Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1543070
C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 21 C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 21 business, so I reached out to them, and they introduced me to a director who hired me to work on his feature film. So, my first job was a very low-budget film. I did all sorts of things. I typed script pages and I was the coffee boy, that was my main job. I worked on the set, and that led me to work as an intern apprentice in the editing room. The editors were two guys from NYU who offered me the job. Then Keith Robinson hired me to assist him with a variety of small editing projects. We started working on Saturday Night Live. SNL has been on the air for 50 years now, and I worked on Seasons 2-10. What was your job? The parody and film commercials. The idea was that the cast and the writers could make films, so we edited those. They were mostly shot on 16mm, some of them were on 35mm. My boss, Keith Robinson, was the editor and I was the assistant. We did the sound together and went to the mix. We also worked on the "Mr. Bill" segments. We worked on some very funny fake commercials and very interesting films. With Keith's help, I started getting some job offers as a sound editor. One of the early films was a concert film about nuclear energy called No Nukes (1980). The concert was filmed in Madison Square Garden and the artists included Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and Bruce Springsteen. There were a lot of things happening in New York City at the time. There was a small television industry, a lot of small films, and around 20 big feature movies in town at any given time. And people like Sidney Lumet, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee were making films here. A friend of ours, Mark Silverman, who was one of the producers of Blood Simple (1984), asked me if I was interested in working in feature films and asked, "would you like me to introduce you to the Coens?" I said, "Yeah, sure. Absolutely!" So, I met with them, we hit it off, and I got the job. This was a low-budget film, less than a million. The Coens hired me as an assistant to edit the sound. It was a very long period of about six months where we mixed a few scenes at a time because we could only work when the mixer and the stage were available. We'd cut together a reel or so, we'd go in and mix it and we'd move on to the next one. The mix was at Sound One in New York, with mixer Mel Zelniker. We had a really great time, so exciting to be making a feature film. Piecing it together bit by bit. Blood Simple was an amazing way to get started in mainstream moviemaking. I would describe our process as unorthodox and extremely wacky. We brought in my friend Carter Burwell to compose the score, who did a historic job. And the rest is history, like they say. I think we've done 25 movies together now. Joel and Ethan (Coen Brothers) are following slightly different paths at this moment, working on separate film projects. I think they're going to do another movie together soon. Do you anticipate being involved? I hope so. I'd say they're stuck with me! How was sound design handled during your earlier days? Sound editing and design in the '70s and '80s were exploding in importance. Major movies like Apocalypse Now and Star Wars required giant sound crews producing hundreds of FX tracks. Far from this exciting revolution in Los Angeles and San Francisco, we were struggling in New York to make rent. We figured out a workflow that would allow us to limit our choices in the editorial process and spend our time in the mix making our sound design fit the small films we had to work on.