Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487666
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I W I N T E R 2 0 2 3 53 I went to work for Disney in 1982. I had done some work for Disney before that. Specifically, I went to work at Disney Studios (in Burbank) to record the music for the Epcot project. They knew they wanted to hire someone for a short period of time because there was going to be a lot of music recording, and they needed to have someone there all the time. And so that's what I was hired to do specifically at the studio. And it was great. All the music production for all of the Disney parks at the time was done in L.A. at the studio. Everything musical, everything that was in production was done at the studio. So, the contractors were there, the copyist was there, the arrangers were there. I spent a while working on Epcot, and what it morphed into was whenever a feature or TV project would come along, I'd record that too, because I was there and got to know some composers and wound up working on multiple projects with people that I got to know. How did you make the transition from scoring mixer to re-recording mixer? Well, when I worked in television, you're often the production and post-production mixer, so I had some experience. A lot of it was for productions on which I had done the production mixing work alongside the editors and then did the final mix in post. So, when I got into scoring, a couple of composers I worked with asked if I would be willing and able to carry the project along through scoring and re-recording. You've done that on some pretty big films like Jurassic Park and West Side Story, to name just a couple! Yes, but the change from the three to the two-mixer formula in the late '90s sort of really inhibited my opportunities for doing re-recording, and of course, I was mainly doing scoring anyway. We're spending a lot of time preparing for the final dub. Unless the picture really called for a music expert, they didn't want to hire one. And sometimes even if it did call for a music expert, they didn't want to hire one. I think most of my music colleagues would agree that that transition sort of eliminated the music position for a lot of us. I loved mixing when I was the third mixer. I loved just handling music, but sometimes they'd throw me Foley or backgrounds or something. I didn't really mind that, and I really felt it was better to have, of course, three sets of trained ears on the stage, but also, you're just so much more efficient when you're able to focus on one thing and not have to stop, go