Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500189
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 39 or so. It was small enough and great enough, I was able to get opportunities quickly. SL: Absolutely. One of the first movies I think I remember seeing your name on was Remo Williams. I believe you did Foley on that. GR: Foley! Oh yeah! I love doing Foley. I did Foley for Willow! SL: Yeah! That must have been fun! I'd love to hear your experiences on those. Remo Williams was a fun film. It's one of those little undiscovered gems of the '80s. I really enjoyed it. GR: I think the expectation was that Remo Williams would turn into a franchise. SL: A series, yeah. GR: I guess it didn't do well enough. But it was a good action film, so of course, great for Foley. And I loved it. If you want to do sound design or sound effects for a living—it's great to know how to record in the world and operate all that stuff—but it's really great to do Foley. Because you have to be clever about taking things and turning corn starch into snow— or discover on your own Foley tricks to make something work. Willow was fun, too. The reason I did Willow was Dennie Thorpe, our usual Foley artist who was pregnant at the time. So they had me. The thing with Willow was—I remember carrying a lot of heavy stuff and being big bad guys, carrying big things around and big footsteps and chains, some massive stuff while Dennie, who is a lovely person, pregnant, sitting in a chair—just giving notes! But that was about "beef." You know? And people like Randy Thom did Foley. And recording Foley is a great experience. So as you said, I got to do a little of everything in the early Sprocket Systems days. And everything teaches you something. SL: Absolutely. What came next after that? Were you editing or mixing? Or did it all sort of happen at once, going from here-to-here? GR: I did a bit of Foley for films, I recorded Foley for a lot of films. The Lucasfilm tradition, which is, at the time especially, when I started doing more sound design, I would do editing and mixing simultaneously. I did Cocoon, the Ron Howard movie, and it was a great experience for me. Gary Summers and I worked on that. We designed sections of the film— not the whole film, but the science fictiony sections—and we premixed them. And then we took them to LA—I was the one who brought these premixes—on mag—down to LA, and went to the Zanuck Theater, which was a mix theater at the time. And I will say that the experience of the final mix—when I was NOT doing it—was very disappointing. It's great if you're going to mix it, mix it all the way through, and be the person responsible. So editing and mixing kind of grew in parallel. SL: You were lucky enough to be at the end of the era when we were still working on glorious film and mag. Now that you're in the wonderful digital world, looking back, how do you compare those work ethics? GR: When you think about it, the great sound effects editors—and when I started, there were people like Ken Fischer and Terry Eckton… SL: I LOVE Terry. I adore Terry. GR: …Renowned sound effects editors. And think about what they had to do then! Because now, a sound effects editor has their Pro Tools session with three-kajillion tracks—and you cut everything in context. You hear how it works together. If you want to build something out of six elements, you build those six elements and they come together. But in those days, it was a Moviola, one tape head… SL: Maybe a KEM, with a couple tracks… GR: Yeah! A KEM… Or a sync-head, you would roll by hand, and listen to three or four sounds, kind of at the same time … you had no idea how things would work together! So it's the equivalent of … like DPs which were so famous and respected— especially then—they could see what it was going to look like on film before anyone else. In the digital world, you can look at the monitor and you see what it's going to look like now, right now on the set. In the old mag days, the sound editors, they were really good at assembling scenes in their head! Then you get— Terry Eckton, Ken Fischer, Richard Hymns … people like that, you get to the mixing stage, "man, this works great!" That's a real talent. So Photo: Courtesy Gary Rydstrom