Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1532010
C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 23 C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 23 Sometimes I felt like I was really going to be fired and other times I'd squeak right by. No one was spared, the DP, the focus puller, no one. Back then, it really did seem like you lived or died by dailies. Later, I learned to sit next to the volume control knob in the theater so that I could at least ride the levels! Is that something you teach your students? No, I think going to dailies collectively is extinct. I tell my students to listen carefully and then re-listen again to find all the elements that go into their recordings. I tell them that this business is constantly churning. Every job is going to be different and how you react and problem-solve is important. There is no one single way to do things and it's up to you to deliver an outcome. Every project is going to be different and what worked on one might not on the next. You really have to stay on your feet. Is there a memorable experience you could attach this to? I managed to mix a couple more movies and in 1987, Alex Ho called me to come down to Dallas for Oliver Stone's Talk Radio [1988]. I traveled with T.J. O'Mara [boom] and Kim Maitland [utility]. We were seven days out from shooting when we arrived. We had all read the script, but when we got to the main radio station set for a walkthrough, it was apparent that we were not ready for the scope of what Oliver wanted to accomplish. Why was that? Essentially, we needed to build a functioning "talk show" radio studio from scratch. One of the tricky elements was that the set was designed so you could see four different booths separated by clear glass. There was the engineer's booth, a producer room, a green room, and the host's setup. The focus would be on the center glass room where talk-radio host Barry, played by Eric Bogosian, would be doing the majority of his work. We immediately realized the need to build a headset with a mic arm that would give him total freedom of movement. With help from the props people, we created a decent looking and sounding headset with a Sony ECM 50 lavaliere. That solved one issue, and then we would figure out how he would hear the call-ins, music cues, and other cues. Then we went to the next booth and tried to figure out what this character might need. For the wired telephone call-ins with real off-camera actors, we made a rolling soundproof telephone booth that we could place anywhere it was needed. We knew that we would also have to do the music playback cues and record them, so we found a 16-track recorder which was completely foreign to me at that time. Also, I'm running out of tracks fast, so we get a second Nagra. At this point Kim, T.J., and I are putting in 16-hour days wiring each booth, adding speakers, hiding microphones, just essentially trying to stay ahead of what might possibly happen when we start filming. This was still analog times and next-day shipping wasn't a reality. We scoured the Dallas area for whatever supplies we could buy. As a team, we walked through each booth and imagined what we could do to record dialogue and give the actors the communication possibilities the script or Oliver called for. We On tick, tick… BOOM! with my current crew Terence McCormack Maitland and Jerry Yuen.