Vol I, No.1 March, 1989

WELCOME

Welcome to MovieSound Newsletter, a hub of information for movie fans who enjoy state of the art film soundtracks, both in major theaters and at home. You're going to read a lot about the making of soundtracks, and the experience of listening to them, written by sound pros who care about craft! We'll talk about traditional and new wave methods of making the flickers talk, from the Vitaphone disc to the laser disc. You'll be well informed about all the elements affecting movie and stereo TV tracks, ranging from the best-laid plans to bottom-line realities. In upcoming issues, we'll talk about each of the myriad technical skills that work together to make today's complex stereo soundtracks such a high-energy part of the movie experience. Students and film fans want to be well-informed about the techniques of sound designing and editing, mixing, recording dialogue, even replacing unwanted sounds. But even casual filmgoers have a right to expect first-rate sound for their $5 - $7 at the box office. Every good director knows that half the story is told in sound, but every theatre owner doesn't! We're going to rally against movie theatres with sloppy sound systems, and we'll publicly applaud those that do a good job. We'll share theatre sound experiences from all regions of the country, in an ongoing series of reader polls. This is the only periodical where you'll see upcoming and classic movies, tapes, and laser discs reviewed for their technical and artistic qualities in sound. Our readers understand that sound and dialogue effects are created, not simply recorded for fiction films. It is you readers who will provide the most fertile ground of discussion by writing in with your ideas, questions, gripes, and comments. So, thanks for joining us with our debut issue. Next ish, we'll begin an informative series with "What is Post-Production Sound?"

PATCHING UP LAWRENCE

When Lawrence of Arabia was released in 1962, Richard Anderson was 11 years old. Since being impressed by the first run of Lawrence , Richard grew up to become Supervising Sound Editor on many top films, including The Color Purple , Beetlejuice, Harry and the Hendersons, and 2010 . We can't list his whole résumé, but he worked on Poltergeist, 48 Hours, Gremlins , and Star Trek-The Motion Picture. He has an Oscar(TM) for Raiders of the Lost Ark , and other awards including Golden Reels for Predator and Spielberg's Amazing Stories (the B-17 episode) "The Mission."

Recently he completed work restoring the soundtrack for missing pieces Sir David Lean has replaced in a re-release of Lawrence. Following are excerpts from an informal conversation with MSNL:

MSNL: Have you always had an ear for films ?

RA: "My earliest recollection of seeing any movie was in stereo. There was an English marching band playing military music. As they marched by, the instruments panned by separately. They were either recorded or mixed that way. I remember being impressed with the realism of that effect. Just like you were there. That was Around The World In 80 Days. "

MSNL: Did you notice the track more than the photography?

RA: "As a kid I remembered the visual things more. Now that I'm in the business I'm aware of the sound portions. I remember a scene in which Lawrence meets Omar Sharif for the first time. He's with an Arab guide in hostile territory. The guide reacts to an infinitesimal speck of dust on the horizon. Slowly this tiny spot comes in closer until you realize it's a man on some beast, then it gets closer and you see he's a man on a camel, silhouetted in the heat waves. He comes in from infinity and the guide runs for his camel and a shot rings out. Bam! He's shot through the head. Lawrence doesn't know what to do. The guy comes closer and you see he's riding a camel and you hear this sort of ... camel feet! He eventually rides in and unwraps the cloth from his face and we see it's Omar Sharif, What an entrance! There're a lot of

very wide shots of the desert where, on a small neighborhood screen or on TV you wouldn't see this little speck riding in but on a big downtown theater screen you would. Another thing they did was to paint diagonal lines in the sand, very subtle, but pointing toward infinity, to lead your eye to where Sharif is coming in."

MSNL: Rich, how did this job begin for you?

RA: "I got a call from Bob Harris who was producing the re-cut in late '87. He said he was restoring Lawrence of Arabia to its long version. My first thought was "Boy, it's already a long movie." The movie was initially shown at 220 minutes, and it was screened at the Academy with that length. (Producer) Sam Spiegel or someone said it had to be cut. Lawrence only played a few days in the major cities in the long version, then they came up with a version about 202 minutes. They pulled the long prints and this medium version took over. Some years later (1970), it was re-released with another 10 or 15 minutes taken out, and that's the length you generally see on television.

Now Sir David wanted to re-cut it with Anne V. Coates, the original editor. So last year Bob Harris was trying to find Anne Coates, He was on the 'phone with John Davison (producer of Robocop ) and he was saying, 'By the way, do you have any idea where I can find Anne Coates?' Not knowing whether she was still around the business, was in England, or whatever. And John said, 'I don't know where she is this minute, but her cutting room is right next door.' This was a longshot!"

MSNL: Was it a six-track stereo originally?

RA: "The original 70mm release was a six-track discrete, non-Dolby because there was no Dolby noise reduction. 25 years ago, the really big first-run pictures like Oklahoma and the Cinerama shows were released as six-track discrete."

MSNL: That means five separate channels for the front speakers and a surround channel. Today you have more commonly the "six-track spread," which has three across the front, surround, and two more at left-center and right-center with low-frequencies derived from the other three.

RA: "Right. The so-called 'Baby Boom' channels. Then in those days the 35mm 'scope versions were sometimes magnetically striped for four-track stereo. Today the same effect would be gotten from a Dolby stereo optical print. Anyway, this film had been progressively chopped down over the years. Bob started researching where all the original (sound and picture) elements might be. He talked to Sir David and started to dig around in the storerooms in London, and in Columbia's Hollywood, New York, and 'salt-mine' vaults in Kansas or wherever. There was no track for the original long version of the movie! He did manage to find certain of the cut scenes, but only in 35mm composite prints. Bob had to try to piece the whole movie together. The 65mm camera negative existed. It had been stored. I guess they figured if nothing else, they could sell lots of stock footage of the desert. But the sound? There were no original ¼" tapes of the production sound. I'm not an historian but it's possible in those days they shot (sound) directly to 35mm film stock. But whatever it was recorded on, if it does exist, no one could find it. So there were no dailies of sound. They threw out all the original material, and yet they saved trims from the old work print. It had all been rolled up in little rolls and put in metal cans which had literally rusted shut! They had been sitting in a storeroom in England since 1962. So there was work track, one copy only. And of course, wherever they had made a cut, there was a (sound) cut. Bob found some trims where somebody had taken a 35mm projection print (mono, optical,) and cut some sections out. He made a mag (magnetic) master from that composite. For some sections that was the only sound that existed."

MSNL: You can't restore stereo from that!

RA: "It gets worse! Now as you know, the sound track of a projection print is 19 1/2 frames out of sync..."

MSNL: To accommodate the distance from the picture lamp to the sound head's exciter lamp...

RA: "So when you come to a cut, the sound is cut off in the wrong place. That's more material we didn't have. So for 50-70% of the new material they wanted in the picture the only thing that existed was this mixed composite track."

MSNL: So, for purposes of remixing, dialogue is married to sound effects, sound effects to music, etc. Bummer!

RA: "So when a section would start, we didn't have a track for the first 20 frames. There were one or two sections where there was an M&E (music and effects) that had had been prepared, in stereo, for foreigns (non-English distribution.) If you see the film, there's a scene where they first come to Anthony Quinn's camp. There's a sequence that was cut out where, as he gets close to his camp, all his army of followers ride out to meet him, with flags and shooting guns in the air, and there's only 50 of Omar Sharif's guys. So you see (and hear) the power that this guy has. In the short version, they just dissolved to them having dinner in the tent and we don't see this. Fortunately, this was a section where we had the M&E, You didn't really have any English dialogue, 'cause they're all riding and shooting and shouting in Arabic, so essentially the M&E was the same as the domestic mix. There were some sections where we were able to get use of the work track. The pieces we had were trims , not the pieces that were in the film originally, but out-takes . There's a whole scene in a tent where the British Army is discussing Lawrence. All the dialogue we used we had to try to lip-sync from out-takes. A lot of it was up-front close-ups. Jim Christopher did a good job of editing that stuff, syncing it up. Sometimes an actor would ad-lib a word or two in one take, different from another take."

MSNL: For example?

RA: "In one scene a guy started a line with "Well..." in only the take that was used. We had sound of the other takes, but he never said "Well." We just had to leave it out. Our philosophy was that people have to realize this is a reconstruction."

MSNL: So you always had some kind of dialogue to work with?

RA: "Oh, no! There're scenes between O'Toole and Alec Guiness, and Jack Hawkins where they had trimmed a lot. We put the trims back in, but they didn't have track for them. But they had a copy of the original script, and just to check (for ad-libs and new lines) they hired a lip-reader to watch the section. So they went to London and Lean directed the looping of the actors. Now this is 25 years later, these guys are looping themselves."

MSNL: Sounded a lot different?

RA: "Obviously, voices change and thicken with age. And Peter O'Toole had a lot of pints and liters go down his throat in the past 25 years. Of course today he doesn't drink at all. We matched as well as we could. But it was shot with a lot of wide angles, and we had no guide track. Sometimes the actors would walk right up to the screen in an attempt to see their mouths. Burt Weinstein sunc up all the London loops."

MSNL: You looped all the principals, then?

RA: "Jack Hawkins had died, and had to be looped. But interestingly, he had done his last few films when he had throat cancer, and so there was already an actor sound-alike (Charles Gray) who was looping his voice. So they were able to find this guy for this reconstruction."

• Part 1 of a two-parter.

• Next: Music and sound effects solutions

THX AT HOME ?

What are these rumors about THX theater speaker systems working on plans for your very own living room? Check us for further items when we can pry something out of the engineers at Lucasfilm. We'll be working on a piece about the not-so-secret THX speaker set-ups in your better theaters ASAP!

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THEATRE BEAT

Ever do this? Sit down on a Friday night, rich with anticipation for a wide screen fantasy. Find the perfect seat in the stereo center. Pull your shoes out of the flypaper on the floor and settle down in your favorite position, knees up on the seat in front of you. House lights down, music up. You're flying high in escapist heaven when there's this terrible thumping in the side wall. You remember they're running another picture next door! You wouldn't be caught dead seeing it, but you can't stop hearing it through the paper walls. Now you're completely obsessed with another movie. Or there's this rasping distortion in one speaker that blows your suspension of disbelief. You forget for a while, but it comes back like a toothache for ninety minutes. Does this bother you more than a Diet Coke ad with the dreaded Whitney Houston? Or every time the actors pronounce a sibilant "S" it sounds like they're frying 10-foot high slabs of bacon behind the screen? Is that what's troubling you, bunky? Is there an a__hole sitting behind you talking at his date as if he were watching TV? Is that what's making your head spin around like Linda Blair's?

Well, we think that having a good listening experience at the movies is as satisfying as a great live performance of a symphony. We want to take a careful look at theaters in your area. If you'll fill out this little survey, your humble editor will attempt to report on the results a couple of ishes down the road. Then we'll do this again, and continue to clarify the picture of the state of theater sound out there. After few such surveys, we should all have a better idea where the best theaters are.

SCOREBOARD

TURKEYS GET NEW GOBBLE

Ridley Scott's 1985 Legend suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous studio marketing in more ways than one. As so often happens when the "suits" at the studio smell a flop, they started to monkey around with the score. Unfortunately, in their panic, they sometimes end up with a less effective score than what they had in the first place. Examples of this are too numerous to mention. Georges Delerue's magnificent score for Something Wicked This Way Comes was dumped for James Horner's. Lalo Schifrin's clever Jinxed score was thrown out for Miles Goodman's. The biggest tragedy is that the general public can never hear these rejected masterpieces. But, in the case of Legend , there is some hope. Although the geniuses at Fox decided to replace Jerry Goldsmith's breathtaking orchestral score with repetitive synthesized drek from Tangerine Dream, they released the FOREIGN version with the Goldsmith score! Don't ask why. The good news is that the Goldsmith score was briefly released on LP. (Filmtrax Records.) If you know a die-hard collector, it's worth looking for.

--- Rich

Richard Stone is a composer of film and television musical scores

DIALOGUE WITH US

It takes two... Write us with your questions and ideas. This space should be a letters column. We'll let it grow as you fill it up!