Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504731
42 M PS E . O R G and started your own thing? Who instigated that, and how did it happen? MM: You know, it was all very organic. It was at the time when the studios were starting to disband their sound departments. For decades, each studio had a sound department. That meant they had to keep on a staff whether they had films for them to work on or not. At some point in the early '80s, someone in accounting probably scrutinized a balance sheet or a ledger that showed income lower than expense, and that had to be reconciled. So Richard, Stephen. and I had a great experience making Star Trek, really, hit it off. We liked each other and decided that it would make sense for us to stay together and work together as a team—and perhaps leverage this nascent trend in Hollywood: studios farming out their sound work to independent companies and not their in-house. SL: So you go and you buy one of those big dubbers… MM: A Magnatech. SL: And that must have been a pretty nervous feeling for a little while, because I can imagine those were pretty expensive back in the day. MM: I'm thinking on the order of $15,000-$20,000. And that was a lot of money for us. But we were really committed to it being a part of our success. Very few others were doing that, at least in the way that we wanted to do it, so that we got better quality. We always bought the most expensive audio stock to print on. And we always made sure that our editors had their transfers when they needed them instead of waiting. SL: I remember that. I started with you guys right at the tail end of the film era. And there were always boxes of film, racks of film, the SMELL of film. MM: Oh yeah. SL: You and I have talked a lot about Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which was one of the first big films that exploded for you guys. You had done a lot of dialogue and ADR editing on features, and before you had done effects editing at Hanna-Barbera. Now on Raiders, you're really getting into cutting effects on a feature. But could you talk about those different disciplines? MM: Well, the monkey in Raiders actually fused those two disciplines. SL: That's a very good point. That was fantastic. Please talk a bit about that. That was your idea, to bring in Frank (Welker)? MM: Yeah. Richard had given me Reel 3 and it contained the monkey. Raiders was my first big movie editing sound effects. To prep for the movie, I recorded all manner of monkeys and primates, anticipating building the voice from "whole cloth!" I did an early pass—I wish I had saved it—where I had made thousands of one- and two-frame edits, splicing together these monkey utterances … and it was just awful! It didn't have the whimsy that the movie had. I felt stuck. After a great deal of frustration and wasted time, I remembered Frank Welker, who was a regular at Hanna-Barbera, literally monkey- ing around between takes in the Hanna-Barbera Studio. It always made me laugh … as I tossed them into the bin. And I just thought, "I wonder if they'd go for this!" That inkling of an idea fused my cartoon sensibility and dialogue editing chops to take a human voice and synchronize it with a real monkey— and pull off a performance. I programmed it like ADR, with cue sheets and recommendations for attitude verbalizations. Frank Welker came to the ADR stage, and he did the monkey sync-to- picture. It was brilliant! I did a little bit of fitting to make it right with the mouth opening and closing. I brought Frank Marshall (the producer) in at the end of the session to play it for him—all crossing our fingers. He laughed Field recording in the dunes of Qatar. Photo by Mostafa Sheshtawy