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37 Q4 2016 / CINEMONTAGE give it a mood and a feeling." During the mix, however, Fosse said to him: "It doesn't work. Do you have any others?" The director and sound editor proceeded to a back room at Trans/ Audio, where the film was being mixed, and pulled out alternate backgrounds. Fosse listened on a step outside the room as Schell went through the options. "He listened to everything I had," Schell recalls. "He didn't get mad or anything — extremely professional. I learned how to be a professional working with him." Fosse also preferred to crank up the volume on dialogue, effects or music, when appropriate for the scene. "I was always told, 'Don't push it too loud; it's going to break up at the print,'" Schell remembers. "When we got to the mix, Fosse would just push it and push it. I learned that you could push it and push it — and everything is going to be okay." Not every scene required such thoroughgoing re-evaluation. For scenes depicting dancers at work in a studio, four of the original performers were brought in to re-record the sounds generated by their athletic yet artistic movements. "They knew it by heart already," Schell says. "They were able to re-create their own steps to perfection — they did it in one, two takes; boom." On at least one occasion, Schell seemed to take a page from the tempestuous characters seen on-screen. During a late night at the DGA building, Schell was frustrated working with a Foley recording that kept changing from the synchronizer to the Moviola. "I was going crazy," Schell recalls. "I was there until two o'clock in the morning." Eventually, Schell realized that the synchronizer was faulty. Fortunately for him, the space in which he was working had a window which looked onto a construction site. "I took the synchronizer," he remembers with a laugh, "and threw it out the window into the construction site." It is the sort of impulsive action we might expect of Joe Gideon. Ultimately, however, the long hours and hard work were worth it. Along with Newman and re- recording mixer Dick Vorisek, Schell was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Sound. (BAFTA Awards were given to Heim for Best Editing and Giuseppe Rotunno, ACS, for Best Cinematography. Heim also won one of the four Oscars the film garnered, including awards for Music, Art Direction and Costume Design.) The news of the nomination was unexpected. "All of a sudden, I got this thing in the mail saying, 'You're a nominee,'" says Schell, who was already onto other projects. After the awards season passed, Schell continued to reap benefits from the film. Before working on All That Jazz, he had scant experience with music-heavy movies. Instead, he gravitated toward gritty urban films, such as The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), on which he worked as an assistant picture editor. "All the other films I had worked on before were not that kind of film," he comments. "This was another world. It opened me up in that way and I got a lot out of it." In the years to come, he served as the supervising sound editor on his share of tough- minded dramas — like Casualties of War (1989) and Q&A (1990), the latter one in a series of collaborations with Sidney Lumet — but also a number of films with strong musical elements. He worked on Tender Mercies (1983), The Cotton Club (1984) and School Daze (1989), among others. Although he never collaborated again with Fosse (who died in 1987), his career in features concluded with a Fosse-inspired project: Chicago (2002), the book to which was co-written by Fosse and Fred Ebb. Director Rob Marshall coaxed Schell out of semi-retirement for the film. "He would talk about Fosse, and I told him about my experience with him," Schell says. "Of course, he's a different personality and a different person, but he was very, very much a perfectionist as well." For Chicago, Schell was again nominated for a BAFTA Film Award for Best Sound — this time, though, he won (along with re-recording mixers Michael Minkler and Dominick Tavella, CAS, and production mixer David Lee). Perhaps taking his cue from the always professional Fosse, however, Schell remains nonchalant about such acclaim. "It's nice to be awarded or if somebody takes notice of your work," he reflects. "But you don't do it for that reason." f MY MOST MEMORABLE FILM All That Jazz. 20th Century- Fox/Photofest CONTINUED FROM PAGE 34