Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/713016
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y S U M M E R 2 0 1 6 23 including a win for his work on Glee and once for his cur- rent gig, Better Call Saul. He has also been nominated for the CAS Award four times. Palmer graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas as a radio, film, and TV major. There was an emphasis on audio, but only about four students chose that path. The final class was a year-long class. Ted Gardner was his audio professor, an early adopter of a mobile recording truck in Dallas. Robert Wald CAS (who was nominated for the Oscar for 1987's RoboCop), had studied there as well, as did John Pritchett CAS years earlier, who won the CAS Award for Road to Perdition. Palmer was also a musician, playing guitar who, after graduating, toured for a few years in cover bands, playing 5-6 nights a week all over the country. After a couple of years, he got an offer to be a live audio engineer for the band Buster Brown in Dallas, and took it as his entry into audio. "Being the guy in the band who owned the audio system was a great way to ensure a job," Palmer explained. Bob Wald had come into his class at SMU for a guest lecture, and Palmer had kept in touch with him after that. Wald called Palmer at work and asked if he was willing to keep his head down and work as utility on a TV movie being shot in Phoenix. "It paid double what I had ever made before, so I covered the phone and leaned over to my boss and said, 'I quit.'" Don Broughton was the boom operator. "I had no idea what I was doing. I kept my head down and, after that, Bob got called to do a feature in LA, and the feature union- ized during production. I got into the union on my second show ever! I got a break on the initiation fee as well, since it organized during shooting. I had no real experience and it was one of the hardest jobs in my life," Palmer continued. "Bob Wald was my first early mentor, fol- lowed by Geoff Patterson CAS (who won the CAS Award three times for the series Deadwood)." When Geoff moved from booming to mixing, he asked Palmer to move up to boom with him. "It was a bit of the blind leading the blind. It was a month- long shoot on a horror film in 1992. Geoff ushered me into being a boom operator and I stayed a boom op until 1999, which is when I moved up to mixing." Being from Dallas, Palmer was invited to work on Walker, Texas Ranger, which was a huge production, usually with two sound crews working. Wisely, he had spent the previous years investing in gear so that he would not have to buy an entire package all at once for his first mixing gig. Don Broughton needed someone to cover him as boom op on the show and asked Palmer. While on set, mixer Darrell Henke asked for a recommendation of second mixer, and Palmer quickly responded, "I'll do it!!!" Palmer finished his booming career on the first film he did with Peter Devlin mixing, the Oliver Stone feature film Any Given Sunday. Stone is famous for thinking outside the box as a director, and the film is a good example. There would frequent- ly be three scenes shooting at the same time, in different areas of the same football stadium. They might be shooting action on the field with both sets of sideline coaches mic'd, while at the same time, the announcers were being shot in the booth, and a third scene in the locker room may be taking place. "Oliver Stone used to refer to it as 'the three-ring circus,' so that he could have all of us working at once," Devlin explained. For that reason, there were three full crews working at any given time, with second unit occasionally sending a sub-mix to the first unit recorder. The stadium was also set up with speakers to simulate the sound of a live crowd to help moti- vate the actors. Devlin was using Nagra D as recorders, so they had more tracks than previously available. A picture taken by Dixie Deane of Peter Devlin in 1985. His backpack is a radio mic transmitter that they were using to transmit back to an outside broadcast vehicle for a radio program. Peter is holding a Stick Mic (as it was called). The presenter used this and we got about a half-mile range. The program was The Gloria Hunniford Show and it was broadcast daily onto BBC Radio 2.