Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1197255
40 W I N T E R 2 0 2 0 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y THAT IS A LITTLE DIFFERENT. YOU STILL HAD A SOUND EDITOR AND CREATIVE DIRECTION. In Hollywood in those days, there were always three-man crews. One guy did dialogue, one guy did music, and one guy did effects, and we didn't have that. We had to do it all by ourselves. I think there was some resentment from the Hollywood sound community in those days toward New York. I always felt like there was a resentment there because we would do what they did, but we would do it by ourselves. Buzz Knudson [The Exorcist, The Blues Brothers, Flashdance, Heaven Can Wait] and Warren Beatty were good friends and Warren trusted Buzz. When Dick and I mixed Reds, Warren brought Buzz in at the end to listen to the mix and give it his blessing. After that, Buzz and I got to be friendly. He would come to New York periodically, and he would always take me out to breakfast. He would inevitably ask me the same question every time. "How do you guys mix a whole show by yourselves?" I would always say, "The same way you do, Buzz, one scene at a time." DO YOU FIND YOURSELF APPROACHING DIFFERENT TYPES OF PROJECTS IN DIFFERENT WAYS … A DOCUMENTARY VERSUS A MOB DRAMA? I just want to make them sound good. That's really the task, right? Whether it's a documentary or a television show or a feature film. Obviously, you've got different kinds of budgetary and time constraints. For probably the first 20 years that I was mixing, I was doing only features. Every once in a while I'd get a documentary, but mostly it was features. And I didn't get involved in any television series until the late '80s. There wasn't much episodic television being done here. DO YOU HAVE KIND OF A SYSTEM IN WHICH YOU APPROACH THE MATERIAL ON A PROJECT? DO YOU LIKE TO DO ONE THING FIRST OR ANOTHER THING, OR IS IT REALLY PER PROJECT? Well, it depends on how much time I'm given. For a feature film, usually I would have four or five weeks, at least. Melvin and Howard was mono, so we did no pre-dubs. But beginning with my second feature, Honeysuckle Rose, I was working mostly in stereo and that required pre-dubbing. So, I would do a dialogue pre-dub with just the dialogue and ADR. Maybe if I was lucky, I'd get the ambience tracks if they were ready, so I'd have something to work the dialogue against. But very often, all I had was the dialogue. I would mix a reel of dialogue, and then take that pre- dub and put it up just into the monitors, and then mix the effects against that. Once we had a dialogue pre-dub and an effects pre-dub of all the reels, the final mix would begin. The music would come in, and we'd take the pre-dubs and make a final mix with the music. That's how it generally worked with features. Documentaries were different. They were simpler. There weren't as many tracks. It was much less complicated and, generally, I would just put everything up and mix it. I didn't really start mixing episodic TV until much later. I mixed a couple of episodes of The Equalizer in the late '80s, but the first television series that I really worked on was Boardwalk Empire, and that was 2005. WELL, THAT'S NOTHING TO SNEEZE AT. THAT'S AN AMAZING SOUNDING SHOW. With television, I mix without doing a dialogue pre-dub, not because they're less complicated but because the time is so limited. We only had a few days per episode. And if we had five days an episode, many other mixers would tell me, "Hey, you're lucky. We only have two." With regard to episodic TV, I doubt that I or any other mixer will ever be given that long of a schedule again. I CAN RELATE. I'M DOING A 41-MINUTE MIX FOR ABC TODAY AND WE GET TWO DAYS, INCLUDING OUR PLAYBACKS, NOTES, AND PRINT. BUT I HAVE A PARTNER, TOO. That's the way it is now. On Boardwalk Empire and Vinyl, I had luxurious schedules. I had five days per episode. But even with that, I didn't really feel I had time to do a dialogue pre-dub because of the amount of music and the density of the track. WELL, YOU WERE MIXING IT BY YOURSELF. Yes, I was. On Boardwalk Empire and Vinyl, putting aside the pilot episodes, which were two hours long and were done like a typical Scorsese movie, I didn't feel like I was really getting any benefit from using the time that way. So, I just started putting everything up and mixing like I did when I first began to mix. I was mixing by myself but the FX had been pre-dubbed in Pro Tools by the FX editor. DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR ASPIRING MIXERS, OR PEOPLE THAT LOOK AT YOUR CATALOGUE OF WORK AND WONDER HOW THEY COULD BE SO LUCKY TO HAVE SO MANY AUDIO ADVENTURES? I'm now teaching an advanced sound design class at The School of Visual Arts here in New York with Chris Newman. We're co-professors of that class. Chris does the production side, and I do the post-production side. It's a great course. The students love it. I'm always being approached by young people asking me, "How do I break in? How do I get started?" I would say "be persistent." It's really difficult now. We don't have the same kind of apprenticeship system that was in place when I learned. Even in Hollywood, the guys would start with the sound effects, and they would move to music, and then they would get into dialogue mixing. That whole system seems to be going away. I don't really know the answer anymore. I would just say get whatever kind of job you can get in the field. If you've got free time, get your