Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1197255
36 W I N T E R 2 0 2 0 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y to teach me already. I had worked with my mom in the cutting room a couple of times. I had this very big idea of how much I knew. So, I started looking for a job as an apprentice film editor in features, but I couldn't find anything that summer. At the time, my mother was working on Little Big Man or maybe Night Moves. Her assistant, Steve Rotter, who later went on to become a well-known film editor, suggested that I talk to Elisha Birnbaum, who had just opened a little sound shop called Image Sound Studios in two small rooms on the 8th floor of the Brill Building in New York. YOUR FIRST SOUND GIG? Yes. Elisha had a Nagra, a two-track Scully, a couple of microphones, and two 16/35 dubber/recorders for doing transfers. That was it. He had built a little narration booth and we would record voiceovers there on the Scully. He had just opened the place maybe six months earlier. It was just him and one other guy, Allan Byer, who later became a production mixer. He hired me for $90 a week, off the books, and he told me, "If you do well, I'll give you a $10 raise every three months." So, that's what I did. My first assignment was to go through several big boxes of sound effects on quarter-inch tape that he had gotten at an auction. Some of it was garbage, but it was enormous and contained a lot of good effects. He sat me down with a Revox tape recorder and he said, "Listen to these tapes, figure out what the sounds are and make a list of what's on each reel." So I went through the whole thing and listened to every reel of tape. And [I] tried to figure out what was what and made lists of what was on each reel—that took me at least a month or two. THAT'S AN INTERESTING AUDIO GAME. KIND OF THE REVERSE OF THE PROCESS THAT A FOLEY ARTIST GOES THROUGH. INSTEAD OF COMING UP WITH THE IDEA OF SOMETHING THAT WOULD SOUND LIKE A THING, IT'S TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT THE THING IS THAT IS MAKING THAT SOUND. Is that a train? Maybe it's wind. I'm not sure. Some of them were obvious but a lot of the stuff was, particularly the ambiences … well, sometimes I wasn't sure what was what. But, I went through it all, and I made all these lists and put a list in each box. Then he showed me how to splice the tape and cut in white leader tape. He said, "Cut out all the slates and all the garbage, separate them with YOU GREW UP IN "THE BIZ." DID YOU KNOW SOUND WAS YOUR CALLING RIGHT AWAY? DID YOU EVER IMAGINE DOING ANYTHING ELSE? It wasn't really audio in the beginning. Obviously, editing was a big thing. My mother, Dede Allen, was an editor. And my father, Stephen Fleischman, was a documentary filmmaker for the networks. It was before the end of the Fairness Doctrine when the networks were required to provide programming in the public interest. Most of that was the nightly news but they also made documentary films. There were series like The Twentieth Century, CBS Reports, and ABC Close-Up! They did hour-long documentary films about all kinds of different subjects. My father was a writer, director, and producer on many of these kinds of documentaries. So, I did grow up in the business. When I was in high school, I really was interested in editing, acting, and directing. And when I graduated high school, I went to NYU Film School for two semesters but dropped out after my freshman year. It was 1970. Nixon bombed Cambodia. Everyone went on student strike. And after that spring term, I never went back. I thought I knew everything about what they were trying Tom Fleischman at Soundtrack. Photo by Ric Schnupp