CineMontage

Q1 2019

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26 CINEMONTAGE / Q1 2019 MY MOST MEMORABLE FILM Vicari parlayed his passion into a career in the early 1970s when he joined Capitol Records. His first jobs, however, were in the mailroom and then in the data-processing department — not exactly what he had in mind. "That was pretty much as far away from the record business as I could get," he recalls. "I got a job with an independent record producer who had worked at Capitol Records, and we had a little company for about a year, but I got a connection with the daughter of our secretary — who was the secretary of [A&M Records executive] Jerry Moss." After completing a three-month engineering apprenticeship program at A&M, Vicari won employment at the legendary label, working first as an assistant engineer and then as a full-blown engineer. "A&M was the hub of the record business at that time," he remembers. "Every day when you went to work, it was Joni Mitchell, Burt Bacharach, Barbra Streisand, Joe Cocker, Billy Preston, Paul Williams, Gino Vannelli, Cat Stevens… It was just a plethora of amazing music — some of the era's most memorable artists." Four years later, he accepted a position as staff engineer at Sound Labs and eventually went independent. "I was the executive producer of Prince's first album for Warner Bros., when he was just 17," Vicari comments. "One day I introduced Prince to Sly Stone. I remember standing in the Record Plant, thinking to myself, 'This kid is going to kick your ass!'" As he was making waves with music, however, Vicari was getting a taste for film. Early in his career, he received a sound credit on the Joe Cocker concert film Mad Dogs & Englishmen (1971), while his association with Williams led to his work as a scoring mixer on Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (1974), which featured Williams in a leading role. Other film assignments followed, including the Streisand-Kris Kristofferson A Star Is Born (1976) with music producer Phil Ramone. Yet the then-engineer always had a clear sense of his career priorities. "I was never in the film business," he offers. "I was in the record business." In 1996, Quincy Jones, executive producer of that year's Academy Awards, invited Vicari to mix the music for the Oscars telecast, a gig that continues to this day. Feature film assignments quickly followed. Although his approach to mixing remained constant, he had to adjust to the different technology of film, as well as to the presence of dialogue and sound effects. "When I did Payback [1999] for Mel Gibson, they said, 'OK, let's hear the cue,'" Vicari recalls. "I played the cue, and I had pinned Mel up against the back wall because it was so loud. I was used to being a record mixer. I said, 'Oh, this dialogue is kind of important!'" He first crossed paths with Thomas Newman when the composer needed a mixer for an ultimately unused track in Martin Brest's Meet Joe Black (1998). "It never made the movie, but I was incredibly honored," Vicari says. Subsequently, he mixed Newman's main theme to the HBO series Six Feet Under (2001-2005). Then came the offer to join Road to Perdition. "I was being inserted into a group of people who've been working together for a long period of time, and I didn't feel completely comfortable," he recalls. "But I felt completely honored to be in their presence, and I wanted to do the very best job I could." The three-month scoring process on Road to Perdition began at Paramount Stage M, where pre- records were done with individual instrumentalists, including Jon Clarke, Eric Rigler, Steve Kujala, George Doering, Steve Tavaglione, Michael Fisher and Rick Cox, among others. "Tom usually comes in with a skeleton guide, which we then embellish," Vicari explains, adding, "Keep in mind, this is a totally analog movie. Every 10 passes, I have to make a slave and then bounce it all back to two multi-tracks. This was quite an involved situation, and I was helped by [guitarist] George Doering and [score recordist] Paul Wertheimer." After the pre-records were completed, the team went to the Newman Scoring Stage (named for Thomas' father, the legendary composer/arranger/ conductor Alfred Newman) at 20th Century Fox to add the orchestra with Armin Steiner. "Armin was one of the world's premier scoring mixers, and my Tommy Vicari, left, working with composer Thomas Newman on the score for the pilot of The Newsroom series in 2012.

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