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30 CINEMONTAGE / Q2 2018 summers on the lot. "People would go to summer camp, but I would go to my dad's work," Nichols recalls. "I was pushed onto different soundstages — The Courtship of Eddie's Father, Medical Center — almost like babysitting. He would say, 'Stand behind the mixer' or 'Stand behind the boom man,' and then would drop me off there for two hours." Sound was an early enthusiasm for Nichols, who was given a reel-to-reel tape recorder as a child. "I'd record radio stations and make my own mix tapes with a microphone," he recalls. Nichols ultimately entered the business after his father arranged a "one-day job" for him at Samuel Goldwyn Studio in the late 1970s. "My dad said, 'What did you think?'" he reveals. "I said, 'Dad, I can't do this job. It's a boring job, and I don't know how you've done it for this many years.' Next Thursday, I got paid and I said, 'Dad, I can do this job, I can do this job!'" In the end, Nichols found a home at Samuel Goldwyn Studio, which by 1980 was known as Warner Hollywood Studios. He first found work in the studio's film vaults — "I was taking the splicing tape off the tapes and was degaussing hundreds of thousands of feet of mag film so they could reuse them" — before finding his calling as a recordist. His first feature film was The Final Countdown (1980) starring Kirk Douglas. "As a recordist, you work on a stage and prepare all the playback machines," Nichols explains. "You get the technical specifications from the sound supervisor, music supervisor and picture editors, knowing what sample rate you're running at and what film rate you're running at, so it all can be in sync. We patch all of that information to the mixers on their mixing boards. At the time, we were using Quad-Eight boards." By the time he got the call to work on Top Gun, the recordist had honed his craft on several high- profile features, including Frances (1982), Rocky III (1982) and Moscow on the Hudson (1984), and had been mentored by recordist Walter A. Gest. On the film, re-recording mixers Rick Kline, Donald O. Mitchell and Kevin O'Connell, CAS, led a team of three recordists, James Cavarretta, Mike Haney and Nichols — a rarity, according to Nichols. "This was a first for a lot of things," he comments. "Most of the time, you have just one or two recordists to oversee dialogue, music and effects, but this movie was going to be something big and they wanted three. They pulled us all together." Nichols was tasked with overseeing the music track, which was stocked with songs that became synonymous with the movie, including "Mighty Wings" performed by Cheap Trick, "Hot Summer Nights" performed by the Miami Sound Machine, "Playing with the Boys" performed by Kenny Loggins and, most famously of all, "Take My Breath Away" performed by Berlin. "This was one of the better soundtracks that ever was," the recordist observes. "It opened up a can of worms because other bands and musicians said, 'Well, we can make a soundtrack.' There were soundtracks prior to it, but not like this." Nichols continues: "To set up a stage for Top Gun in the morning, it would take almost two hours just as far as patching goes. Then you got the recorders together and the picture together. You CONTINUED FROM PAGE 28 CONTINUED ON PAGE 32 Robert "Bubba" Nichols in the the 70mm Sounding Room at Goldwyn Studios in 1984 during the making of The Right Stuff.