Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544300
talked about "protagonists" and "backstory," using a film language I didn't understand. I thought, "why aren't they inviting me, their supervising sound editor, to these discussions?" I was never part of those conversations. I wanted to be. I assumed they didn't think I'd have anything to add. I probably didn't, not only because I didn't understand the concepts, but I also didn't have the language to participate in those conversations. I wanted to be a collaborator. I wanted to be in that inner circle, deciding how the movie was going to work on a narrative level, and how sound could further it. That was a catalyst that sent me in a new direction in my career. I had to learn the language of cinema. I was nothing more than a gifted mechanic, completely unaware of what made movies tick. Early in my career, I had a seminal failure while working at Paramount Studios. I was an ADR editor in the sound department and word got out that I had been a sound effects editor at Hanna-Barbera. In between my departmental ADR tasks, my boss gave me a reel of a TV pilot called Here's Boomer. My job was to cut in sounds for the voice of Boomer, a trained dog that was the star of the show. I had never cut "live action"; I was great with boinks and slide whistles but had no idea how to bring a real live dog to life with sound. I cut the reel and sent it to the stage, and it bounced. It was rejected as "unmixable" and one of my cohorts had to recut the entire reel. See … at Hanna-Barbera, we only had one dog bark, the Paramount library had hundreds. So, I used all of them, creating essentially a pastiche of a mutt, built out of the vocalizations of Poodles and German Shepherds, Chihuahuas, and Great Danes. It was awful. In those early days, I only understood sound editing for everything that it had been for 50 years, a rote, mechanical process of adding the things that were "missing." It looked something like "Oh, the gunshot is missing. I need to edit in a gunshot. Oh, maybe I should put in a really good one. Maybe I'll go record one." But it never occurred to me to think, what does all this mean? Why is this character shooting this gun, and what does the sound of the gun Mark Mangini shoots Barrett .50 Cal c. 2016