Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1353865
38 I M PS E . O R G It's The Little Things That Count BY SOLANGE S. SCHWALBE MPSE Jon Johnson is an award-winning sound supervisor from Wyoming and he attended fi lm school at Montana State University. He has multiple nominations and won an Oscar for his work on U-571 (2000), an Emmy for Unnatural Causes (1984), and a Golden Reel Award for Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure (2007). Jon has garnered 107 sound credits over his career and to name only a few, is known for his work on 42 (2013), The Rookie (2002), and most recently, The Little Things (2021) which he supervised the sound on during the pandemic.‰He and his crew started in May 2020.‰ Solange S. Schwalbe joins Jon Johnson for a casual conversation and a look back from the beginning of his 39-year career in sound editing to present day, posing here at a local pub, enjoying retirement! SOLANGE S. SCHWALBE MPSE: Jon, thank you for taking the time to sit down with me and the MPSE Wavelength readers to share your story. Tell us about you, where you started, how did you get into sound? Where did it all start? JON JOHNSON: My fi rst year out of high school, I was studying electronics, then I got through a fi lm program at Montana State University. I had a foot in both worlds as far as that happened. (When I moved to Los Angeles), I got a job as a driver at Neiman Tiller, which had the fi rst computer audio editing system. This was in 1979. I can't describe it. The space that the computer was in was as big as this room. It had removable hard drives that had 20 MB or 40 MB of memory. Ten years later, I was working at Glen Glenn, I was supervising there, then I had a chance to go to Modern Sound where they had a digital system called the Synclavier which I cut on the TV show MacGyver. Jim Wolvington was doing all of the Star Treks there even though he had his own home system. Oh, a home system! That's pretty cool! (laughs) Two years later, I did a show at Skywalker. It was a TV show. I did it all on the Synclavier. As I was driving back I said, "Well, maybe I should start my own business." That was 1989. And so it started with just me, a one-man band, then it kinda spread out a little bit. I had to hire people to get the dialogue and such. And then, Pro Tools started getting on the forefront, so we branched out a little more, bought more of those systems and such. I had a 20-year run with (my company) Fury and Grace. Along the way, I met quite a few interesting characters. One of them was Greg King. I met Greg when he fi rst came down to work on The Santa Clause with Bruce Stubblefi eld.