Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1151081
28 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2019 MY MOST MEMORABLE FILM Upon graduation, he eventually found work with a trailer maker in New York, Michael Spolan. "He would cut advertising campaigns: trailers, commercials, what have you," Bochar remembers. "At the end of a campaign, he turned to me and said, 'OK, get it ready for a mix.' I looked at him and said, 'What? Uh, I've never really…' He said, 'Come on. You've got the narration, you've got the production from the set and here are a bunch of sound effects.'" Although Bochar, who served as a first assistant editor on George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982), harbored dreams of becoming a picture editor, he soon realized that his accidental introduction into sound made for the steadier paycheck. "You finally reach that point in life where you want a family and a little more security," he says. "I woke up one day and said, 'I'm good at what I'm doing in sound. Why don't I just make that my career?'" In 1987, he received his first credit as supervising sound editor on the Albert Finney-starring theatrical adaptation Orphans — the first of a series of films with noted director Alan J. Pakula. While working on Pakula's Consenting Adults (1992), the young sound editor was introduced to picture editor Sam O'Steen, ACE, who, several years later, brought the sound editor onto Mike Nichols' Wolf (1994), a horror film starring Jack Nicholson. "Mike had an established crew that he'd worked with and loved," Bochar comments. "But Wolf had this other layer of sound design — a character turning into a wolf — and they were having some issues time-wise with the sound crew. Sam called me up and said, 'Hey do you think you could come on and help us with some of this stuff?'" By the time the film was finished, a collaboration had been born. "Mike pulled me aside and said, 'I never knew we could do some of this,'" Bochar recalls. "I said, 'Well, maybe it's because some of the technology we're playing with these days is allowing it.'" He was part of the sound crew on most of Nichols's subsequent films, including such acclaimed efforts as The Birdcage (1996), Primary Colors (1998) and Closer (2004). The director was fascinated with the possibilities of sound. "Everything was about character for him," the sound editor/mixer observes. "Footsteps were characters." Nichols' philosophy resonated with Bochar, who, in the late 1980s, co-founded the New York-based shop c5 sound, inc., with Skip Lievsay, CAS, Bruce Pross and Phil Stockton, MPSE. "The one thing that all of us in New York both appreciated and grew up with was that it was always about the story," he maintains. "When I supervise, I always make the production the 'god track.' The production is that part of the movie that is telling me the story, and it's also telling me what to put into the film." In fact, a number of the filmmakers with whom Bochar has worked indicate sound effects or design at the script stage. "The Coen brothers kind of tell you what to put in sound-wise," he reveals. "Elaine May, when she punched up a script for Mike, included sound notes." Sometimes, though, he had to disregard such directions and let the film guide his choices. "You can go to a spotting session and people can tell you what to put in the film," he adds. "Once you're working on it, sometimes what they tell you to put in the film isn't really what you need to put in the film." On Angels in America, however, Bochar was left to his own devices to a striking degree. "Mike loved the project, but from a sound end, he let me do whatever I wanted," the sound editor/ designer/mixer relates. "We never spotted the film. The project just shouted to me: 'Do this'; 'do that.' We would play Mike reels and, for the most part, we would do a few adjustments of levels. He never dropped a sound effect." Ron Bochar working on Angels in America in 2003. Angels in America. HBO Films/Photofest