Production Sound & Video

Summer 2021 – LOCAL695.ORG 29 With more than forty-three years in the film industry, Craig Woods has an enviable amount of experience to draw from and great stories about his career. "LA was really a hustle-and-bustle city in the late '60s. When I was just a kid, I was lucky enough to be playing bass for a songwriter who went by the name of Kenny Nolan. His mother, bless her heart, asked me, 'Well, what do you want to become when you grow up?' I answered, 'I want to work in a recording studio.' "She gets on the phone and calls a guy named Rich Jacobs, a prominent music producer. Talk about contacts! So, there I was at seventeen, working at MGM Recording Studios on Fairfax Boulevard, then I went to a place called TTG, which was on North McCadden Place near Sunset and Highland. I have great memories of setting up microphones for one hundred musicians, violins, cellos, and the rhythm section, which pretty much gave me my career foundation." Craig went back to school to finish college, but after graduation he found most of the recording studios had shut down, and a lot of musicians were out of work. People he used to work with were session players from The Wrecking Crew to The LA Express. Back in the day, they were triple booked but now, they were barely able to make a living. With his bread and butter drying up, Craig luckily got a call from 20th Century Fox for a Y-6 position. He worked there for a while, then went to CFI and installed their Sony BVH systems, as they were getting rid of their giant Ampex machines. In 1978, Craig worked as a Utility Sound Technician on The Blues Brothers for Bill Kaplan and again on Continental Divide in 1980. Craig moved up to Boom Operator on television series such as Vietnam War Story and Studio 5-B. In 1990, he worked with Mixer Richard Bryce Goodman on The Hunt for Red October. "Submarines are tight places and there was just no thought about putting a Boom Operator anywhere in the process. I asked Richard Goodman to get me two snakes with sixteen inputs, and both snakes went on each of the submarine sets that were on gimbals, and I exploded the wires out to every possible place in these sets and then just placed mics everywhere I could. You can even see some of them in the movie but nobody would ever notice. "You learn more of what not to do in many cases, what fights not to pick. I'm not here to roll around in the dirt because a director wants to do something that's counterproductive to the sound, which we all go through. I express what the consequences of their decision will result in, and then I walk away." L to R: Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Peter Gallagher

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