Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/855478
38 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2017 your head." The film's final tennis match was the movie's most demanding sequence for both Lee and Iatrou. "All the matches have so many layers," concedes Lee. "You have the girls, the commentators, the game, the crowds and the music. They're tricky sequences and took a lot of finessing and prioritizing." Some of the effects are subtle. For example, as Riggs leaves the hotel to go to the final match, at the last moment, his son Larry decides to stay at the hotel and watch it on TV. "The music has this ongoing beat to drive us forward, and I took the cue," says Lee. "It's a very tiny thing, but as Bobby is on the escalator, I built it to have this rhythmic, clunking sound, like marching forward with the game." Lee says she purposefully varied tennis hits in the match, adding subtleties to the audio that supported the match as it developed. "I would put hints on the strategy in the game," she reveals. "Sometimes they'd lob and I'd cut in slices of tennis hits so you know when they want to hit far or close, as part of Billie Jean's game plan in the match, since Bobby is so out of shape. As the match gets going, his feet are stomping more as he gets tired. The crowd builds into more of a frenzy, with call-outs here and there, to help spice it up. Then the crowd noises drop on the last match point, which helps build the tension." For Iatrou, one of the challenges was that the directors wanted to use the original recording of the late sportscaster Howard Cosell's commentary of the game. "Ordinarily, you'd use a sound-alike when the person is deceased or there's no chance to bring him in," she explains. "But they wanted the original recording, which was a mono mix on a stereo track. We looked for separate tracks but couldn't find them." Iatrou says they did a massive search for a sound-alike and did find someone who was "close and good, but not a perfect match… so we used him sparingly. The bulk of that is the real Howard Cosell from a videotape of the broadcast." What made it more difficult was that Iatrou had to seamlessly blend Cosell's dialogue with that of actor Natalie Morales, who played co-host Rosie Casals. Iatrou points out that because they were mixing sounds of the original recording, they sought out the microphone used at the time, an Electro-Voice 635A, which they used to record Morales. "We used the mic for all the broadcast commentators," says Iatrou, who notes that they found and purchased the microphone on Amazon. com. When it came to replacing Rosie's voice in the original video recording, according to Iatrou, "We spent more time mixing that in terms of pre-dubbing and mixing than anything else in the movie — and we tried so many different things." Ultimately, what worked was noise reduction plug-in Isotope RX5 and EQ Match, the latter of which was used to make the EQ of the distressed, old recording of Howard Cosell dialogue match with the bits from the sound-alike. "And dialogue/music mixer Ron Bartlett spent a lot of time EQing the dialogue," adds Iatrou. Regarding the music and effects around those scenes, Lee reveals that they allowed her to create "the illusion of immersing the audience" in more of a surround environment. "Jon and Val