Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500189
66 M PS E . O R G electric dam somewhere in South America. It featured great footage of colossal earth-moving equipment, explosions, and hydro-electric turbines all shot MOS (without sound). We had a contract at a company called Ross-Gaffney on 45th Street, where I could go sit in a room full of quarter-inch tapes and audition stock music and sound effects, submit a transfer order and the next day, pick up my reels of 16mm mag. Cutting the sound effects and music on that documentary made an impression I can still remember. The essentially silent film (narration only) became three dimensional when sound effects were added. Suddenly, there was a clear distinction between a wide shot and a CU, between an insignificant object or event and an important one and a strong sense of the scale of the project. We followed a similar procedure at Troma Films where I worked next, a company so cheap that they'd send me down to Colony Records on Time Square to buy Eastern European recordings of classical music, recorded on the other side of the Iron Curtain. How were they going to know? For the cost of a record album, Troma got a score! I cut a film for them, along with four or five others, working 10- or 12-hour days, seven days a week, for $50 a week in a dirty, seedy second-floor storefront holding nothing but four Moviolas. The dingy, un-air-conditioned room was half a block north of Times Square on Broadway above a falafel stand emitting great clouds of falafel steam from the kitchen. This was also the spot where Gene Palma, the Times Square street drummer in Taxi Driver, often performed. And we had to keep the windows open or we'd suffocate. Moviola speakers turned up full blast. Good times. From time to time, they'd bring in Dan Loewenthal, a real editor, to give us suggestions. Dan recommended me for a couple of jobs after that. By this time, I was laser-focused on film work. I picture edited a couple of very low-budget features and worked as an assistant picture editor on slightly bigger films, where I usually did the sound editing, too. I eventually made it out to Los Angeles with Cannon Films working on the Chuck Norris film Invasion USA, picture edited by Dan and Scott Vickery. I worked at Cannon Films for three years, and by my third film with them, they let me supervise the sound and I've stuck with that ever since. Who or what shaped the early part of your career? How did you navigate your way? I think, like everybody, I just slowly figured it out little by little. When I moved to NYC from suburban Florida, a naïve hayseed in the Big City, I didn't know anybody in the film business or anything about the film business. There was a small book called the The Yellow Book which was published every year that listed the names and addresses of every production company, trailer house, film service company, etc., in the city. Most were very tiny operations, with maybe a couple of employees, but it also included big companies. From the The Yellow Book, I made my own little workbook that listed companies by addresses rather than name so I could efficiently hand out resumes the length of maybe two or three streets in midtown in a day. After a couple of months, I got a job at the place I spoke about before that made industrials, Eric Grove Films. Eric gave L-R: Richard, Doug Hemphill, Peter Weir & Ron Bartlett, The Way Back, Sydney, October 2009. Photo by Andrew Bock Example of 8-plate KEM