Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500189
56 M PS E . O R G cues, and what they were and why. I have a list of 10 feature films that you worked on, and the first one is The Black Stallion, which was in 1979. JR: Yes, The Black Stallion. This was a picture that I did with Joan Rowe and Elliot Tyson the Foley mixer. We were at the Goldwyn Foley Stage. We did it at night, and believe me, that cured me from ever doing a film again at night. But what was really unusual about it was the supervisor Alan Splet. He really wanted to have a sense of this horse being alive through the horse hooves. Well, you know, back in the day, coconuts, that's really kind of what you used, but they were not going to cut it, I'll tell you. So I was really at my wit's end—what are we going to do? What are we going to DO? David Fein, another Foley artist who was working at that time at the MGM Studios, was a good friend of mine. I said, "Gosh, I don't know what I'm going to do, David. I've got to come up with these horse hooves," and he said, "John, I have the answer." "Really?" "I tell you what, you meet me at the studio, and I will 'cough cough,' hand you these in an attache case 'cough, cough,' and you'll get them back to me the following day." Well, they of course, were the famous MGM horse hooves. They look like Fred Flintstone's phone receiver if you will. So, that solved a lot of problems, but there still was one where Black, that was the horse on the tramp steamer that was going down, and Black escapes onto the deck and then basically gallops off the deck into the water. Now, I could not take those MGM horse hooves and make them work for the deck sound. So I thought about it and thought about it, and I think I talked about it with Joanie. We would rent props from time to time from Ellis Mercantile. Unfortunately, they're defunct but there were a couple people that I knew really well, great people who worked there. I went there and by gosh, I found this 4½-foot-high horse leg with a handle on top and it had a moveable hoof at the bottom. And I could take that thing and just bang it on the wood floor on the stage and it sounded great. SSS: Who would have guessed? JR: Yes. So now the great end of the story is Alan Splet, being the genius he was, and he passed away from us way too early, he took the Foley and went out and re-recorded it in the world to what he called "worldizing." So imagine, he went to a beach, because that's where Black mostly was, on this beach island, and he would play the Foley out into the environment and then captured it back via microphone into a recorder, but having the environment there, along with the Foley to quote "worldize" it. So that's what makes that picture really unique. SSS: So, he took the recorded Foley and he played it in an environment, like he played it through speakers? JR: Correct. SSS: He would play through speakers, record the speakers while on the beach so he would get the beach background with the recorded Foley, then he would send that back as a single cue, "worldizing," meaning the hoof steps have the beach environment embedded in it. JR: Right, so in other words, versus the mixers adding their quote, "ambience" or backgrounds, whatever it was, it was pre-inserted, not everywhere, and of course, I don't know the actual location. We can maybe ask Ann, Alan's wife, she might know. Again, unfortunately, he's passed on but, but that really made that unusual. And I really love that picture. It was a great picture. SSS: Wow, "worldizing." So that's how you worldize a single Foley cue. That's fantastic! That's great. The next movie is called Inside Moves, 1980. JR: This is a Dick Donner picture. And what's unusual about it? Well, not much you could say, but the storyline is about a handicapped gentleman after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, he tries to find common ground with troubled souls at a local dive bar. What does that mean? Well, every person that he associated with had some type of disability. Now, any Foley artist can tell you because this main actor John Savage that I Foleyed, he had a limp from this [suicide] attempt, he jumped off the building and lived. So he had a terrible limp. And of course, through no fault of the picture editor, you could have the limp on the A side of the cut, and all of a sudden on the B side of the cut. Now, how does that sound? Ca-THUNK, ca-THUNK. Ca-THUNK-THUNK? You know what I mean? It's not going to sound right. So then we, the Foley artists, have to figure out how do I cheat that? Do I drag my foot through the cut a little bit? Do I throw that B side out of sync a little bit? I mean, you really have to be on your game, and of course, every character in this picture had something like that, so I was exhausted by the time that picture was over, I'll tell you. But it was really a good focusing event in my career. [laughs] SSS: It really tells you how detailed the picture editing is and how picture editing can affect Foley cues. JR: Absolutely. And this is not to call out the picture editors at all, because they have to make sure the storyline is moving along correctly with the dialogue, etc., so they can't really go, 'Oh, gosh, that might affect the Foley people. Let's change that a little bit.' They just got to do what's going to