Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1122868
editing systems weren't really set up to do that level of editing. While we transitioned through other DAWs, such as Sonic Solutions, the main driver was the desire to work digitally and have greater control. Looking through your IMDb list, I notice that you have shared credits for supervising sound editor AND re-recording mixer, starting with the 1993 movie The Pelican Brief. While this is more common now, that was way ahead of the game back then. Tell me about that. When we created C5, in addition to wanting access to technology, we wanted better control of our sound. Back then, you'd cut effects and then show up to the dub stage with a cue sheet and it might show something like: track one is a door, track two is the door creak, track three is the door rubbing on carpet. There's three tracks for the mixer who is seeing everything for the first time. Sometimes they'd put everything up and sometimes they wouldn't. We thought, "Why not just bring the build that makes the full 'door sound'?" since that's what we were able to do with the Synclavier. So we started to bring in fewer elements because we would premix our builds. I worked with legendary re-recording mixer Richard Portman for the first time in 1990 on Presumed Innocent. I brought in my tracks and we sat down to talk about the effects. And he goes, "I'll take care of the dialogue and the music and you take care of the effects. You cut the stuff so you mix the stuff. You can mix, right?" That was my entrance into being able to sit at a board with a mixer. Richard and Lee (Dichter) were both open to it. It took a couple years for management to be okay with the double credit, but it came around. Skip Lievsay, to me, spearheaded the whole notion of editors being able to also mix. Let's talk about Maisel. Word from your colleagues is that the show runners Amy (Sherman-Palladino) and Dan (Palladino) weigh sound as an extremely important part of the series. Very much so. They treat it like an hour-long feature in a condensed form. The first thing Amy told me was that she didn't want the show to sound like a boring sitcom done on the set. She wanted it to sound rich, full, and busy as all hell, even though she's aware that not everyone will hear everything we're doing with sound because the dialogue will be on top of it. If you mute the dialogue while you're doing a mix, you hear all this lush, supportive material. If you just have the dialogue, the soundscape is very dry and it doesn't have the same kind of life. They know what they want on their show and they're giving us the time to do it in a comfortable fashion. They create rhythm and they create cadence in how they write their shows and we get to do our part. It's hard to ruin something they've written. (ATMOS & IMA X) SOUND EDITORIAL