shy. Deborah Wallach, the sound supervisor and ADR editor, and myself, were able to get him relaxed and comfortable. We tried to do some extra breathings, exertions, and things like that. However, Alex is in such good shape since he climbs mountains, that it was totally unnecessary. We did four sessions with him but, in the end, we only needed to record a little here or there for the usual reasons. The biggest challenge was matching the narration that Alex did at various times on location instead of traditionally in a recording studio. Less is more with ADR. How do you relax when you're not behind the console? I enjoy hanging with my family, my grandkids. We like to spend some time in Florida.