VolInum8

WALLA WALLA, EVERYWHERE

When we saw Memories Of Me last year, we were tickled by the scene in which bit-player Alan King introduces Billy Crystal to the "Inventor of the Courtroom Walla" among his rag-tag troop of Hollywood pals. King illustrates with a melodramatic courtroom cliché; the crowd of extras turn to each other and murmur inaudible "wallas" and "rhubarbs" to show their concern. We audiences always enjoy inside filmmakers stuff surfacing in a general-interest picture.

Actually, wallas are often shot "MOS" (Mit Out Sound) or replaced with a group of ADR or sound FX crowds. Why? It's hard to mike a large group of actors really well on camera. People working quickly on a set are more concerned with visual problems. What the extras say isn't really important A smart director and production recordist will have the crowd react in complete mime anyway, especially if tnere is principal dialogue "up front" beyond the crowd. Then the tracks can be worked separately. Every dubbing stage has a pile of old tape cartridges marked COURTROOM WALLA, RESTAURANT WALLA, STADIUM CROWD , etc.

These may be the same ancient sound FX you've heard time and again in old TV shows and movies. They're certainly handy to fill in on a temporary mix. (Known to the trade as a "Temp. Dub") But the modern, finished soundtrack needs either a custom-recorded stereo walla (as sound FX) or the treatment of "Group ADR" actors. They can record the scene in sync to picture, allowing both a clean track for editing and mixing, and much more appropriate responses to what's going on in the story. A lot of ADR editors will ask the group to provide a true walla or murmur as a 'bed" layer, and then do other tracks containing short SPECIFIC lines in recognizable English. When sound editors provide material for a generic foreign version (music and FX, no dialogue,) the SPECIFICS are left out by the rerecording mixers and the "bed" walla can remain as sound FX.

BEAR WITH US

By now everyone has heard of The Bear . A squeaky-clean wildlife flick that appeals to the family might be insipid and unsophisticated, but it is not. This picture offers a terrific opportunity to hear the contribution of Foley sound FX (those sounds performed in a studio before a projected silent image.) Roger Ebert noted that a lot of the effective sound he heard was done in post-production, not recorded when the cameras were rolling. A laughable un- derstatement. MSNL readers know that scenes with trained animals have virtually no useful production sound. Check out any TV nature documentary. When you see animals moving in the brush, you're hearing a Foley artist moving around on their stage. Telephoto closeup of a Red-Crowned Grackle singing? Most likely the sound is edited from a separate field recording. You can't get optimum conditions for sound and picture together in the wild. Bears have always has a broad appeal in show business. They're cuddly, they stand up, they use their paws like hands. They can learn tricks, but they don't read scripts.

The dailies would probably have sounded like the non-stop coaching of off-camera trainers. (Stand up, Bosco, good boy, now growl! Eat the fish Bosco, good boy!) Production would have wind noise, camera noise. Airplanes would have been heard in the 19th Century wilderness. So this film makes a great introduction for people new to appreciating moviesound. To begin to think what effort must have gone into this track, think of it as completely silent. Look at a TV with the sound muted, and look for things that might make noise. What layers of sound go together to tell the story?

The Bear 's major strength is that sound is not over-produced. Choices have been made about what is important to hear. Some soundtracks simply try to "cover" everything on the screen, sounds pile up, and become an unfocused muddle.

Most of it is ultimately cinematic, just moving pictures. With only a couple of dozen dialogue lines in the whole show, this international production must be easy to subtitle or dub. The trappers may not be speaking English, or may have been re-voiced from heavy accents. So much of the story is told without dialogue, the film isn't afraid to be silent. The men don't have to talk when they know it's time to destroy an injured dog. We get it. But every sound tells a story. Distant hounds and horses echo from the hills... When we've been involved long enough with only bears and wilderness, dogs and horses are a rude intrusion. They suddenly remind us that humans can invade this paradise.

Rivers and streams make good use of stereo recording, and help define the depth of the sonic stage. Water has a rich low-end and sparkling highs. The right sound here evokes refreshment, like some beer commercial. But there's not much mid-range in this film at all and its warmth is missed. Perhaps we can hear this as a stylistically French sound job. An avalanche has its share of bass-boomy rocks, and that gives prop rocks some credible weight. But this sequence lacks a bright layer of sandy gravel "raining" before, during, and after. A missed opportunity for sonic storytelling.

Backgrounds in the environment are clean and articulate, with wind in leaves sounding different from wind in open spaces. There was always (even in our second-rate theater) a nice enveloping sense of surrounding ambience. It is rare to hear well-chosen air backgrounds in scenes of open space. Even swarming bees get us involved with the cub, by humming left, right, and in surrounds. Most of this planet now has severe noise pollution from airplanes. So we wonder where is the wilderness where these backgrounds were recorded?

Most of the sync and coverage of sound are impressionistic in this track. Although some detail is lost, or opportunities missed, it's not such a bad thing that The Bear is painted with broad strokes and splashes of sound. Sound rarely distracts from the dramatic focus of a scene, as it sometimes does in Hollywood tracks. But much seems unbalanced. Out of scale or proportion. For instance, mouth movements of bears, such as tongues licking and eating sounds, were well-performed and recorded with enough body to give them bear-sized weight. The Foley must have been fun to make on this show, though sometimes it's mixed out of whack. There's frequently too much volume and bass on bear footsteps that are very distant. OK, already. We know bears are heavy. We get it! Often the little cub sounds like he weighs as much as the big guy, and that's just pointless. So the mix's major weakness it its lack of proportion. But this Foley does capture character well. Animals move with real personal intention.

A lot of the grasses and foliage seem to have been recorded in piles of recording tape. That's an old trick, but lacks the soft freshness of live grass. An owl and some bird wing-flaps were nicely mixed, but had a strange quality that didn't sound feathery. There were other Foley moments missed: Some dry leaves shredded by a man were silent. Dropping pine cones no noisier than cotton balls. Footsteps in mud that don't squish. Walking in a shallow stream, we hear something like dry cobblestones, with no sense of wetness. On the other hand, there's a nice change of sound quality and rhythm when we go from bears to a family of deer. And, when the men walk off into the hills, we hear changes of texture from dirt to gravel to rocks.

Sound editors will tell you that editing the sounds for babies, dogs, and monkeys are among their most challenging and creative assignments. Why? For each dramatic situation, they find a particularly expressive vocalization. It's the edited montage of these sounds that give animals their character. This means taking pains to audition hours of tapes, most of which have nothing interesting to hear. Nature photographers and directors of trained-animal pictures wait forever for the right shot, then create new reality by careful editing. So the sound experts tell a story with sounds that cue human ideas. These bears express themselves vocally with an amazing (possibly unnatural) vocabulary of moans and grunts. Possibly a mix of recorded bears and manufactured sounds. We might envision moaning through a big, resonant cardboard mailing tube to fake the extra little dramatic sounds we can't get the bears to record. With subtlety, this would work.

The Big Bear really gives out with some serious roars. But the Bear Cub speaks too many little cute sounds that might have been made by a child or an actress. There are scenes where he makes a lot of effort grunts that out-Disney Dumbo. They simply over-anthropromorphize the animal, and adults will feel cheated out of the real drama of nature.

But overall, it's a class act, this picture, with its many proclamations of humane treatment, its orchestral-sounding score, its surprise animation fantasies, and its spiritually uplifting simplicity. The totally artificial sound track makes a nice textbook for sound appreciation. In a way, it is like animation. Starting with nothing, the film artists build up layers to create a new reality. The Bear also reminds us that the animal trainers' art, like movie sound, goes mostly unsung. And reading the international names on the credits reminds us that the environment belongs to the planet, not the people, and that films are a great teacher. -VTA -DS

'89 GREAT VINTAGE FOR LASER SOUND

People go to the movies to be glamorized, which was perhaps more true during the Golden Age when movies were events to be experienced once and cherished thereafter only in memory. Revival houses served to refresh those memories, to introduce new audiences to past glories, and to build a base of disciples spreading the gospel of movie history through gushing appreciation or intelligent criticism.

Then along came television, which trivialized movies by eliminating hunks, chopping commercials into what remained and, perhaps worst of all, endlessly recycling them. The great cliché "Familiarity breeds contempt," may well apply to movies seen once too many times, especially under lousy conditions.

Movies have always performed best in a crowded theater with a participating audience, each individual responding to the emotions generated by the film and flowing around her or him. Except in eariy kinetoscopes, film watching was never meant to be a passive experience, personified by a lonely soul blinking at shadows in a darkened room.

How then to explain the appeal of rediscovering movies on laserdisc, when they were originally intended to be seen not in the home on state-of-the-art consumer hardware but in a large auditorium filled with paying customers munching popcorn and sipping Coke? The answer lies in the unique human passion to possess what we love. We are by nature possessive animals who insist on owning our experiences. Now we can own forever our favorite movies either in cheap mass-market VHS copies, or deluxe laserdic editions as impressive as fine library books.

It's impossible to recreate on a home video system the precise experience of a great audience movie, but such a system can emulate that experience by evoking the emotion we remember feeling the first time we saw Star Wars, Gone With The Wind , or Put Your Favorite Title Here.

Those who seek to recreate that experience demand the best delivery system available and currently that's laser discs, with their high-resolution image and crystal clear digital sound. In five to ten years, it'll be a high definition picture with sazzafranic sound coming across on frequencies that can be soaked up by the pores in your cheeks. You won't even need ears.

That's later. What we have now are discs. And if you hunger for a high quality system that approximates your recollection of opening night at Star Wars , discs are for you.

The restored version of Lawrence of Arabia has just been released in Widescreen format with Digital Sound and Dolby Surround, by RCA Columbia and in an even more impressive Criterion CAV pressing. This is a striking remix of a 27-year-old stereo track. (See MSNL issues #1 and 2 for the inside story on that restoration.)

On the Criterion edition, the audio is clean and powerful, and has none of the variable levels of hiss that could be heard in the 70 mm six-track theatrical release earlier this year. Those defects couldn't be helped, given that 70 mm mag is unforgiving when new material is mixed with old. But in digital sound on laserdisc, those differences are diminished to an imperceptible level. At last, Lawrence is permanently available in a stunning home video format that invites repeat viewing. The old "panned and scanned" analogue, shorter version really did discourage our appetite. This one tops our list of the best discs released in 1989. The others are, in alphabetical order:

Casablanca

Criterion CAV boxed-set with Digital Sound and a highly-informative commentary by Ron Haver on the second audio channel. The class-A treatment for a perennial.

Die Hard

CBS-Fox Digital Surround Sound, Widescreen CLV, the first and best of Fox's Special Widescreen Editions. The ads claimed that the audio was supposed to "blow you out the back watt of the theater." We suggest you reinforce a few walls before cranking this up in your living room.

Dr. Zhivago

MGM CLV, extreme widescreen. Digital Stereo Surround. Another excellent David Lean treat for the eye and ear. Pay special attention to the train effects that dominate the first ten minutes of side 3.

Empire of the Sun

Warner CAV and CLV, Beautiful video transfer, timid Widescreen, superb Digital Stereo Surround. (The CAV freeze frames jitter, but this isn't really a study-it-by-the-frame movie.) The aircraft flybys are particularly impressive for audio.

Gone With The Wind

MGM CLV, Digital Sound. Painstaking computerized restoration, frame-by-frame from the original Technicolor 3-strip negative. Excellent clean mono audio.

-Ed. note: MSNL was not thrilled with the new print of GWTW heard in a theater. See our issue #3.

The Longest Day

CBS-Fox CLV, Widescreen, Digital Stereo Surround, B&W. Darryl F. Zanuck's all-star World War Two epic has just become available in a deluxe edition that restores both picture and audio to near-theatrical quality. The battle scenes deliver a powerful audio image which in 1962 had only Lawrence of Arabia as competition. Whatever the film lacks in idea and point of view, it is still a landmark effort.

Treasure of the Sierra Madre

MGM CLV. Analogue Sound with CX noise reduction. Another perennial given a new life. Crystal clear video and audio. Classic Warner Bros. mix from the '40's. You can close your eyes and distinguish the Warner sound from the other studios'. It's the gravelly dialogue and the way the music is mixed to a keep-you-awake level.

West Side Story

Criterion CAV and CLV, Widescreen, Digital Sound, Stereo, Dolby Surround. The CAV edition adds an amazing collection of supplementary materials including pre-production stills, a commentary by Co-Director Robert Wise, set designs, storyboards. and a complete shot-by-shot breakdown and analysis of the Tonight (Ensemble) sequence. From an audio point-of-view, this LaserDisc is important for its soundtrack having been digitally remastered down from the original 6-track discrete mix, including dialogue spread across left-center-right. Ed. note: There will be a more complete review of the disc next issue.

Zulu

Criterion CLV. Widescreen. Digital Sound. Not stereo, which is surprising since

this film was shot in Technirama-70. The audio is ersatz stereo, our pet term for enhanced mono. but excellent nevertheless. This is a wonderful demo disc for selling your reticent friends on the laser format

-GS

George Simpson, novelist and sound editor, sticks his head inside a laser disc player for us from time to time.

TAKING MY ACT ON THE ROAD

Who would have thought that a Foley artist's profession and expertise would attract enough attention to warrant radio and television interviews as well as newspaper and magazine articles? Certainly I never would have guessed. Sound effects themselves are only recently being acknowledged as important and integral to filmmaking. But Foley, (footsteps, cloth and prop movement performed in sync to picture), was always the poor cousin to edited sound which has been the poor cousin to picture editing for years. So what is all the hub-bub about?

Well, I like to think that filmmakers and filmwatchers are finally beginning to appreciate the magic that happens in post-production sound and are now becoming quite curious about how we sound people spend our days (and some- times far too many nights).

During this past year, I have been requested to lecture and demonstrate about the mysterious craft of Foley in several contrasting venues. In April, I was an artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. I worked with marvelous artists and musicians in a week-long residency which culminated in a weekend of performances for the public. I discovered that there is a definitive population of people who want to be educated about movie sound, and who find the performance of Foley to be "quite a show". In July, I appeared on the David Letterman Show for a short segment at the end where 'Dave' and I Foleyed props to a scene in a public domain detective movie. New York audiences are very hip and the response of the studio audience was supportive yet sophisticated. They were used to Letterman's brilliance so while I was warmly received. I never fooled myself for one second... they wanted to see him, not necessarily me with my bag of tricks.

Fortunately we had a great time and I would go back again. In late summer I appeared for three weeks at the California State Fair in Sacramento with an apprentice Foley artist, where we performed four shows a day of Foley demonstrations. This was an experience I wish never to repeat. The exhibit of which I was a part was designed quite poorly by the administrator in charge. The traffic pattern for the public was atrocious and the sound level in the exhibit hall was more than a little distracting. There was no overall cohesion or cooperation among the exhibitors. Add to this hoards of people who could not find adequate room to sit nor were they able to focus well with all the noise in the environment and you have quite a zoo.

Unfortunately, we also discovered that some people are unbelievably poorly behaved. It was always a battle keeping the public off our stage which had thousands of dollars of loaned equipment and the "docents" seemed more interested in partying with each other than monitoring the exhibits. Fortunately, there were enough concerned and interested audience members to remind my partner and I that promoting movie sound was worth the inconvenience of the fair.

Most recently, I was honored to hold two seminars on Foley for the Denver International Film Festival. It was my first film fest, but if the others are anything like this one, I could really get used to this. The director of the festival, Ron Henderson, has organized a top notch group of people who orchestrated a beautiful event. I had wonderful, inquisitive audiences and worked with people of the utmost professionalism. It is becoming more evident that there are a lot of people who are as fascinated with movie sound as we craftspeople are. I heartily recommend attending film festivals if you can. It is a rich opportunity to be exposed to all genres of films and all perspectives of filmmaking. I was fortunate in that I dialogued with foreign filmmakers about film sound (among other subjects like chocolate, skiing, and Eastern European politics).

With these past demonstrations under my belt, I think I can safely say that interest in movie sound is on the rise. More and more, people from varying professions and tastes in films are enjoying their prerogative to understand and be educated about the work behind the scenes. I applaud this awakening fascination. We here at MSNL hope to contribute as much as possible to the enlightenment of all who love movies as we do and want the sound quality to match the other production values. After all, an educated audience is an empowered audience.

-VTA

Ed. note: The Foley exhibit for the California State Fair was made possible by a generous grant of equipment and techinical support from The Saul Zaentz Company, Berkeley, and Meridian Studios, Burbank.

Letterman gags his way through a Foley session with Vanessa

SMALL ANNIVERSARY

Did you know that NBC is now producing all of its prime-time shows in stereo? The technique of broadcasting "MTS" stereo audio for television began in 1984 on The Tonight Show. We think we've come a long way in a very short time in improving TV sound. Wnen it began, the standard put-down of the system was: "Big Deal! Now we can hear Ed laugh at Johnny's jokes on the left and Doc on the right! But what does the quick acceptance of TV stereo and its allied higher standards of frequency range mean to movie sound fans?

First, though we can't expect TV shows to rival the best feature films, we can expect a competitive environment to force the standards upward. That's good for craftsmanship in Hollywood, and it educates producers and directors to the importance of sound. Second, it makes even average audiences begin to expect clear, articulate sound as customary in their entertainment. It took a few years for FM stereo to overrun monaural radio, but it was a pretty good boon to the music business.

Something else happened when FM stereo grew up in the 1960's: Announcers became free to develop speaking styles entirely different from the forced, formal projection of radio's first thirty years. FM allowed them to be casual and intimate, while audiences could understand every word and nuance. Young listeners with headphones became aware of subtle detail in broadcast music, and the content of pop music changed to exploit the technology. These same young ears listen for more dialogue and sound effects detail in movie theaters. So directors and writers, early in a film's conception, are thinking sonically. We are hearing movies on video mature and grow more complex, thanks to laser disc, HiFi VCR'S, and now MTS.

COLORIZING PAYS ... FOR RESTORATION

We just saw a brand-new 70mm print of West Side Story , You'll be able to get the laser disc soon, and we heartily recommend it. But MSNL experienced something that only the MOVIE THEATER can deliver. LA's Century City Cineplex Odeon treated the picture like a treasure. This is the same venue that ran the restored Lawrence of Arabia (see MSNL #1 and 2.) for an appreciative special-run audience early this year.

With the intelligent music of Leonard Bernstein, lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, and the modern choreography of Jerome Robbms, something exceptional was created for the stage and completely reinterpreted for the needs of the motion picture. It goes places no stage play could go, yet is faithful to the visual artifice of a stage play, and has a look that only 70mm can properly capture. If you have never seen a print of a 70mm shot on 65mm negative, you haven't lived in a movie theater. When color, resolution, film grain are nearly perfect, the best sound editing, recording, transferring, and mixing have even more impact.

Among the ten Oscars this 1961 production won was the one recognizing the Todd-AO and Samuel Goldwyn Sound Department sound. Murray Spivack, who gave sonic life to King Kong , supervised. This sound has been carefully retransferred to accommodate modern theaters.

Although some cost is recovered when a new version is released on video, projecting classic films is not profitable. Each print costs a fortune, and few prints are distributed. These efforts, like any cultural event (support of orchestras, art museums, public radio) depend upon an active public. Some superstar directors raised the money to restore Lawrence, and we were told that recent restorations of Gone With The Wind, The Wizard of Oz , (both 35mm productions from the MGM library) and now West Side Story were funded by Ted Turner.

When the popular audience watches Ted's TV networks and rents colorized tapes, some of that money filters back to rescue classic film negatives (Black- and-white negatives have to be restored before films are colorized on video anyway). The permanent loss of film materials is a cultural crisis about which the American Film Institute has been warning us for years. Now we're moving on to restoring the great 70mm films. Is this Turner's debt to society, paying off the bad kharma from all his colorizing? 70 mm theaters with 6-track sound and THX playback specs come close to the "feelies" of Brave New World . But we don't mean anything insidious is at hand. Complete sensory involvement is good at the movies. That's why we go. Let us know if a 70 classic is shown in your area.

-DS