Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544300
20 M PS E . O R G Solange S. Schwalbe MPSE: CONGRATULATIONS on receiving this year's MPSE Career Achievement Award! It used to be named the Lifetime Achievement Award, but recipients always thought it meant it was the end of their career. Mark Mangini MPSE: "I'm not dead yet" (as old man in Monty Python's Holy Grail). SSS: There have been so many things written about you and broadcasted about you because of your publicity and your fame that I wanted a new twist, a new spin for this interview. One that perhaps looks at some of the "lowlights" and not just the "highlights." MM: This is still a Lifetime (Career) Achievement Award, right? Not a Lifetime of Mistakes and Misfires Award. Happy to share some of those, certainly from the early years and maybe some from the middling years, and, well, there's been some recent ones too. SSS: Well, I do want to talk about the beginnings. I want to talk about mag and the digital bridge, what it was like to go from mag to digital. A lot of people failed, and a lot of people dropped out when we went digital. MM: The shift to digital audio was a sea-change in our community and formidable for many, me included. It wasn't just a paradigm shift, requiring comfortable adaptations to traditional models, it was a whole new way of thinking about sound. Yet even in its heyday, and my early years as an editor, I didn't care for mag nor did it ever evince an air of "high fidelity" or state of the art … even in 1976, I knew mag was too rigid, too mechanical, too … physical a medium. Something was going to replace it soon. I mean … we had seen the computer. And yet, in all those restrictions, I found an unexpected benefit. It was so expensive, cumbersome, and well … monoaural, it forced me to develop the skill of imagining what layering tracks would sound like … in my head. Though I started my career at Hanna-Barbera, where you weren't allowed to edit more than three or four tracks total, for your mix, it wasn't uncommon to double and triple up sounds to make something more complex or interesting. However, you had to edit them on a single audio channel Moviola™ … a steampunk leviathan that was bigger than a car and louder than a wheat thresher. One could never hear the sum of all of one's choices. Working with mag forced me to hear layered sounds in my head before hearing them combined for the first time in a mix studio. This restriction pushed my imagination hard and over time, created a confidence, knowing what to use and what to leave out … and why. This experience is still valuable today, in spite of having access to virtually unlimited channels. I fear Mark Mangini MPSE working on a Moviola™ at Hanna-Barbera c. 1978