Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487730
JER: David and Ramiro had been lined up for West Side Story years in advance, and rightfully so … they're each amazing. And Steven Spielberg's reputation is such that he attracts an entire army of department heads who are leaders in all their fields. That was especially true on WSS. My first day on set was analogous to arrival day at an Ivy League college, when everybody you meet was both a high school valedictorian and an exceptional athlete or artist, and so accomplished that you can't help wonder if it's a cosmic mistake that you are in the same place! But I like a scary challenge. Film musicals are inherently the most complicated projects a music editor can work on. They involve the longest schedules, the most interfacing with other departments, working and recording in multiple environments with completely different acoustics, and coalescing the final elements into sounds that maintain the illusion that the actors are bursting into song and dance spontaneously. There were certain problems unique to West Side Story. It had multilingual vocals, on-camera whistling and finger snaps, on-camera jazz bands, weird orchestrations, and songs that are iconic and yet very difficult to sing. We literally had hundreds of interactions with the Leonard Bernstein Estate, which had approval over any changes to the arrangements, whether they were done by David Newman or John Williams (who quietly assisted in a few areas). Also, the initial recordings were done with the NY Philharmonic in New York, but COVID forced us to complete them in LA with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I think any sound editor can relate to this: One of the things I'm most proud of in the finished film is completely invisible. There are places in the (very exposed) end credits where we jump back-and- forth between the LA Phil and the NY Phil, sometimes in the middle of a phrase, and even Spielberg and Sondheim couldn't tell the difference. That's a tribute to hundreds of people who all did their jobs exactly right. The two greatest orchestras in the country were recorded in different cities in different years with different COVID restrictions, but the playing and the engineering and mixing were so precise that they breathe as one. We even overlaid them on top of each other on a couple of songs, which would have been impossible in the past. PL: I can imagine that music editing has become a more creative process, both in terms of reconstructing current and/or creating new cues—post-scoring sessions in order to deal with picture changes—and also in terms of having a voice in what the score will become vis-à-vis your work in temping a picture. How has the field of music editing changed for you since you started? JER: When I started in the late 1980s, the technology of sprocket- driven magnetic film was bulky and expensive and largely hadn't changed for 50 years. You needed somebody to show you how to wrangle it. It was my fortune to fall in with Jim Henrikson, who was a master diplomat, a wizard at music cutting, and a sage advisor to composers and directors because of his vast experience (which included work for Kubrick, Scorsese, Howard Hawks, Jonathan Demme, Hal Ashby, Ron Howard, and many others). Working with Jim for 25 years, I also learned how he dealt with other parts of the job, such as big-budget politics, unreasonable work demands, and salary negotiations. But you no longer need a mentor to get started. After the move to computers in the 1990s, software tools for music editing are taught in every film school and every music school in the world, and you can operate them on your laptop or an iPad. Like the transition from celluloid film to video, that gives access to many more people, which is healthy, but the flexibility of the tools also is changing job definitions, and that can cause personal friction. Picture editors don't have to go to a dub stage for a temp dub anymore; they often would prefer to do it themselves in their Avid's. Music editors get asked to remix what the composer has approved with his engineer, and I've even had a director say to me on a final dub of a $150 million movie, "Don't you have a little keyboard where you could play another part on top of this?" All of the new technical flexibility has ripple Joe E Rand in Hans Zimmer's studio, 2006.