Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1197255
38 W I N T E R 2 0 2 0 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y HOW DID YOU PROGRESS FROM MACHINE OPERATOR TO THE MIXING CHAIR? WHAT WAS YOUR BIG BREAK? I got a phone call from a guy named Jack Vorisek, who was Dick Vorisek's brother. Dick Vorisek was the premiere re-recording mixer in New York in those decades, in the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s. He was top of the heap. Dick Vorisek was working at Reeves Sound Studios on the east side of Manhattan. Dick had mixed all of the really great New York films, including Arthur Penn's The Miracle Worker, Sidney Lumet's The Pawn Broker and On the Waterfront, Robert Rossen's The Hustler, and most of the other big pictures that were made in New York from the '50s to the '80s. Dick worked at Reeves Sound Studios with his brother Jack, who was more on the administrative business side. Dick was the mixer. Reeves was a big operation. It was the biggest sound operation in New York through the 1960s. Jack and Dick left Reeves in 1971 and opened their own shop. They went into a partnership with Mark Wortreich, who had a little transfer operation on the west side called Audio Transfers. Together, they built two re-recording stages at 254 West 54th Street, the same building that housed Studio 54 and opened Trans/ Audio Inc. When Jack offered me the job he said, "We'll get you in the union, and you can work in the transfer room." So I left Image Sound and Elisha gave me his blessing. He said, "Go. Learn everything you can." This was 1973. It was an amazing opportunity. I worked at Trans/Audio for 12 years. I spent about eight years in the transfer room, just transferring dailies and doing all kinds of transfers. For those youngsters who don't know what a transfer is… The track used to be recorded on quarter-inch tape and would have to be transferred to 35mm magnetic film for the picture editors to sync to their 35mm picture. Dailies transfers were a big part of any sound shop operation in those days. The great thing about that job was that if I didn't have any work to do in the transfer room, Dick would allow me to sit in the mixing room and just observe. I would cheat a little bit. We used to get these long transfers like quarter- inch episodes of Bonanza M&E's on 10" reels, or 2,000-foot reels of mag-striped Auricon newsreel footage that had to be transferred to 16mm mag. Those transfers sometimes ran for more than an hour. I would get the transfer going and I'd sneak out of the transfer room, go down to the mixing stage, and keep an eye on my watch. Somehow, I got away with it. Dick and my mom were good friends and had worked on many films together, so I had known him since I was a small child. He was very generous to me in this way. THAT'S A VERY ENVIABLE GIG. I spent a lot of time observing in the mixing room. After a few years, the studio started offering mixes for student films for graduate film students from NYU, Columbia, and School of Visual Arts. The students were making film projects, and they needed a mix. Trans/ Audio offered them a mix rate of $25 an hour on Saturdays and Sundays. I was being paid scale in the transfer room and I would go in on Saturdays and Sundays and mix these student films for my scale pay, but it was a great training opportunity. I ran into every problem you could possibly run into as a mixer. The tracks were always terrible. It was always difficult. But I met some great people. I mixed student films for Joel Coen [No Country for Old Men, Barton Fink] and Nancy Savoca [True Love]. I later mixed her feature film, Household Saints. Another thing going on at that time was that there was a CAS production mixer in New York, Chris Newman [2013 CAS Career Achievement Award recipient and three-time Oscar winner], who was one of the top production mixers in New York. I was transferring his dailies on a number of the films he recorded. He called me up and he said, "Can you go to the lab early in the morning and pick up the tapes and get into the mixing stage before they start mixing and do the transfers through the console, and do some equalization and some noise reduction?" So, I started doing that. I would go to Technicolor on 44th Street at 7:00 in the morning and get the quarter-inch tape from the previous day's shoot and go up into Stage B at Trans/Audio and do the transfers in the stage using the console equalizers, a Magna-Tech compressor and noise gate, and a couple of Urei notch filters. SOUNDS LIKE IT PAYS TO GO THE EXTRA MILE. THEY WERE PROBABLY THINKING CHRIS WAS A GENIUS WHEN THEY WERE WATCHING DAILIES? Yes, he wanted the dailies to sound good at the evening dailies screening, but eventually, the sound editors put the kibosh on that because it became very difficult for them to get a reprint. For a while, what I was doing was making quarter-inch copies of the printed takes so that they could, at least, get a reprint of the printed takes, but if they wanted to get something that hadn't been printed, it wouldn't match. This became a big problem, so after All That Jazz, I had to stop doing that. It was " " In those days in New York, there were no mixer teams at all, ever, until much later. And even now, still, I do many projects on my own.