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 41 RLA: It's in a bunch of movies now. At one point, it was either Lon (Bender) or Wiley (Stateman) that called up and they said, "You know, we've got most of that Cadillac, could we just have the rest of the set?" So I think I just said, "all right, fine." SL: It's amazing how that stu› gets around. RLA: I remember, the last movie I did as a sound editor, was 22 Jump Street. It was cut down at Sony (with Geoff Rubay.) And again, for some reason, I got assigned backgrounds. But I was going through all the old college sound effects, and there's a lot of material from our library in the Sony Library. The stuff we shot for Raiders at the USC campus. SL: Back to 48 Hrs ... great guns in that. RLA: Yes! Yes! Yes! We went to an indoor gun range and recorded interior guns, which has a very interesting slappy echo. It's different from the classic Winchester rifle in the canyon that (reverberates away), the environment is really big. In the old days, people didn't think about that as much. They'd just grab a gun sound. SL: That's a good segway to Under Fire, which you really tried to make the guns sound documentary-style. RLA: Right. On Under Fire, the director (Roger Spottiswoode) said he wanted the guns to sound like you'd hear on the news. Originally, we tried using field recordings. Normally on a movie, they want the guns to be honkin' big. The hero's gun, you know, like Indy's? BOOM! Like a hand-cannon kind of thing. Dirty Harry, same thing. But if you actually record guns, they're kind of underwhelming. Even a large caliber gun can be underwhelming. So we got basically unprocessed field recordings. Not slowed-down, not layered, not made bigger. And even that, Roger Spottiswoode said, "No no, they still sound Hollywood." He said he wanted them to sound like if you were watching CBS News about an insurrection somewhere. There were a couple of close ones where we did use bigger sounds. We went through the production recordings, and all the scenes that had gunfire, we mastered those. The ones where they were shooting from a block away, and it really did sound like the news, which somebody could say, "Oh, it's a bad recording." Nevertheless, it felt like you were there. SL: Gremlins. As I remember, Mark Mangini supervised all the creature vocals, and you did the hard e›ects. RLA: That's what's interesting to me. Like when I did Hollywood Boulevard, I did the entire movie. I did everything. Except I farmed- out a couple of effects to Ben. But I still ended up cutting it. He just made some wild masters. But, how do you divide a movie? Do you divide it by the reel? Do you do it by backgrounds? I mean, sometimes, like in Raiders, 'by the reel' made sense because they'd be in one location, then they'd go to a totally different location, so you didn't have to match anything, except maybe Indy's gun. That made sense. SL: One of the things I really love on Gremlins is the broken Peltzer phone ringing. I love that phone ring. It's so anemic. RLA: Right! And it was one of the simplest effects ever, because I just took the shell off a standard Series 500 phone, and I just put pressure on the bell, so it sounds muffled. You just play with it. SL: That performance stu› is what makes it so indigenous. It has character, and it tells the story. This guy is a failed inventor, and everything he tinkers with breaks down. RLA: Right. Right. Not trying to brag too much, but the whole era, in which I got started, we went out and recorded alot of new material—often in stereo. Maybe Walter Murch was the guy who kicked it off, but certainly Ben, and then myself, and then later Steve, and you, and we got into recording stuff. Because, back in the day, if you were Warner Bros., and you already had some gun that was recorded for a Jimmy Cagney movie in 1932, they would ask, "Why do we need to record another gun?" There was this attitude like "we've got one of those." Or "we have a wooden door. Why would we want to record a wooden door? We got it! We've got TWO in our library!" You know? And also too, the recording techniques were better, the machines got better. And certainly, with all those old optical effects, we were in the mag era, and later the digital era. But we would go out and record stuff, and rather than like at Gomillion, where we didn't have budgets or time to do it—we would record new, custom material. SL: That's like Ben going to all the studios ahead of Star Wars and borrowing things. RLA: Right. And we did that with Raiders. We went around and got all the Middle Eastern wallas and sound effects from studio libraries. SL: Sure. The sound e›ects you're not able to record, you try to find. But if you're able to go out and start recording sound e›ects… I tell that to students when I lecture. Start building your library because that will be your best thing to have. An original palate. RLA: Right. I remember when I started, you would have, for instance, a door master, and it would be the same door over and over. "Ka-CHUNK! ... Ka-CHUNK! … Ka-CHUNK! …" Like Ben Burtt was complaining, "They got something from a production recording" and they looped it. But maybe there's a scene where the guy is sneaking in—so it can't go "Ka-CHUNK!" You need that light clicking. SL: I remember the infamous "Marcus Welby" door.