Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1279181
40 I M PS E . O R G he didn't want! Not that there wasn't a lot of design work for us—it was a lot of fun. We did do all the Foley down here. Even the scenes that Ben did. SL: After you do Raiders, I imagine there's no turning back! RLA: Right. Once you've done Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was my first movie to be in the Bake-Off (the final selection process for the Oscar nomination)… and then The Final Countdown, Raiders, and then Poltergiest, I was established." For a while, every year we had a movie in the Bake-Off. SL: Let me just throw a few titles at you and you can come up with some quick remembrances. Poltergeist, which you just mentioned. RLA: By then Steven Flick knew us, so we just took over! A lot of the movie was set in a generic Southern California housing tract, so we went out and recorded a lot of backgrounds, day and night. And then of course, there is all the hell that breaks loose—literally, hell breaks loose! We did a lot of design stuff on that too. Like the Ghost-a- phone, which Alan Howarth did. SL: The Ghost-a-phone was amazing. Alan made a record player with a needle and a paper cup as I remember, to acoustically play a record Jerry Goldsmith had made of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." It was for the compass that floats down onto the spinning record. I also remember you recorded all those old Frankenstein electrical props that Ken Strickfadden made for the 1931 film. RLA: Yes, that was a lot of fun. We went out and recorded those wonderful machines. And Stephen almost bought the farm! You hear on the master, he says, "Let's put a mic down here!" and they yell, "No! No!" SL: Right! These are the huge electrical props, Jacob's Ladders and such … and Stephen (Flick) wasn't careful where his microphone was placed! I love your comment, that we hear on the master after the disaster was averted: lamenting that "we'd have to finish the film by ourselves!" Typical Richard reaction. Predator. RLA: I did that with David Stone, who is now teaching at SCAD. I mainly did the backgrounds on that show, David did more of the upfront effects. But the sound of the jungle was a really big part of the movie. SL: The backgrounds are really tasty in that film, though. The birds and the insects … always changing for day and night, and guiding the mood of the film. RLA: What's interesting to me about backgrounds, people tend to poo- poo them as not important. Literally, we used to use loops. You'd hang a loop on the dubbing stage, in those machines that you could put the loop in, the loop boxes. Remember those? SL: Oh yeah. Soundelux had carts. Old radio carts. RLA: Right! And sometimes they'd stick and they would hit them! All this mechanical stuff we used to do… Remember 'exercise the patch cord?' When you'd get crackle? Meaning 'jiggle the plug.' It's interesting how backgrounds can really affect a movie—the feeling of it. SL: The Lion King. RLA: I went to meet the directors. They showed us the opening reel, which they ended up using for the trailer. Mangini cut the sounds for that reel. And when we did the final, we basically just used the same thing. I didn't recut anything for that. I think the reason I got the show was that I had previously been to Kenya, and I recorded sound effects just for fun on a small digital recorder that I borrowed from Jim Christopher. Mainly backgrounds, because of course, my thinking was, well, you can always get an elephant. We have elephants in LA. But what you can't get is the actual sounds of the bugs and the birds, and the things that are indigenous to an area. In a way, those backgrounds are really important. So, anywho, I'd been to Kenya. I'm watching the movie with the directors at the interview and I'm saying, "Oh, that's a Marabou stork. Oh, that's a Guinea hen." I knew what all the animals were, without them having to explain it. So I think that was one of the things that helped me get that show. SL: I remember I really earned my credit on that one—Mangini and I tracked down all the animals. All the animal sounds were spot-on. I worked my ass o› getting all the di›erent birds… RLA: I remember, you called up all the libraries like Cinesound in London to get all these sounds from movies that had been done ten, 15, 20 years earlier. SL: 48 Hrs. I remember the famous caddy series... RLA: Yes! The '64, piece of shit, sky blue Cadillac. That's what it was called in the movie. SL: It had a lot of character—sonicly. RLA: Which we improved on by pulling plug wires. Basically it ran on six cylinders instead of eight. That's what made it interesting. Even though it was an old car, when all the plug wires were in, it still sounded pretty good. It wasn't as interesting. But it was supposed to sound like it was ready to fall apart. So the teamster guy, who went out and drove the car for us said, "well, we could (pull the plug wires)." We had said things like "you could put some holes in the muffler!" And he said, "well, better not, because then we can't UN-do it!" But he said pull the plug wires! 'Oh, well that sounds great!' So we tried with seven, then we settled on six cylinders. SL: That one has the big dieseling— which got into the Hollywood Edge CD library.