Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535880
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 41 My turn finally came. I was called to the booth. The masseuse left the room so that I could get undressed. Not being familiar with the routine, I didn't know, do I take everything off? I made my decision. I climbed on the table, lay down on my stomach, draped the towel/cloth thing over my, umm, mid-section, closed my eyes and waited. She came in. The massage started smoothly. Man, oh man, I get it! This is nice. The music lulling me, the incense close to cloying but not quite. Then the massage started to get rougher. Maybe this is what they do. Start soft and then get more intense. Wait, now my limbs were being twisted in uncomfortable ways and the massaging of my back had turned into fists pounding. Why was she slapping the sides of my head? This wasn't even a little bit relaxing. Should I say something? I didn't want to appear naive in the ways of massage. I was a sophisticated modern, hip Hollywood sound guy. Oof, okay, that hit hurt, ow, that one too. What started as John Woo beautiful slow-motion doves were turning into giant John Woo handguns held sideways and blasting away. That's not massaging, that's just slapping and pounding my back and head hard. This made Monk in one of his closed fist-pounding the keyboard manic phases look like sensitive Bill Evans tinkling the ivories. Time to say something before I ran out of clumsy metaphors. I raised and turned my head and there above me with a stupid grin on his face was Bob Beemer. I then noticed the curtains had been opened and the entire crew was watching and laughing. Somewhere mid-massage, Bob had switched places with the masseuse. Ha ha, very funny. A lesser man would have called HR. The Bourne Identity director was Doug Liman. Oh, my goodness. How to describe him? Interesting seems mild and ambiguous. His father was Arthur Liman, the Chief Counsel for the Senate's investigation of the Iran-Contra Affair, immediately earning Doug points in my book. Loving that stuff, I had watched those hearings as closely as I had watched the Watergate hearings decades earlier. Oliver North, Casper Weinberger, Fawn Hall's underwear, I ate it up with a spoon. Arthur Liman was a modern-day hero. His son, Doug Liman, was an indie film darling shooting the pretty great Swingers on a shoestring using friends, family, and filming on short ends. He then directed the cult classic Go. How cool was this guy? Very cool. On our first meeting, I found him smart, creative, funny, and … different. He was obviously a child of privilege, but I wasn't going to hold that against him. You run into that a lot in our business. Graduates of expensive universities who owed nothing on student loans and seemed pretty great. Doug reminded me of comedian Steven Wright. A combination of intelligence, spaciness, and bemused childlike wonder. He was also a great campfire storyteller. He told tales about his college days, stories about stealing shots on Go (or was it, Swingers?), and there was that great story about acquiring the rights to The Bourne Identity. He said he found out where Robert Ludlum lived, got road maps, climbed in an airplane which he flew himself. Using those road maps, followed highways, freeways, and roads to Ludlum's place. He landed the plane, knocked on the door, and talked Ludlum into selling him the rights. Incredible. There was another story about defending his house from a crazed squirrel that his delivery made way funnier than it had any right to be and a frat-boy story about frat brothers, a cardboard box with holes cut in it, and a cat that I can't tell in a family magazine. A good parent's tuition money hard at work. Someday I'll tell the Doug Liman Bourne Identity Ben-Gay story, on second thought, probably not. I swear I saw him one night on Comedy Central in front of that famous brick wall doing stand-up and he was good. Right about now you're thinking, "Yeah, blah blah blah, what about the dolphin?" Here ya go… ou, of course, know that the mixing process involves many playbacks, many notes taken and given, many sounds added, subtracted, moved around, and messed with. On most of our shows, cutting was divvied up by category rather than by reel. Dino DiMuro had been given all the fight scenes, a free hand and off he went. He cut the fight scenes choosing realistic FX as opposed to Jean-Claude Van Damme-sounding FX. He picked every FX, shaped every dynamic, and cut those fights brilliantly. They sounded real. Nothing needed to be added on the dub stage. Coupled with great Foley programmed by Cowboy Craig Jaeger, walked and propped Y