Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1061972
91 Q4 2018 / CINEMONTAGE some top directors and editors in the business." One significant relationship almost began at Photo-Mag but flourished at Sound One: Dichter's 31-film collaboration with Woody Allen. While Dichter was still at Photo-Mag, Allen's longtime editor, Susan E. Morse, ACE, persuaded the director to switch from Magno Sound to work with Dichter. "A week before the mix of Zelig [1983], Susan came in to do a temp mix," Dichter recalls. "She ran it for Woody and he said, 'It's not working. We have to re- cut the picture.' It would be ready to mix two months later, but I was already booked on something else." Four years later, Morse again asked Allen to collaborate with Dichter on Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). This go-around, however, the timing worked out and the mixer embarked on a working relationship that endured for more than three decades and earned him a BAFTA Film Award nomination for Best Sound for his work on Allen's Radio Days (1987). "I attribute it all to Sandy Morse," says Dichter, who discovered that his preference for natural-sounding dialogue meshed with Allen's. "As far as mixing dialogue, the whole key to me is to try to make it sound as if you're part of the conversation," Dichter continues. "We're POV of the camera, and you want to feel like it's real dialogue, real sound that's full-frequency and not pinched, over-equalized and over-filtered." He would eventually preside over Allen's reluctant transition from mono to stereo soundtracks. Dichter himself had first mixed in stereo on Stan Lathan's Beat Street (1984). "Woody liked mono," he says. "It's what he grew up with. He equated the big stereo stuff with the Hollywood sound, and he didn't like that." Dichter's initial attempt came on the musical comedy Everyone Says I Love You (1996), but when the mixer screened reel Right: Lee Dichter, right, mixing the documen- tary Joe and Maxi with supervising sound editor Joshua Waletzky at Photo-Mag in 1978. Photo by Susan Lazarus Below: Lee Dichter, left, and supervising sound editor Chic Ciccolini during the mix of Far and Away at Sound One in 1992. Bottom: At the mix of Casanova at Sound One in 2005: Front row from left, supervising sound editor Michael Kirchberger, Lee Dichter and re- recording mixer Roberto Fernández; back row, mix tech Harry Higgins and sound editors Roy Waldspurger, Everett Moore and David Cohen.