Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1279181
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 37 We did pre-dubs at Producers Sound on Highland in Hollywood, which is no longer there. They were still working, you know how it is, the opticals come in at the last minute, and everybody's going crazy trying to finish things. You know the story about how Lucas cut the sequence with dupes of airplane dogfights (stock footage from old WWII movies). So when I was cutting, there were still a couple shots with a Stuka diving—which meant that they hadn't even gotten the early version of the optical in! I wasn't on through the final, I only went through the pre-dubs. And then they said "Thanks." I think at one point, I went to visit dub at Goldwyn (now 'The Lot'). But we pre-dubbed at Producers. That's my memory. SL: At Gomillion, you were doing low- budget TV shows and TV movies. Wasn't one of them a Judy Garland docu- drama? RLA: Yes. Rainbow. We did a lot of movies of the week (MOWs), which is really a genre that has pretty much gone away, nobody does those anymore—but at the time, it was a big deal. You know, those two-hour TV movies. And then they started doing miniseries, which was sort of like a couple of MOWs strung together. But we did a lot of these movies, and it was interesting because we didn't have a lot of time or budget to do these things, so I was able to do a lot of different stuff. I did a bio-pic show about Kitty O'Neil, the stunt woman. And, unlike if you were on a TV series like a Law & Order, where the whole season would be similar stuff—the police station, the courtroom, the New York traffic on each show, it's almost like we would get literally two weeks to do a feature movie, a 10-reel movie. So we really had to whomp it out. But we got a lot of experience. Generally, I would end up cutting reel 1 and reel 10, because those would be the big reels. Reel 1 was to grab the audience and reel 10 was the conclusion. And in the middle was mostly just talking. SL: That reminds me of working with you—you gave me reel 1 of quite a lot of your films. And reel 1 was always so busy! RLA: "Yeah! Generally, reel 1 is an important reel." SL: Oh yeah. The avalanche in Brother Bear, the hero being flushed down the toilet in Flushed Away—insanely busy scenes. But I didn't know any better, I loved it! I just jumped in! RLA: I think we're all that way, we all just jump in and do it. I did two TV series in my life. One was a four-episode thing called People of the Wind which was about Native Americans. I think there were only four or five episodes, maybe six. It was like a special thing on NBC. And then Bigfoot and Wildboy, which was Sid and Marty Kroft. They used to do those Saturday-morning live-action shows for kids. They were shot on 16mm! Ted (Gomillion) and I were given an episode, we were doing the second season. The first season, it was one part of a show that had two or three other segments. So they sent us an episode from the previous season, and the Bigfoot and Wildboy segment was only eight minutes or something like that, and most of it was just them running through the woods—so Ted gave them a bid based on that. Then they spun it off to its own show, so now it's about 20 some minutes of actual material. And all of a sudden, it had mad scientists, and aliens from another planet with spaceships, and alien weapons, and all of this high-tech stuff in it! It isn't just guys running through the woods and just Foley! There was a lot of design stuff! And of course, each one would be different, because the aliens would land, they'd deal with them, and they'd take off at the end. Warren Hamilton (a revered veteran sound editor) worked on that show. In fact, I think what happened was, because we all kind of worked on all of them, they just arbitrarily gave me supervising credit for I think half the episodes, and he got half the episodes. But that didn't necessarily mean that that was the one that we really supervised. While working at Gomillion, Richard met Stephen Flick. "(Ted) would hire people by the reel, we would need additional editors, and Steve would come in sometimes." Stephen would become one of Richard's future partners at Weddington Productions. RLA: So anyway, I'm working for Ted. And because I had worked with Ben on all the Star Wars stuff, they were going to do More American Graffiti. But it was going to be cut at Lucasfilm. Not the Lucasfilm of today—but the Lucasfilm that was in a former beauty parlor in downtown San Anselmo! So they asked me to come work on it. And initially, I was going to be the supervisor of the project because Ben was going to be working on something else. But the schedule changed, so Ben ended up being the supervisor, and Bonnie Kohler and I were the two main editors. We cut up north, and then we mixed at Stage D at Goldwyn. Because it was four stories in one, I ended up doing the Vietnam and the drag strip segments. And Bonnie cut the college protests and the 'Candy Clark becomes a country music singer' sequences. As a result of that film, I got Star Trek: The Motion Picture—because I'd done that and it was in stereo. Rick Mitchell was the head picture assistant, so he said to them, "I know this guy." I'm sure they would have preferred to get Ben Burtt, but he wasn't available. It was funny—I went to lunch with the picture editor Todd Ramsey. I was thinking, well, they're just going to hire me as one of the line editors. I thought it was unusual that the picture editor is interviewing a line editor! Then during our lunch meeting, it suddenly dawned on me, he's asking me to be the supervising sound editor on this movie that was 40 or 50 million dollars, which was a huge amount of money at the time. But that's how I got that job, because I had done the stereo stuff on a couple of films for Lucas.