CAS Quarterly

36 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y MOTION PICTURE – DOCUMENTARY The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart by G. JOHN GARRETT CAS Meet the Winners The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart explores the history of the Bee Gees through archival interviews, footage, and new interviews. The documentary was nominated for an Eddie and a Golden Reel, ultimately winning the CAS Award. Re-recording mixers Jeff King and Gary A. Rizzo CAS took some time to talk about the project. JEFF KING: Re-recording Mixer How much time did you have for track prep? I don't know how long, a few weeks? I don't think a lot of time. [Supervising sound editor] Jonathan Greber had a little time, maybe a month, I'm not sure. How about for the mix? On independent films and blockbusters, you have a pre-dub period of a week to a few weeks, but often on documentaries, you just show up on day one and go. We mixed this in five days, but we got through it in a few days because we screened with the clients, and went back for tweaks. Since we were doing it so quick, for me, Gary asked me to do it like, last minute, so I had no experience with the material or anything. So, as we were going, I just saw it coming down and was trying to keep up because we were moving so fast. Every once in a while I'd say, "Hey, let me go back and grab this one thing, let me tweak this a little bit." It seems like with documentaries, there's never really the time to have a pre-dub. In this case, let's just go scene by scene and work it out. That was kind of the idea of trying to get multiple passes, see where it was, and go from there. What kinds of challenges did this documentary present? Gary Rizzo did the dialogue so it was a bigger challenge for him with so much material from different eras and matching things from archival sources in interviews and music. With me, the FX with all the archival stuff and sometimes there would be a lot of crowds, sometimes it was attached to the music, sometimes we would sweeten that but still make it true to the original. Making the old stuff sound good and maintaining the authenticity was the hardest challenge. Any interesting FX moments you can share? It's so dialogue and music-driven, obviously, but there were a few cool FX moments that were, for me, kind of fun. We're laying backgrounds and ambiences, matching some of the crowd stuff, that's always a challenge. In 1979, there's this "demolition disco" thing where they're blowing up all these records, and there's a concert thing woven into that with all these explosions. That took a lot of work finding the right

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