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through period phones so post wouldn't necessarily have to add a filter," explains Kunin. "The very first time Meryl was in the film, she wasn't on set but calling in. I hooked up a more complex system than I wanted, but it allowed both Steven and Tom, who she was speaking with, to hear her through the phone." During the rehearsal, Kunin mixed Streep quite higher than he normally would. "Steven loved the sound so we kept it that way for the scene. When we did the next phone scene with reporter Ben Bagdikian [Bob Odenkirk], Steven requested that I make it sound like Meryl's call. We then proceeded to do all phone calls for the film this way." According to Kunin, the setup involved a Viking DLE200B "ring down" box. The unit could power two telephones with four conductor modular plugs and standard phone cables, which allowed the actors to talk to each other on a closed line without needing to be connected to a network. The on- camera performer would speak into a working period phone connected by a phone line to one input of the Viking box. Sound then put a telephone splitter on the downstream side of the Viking box where one side of that split would be routed to the off-screen performer on a period phone or cell. The other side of the split would be run to an additional period phone that was used to record the dialog of the off- screen performer. Kunin removed the mouthpiece of that additional period phone and then taped a DPA 4061 lav against the earpiece speaker with foam over it wrapped in Duvetyne fabric and sealed with gaffer tape to isolate it from ambient sounds. "By removing the mouthpiece and cutting out the wires, we made it like a deadline, and there wouldn't be any feedback from the room. But you could still hear it and record through the earpiece." The DPA was normally hardwired with an Ambient XLR adaptor and 48v power to the mixer's Sonosax. At times, it was connected and powered with a Lectrosonics SMQ transmitter. Sound resorted to variations of this rig numerous times, even creating one for a live seven-way call where Kay Graham decides whether or not to print the papers as Ben Bradlee and members of the Board plead their case on why she should or should not. Scenes were covered with more cameras than normal because of the truncated schedule forcing sound to keep a lav on everyone and double boom the pirouetting cameras. For Streep, generally a Sanken COS-11D was paired with Lectrosonics transmitters while Hanks had on a DPA, but a mix of both, along with Countryman mics were used in the production. A sequence that had plenty of movement was when The Pentagon Papers first arrive in the hands of Bradlee and his team. They end up mining through them at his Georgetown home that was built on the soundstages at Brooklyn's Steiner Studios. "Steven has a great sense of what he wants to do and we get to see all the moves Janusz has worked out in rehearsal," says Kunin. "We always try to get a boom overhead, but with a scene this radical, we had to look to the lavs, especially going from room to room to room. Sometimes there was no way for Michael to walk through a doorway with the boom, so Jeanne would step in with a second boom or we would plant mics. We even planted mics in the rooms to help build the tension to the scene." Graham was often the only woman in this man's world, a theme sound capitalized on by shaping her point of view in the mix which Supervising Editors Richard Hymns and Brian Chumney and Re-recording Mixers Andy Nelson and Gary Rydstrom continued in post. "Steven wanted the sound to be period accurate. Especially in the newsroom," says Rydstrom. "But the other thing was this idea of a wom- an in a man's world. We looked at things as simple as the way her high heels sounded to add to the subliminal under- tones of the movie." After The New York Times published its front-page story, "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement," on Sunday, June 13, 1971, it only took the Nixon administration two days to ask a federal court for an injunction to halt any further publication. The Washington Post took a huge gamble publishing the pa- pers, but in the end, it paid off as other newspapers followed suit. For Kunin and his team to relive this history, he says it was tremendously challenging because of the amount of dialog but genuinely they all had a lot of fun. On set with Steven Spielberg, Streep and Hanks inside the White Plains, NY, office set Production Sound Mixer Drew Kunin fills out a production report for The Post