Along with his sound career David was also the editor of the Movie Sound Newsletter.  It was a chronicle of audio for film from the trenches of Hollywood.  The Newsletter is long since out of print but David is bringing it back to life on the web.  You can find online versions of the original Newsletter here.  There were numerous notable contributors to the Newsletter including David’s brother, Richard Stone, a composer and multiple Emmy award winner who, among many other projects, composed the scores for Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain.

An accomplished visual artist as well as a consummate audio professional, David is truly a man of many gifts.  Probably most key of all is his curiosity, sense of humor and temperament.  David hosted me for a weekend series of workshops at SCAD in the Spring of 2011 and I found him to be an extremely personable, approachable and popular guy.  In an industry filled with nervous and insecure individuals, David is a shining light.  He kindly found time between classes to chat with me about his past, present and future plans.

WOODY: So how did you get into sound originally?

David Stone (L) and Tom McCarthy(R) accepting the Academy Award for Dracula

DAVE: Probably just like you and a million other guys, I know Walter Murch talks about having this experience, I was a kid who knew how to play with tape recorders.  We were lucky enough to have one as a kid.  I would never say that audio technology and recording is a passion of mine, it is not.  It just seemed to be another tool for storytelling.  So I played with tape recorders and my friends and I made little radio plays when we could.  When kids were doing a presentation at school I would offer to prepare a tape to play back with music and sound effects or whatever was needed.  In junior high I fell in with the 8 millimeter filmmakers.  I was always interested in animation and special visual effects.  I thought I’d have a career, if I was lucky.  I got my art degree, and was hoping to get into animation and visual effects.

WOODY:  So your degree was visual arts?

DAVE:  Fine arts, painting sculpture with a major in print making and a minor in art history.

WOODY:  Visual art informed your sound craft?

DAVE:  I feel like I transliterate ideas from print making, which is really all about layering areas of color in composition.  I transliterate that thinking into audio.  I think intuitively about layering sound in my sound effects. Everything having to do with the architecture of layered sound, my print making background comes into play.  Even though it’s slightly different language, the principles are the same.  In college I worked part time in a print shop preparing graphics for printing presses.  Commercial art which I had not learned in school.  The principles of commercial art also apply to sound effects editing.

WOODY:  Did you continue to pursue the visual arts as you were working in sound or did that transform more into sound exclusively?

DAVE:  My official transformation from animation to sound editor was a very specific incident.  I was working at Hanna Barbera.  This was in 1976 or 1977.  I was working as an “in-betweener.” An in-betweener is the bottom rung of the animation ladder. I was drawing the less important in-between drawings that the assistant animators provided.  I was in the bottom there with hundreds of others who were drawing on those horrid Saturday morning cartoons.  Because I had interest in tape recorders and helped making backyard films with buddies I took breaks with the sound editors down the hall.  We had a lot of rapport and I was interested in their sound effects and was interested in what they did.  I also had a deep understanding of the esthetics of sound effects in the Warner Bros cartoons that Treg Brown edited.  So we used to talk about that stuff a lot and in not too much time the guy who was in charge of that department asked me if I wanted to apprentice there instead of in animation.  I moved over there and very quickly had to learn sound editing skills.  Like rewinding three thousand foot of mag, working with Moviolas and all the editing bench skills.  I had to learn them fast.

WOODY:  This is at Hanna?

DAVE:  Yes, at Hanna.  In the basement on Cahuenga in the middle of the Cahuenga pass.

WOODY:  So the shows that you were working on back then were – Scooby Do and re-dos of The Flintstones and Popeye too right?

Hanna Barbera Studio

DAVE:  Yes.  The Popeye’s were a particular offense to real animation fans.  We knew they would be.  I infamously put out a gag memo.  If you saw it today you’d think it was something that would have come from the Onion.  I heard a rumor from suits upstairs that they were thinking about doing Popeye at Hanna. Any hardcore animation fan who appreciates the Max Fleisher and Dave Fleisher Popeye’s, with animators like Irv Spence would not be happy.  So it was offensive culturally and I wrote this joke memo – I stole some letterhead from Hanna Barbera, I still have a copy of it around somewhere, it basically explained how Hanna was going to do Popeye but they were going to make some changes.  To please the network they needed to change a few things – like Popeye and Bluto were not going to fight, they were just going to argue.  Olive Oil needed to be filled out because she was too skinny and they had to determine who were the parents of Sweet Pea.  A gag just intended to be an office memo.  A couple of months later we started doing the Popeyes and they were being animated in Australia in a place that Bill Hanna had invested in.  They were beautifully animated actually for television, we didn’t expect them to be well animated, but I was right about the stories and the ridiculous changes that came from the network TV interference.  Trying to make everything relevant and less violent.  Popeyes were probably the worst choice for updating.  In this case my satire turned out to be prophetic.

WOODY:  Isn’t that usually the case?

DAVE:  Absolutely!  I didn’t work on the Popeyes that often, I worked on Scooby Do’s Laff-A-Lympics, Captain Caveman, Dinky Dog – I can’t even remember all the stuff we did.  I generally asked for and was given the funnier cartoon animal shows as opposed to superhero cartoons.  My bosses knew that I would get bored and upset pretty quickly if I had to do stuff like Super Friends.  You know that stuff was pretty dreadful.  So I tried to stick to the Saturday morning cartoons that were at least inspired by classic theatrical shorts.  There was a better overall quality and I had more fun doing those.

WOODY:  Animation is different than live action since it has no sound and everyting must be created, and all animated programs have such distinct audio characteristics per show, were there specific sound libraries while you were at Hanna to pull from?  And also were there guidelines so that – this show used these effects but – this show used only those effects and so on?

DAVE:  Absolutely.  When a new show was established there were a small handful of sound effects that became signature for the show.  Partly because in limited animation for TV there are certain pieces of animation that get used over again, a certain run or zip off-screen and so forth.  One of the reasons that limited animation works for TV is the ability to engineer repeated craftsmanship.  Scooby walks on from right to left, that becomes a library of animated movement.  Likewise that affects a library of sound effects that you apply to each show.  When the show is new the editors have fun because they are establishing that all for the first time.  Incidentally the same thing happens with music, they couldn’t score those cartoons straight through so they would score, say, the first six episodes and the main titles.  Then everything was tracked from the music cues that were built for the first few shows.  Music editors would do the whole rest of the series based on the library of cues that came from those first shows.

Dave Stone cutting mag - notice the "asset management" on racks

We’d do the same thing in sound effects. Within the first few episodes you could guess what the bits were that the characters were going to do over and over again.  For instance, Captain Caveman launching himself into flying or whatever it was he did.   [Laughs]  So when you create sound effects in that milieu in terms of the workflow, what you are really doing is layering five six seven eight mono sound effects in a sequence that matches the animation right?   So since you didn’t do pre-dubs at Hanna Barbera cartoons back in the 70’s you would get a reprint of the effects track from the mix and keep that reprint as a loop that said “after Caveman Launch” or “Superman landing.”  You had a loop of those mono sound effects mixed together for any action that you knew was going to be used infinitum.   Once they were approved by the producer or show runner you knew you were safe to use them over and over again.  So you don’t create effects from scratch, you create these from those that are in the library.

WOODY:  What was the management of those assets back then?  Today we create a folder on a drive and drop them in!

DAVE:  I’m sure it was the same way at Filmation and at DePatie/Freling, all the other animation shops in town were set up this way.  There were individual cutting rooms, which an editor would occupy, if he was employed there frequently, he could make it kind of his own room.  In those rooms you had a film rack and some shelves you could keep your favorite mini library version of the overall library  in there while you were doing a show.  Every cutting room had shelves with rolls of mag on them that contained those sound effects.  For instance, one of the running footstep sound effects would be called “dull thuds in 12’s” Every cartoon character that ran in those days had “dull thuds” which was a sort of an innocuous footstep impact.  You used them for running not for walking.  They were printed in 12’s, 10’s, 8’s, 6’s and 4’s.  Meaning – that many frames for the repeat of the sound.  So a run cycle of 12 that an animator does, as soon as you sync up the first footstep no matter how much he runs, he’s running on that same rhythm.  So if you have a loop that says dull thuds in 12’s, you can have the assistant, and I was the assistant, go up to the transfer department and say I need a thousand feet of this.  So he puts up the loop, prints a thousand feet, that’s ten minutes, endlessly looped running footsteps in the rhythm of 12’s.  So one of the rolls that you keep on your rack is “dull thuds in 12’s.”  Then you see some new animation and you say, “oh I see, he’s running in 12’s” then you throw that in and sync up the first step.  That’s sound editing much in the spirit of sewing, not very creative but it pays the bills.

So the main library, outside of everyone’s cutting room, at Hanna anyway, was in the common hallway that all the cutting rooms shared.   In that hallway, in that space, were a line of film racks where hundreds and hundreds of these rolls sat.  I don’t know – maybe there were 2 or 3 hundred rolls of these sound effects that everyone used commonly.  If I needed some machine gun fire I could walk to the rack that had them and grab what’s left of that thousand foot roll and take them into my room, cut some machine gun and then put the roll back.  The apprentice would watch the size of those rolls and as they diminished to the point that the rolls would fall through the steel rods of the racks then he or she would know that it was time to print some more.  Then they would go back to the library, pull the loop out of the files, take the loop to the transfer room and order another thousand feet.

Now I’d like to tell you about some of the interesting folklore that has to do with cartoon sound effects.  It has to do with the workflow and it is the cause of how some of the effects are named.  Hanna Barbera eventually created commercial CDs of the library.  First of all there is corruption in the creation of the CDs.  Stuff was put together in units and rolls for the CDs was nothing like the way it was configured in real life.  There is some reconfiguration in the CDs that throws everything off.  The equivalent of this in the music world would be if there was a new “Best of John Coltrane” album  and you had a couple of pieces that were in the same order that they were on one of the well known records  and there were also several pieces that had no  connection to it or were recorded under different circumstances. Recorded with a different band of musicians or recorded at a very different part of his life’s work and his style had changed.  Then all of a sudden they were on the same album and you would go nuts!  This is what they’ve done to mess up the sound effects.

I’d also like to discuss the naming of the effects.  When the assistants got transfers made onto rolls from the original loops, the way that they would identify them was with a white paper or cloth tape on the outside of the mag roll and a sharpie to identify the name of the effect.  Sometimes when the prints were being made by transfer or the apprentice, or assistant they would misspell or miswrite the name of the sound effect.  Pretty logical, human error right?  So here is a good example of that – there was an effect called “ear’s splutz” it was a particular type of squishy comical sound.  Comedy sounds would have these funny onomatopoetic names.  My favorite one was “crab quacks.”

WOODY:  Crap wax?

DAVE:  [Laughs]  “Crab quacks.”  My sister was an English professor, she would visit me and she would see these names and she would go nuts because she loved the folklore of it.  The folklore was really interesting.  So anyway someone misspelled – “ear’s splutz.”  We know that there are splutzes and squiches and squniches and sqooshes and they all sound different, it takes the newcomer a lot of time to learn what those are because they are onomatopoetic names.

Hanna and Barbera at work

So how did it come to be named “ear’s splutz”?  In this particular instance my understanding is that “ear” should have been “Earl.” The L gets left out on one fine day and forever after they are copying it as “ear’s.”  Because someone was in a hurry and they left the L out of Earl.  And so now it is called “ear’s splutz” – forever! That’s how some of these things got named.  And many quite incorrectly but it’s become a sort of argot folklore.  And Earl by the way, I believe, was before my time at Hanna.  There were some legendary sound effects editors.  One of them was a guy who was in Spike Jones original comedy jazz band – and that was Earl.

WOODY:  So he designed that sound.

DAVE:  Yes.  And a lot of sound effects were… today we say designed… and that seems to imply an awful lot of deliberate creation.  Often in the old days, because you didn’t have the ability to tweak sounds as well, many of the sounds were “created” by sound editors simply doing what I described before – cutting five or six tracks for a moment in the animation and then those tracks were mixed together.  That mix down was then called a new sound effect.  An example of that would be a sound effect in that collection that is called “Dinky digs”.  That was something that I made, it was never intended for posterity.  I had a series of cartoons called Dinky Dog, and he was a giant dog and he was cute and when he dug a hole in the yard, which was usually big enough to swallow a car we had a fast cut digging and shoveling sound.  I made it by having a few tracks of digging sound effects that I had to cut very fast.  I had to shorten them and get the rhythm that was in the animation. When I saw that it was going to be a repeated action over several episodes  I made sure to keep a mix down of that.  I then made a loop out of it and called it “Dinky digs.”  Not being the least bit poetic about it.  So that ends up in the library and guys use it every time they need a fast cut digging sound.  It’s perfect for that particular type of animation.

I think sqinches and squashes often were often the result of accidents in the process of transferring from tape or from mag to mag.  When a mag recorder is speeding up or slowing down or the recorder is on and the playback is speeding up or down.  Before they get up to speed, you get these sometimes hilariously funny alterations of speed and pitch just at the beginning as it’s running up to to speed. So sometimes guys would have a funny kind of squash sound with like mud, comical mud sounds, percussive but mushy and if, at the end of one of the rolls, there happened to be one of these aberrations the change of speed and pitch it would make them incredibly funny.  So when these accidents happened a guy would keep these sound effects and put a funny name on them and they would proliferate in the library.

WOODY:  You and many of your colleagues have gone on to greater acclaim from those days at Hanna.  You were working with Mark Mangini at the time?

DAVE:  Mangini, who is ten years younger than me, starting working there the same time as me.  We started the same week. I was in sound editing starting out as an assistant and he had been hired directly into the track reading room.  [Laughs]  I guess we’ll have to explain what that is…

WOODY:  Yes!

DAVE:  Mark is so smart and has such a good ear, he got a job reading track.  Reading track means – for animators to make lip sync dialog they have to have someone analyze the recorded dialog on mag on a synchronizer and write out a chart of what syllables and phonemes occur at a particular foot and frame.  So every cartoon piece of dialog would go through a synchronizer.  Someone would scroll through with their thumb and then say “Oh the ‘m’ is at 3 feet 8 frames… “o – t- h – “ we’re going to spell Mother… “ the ‘th’ is at 3 feet 18 frames and then the ‘r’ finishes at 3 feet 22 frames.”  So then all of this is then put on a chart.  Phonetics meets film feet and frame timing.  Otherwise the animators can’t draw sync.  That’s how you get sync dialog back then for animation.

WOODY:  Amazing…

DAVE:  So the track room was filled with hard working young people.  We used to use the Sennheisers with the little foam ear pads, so you could hear someone if they were talking to you but you could also clearly hear the sound.  They were amplified by these horrid squawk boxes.

WOODY:  I remember them well.

DAVE:  Oh my God Woody, you know what they were like… 90 percent noise…

WOODY:  Yes, I had completely forgotten about them.

DAVE:  The track reader is looking at a recording script, listening to recorded 35mm track, and writing a chart that the animators are going to see that shows them the timing.  Mark was so good at that he very quickly eclipsed the output and accuracy of a room full of people.  Many of whom were older than him.  Many had been there a long time and weren’t advancing.  Probably because they were half his ear and his brains.  So he rocketed through that job pretty quickly because of his talent.  So then, this is really weird Woody but, we had a pretty smart boss at the time.  Mark was advanced from the track room to become a rookie sound effects editor, and I was advanced from apprentice to a rookie sound editor at the same time.  Our boss could see that we were young and ambitious but we also really had a passion for the work.  It’s not like we were ambitious for power, it was just that we were really good at this work and he advanced us at the same time.  If memory serves we were both given a chance to cut reels as an audition to see if we could become editors.   Now, we were lucky too because at that time they needed more guys, they were doing a lot of shows.  They wanted to bring people up whenever possible from their own farm system rather than pull in editors who had only worked in live action TV and films.  We had a talent for animation which is something you really can’t teach.

Mouth shapes for animation

WOODY:  Animation sound effects is a very specific skill.  You just have to be able to think that way.  Someone who’s mind hears a blender when a whirling wisp of wind goes by or something…  You have to think that way – or you don’t.

DAVE:  Exactly Woody.  I know some remarkably talented sound designers, mixers and sound editors who just don’t get animation.  I really think it’s got something in common with jazz.  There are musicians who have enormous virtuosity playing an instrument but they can’t swing.  With animation sound effects you either swing intuitively or you don’t. The way that people think in animation sound, when they are doing a gag not something realistic – often it’s a sonic non-sequitur – listen to Treg Brown and listen how he takes sound effects from the real world that have nothing connected to the image – rather a theatre of the absurd and somehow – he always got it right.  You either have a penchant for an animation sound gag or you don’t.

WOODY:  The Academy offers these wonderful events on filmmaking and I remember one that you presented on called “Now Hear This.” Would you take a moment to discuss that evening?  There were some wonderful distinctions made about the evolution of animated sound.

DAVE:  I’ve been a part of two of these evenings, the more recent one was on horror movies and the one you attended was the year prior.  It was called “Sound Behind the Image 2.”  The Academy had approached Mark Mangini to create the evening and he kindly asked me to participate by speaking on Treg Brown.  The way that Mark organized it he wanted to talk about three different aspects of animation sound.  The first section was performance – the history of the first sound for animation was Steamboat Willie – and everything was based on performance to picture playback.  Disney and his guys rehearsed and performed the sound effects and the music live.  Mark tells a story about that – how they hung up a sheet in one of their offices and invited wives and family in to experiment.  Disney wanted to have an audience to help determine whether they could make the connection of the the sounds with the cartoon together and accept the illusion.  That’s how far back we were going conceptually.

So Mark structured the evening very smartly I think.  Performance continued through Jimmy MacDonald’s invention of mechanical props that made either funny or naturalistic sounds that were controllable to picture playback in the studio.  Much as a Foley artist walks the performance of the actor in order to capture the right rhythms and nuances as if you recorded the actor’s feet on set.  MacDonald had figured out that if you wanted to control wind and surf and rain to match the picture he would have to build mechanical gimmicks that would make sounds where you could control the speed or the pitch of in front of a microphone in the controlled atmosphere of a studio. That’s why Jimmy’s props are so important.  For any who hadn’t seen the evening – for instance – Jimmy would create the sound of a frog croak by bowing a taut string connected to a coffee can.  He excelled at creating these kinds of mechanical creations – he was an engineer and a drummer.  He thought in both rhythm and in mechanical technique to make sound.  Traditionally, we would never have Foley in cartoons.  Now it’s done for feature animation, modern animation has Foley, just as much as modern live action films.

Foley book written by Vanessa Ament

For TV animation you never had Foley in those days at all.   In my view Foley gives you a realistic texture and has nothing to do, unless you are Jimmy MacDonald from the 30’s and 40’s, nothing you can do on a Foley stage that has a comical qualities that you want for cartoon work.  When doing a film like Beauty and the Beast, I used Foley to anchor when the narrative part of the story calls for realism, when the cartoon characters are being like people.  That’s when I want to hear footsteps or the nuances of their cloth movement, the kind of thing that you would hear from a live action movie.  When it is dramatic and not comical I would emphasize Foley.  I would shoot more Foley and I would tell the mixers where I want to hear it.  When it is being funny then it is about the cut sound effects –the hard effects.  Cats Don’t Dance and Beauty and the Beast and A Goofy Movie are three of my jobs that I think fit that model very well.  You are not aware of Foley unless the characters are acting like people in drama. And when they are being funny, you don’t rely on Foley, you go to the hard effects where you can be silly, broad and over the top.  Although in Beauty and the Beast John Roesch created some funny sound effects on the Foley stage but that is an exception to the rule.  Vanessa Ament did footsteps for them and just treated the characters like people. Every movie is different but that is a general rule of thumb. So performance in animation sound was the first thing that Mark dealt with.

WOODY:  In the evening at the Academy you and Mark did a fascinating experiment, could you tell us a bit about that?

DAVE:  Yes, here’s what we did, it was Steve Lee’s idea – Steve Lee is a great character who has been around animation lore.  In fact I first learned about Jimmy MacDonald from Steve.  So Steve says to Mark “wouldn’t it be funny to hear a bit of a Treg Brown cartoon with Hanna Barbera sound effects on it or live action sound from sound editors.”  It would be a great illustration to see the brilliant non-sequitur choices that Treg Brown makes for sound effects.  Mark got a hold of the M&E for Zoom and Bored, a roadrunner cartoon and we took a minute or so section.  We had the music and I cut Hanna Barbera library sound effects, and I know their style so well that I was able to do it as if it was cut in the Hanna Barbera sound editing rooms.  Of course it was totally awful that way!  [Laughs]  They are the wrong sorts of sounds for the cartoon.  Then I did a version as a prosaic, live action sound effects editor who only worked on movies and didn’t understand animation.

WOODY:  I remember that, it sort of fell flat…  [Both laugh]

DAVE:  Yes, the magic juice of animation humor was not invested in the sound effects.  And that is what happens.

Sound Behind the Image - Motion Picture Academy

WOODY:  So “performance,” as Mark saw it, was one category of animation sound.  I think he broke it into several sections for the evening…

DAVE:  Yes, the first part was performance and then “interpretation” was next.  That section was where he asked me to talk about Treg Brown.  The idea was that, as Ben Burtt pointed out in one of the clips, Treg Brown was the first guy to handle animation sound effects with live action sound effects from the Warner Bros. Movies, cut inappropriately for the wrong things.  Does that make sense?

WOODY:  He juxtaposed – took the seeming wrong sounds – to create comic moments…

DAVE:  Yes, exactly.  And he was a master at doing this.  As Ben pointed out, and this is why this is the category of “interpretation”, instead of just trying to find funny sounds, Treg Brown took sound effects from the complete library.   So – Elmer Fudd is running and skidding to a stop but the skid may have come from an early 30’s gangster film at Warner Bros., just stuff that they had in the library.  So a guy falls out of a window and is falling and Treg Brown would cut in the sound of a fighter plane or a bi-plane from World War 1.  He is making analogies and metaphors with the sound, drawing comedy from associations that people have with certain real sounds but applying them in the cartoon realm.

David plays a short clip from the evening, “Now Hear This.”  It is Ben Burtt discussing Treg Brown’s use of sound in animation.

“BEN BURTT:  Usually the sound effects that you heard were  sound effects used by musical instruments…. but with Treg Brown he would bring sounds in from the Warner Library…. it was this imposition of realistic sounds into this fantasy world of cartoons which gave them comic impact.”

DAVE:  Yeah, now you can’t say it better than that Woody.  Now we’ve had a guest in the interview!  [Both laugh]  Rounding out the evening Mark designated “storytelling” as the third evolution in animated sound.  So it’s performance, interpretation and storytelling.  Then he introduced us to Randy Thom and played the very impressive piece from The Polar Express.  Randy is wonderful and I love his work on The Incredibles.

The Incredibles Poster

WOODY:  Amazing! I am a huge fan of all of his work.

DAVE:  Incredibles knows when to do comic and when to do Foley.  It is so important that you buy that these animated people live in our world, in the real contemporary world, so when the guy is at his job in his office and his job is to deny people insurance claims and it’s so gray and dismal we have to have Foley because Foley grounds us to the real world.  Foley is about the friction of dramatic characters as they live in the real world.  It’s very important.  That’s why we use it.  It isn’t necessarily useful to come up with a comical sound it’s about performing live.  They did a good balance of that in The Incredibles, in all of the Brad Bird movies, they know when to sound realistic and when to sound comical.  Brad Bird is consistently good that way.

WOODY:  That was a wonderful evening for the public offered by the Academy.  I often speak with students and new filmmakers and I always encourage them to attend meetings like this that are open to the public.  That night I had the marvelous opportunity to see you, Randy Thom, Mark Mangini and others show and tell the sound work from the inside and it’s rare and invaluable.

Alright Dave, let’s move to some of your other work.  You’ve had the opportunity to work with world class filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Tim Burton, John Hughes, you won an Oscar for your work with Francis Ford Coppola.  These artists create such a wide range of types of films – I loved The Dead Zone but it was nothing like Oceans 12 or Beetlejuice – I would imagine that each of these directors take a different approach to sound.  Would you take a moment and touch on working with some of these different directors?

DAVE:  There were plenty of jobs that I am associated with where I was just a part of the crew and I never worked directly with the Director.  On jobs where I was the supervisor you can bet I worked with the director and have strong opinions about them.  I do have some favorites that are on the top of my list because they were good people and knew how to be a team player and appreciated everyone’s contribution to their show.  I’ve been asked this before and I will tell you the top three of terrific directors, well I’ll have to add Soderbergh and make it four – Leonard Nimoy who I was just on a crew with, Mark Mangini was the supervisor, Leonard and Mark worked much more directly.  I was just a cutter but I spent weeks on the dub stage with Leonard directly, sometimes it’s a line producer on top of the dub but Leonard was there himself, and he’s just a good man.

Star Trek IV poster

WOODY:  That was Star Trek 4?

DAVE:  Star Trek 4, yes.  He’s an intellectual and he’s is very appreciative of everyone’s skills and their specialty which makes his films better.  You know?  So he is on my list.  Another great one is Billy Crystal.  I did the sequel to “City Slickers” and Billy was not the titular director he was the executive producer.  He hired a director to be behind the camera but Billy had input everywhere and was on the dub stage every day.  He was very hands on and very appreciative and very much of a “small d” democrat!  If he was the first guy at the dub he would make the coffee!

WOODY:  I’ve heard stories over the years like that about him.

DAVE:  I was back in the machine room winding down footage and I couldn’t get a phone call.  He was alone on the dub stage, he picked up the phone, took a message for me and walked all the way back to me and say “Hey Dave – Vanessa’s on the line”.  He was such a good man and a mensch.  So he’s on my list.  The third guy on my list is Nick Castle who a lot of people don’t know about.  He made a picture called “Tap” with Gregory Hines and he was the director and creator of the movie.  It’s not the best motion picture in the world but it served its purpose which was a very noble one, to capture in a sort of vehicle drama almost like the old school movie dramas with a great star in a sort of stupid story.  It captured the great art of African American hoofers, tap dancers, a vehicle not only for Gregory Hines but also a showcase to display the work of his very, very elders.  All these old guys who have passed now.  Finally captured on film courtesy of Greg Hines and Nick Castle.  Nick was very egalitarian in his style as a director.  It wasn’t about “audio” it was about – you know what to do to make my movie sound great.  I’ll give you what you need to make my movie sound great.  Explain to me what you are doing and I’ll learn something.   That’s a real director if you ask me.

WOODY:  Absolutely.

DAVE:  Finally, of course Soderbergh, he has a good enough ear that he could have been a sound editor or mixer himself.  His supervising sound editor is usually Larry Blake and Larry would hire me to work on Sex Lies and Videotape, Oceans 11 & 12.  The craftsmanship and architecture is really between Steven and Larry.  Steven is a great guy and I think may be the great American director at the moment.  He’s given us a body of work in a short time that many people don’t achieve over a long career.

WOODY:  Yes, he’s had such a wide range from absurdist sorts of things like Schizopolis to a real masterpiece like Traffic.

DAVE:  One thing that Steven has always done is to defer to the style that movie needs to be.  Like any great artist he is not imposing his thumbprint or his personal style on the movie.  Too many guys go to film school and try to show off on every shot to show how clever they are.  He wouldn’t do that.  It’s what I call invisibility.  Steven is very invisible.  I just saw Thirteen Assassins and I thought that Japanese director was very invisible.  Steven is very skilled that way plus he’s a really good man.  Just as a human being.  I have real admiration and respect for him and he’s very funny.  Like a lot of intelligent people.

WOODY:  I heard that Soderbergh will do everything to minimize the need for ADR (dialog replacement).  That he takes a hands on approach to the set recordings quality, which is not always on a directors agenda!  [Both laugh]

Oceans 12 poster

DAVE:  We did very little on Oceans 11 and on Ocean’s 12 we only did two lines and it was because they decided to change the pronunciation of a proper name.  They had pronounced it in the shoot – both George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones pronounced it a certain way and then in post Steven thought it should be pronounced a different way.  Probably the correct way, and so we did one line of ADR for George and one for Catherine.

Now this is how clever these guys are, you can blame this on Larry Blake.  Larry did a “non” studio ADR recording of George doing his line, it was in the sequence where he is walking across the street to Amsterdam with Brad Pitt and the camera is not close to him.  Larry set him up with the edited dialog from the scene and a pair of headphones and sent a recording rig with no picture.  They went outside of George and Steven’s office on Warner Bros. Lot, you know, with Olive Avenue in the background.  They recorded the line as audio only ADR.  And it was absolutely perfect.  It just laid right in.  I mixed that stuff, Larry let me do the dialog predubs, on that show and also on Oceans 11.  It’s my only mixing experience; I owe Larry for that big time.  I don’t think it was credited but I learned a lot doing the dialog predubs myself.  And I was the lead dialog editor I’m proud to say so I knew where all the skeletons were buried in all the dialog tracks.  So, that was a non-picture ADR, we had to re-do Catherine’s pronunciation, I think Larry did it himself, because she was very close-up when she said that word and that was the only instance on that show that an actor spent time in an ADR booth – on that entire movie!

We teach this to our students here at SCAD, and let me mention that SCAD sound design majors are the best prepared college students to work in the industry.  They are starting to work now and they are great.  They don’t get thrown because we are preparing them so well.  One of the things they learn is to try and collar the filmmakers from our film school and they go out and scout locations to scout for audio locations as well as visual locations.  So they don’t get that beautiful shot under the freeway…

WOODY:  Pointing a mic at the street [Both laugh]

DAVE:  Yes!  On Star Trek 4 in the Klingon Space Ship where the good guys were there is a floor prop, a prop on the corridor floor that was kind of like a plastic sheet that you would put over a fluorescent light… it looked perfect… but they would walk down the corridor and while recording all of this wide shot dialog, these plastic sheets were rattling like crazy.  It absolutely ruined all of the recordings.  So the production mixer, I can’t remember whether it was Gene Cantamessa or Jim Webb, [it was Cantamessa] it was one of those guys, and he said to Leonard “ I can’t get you any useful dialog with this crap on the floor” and Leonard stopped production long enough to have the floor redone into something quiet. And he got beautiful stuff.  A good director understands that it’s part of the filmmaking – it’s not something that you fix in post.

WOODY:  So – Nimoy, Crystal, Castle, and Soderbergh.

DAVE:  I almost forgot Joe Dante.

WOODY:  What did you work with him on?

DAVE:  I was never a supervising sound editor for him, but I was a lead editor under Mangini  on “Gremlins,” on “Innerspace” and “Explorers” and “Looney Tunes: Back In Action.” I can’t remember them all.

WOODY:  So let’s talk about Joe Dante.

DAVE:  I found a real affinity with him. In another life, I would have wanted to be his supervising sound editor. But it was Mangini—and that was perfectly fine with me. Because we think alike—we’re all three of us, very knowledgeable animation fans. Mark and I, as I  explained, worked together in animation in the early parts of our careers. I felt some affinity for Joe as I got to know him a little bit, just working under him as a sound editor and being on the dub stage with him many times. Because we’re the same age, and he grew up, I think, in South Jersey. I was in suburban Philly. And at some point, we put together that, as kids, we watched the same local television broadcasts where we were exposed to the same 16mm prints of The Thing, and The Invisible Man, and the Warners cartoons , you know, in rotation when there were three broadcast TV stations for a major city. It’s a pretty good bet that the smart 12-year-old boys are all watching the science fiction and horror when it goes down on TV. We would have seen the same prints with the same unintentional splices in them. We were both shaped by that part of popular culture, and Joe turned it into a career. Also because he had been, I think, an editor at Roger Corman’s. He was part of a tribe of baby boomers who basically went to film elementary school by working at Roger Corman’s.

Roger Corman

WOODY:  I had forgotten that he was part of that. What an amazing group of people—including Francis Ford Coppola.

DAVE:  Was he involved in Corman?

WOODY:  Yes, his first movie was Dementia 13, produced by Roger Corman.

DAVE:  Oh my god.

WOODY:  Scorsese too.  I think every major filmmaker from those days, somewhere along the line, touched Corman.

DAVE:  Corman was the godfather of so many, especially the baby boomers who worked like slaves on his films. But that was their real film school. Tina Hirsch, who cut Gremlins; Bobby Kaiser, who’s been a top ADR  editor for 40 years, John Sayles was part of that crowd too, I think. That was really—that was to roll-up-your-sleeves filmmakers and editors and writers – kind of what Harvard Business School used to be to  Wall Street. It was a great learning thing.

For sound editing—a lot of people I knew grew up at Gomillion Sound which was—

WOODY:  You spell it the way it sounds—go million?

DAVE:  Yes, it was a proper name. The guy’s name was Ted Gomillion.  Flick worked there, and I think Richard Anderson worked there. My ex-wife Vanessa [Ament] worked there doing Foley—so many people I know learned post-production sound work at Gomillion. David Yewdall did, of course.  They were kind of a low-budget place, but everybody learned a lot of craftsmanship—how to do a lot of work in a hurry.  Gomillion was, for sound editors and Foley artists—those of us on the sound side – as Corman was for writers and editors and future directors.

Dementia 13

WOODY:  Tell me about Joe Dante.

DAVE:  This impressed me. When Steven Spielberg was a young god,  Joe Dante was his peer and not one of his subjects.  I never imagined that someone would speak truth to such power—Steven was producing I guess it was Gremlins for Joe and he had just finished Indiana Jones 2.  The buzz was that Indiana Jones 2 was, what we used to call, an “E Ticket Ride” at Disneyland. You know, it was theme park—it was just – one shot led to another, and they were all linked to physical gags. It was tremendously funny; just as you thought you were safe from sliding over the precipice,  something else comes to endanger you, right? And it was beautifully put together that way—very well conceived, and Steven adopted a very fast editing style. And he was kind of high on that style.

He and Michael Khan had recut a scene of Joe’s movie in that fast editing style.  I remember Steven coming to the dub stage—we were working on some pre-dubs—and they were discussing this. And I remember Joe saying, in his high thin voice, very boldly, “You can’t cut it like that, Steven—it’s a different kind of material.” And I thought people were all going be kissing Steven’s ass, but what impressed me was how very much those two guys were equals and worked together and talked like any other two peers at a job.

Steven Spielberg on the set of Jaws

WOODY:  Steven Spielberg accepted it as a peer?

DAVE:  Yes, like criticism from any peer—they were brothers.

DAVE:    So, they [Gremlins and Indiana Jones 2] come out the same year, and they’re in various stages of post-production when they have that conversation. And that was on Warner Hollywood Stage D where Vanessa and I got married.

WOODY:  You got married on the lot?

DAVE:   We got married on that stage—yep.

WOODY:  Between shifts?

DAVE:  On a Sunday. They rented it to me for a dollar.

WOODY:  Awesome.

DAVE:  Instead of a religious altar, we had the two giant VU meters behind us. Talk about an industry wedding—we used the editing change room to change our clothes.

WOODY:  How many people came?

DAVE:  Oh, it was only about fifteen, something like that, very small – friends and family. We couldn’t afford much for the party after. But it was very sweet of Don Rogers who ran post sound at Warner Hollywood before he ran the sound department at Warner Burbank, he rented it to me for a dollar.

WOODY:  We haven’t spoken yet about your experience on Dracula, for which you won an Academy Award shared with Tom McCarthy.  Was that the only picture you did with Coppola?

DAVE:  Yes, it is. And it wasn’t supposed to be me. Understand that I was the utility player that they brought in when they couldn’t get the big-name guys they wanted.

WOODY:  Who were they looking for?

DAVE:  It was supposed to be Richard Beggs. Richard Beggs is a San Francisco-area sound designer who goes back to Apocalypse and that period of Coppola’s.   Mark Berger, the mixer; Doug Hemphill, who’s now a mixer, who was a great field-recording guy for years; Jerry Ross, who’s a great, wonderful sound editor. They were all young dudes on Apocalypse, and this whole gang of guys more or less taught themselves how to do multi-channel, high-quality sound layering and mixing pretty much for Apocalypse. I mean, it took them forever, but they did it all right.

Dave Stone and Steve Borne at Coppola's Vineyard

Richard Beggs was one of that crowd of guys, pretty much always worked in the San Francisco area. I don’t know that he spent much time in Hollywood. He’s got a great ear.   I don’t know if he cuts, but he was supposed to be the supervising sound editor for Coppola because he worked for him before. But, Richard got a picture called Toys, and he committed to that. So, as much as he wanted to do Dracula, he couldn’t.  They hired Leslie Shatz. Leslie Shatz is also a brilliant mixer and San Francisco-area sound designer type guy. And I had worked with him once or twice. He did a lovely job suping War Of The Roses—I think was the last time I had worked with him.

Now, Leslie is not a San Francisco—I think he’s a Los Angeles guy by birth, but he spent a lot of time in San Francisco, and he knew a lot of the post-production sound community. He worked, I think, as a studio mixer up there and stuff. Not really that sure about his background, but he was known to work a little bit in Hollywood and a little more often in San Francisco, which is still the case. He just did a lovely job on a very arty picture that just came out that they’re calling the first feminist Western, which is called Meek’s Cutoff, – Leslie suped that. Again, it was a low-budget independent artistic feature film with probably a very small sound crew. Leslie is really good at the kind of stuff—kind of high-art sound supervising. So, he was supposed to do it—he was the brand name in San Francisco and was a pinch-hitter for Richard Beggs.

Dracula

Now it gets complicated.  [Laughs]  There was some deal with Sony Pictures where Francis was supposed to be doing Dracula as a big-studio, money-making picture—not an art picture. And although I don’t know the historical details—and I’m only just reporting what I saw from the trenches—but my impression was that—it’s similar to the way in which Orson Welles was lured back from Europe to do one last money-making project.  That was “Touch Of Evil.”  One last time he had to cope with the studios to do Touch Of Evil. He wasn’t supposed to turn it into an artistic film—it was supposed to make money as a film-noir picture. And of course, he turns it into another Orson Welles masterpiece.  It reminds me of how Francis was supposed to come and make a big studio picture like he did with The Godfather, and make them some money. Consequently, there was pressure on post-production to figure out how to share the wealth and expenses of post-production. So, a deal was made somehow—I was not in on this when I got hired, by the way—I’m just figuring this out post-mortem. Francis could have part of the mix—he could have final dub, and he could have part of the sound-supervision, sound-design team. But Sony Pictures was going to have an in-house sound-editing crew, and do the pre-dubs on the Sony lot. So, Tom McCarthy Jr. was the Vice President of Post Production Sound, and an old buddy of mine. We’d worked together many, many times in the past, so he called me up and said, “How’d you like to do a horror picture?” And this was right on the heels of my being upset that I had missed out on a couple of other good titles where I didn’t get on the crew. “So, it’s a horror picture—what have ya got?” He says, “Oh, they’re doing  Dracula.” I go, “Okay, fine.” And he said, “And you know who’s directing it?” I said, “No.” And he says, “Francis Ford Coppola.”

Tommy was supposed to represent and provide the functional, pragmatic editing of sound work and the preparation of pre-dubs. Then we were supposed to bring them up to Francis’s place and mix them in his attic mixing room above the winery office, which I think is where they mixed Apocalypse. So, that is what we did—we put a crew together and I was supposed to be like the liaison between San Francisco high-art sound design and Hollywood pragmatic sound editing. And I thought that Tommy was right to think of me. I filled that role perfectly because I had worked a little up north and a lot down south. And I understood there was a cultural difference, at the time, between the way guys did their work up north and the way they did it down south. And there was some political mismatch—the style of how people approached their work was different.  I was supposed to be both a manager and a diplomat, and make that all work.  Leslie Shatz, who is a sound designer/editor/mixer/supervising sound editor, was going to be the sound designer, and ultimately the final mixer. He didn’t get involved—he was busy with something – until we actually did the final mix, so you could say that he and his co-mixer Marian Wallace were just the final re-recording mixers. And also he brought a friend from San Francisco—Christensen…

WOODY:  Kim Christensen?

DAVE:  Yes, he brought sound effects, and added them in through keyboards and what-not. It was kind of an extra tweak while we mixed.  My job was to handle a crew of guys that Tommy had semi-regularly employed on the Sony lot. They were young—a lot of young sound-effects guys with great ideas who had not worked on any feature films pretty much. Or they had worked on B features and television. And I was supposed to wrangle them into a team that could do some high-falutin’ sound effects work on moviolas and on Cyber Frames. Then we also had a slightly older, more experienced crew doing dialogue at Sony that was run by Dave Cohn. He was like the lead dialogue guy. I was the supervising sound editor, along with Tommy McCarthy, who was the head of the department. It was an interesting job, Woody, because it was a hybrid of technologies. We cut the Foley and the dialogue on Cyber Frame, and then laid that onto 24-track for pre-dubs and then made 35mm pre-dubs from those 24 tracks.

WOODY:  Did you say Cyber Frame?  Was that a system at the time?

DAVE:  Yes. Very big before Pro Tools came in. Then the other end of it was moviolas. We cut a whole lot of sound effects on moviolas. And then we made special sound effects. I would audition sound—let’s say, I’d audition a bunch of animal effects on a moviola, and ask the young Cyber Frame sound-design geniuses— at the time, Cyber Frame—if you wanted to make new sound effects, it had a double boot system, and you would boot it up as an Audio Frame, which is a totally different animal. If you booted it up as an Audio Frame, you had yourself an MS DOS non-graphic platform, which would allow you to combine sampled sounds and make what I guess what you would call a wave editor, but not a track editor. It would be like Sound Forge.

Dracula Sound and Picture editing crew in Napa

So, the guys would load sounds—you know, lions and tigers and bears in 35mm, they would send those to transfer. Transfer department would transfer those 35mm sound effects onto magneto optical media, [MO] which is what the Cyber Frame reads. It would take those MOs, which were like early versions of CD-ROMs, I guess you’d say, and it would read those into the system. Then they would boot the system as an Audio Frame, not a Cyber Frame, and while it was in Audio Frame mode, these guys would design new combined, mixed sound effects. They would then go over to Cyber Frame to be sunk up and spun out onto 24-track, so we could make our 35mm pre-dubs. Now if that isn’t a hybrid, I don’t know what is. [Both laugh]   ’Cause it went from 35mm—dusty old library sound effects from the old MGM sound-effects library—it went to the digital realm where sounds were combined, and then laid up as tracks and spun out onto two-inch tape, and then mixed back down to 35mm in pre-dub. So, we went a long way around from 35 to 35, going through digital. That’s as hybrid as it’s ever gotten in my understanding.  We had some very clever young fellows—Sanford Ponder and Chris Aud and Dave Van Slyke.  Bunch of very clever guys who are still in the rackets. Well, not Ponder. Ponder went to work for a young software company up in the Northwest, when it was just starting out. It was called Micro . . . soft. [Laughs] And after a couple of years, I think he cashed in his stock options and retired. [Laughs]

WOODY:  The American Dream.  Well, God bless him.

DAVE:  God bless him, indeed. Sanford had a great ear, and was a true designer, and has always made—even back in those days—made electronic music of his own compositions. So, he’s an artist. I have a couple of his CDs—sort of ambient, electro, spacey, meditative music. I really like it.

Tom McCarthy

WOODY:  Tom McCarthy is still at Sony today.

DAVE:  Yes, back then I don’t think he had the VP title then, but he was the head of sound editing.  Parallel to what CeCe Hall did at Paramount. So, they ran the editing shops for sound, and they—Tommy and CeCe, I believe, had salaried positions, but everybody else who worked in the cutting rooms for them was on a weekly wage for the union. So, Tommy was Sony Pictures’ sound editing. Everybody who had a job at Sony Pictures in sound editing or Foley knew Tommy or was put in their position by Tommy. On Dracula his role was really to represent the studio, and make sure we were on time and on budget.

WOODY:  Had he already started Dracula by the time he involved you?

DAVE:  No.  We went to the very first meetings together in Francis’s office. We went up to San Francisco—Tommy and I and Dave Cohn and a couple of other guys went to Francis’s office at Zoetrope in downtown San Francisco to have an initial meeting about it.  We hadn’t seen any footage yet, at that point, and I think before we left San Fran, somebody showed us some rough cuts of a few scenes. Then we went back to Hollywood and set up cutting rooms, and waited for the picture to arrive.

WOODY:  What kind of time did you have for the design and edit, and then how much time did you have for the dubs?

DAVE:  I have no idea! [Laughs] I have complete amnesia about the period. I don’t know if it was six months or three weeks, Woody.  I have a friend who’s working for Francis now who called me up and asked, “Is this normal when you work for Francis that you don’t know how long you’re gonna be there and you lose all sense of time?” [Laughs] It’s like—it’s like you’ve gone away to this strange island, and time just stops until the picture’s over. I could, I suppose, research it and figure it out, but I don’t have a clue! I’m gonna guess it was maybe four months all together—which is long for post, but Francis kept changing the picture.

Let me go back and re-emphasize something. That was part of San Francisco filmmaking—I’m sure it’s not true any more, it’s a whole different world now——because now you have Pixar, and however things are done at Lucasfilm from job to job—it’s not the same old story.  But in those days, I think a lot of the post-production sound people in the San Francisco Bay area must have thought, or may have thought, that we in Hollywood were just grinding out sausages without much thought to art. Which is a very insulting way of looking at what we do. On the other hand–on the other side of that geographical, cultural bias would be the Hollywood editor who thinks people in San Francisco have all the time in the world to fiddle around with their movies to get them perfectly right, and don’t have big-studio suits breathing down  their necks. So, both of those things are terrible biases, and they’re not true. Somewhere in the middle there are various shades of gray and truth.

(L to R) with endless cue sheet - David Stone, David B. Cohn-Lead ADR editor, Cindy Marty-Foley editor, Linda Folk-ADR editor

I’m sure much of that must have started with Apocalypse Now taking fifteen years in post. [Laughs] Whatever it took. It did take a long time in post, but they gave us the whole legacy of how to do a lot of the processes having to do with split-surround movies. And so they were almost like a research-and-development farm for some of what has become standard practices.  So, that was very important. On the other hand, we Hollywood editors, I’ve always felt, had much more skill at editing production dialogue and mixing it to sound realistic without relying on a lot of ADR. And we had other skills with sound effects and with working efficiently that did not take place in the San Francisco area. In fact, I’d venture to say our Foley artists developed workflow methods on their own in Hollywood, since the earliest days of regular Foley or Foley being done on every feature film, which may not have always been practiced in the San Francisco Bay area because those people didn’t know how to do it that way. So a lot of their Foley in the 70s and 80s was really not so much Foley as clusters of sound effects recorded on the Foley stage. And recorded beautifully, by the way. So, their emphasis—it was a totally different style of work, their emphasis was more on getting the individual sound effects recorded well in front of the picture while our Foley artist developed ways of getting through longer movements in reel, and getting through them well. And since they basically worked with headphones up north, and most of the Hollywood people didn’t work with headphones on—they were too interested in getting the movement right. It’s different—so, there was a big cultural difference, and part of the job for Tommy McCarthy and I was to keep those differences minimized and work collaboratively and get the best possible effect out of everybody’s skills.

So, while I knew for instance, in terms of special effects sound design, I had great material from my young lads—Chris and Dave and Sanford.  It was a huge crew. I had original sound effects made by them on the Audio Frame, and we knew that Leslie and his San Francisco friends were gonna have some original sound effects available to us only at the final. So, we had stuff you had to put into the pre-dubs. You couldn’t do it all in the final. And I also thought we ought to have our own Hollywood-based special sound-effects design guy, so I thought of Alan Howarth, who is a genius at that stuff.  We hired Alan to custom design a handful of effects which I assigned him. I figured out—we will need an ambience for the canyon outside the castle; we need castle walls; desiccated, decayed sounds; we need Dracula-floats-across-the-floor sounds; we need some scary breathing stuff—you know, we need backwards drips, we need a lot of stuff. I had like a shopping list to turn over to Alan Howarth because he has always doing this kind of stuff for everybody I knew who was suping tracks in Hollywood: Rich Anderson and Steve Flick and Mangini. Alan had been on the first Star Trek, I think, with those guys, so he knew them from that movie. Alan was great at the interpretive design sort of special effects. We had a bunch of stuff from him too, and so everything you hear on the final track—there are mundane sound effects which were edited, I think artistically, by my crew; there are Alan Howarth sounds blended into that; there are original sounds made by the sound-effects editing crew by guys at Sony on the Audio Frame machine; and then there are final-dub additions that Leslie spun in on the fly during the final dub.

EMU Emulator - List price circa 1980 $10,000

Kim Christensen sat with Leslie and Marion. They had a little—what was the big thing in those days—a little emulator thing, a little mini-keyboard with a sampler. Leslie wanted to send in these vocal improvisations from Diamanda Galas,  the singer, with her doing these like ululations and kind of weird soprano singing. So, that’s all in there—it’s all mixed up. What always gets overlooked is how the Sony mixers who did the pre-dubs—how hard they worked—for very little glitz and glamour. Guys like Greg Watkins—I forget the other ones—Gary Bourgeois maybe. These were really, really strong everyday mixers on the Sony lot. And we gave them piles and piles of material to get through on our pre-dubs.

WOODY:  Neither of those guys are credited.

DAVE:  That’s typical on a deal like this. A lot of guys do the set-up work—it’s not fair, but it’s the way it is sometimes. Regular, everyday mixers who do whatever you put in front of them on the lot. We had tons and tons of mags that we schlepped up to Napa in order to do those mixes.

WOODY: Were there moments during the re-recording on the dub stage that you go, “Damn, this thing’s pretty darn good … we may win something?”

DAVE:  Nah, man, you don’t think about the World Series—you just try to get through the next game against the White Sox. [Laughs] You know how it is Woody, you’re so in the moment—you’re much more concerned with “Can I have this particular problem solved by the next hour and a half?”

WOODY:  So, you were nominated and then won, what is that like? What do you go through then?

DAVE:  That’s a little weird because one of the competition was my dear friend Mark Mangini, who had just done Aladdin, which was brilliant, and a huge job, and a very creative job.

I’m sitting in the audience with my wife, and Mangini and his son Matthew. And then the other guys we competed against.  We all knew each other, of course, and we had all been to the nominees’ luncheon together. But Mangini and I were such old pals that it was weird to be competing—and to be competing with such different material. Now, had it been today, an animated feature might have been taken more seriously, and he could have maybe won. But just being animated was a mark against them winning that year.

WOODY:  It’s crazy, isn’t it?

DAVE:  Mark and I both thought we had a good chance against them, for reasons only that the voters get sick and tired of the same old same old on these action films, right? He thought he had a chance because it was this unusual and creative animation job on an animated musical.   I had a Coppola picture which had artistic cache, and was thought by everybody to be very artistically done. So, we thought the Steven Seagal guys didn’t have a chance. It was good craftsmanship, but we’re talking about the politics in the Academy. There are some years when those kinds of pictures win, and some where they don’t.  I think we fell into a time when voters were looking for artistic stuff.

WOODY:  Having spent a career in sound effects, specifically— you did hop around. You did dialogue editing and various—in fact, you mentioned that you did dialogue dubbing on one of the pictures we talked about.

DAVE:  That would have to be Ocean’s Eleven.

WOODY:  Larry Blake gave you that opportunity to do that?

Mark Mangini, Larry Blake, Mike Minkler, Myron Nettinga

DAVE:  He wanted to teach me. I knew he didn’t want to give me credit for it. I don’t think he ever meant to, but he taught me some great stuff. And so I had some real satisfaction mixing those pre-dubs. It  came at a good time for me too in my career, because I felt like one more big challenge before I throw it all away and start teaching. [Both laugh] Let me just say this about the differences between dialogue editing and sound-effects editing and supervising sound editing. I just see it all as a continuum.  I think different people have a stronger talent in one specific flavor of sound editing than another, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t experience both, and I feel like to be a supervisor you damn well ought to be excellent at each of those specific kinds of sound editing. I don’t like to be supervised by somebody who isn’t a great dialogue editor themselves—’cause they don’t know the job!  I don’t want to hire a dialogue editor who can’t cut sound effects. They may not be my favorite sound-effects editor, but what happens when the second baseman breaks his toe and I gotta bring in the guy from left field and have him play a couple of games?

WOODY:  Jackie Johnson, who I use a lot for dialogue editing, can do anything. I’ve hired her to do music editing for me, I’ve hired her to do sound-effects editing for me, and each time she’ll say, “Oh Woody, I don’t really do that.” And I’m like, “Jackie, you cut!” She’s more concerned about it than I am!

DAVE:  You just reminded me of something I heard that Roman Polanski said – some directors plan the shot and then figure out how to fit the actors into the shot. And he said, “I start with the actors and I let the actors rehearse the action before I figure out where I want to put the camera.” And he said, “Not doing it that way is like a tailor who makes a suit and then looks all around for a man that fits into it.” [Both laugh]

WOODY:  Right!

DAVE:  I love that idea. So, with sound editing, even in the highly specialized specialty of sound-effects editing, I used to have some favorites. Sometimes I thought one guy’s good at car chases, one guy’s good at gun battles, one guy’s good with military stuff—and so you sort of subdivide the specialty. But that doesn’t mean everybody should be painted into a little corner. I worked on a picture about Jerry Lee Lewis called Great Balls Of Fire.

WOODY:  With Dennis Quaid, right?

DAVE:  Yes and a young Winona Ryder. She was I think 15, playing 13.   The supervisor was a woman—supervising sound editor—and there was another sound editor who was a woman, and then two guys. So, you had a cutting supe and three editors. And she decided on the first day—she said, “Guess what, guys. You guys are gonna cut the dialogue, and the girls are gonna cut the muscle cars. We wanna cut the sound effects. We’re tired of people thinking girls can’t cut cars.” ’Cause it’s a guy thing. So she said to the other editor—who was Gary Wright—and I, “You guys don’t mind cutting dialogue? And we said, “Shit, we’d love it.” So, men cut dialogue and women cut the cars and all the sound effects, and of course, they did a great job. They’re great editors. You don’t have to have a penis to cut car sound effects!

Great Balls of Fire

WOODY:  Kimberly Harris, Julia Evershade?

DAVE:  Julia was the supe, and Kimberly Harris is a great editor—she’s still a great editor. I don’t think Julia’s in the racket any more. Gary Wright always got pissed off because people said, “Sing ‘Dream Weaver’ for me.” That was the name of the guy who had the hit record. Gary Wright’s a fine editor—I’ve known him for years. And Kimberly Harris. It was a small crew. We did a great job. I still enjoy seeing that movie.

WOODY:  You have any sort of secrets or tricks you could divulge?

DAVE:  Well, the most fundamental secret that I can think of on the sound-effects side, almost every good sounding piece of sound-effects element is made of two or three layers. You can’t always do that. You can’t layer a car rev or a car idle with another one, because it’ll sound like two cars. But in many cases, with sound effects, you can build character into them by layering two or three things together. And almost everyone does that anyway. That’s not a trade secret—that’s just basic craftsmanship. But dialogue—I was a great dialogue editor because I listened to every single foot of every take we had available before I started cutting. I’d study the material twice as long as other people on the crew before I made a single cut. And I would plan my tracks on paper before I cut them.

WOODY:  It’s really  just as simple as being a good craftsman – in any trade. You just gotta work hard and know your business.

DAVE:  You’re making me remember an old thought – “measure twice, cut once.”

WOODY:  Right.

DAVE:  And I think that’s the way I approach dialogue all the time. Very careful carpentry—measure twice, cut once. You have to listen to everything—I tell our students at SCAD that—you gotta listen to everything, listen to everything on every take from slate to slate. And the wild tracks to get to know what’s available. Don’t wait to find out there was a great alternate take until after you’ve cut and slavishly tried to make it sound good. And then do what students frequently do, which is revert to the sort of travesty of trying to EQ smoothness into it, when it didn’t cut right in the first place—and then suddenly find out there’s an alternate take you forgot to listen to—that’s stupid.

WOODY:  I think that’s the secret weapon of dialogue editing, for sure. I just can’t believe how many people don’t go back to the tapes. I’ll get an ADR list, and I’ll be, like, this is insane—we don’t have anything to cover all of this?

DAVE:  Very often the ADR editor, if they specialize, they don’t know that much about what you can save in production, and then on commercial jobs, and sometimes we see this on student films, somebody else like the director decides on the ADR list, and it’s all wrong—it’s all stuff he didn’t need to ADR. Unless, of course, the director wants a different performance or wants to re-voice a character or something. Typically, during my career, we would meet with ADR editors on a show—at the beginning, they’d have a big, huge, humongous list of everything that was conceivably, possibly vulnerable in production. And we’d have that list before we cut the production. After we cut the production, we would re-meet with them, and say, “You don’t need this line or this line or this line if you did it for the reasons I think you did it for.” And by the time they got the actor in front of the microphone, 80 or 90% of those lines on paper got omitted.  It was always for a very important ritual for us—I don’t know how it’s been for you in your career—but we would always wait for the omit list and happily greet it when it had lots and lots of omits written through the ADR script. We were happy to see that. But you couldn’t get that done until there had been a lot of stuff cut.

WOODY:  Let’s move into your new career at SCAD. So, were you teaching at DePaul first? Was that sort of an opportunity that came your way, or was that a purposeful shift of moving from Hollywood into the educational realm?

DAVE:  It was both. Vanessa, my ex, and I had been talking about teaching as a third act of our professional lives for years before I had an opportunity to do it. We talked about it, I think, even before our son was born 21 years ago. So, we just knew that we both enjoyed campus life, and she’s a deeply intellectual person. She really enjoys studying and research. I don’t. [Laughs] And she already had a master’s degree in another field—not film—and very close to finishing her Ph.D. work in cinema studies now. So, for me, it was a matter of teaching not theory so much as production. I wanted to teach about stuff I had learned working professionally in sound. And it wasn’t going to be an easy opportunity for me, as I didn’t have a master’s degree, and I think that in Southern California it’s very easy for the colleges to get adjuncts from the industry to work—teach a class for peanuts on Wednesday nights, you know.  I didn’t want to do that. An opportunity came up to go to Chicago and teach full time, so I jumped on it.

WOODY:  This is without a master’s degree?

DAVE:  Yeah, without a master’s. At that time—the suits have since changed their mind—but at the time, they had an agenda to hire professionals out of the industry and bring some of that panache to their school. At least they had a flirtation with doing that. At SCAD, it’s a more well-ingrained principle, and they have always been great at balancing the professionals from the arts with academics from around the arts. You get the right blend of that at SCAD—it works really well.

WOODY:  You have a very impressive faculty over there. So, you are officially titled the Chair of Sound Design?

Savannah College of Art and Design

DAVE:  Yes. Professor, Chair Sound Design.

WOODY:  I’d like to get a better understanding of the hierarchy of that in terms of your daily work. So, you’re the head of the sound-design program—you develop the curriculum? I’ve got a book you know…[Laughs]

DAVE:  The Academic Program for Sound Design Majors in the School of Film and Digital Media and Performing Arts is what I’m running. We have a school—I don’t know how many schools SCAD has—but our school, which is run by my dean Peter Weishar, our school is the School of Film and Digital Media and Performing Arts.  In that school, you got your animation, your motion media, your visual effects, your performing arts, your film, your sound design, and I forget what else—oh, your equestrian art. We’re a big school within SCAD—I don’t know if you call it a school or a college.

WOODY:  How long have you been there now?

DAVE:  This will be my fourth academic year starting next month—next week—two weeks.  My third year as chair, my fourth year of teaching there.

WOODY:  Are there further goals for you as an educator in terms of SCAD, or president of the college, or start your own school—? [Both laugh]

DAVE:  The only ambitions I have are to learn to be a better teacher, which will probably take me the rest of my life.

WOODY:  So, you teach classes as well?  What courses?

David Stone

DAVE:  To make a long story short, we have lots of different courses, and as a chair, I don’t get to teach the full load of courses that the other folks teach. I can only teach two or in the past we when we’ve been busy with administrative stuff, only one course. But it’s probably going be two now. I have my favorites. We have a sound effects and Foley class. I have a class called the History of Sound and Media, which is lecture only—which I enjoy. I’m supposed to teach that, and Intro to Sound Design, this fall. And I’d like to develop a new class about the industry— about how to get work and how the workflow works in the industry. My favorite, so far, has been post-production, where I teach students how to be a supervising sound editor—how to run a crew of the other people doing the editing and recording and mixing and stuff.

WOODY: Learn from the  master!

DAVE:  One of the things I’m trying to push for in the next couple of years—it’s really hard to change—make new courses and re-fit the old ones to match. But one of the things we’re trying to do is have sound effects and dialogue editing—separating it out from sound effects, Foley and ADR dialogue editing. Very complicated—but we’re trying to shift things around a little bit. I want to learn to be a better teacher. The other ambition I have is to study film and do more writing about the sound in other people’s movies- stuff from before I was born. I’d like to do some more historical writing, analyzing how people have used sound in movies over the years. I’m very interested in that. I’m not a scholar, but I take a deep interest in it.

WOODY:  And  you’ve got a book in you regarding the early cartoon animated sound too.

DAVE:  I guess I might. I’m awfully interested in this stuff, and anybody who teaches really enjoys their work in the classroom, and enjoys passing on the knowledge to students. Because of the way SCAD is, we have so many professionals in all of the arts teaching kids, everybody consciously tries to be a teacher and not just tell war stories. For what people are paying for tuition, they have the right to be mentored and empowered to learn a bunch of stuff, and not just stand there and watching the show where you tell stories about movies they’ve never even heard of. I think everybody’s very good at doing that at SCAD. It’s one reason I’m very comfortable here—that we all are driven to teach, and we’re proud of our accomplishments, but there’s no way we’re trying to teach the next generation to be us. We’re just trying to teach them how to think, and using movies because everybody loves movies—using movies as a spoonful of sugar so they can learn critical thinking.

WOODY:  What advice do you give to your students regarding pursuing a career?

DAVE:  To network with their peers. Because the structure of the industry that they want to work for will change much faster than we can prepare them with specifics, and to also have a really broad knowledge of how—everything in post sound for movies, or sound for games, or sound art—to have the broadest possible knowledge of what goes on in those fields, even beyond your own specialty or talent. Because you can’t anticipate what the world will be when you’re out there working. Maybe there will be no more movies. Maybe there will be video games that are so integrated into our biology that there’s not even a mechanism to play them with. We don’t know what the future will be, but the principles of telling a dramatic story or leading an entertainment audience with sound—those principles won’t change. They haven’t changed since we sat around campfires and made mouth noises while we told stories.

WOODY:  The tools have changed, but you still have a slate, some type of recorder and a microphone. We may not use Pro Tools in a decade, but we’ll still do it the same.

DAVE:  Yes. Craftsmanship isn’t the tools. If you’re a carpenter, do you really care if your hammer has a green handle or a red handle?

WOODY:  Exactly. As long as it’ll hammer a nail. Let’s take one final diversion.  Now we talked earlier about your actual whole entrée into audio was the fact that you’re a visual artist, and you were interested in animation as an animator as opposed to a sound professional. And you did give me a copy of your book, which I loved, The Tao of Sh*t. So, other than this book do you still pursue the visual arts? How did that particular project start?

The Tao Of Sh*t

DAVE:  One of my childhood friends, Jonathan Wolff, is a very spiritual guy, and is an educator—an educational consultant—he works primarily for the Montessori School. He holds workshops with their faculty and stuff. He’s a very deep thinker, but he also has a hilariously earthy sense of humor. We grew up listening to comedy records together, and he’s a very funny guy. You’d never know it when I described his job. He holds sort of highly psychological and spiritual workshops for Montessori teachers. He has done a lot of spiritual study from back in the 70s when we were pretty young, and several years ago he came up with these little koans that he had written that incorporated the idea of shit in the figurative sense—shit as in psychological baggage or work you have to do—shit in the figurative sense, not in the scatological sense. And he wrote all these cute little koans about shit, as we like to say. And he printed it up, with very pretty type, and gave it to a few friends. At some point, either he asked me to illustrate it, or I offered to illustrate it over dinner, or something—I can’t even remember now. But I said it really ought to have these sort of faux Japanese and Chinese and Indian—Asian—art to it. And he said, “Can you do that?” And I said, “Well, I minored in art history, and I can probably illustrate it.  So, let’s do that.”

WOODY:  I really enjoyed that book. I had a fun time flying home to LA from Savannah reading that.

Dec 2010 (David Stone)

DAVE:  I like to draw, and about every two or three years, I get inspired to draw a magazine cartoon, which I never submit. Or something funny, which I never get done. I enjoy fooling around with Photoshop. I’ll occasionally do a gag Photoshop picture on Facebook.  I still have the impulse to draw funny stuff. I have a project I started in the 70s sitting in yellowed old pieces of paper in a portfolio somewhere that I’d love to revive and finish up. Which was a mock do-it-yourself project book. I’d love to revive that. But first things first—gotta mow the lawn, pay the bills.

WOODY:  That’s your retirement project.

DAVE:  I don’t wanna retire.

WOODY:  Anybody I’ve ever met who retired I didn’t meet again.

DAVE:  That’s right—they usually drop dead.

WOODY:  That’s what I’m saying.

DAVE:  If they bust me out of the chair’s office, and I still stay employed just teaching and not chairing, then I can get some of those projects done. Because administering takes a lot of extra time—and I enjoy it.  I do get my rocks off playing around with the typography and stuff.

WOODY:  Thanks David, this has been a wonderful conversation.  Looking forward to hearing your movies and enjoying your satire.

May 2009 (David Stone)

DAVE: It was my pleasure Woody.

The music can include the composed score, popular songs, and source music like radios, cars and or muzak.  Muzak is a brand-name but typically refers to background music heard in stores, elevators and the like. The sound effects can include sounds such as atmospheres or backgrounds, hard effects like car door slams or guns and explosions and or Foley recordings.  Each of these various sound elements may require a number of different edits and discrete sessions for final mixing.

For the purposes of this article we will discuss these ideas using Pro Tools as our recording, editing and mixing platform but these concepts can be easily ported to any other digital audio program.  For those who don’t use ProTools I will define the terms as I go – starting with “sessions.”  In Pro Tools world a “session” is simply the name of any one particular document.  In Microsoft Word you create a “doc file” in Pro Tools you create a “session file.”

Most computer programs allow for the ability to save a document “as” something new.  Basically you “save as” the file saving the past work and adding to it in the new “save as” session.  My strong recommendation is to “save as” whenever you are substantially changing a session.  In fact I like to do many sorts of “save as” sessions.

I have encountered many engineers who like to save over their prior days work.  Most programs have some sort of “back-up” schemes and Pro Tools is no different.  These sessions are automatically saved and can be used to go back to prior work.  However these sessions are meant as back-ups so they will not be well documented.  In the case of Pro Tools it creates a new back-up file by time increments designated by the user.  For instance, by choosing your preferences, you may create a back-up every half-hour or quarter-hour.  This is essential practice for any engineer as a safety but it is not useful over the long term for a complicated project such as a TV show or a feature film that may contain many different “sessions” prior to the final mixing.

Here is a simple system that I have devised using “save as” in my session saving.  The rule is – new day – save as the next increment – Dialog Edit 5 becomes Dialog Edit 6 and so on.  Or if a new engineer is adding to the session, as in the case of a multi-user facility or project, save as the next increment.  Also save each edit, record or mix session by name – “Dialog Edit 1″, “Foley Record 1″, “ADR record Jesse 1″ and so on.

Over the course of a complex project will there be many sessions created in this manner?  Yes, absolutely, but it also allows for precise documentation of each session.  Also the media used within the project is what takes up drive space, the actual size of the “session” file is quite small so you are not using gigs of additional storage.  One of the difficulties in complex projects that are spread over many days or weeks is keeping tabs on the changes that occur as the show progresses.  One thing any good editor/mixer will learn early on is that there must be a simple way to get back to prior work.  Directors and producers change their minds often and you must be prepared to get to those changes quickly.  A director will not want to hear that a session or sequence must “be rebuilt” to conform back to what was recently completed.

I also create a document that references each session file as a paper document.  This is old-school – utilizes a pencil and paper!

These session sheets are printed, documented and kept in a show specific binder.  A sample document can be seen here.  This can and should be altered to fit the working style of the team as well as the project but this one hits the main points for documentation.

Name of session and date are obvious.  I also include the engineers name as well as which session, if any, it was created from.  I also include where the media and the session are physically located, i.e. which computer, which drive, which directory etc.  Nothing is worse than not being able to find an edit session!  Oh it’s on THAT drive!

There is also a notes section that is to used for – notes.  Detail these notes, this has been a long days work and there have been many changes, additions, deletions and breakthroughs.  Be sure to accurately note what has been done, what has not been done, what challenges are still faced in the session and so on.  It may seem that keeping all of this information in your head is fine but good luck in a month.  Theses documents will prove invaluable as the process continues and are particularly useful when multiple editors are working on the same material.

All of the session sheets are kept in a binder accessible to anyone that is working on the project.  In the case of a feature film for instance I break the session binder into sections and by date for easier retrieval.  One section is devoted to the dialog session sheets, one for Foley, one for sound design and effects editing and so on.  Each is placed in the binder on top of the next per section so the most current sessions are on top.

This documentation is not just for today.  A lot of projects change or get changed as time passes.  The producer gets a foreign sale and they require a new set of deliverables.  Or the music rights of some tracks have expired and the sound needs a re-cut.  I’ve had many projects come back at a much later date for a few “tweaks.”  These binders help track down the small things that directors need to alter the film.  I’ve swapped out entire music tracks and re-mixed, I’ve changed ADR lines, I’ve recorded voice-overs to clarify story points, all well after the final mix.  It’s in your interest as the post sound lead to be able to make these changes in a timely and effective manner.  Three years down the line tracking down some ADR takes may be more difficult than you think.

Archiving the sessions will also take some planning if they are to be useful at a later date.  Pro Tools has a great function called “save copy”.  What it does is it takes all of the audio files that are used in a particular session and creates a complete new session.  I can’t go into too many Pro Tools specific things here but there are a couple of tricks I use for archiving that Pro Tools offers.  It has some great ways of importing and deleting audio files and tracks.  When a project is complete I like to create what I call “master sessions” which are a reflection of the elements of the final work.

For instance, I will compile all of the ADR takes for each actor into one session.  I will then strip the session of everything except for the initial picture editors guide track, a stereo mix of the final completed mix and all of the takes recorded for all of the characters.  I will then save that as the “ADR master session.”

Of course you will need to create a “final mix master session” which will contain only the final edits, audio files and work that created the final mix.  Repeat as necessary. Foley master session, dialog edit master session, whatever is needed to easily reach for those sessions at a later date.

If this article was to be stripped down to its essentials I suppose you could pin it on one word – organization.  If you are the supervising sound editor on a big, long project such as a feature film you will need to find and document things clearly.  Get in the habit of it.  It will make the edit easier, it will make the collaboration easier and it will ultimately make your life easier.  Wouldn’t you rather have the chance from time to time to leave early and relax rather than stay late digging through drives looking for a random audio file?

Here’s a rundown of a few things that consistently come up.  You can make your own determination about them to see how you might react if you were sitting at the other side of the desk.

The Approach:

There is a reason that in high school writing classes we are taught to correspond formally.  It’s because in business you must act professionally.  Typically a letter will have the recipients name and address, a date, the senders name and address and a salutation such as Dear X,  -

Email and texting has completely changed the way many people communicate with one another.  Nothing wrong in and of itself of course, but it has carried over into the workplace. Causal notes or emails will not get much traction.  Here is an example -

“hey – cool studio. looking for some work.  I do it all. resume attached.  later”

Or:

“Qualified engineer.  Loads of experience.  The real deal.  Call today.”

Or:

“Just graduated with a degree in sound.  Foley, ADR, sound design specialist.  Give me a shout.”

Or:

“See attached resume.”

Something that any potential employee must understand is that every communication from phone calls to query letters to resumes must inspire confidence that you are going to be a great asset to the team.  What a potential employer sees in your dealings with them is what they will project as to your dealings with their clients.

The Interview:

It must be the allure of the uber-cool entertainment business that implies casualness.  We see it portrayed that way in the media, stars walking around in ripped jeans and tee shirts, crews with backwards ball caps and shorts.  But they are already in it.  They are not applying for work.

I’ve conducted many interviews over the years with unshaven, unwashed, ungroomed potential employees who can’t figure out why they weren’t hired.  Typically I will ask them at the end of the interview if they dressed and acted like this for their last “fill in the blank – Starbucks, Macy’s, Sizzler, Van’s Shoes” job.  They get an odd look on their face and it seems for that split second that they may have had a revelation.

Here’s the thing from this side of the mixing desk – I own this company.  I work hard for this company.  I work hard to get my clients.  I work hard to keep my clients.  I want to continue to be busy and successful.  People don’t come to me to mix their shows because I have Pro Tools.  People come to me because I do good work, have a great staff and I am extremely service oriented.  This is what makes us stand out.  Show me that you understand not only Pro Tools and post but that you also understand clients and service and you may just get a second interview.

Treat the interview with the same respect you would any other job.  Dress well, look good, and make a strong impression.  Be professional, be courteous and most of all be honest about your experience and your goals.  If you are new to the work but show aptitude and the right attitude you may have a leg up on someone who is more experienced but is lackadaisical in their appearance and their demeanor.

The resume:

OK, here’s a pet peeve of mine; a resume filled with skills but no actual experience.  I see countless resumes that indicate “Foley artist, ADR recordist, sound designer, dialog editor“ any and all of the above and yet no actual experience.  Maybe a short film or a couple of school projects but no real work experience.  The lack of experience is not the issue, the idea that you are representing yourself as a Foley artist or a dialog editor after one three minute short is the problem.

I receive dozens of resumes a month.  Many are from seasoned professionals who work freelance and are looking for a new post house to get on a roster.  Many are from students and new engineers.  The differences in resumes are striking.  Not just from the credits of course but in the attitude and in the approach.

Typically experienced engineers list their skill sets and the relevant work.  New engineers, new grads will typically fill their skill sets with every sub-genre of work they’ve taken a class in.

Now I can only speak for myself on this, of course but I would prefer to see the real work of a beginner.  If I see that you worked summers at a restaurant, or a local business and I see some consistency in that work I will draw some conclusions about you.  That says more to me than a class that was taken in Foley.  Since I work with world-class Foley artists with major Hollywood features and I get resumes from the same individuals seeking employment it just rubs me a bit the wrong way when I see recent grad also telling me that they are a Foley artist.

The resume is not only a reflection of your work experience; remember it is also your introduction to a guy like me.  If it’s filled with hyperbole, I may just draw ideas about you from that.  It will color my impression of you.  If you are just beginning I am smart enough to know that your resume won’t have pages of work experience and you won’t be judged by those standards.  However, whatever impression the resume gives me is the first window I have into you.

By the way, I am not saying to leave school projects off the page.  It is legitimate and shows me what you’ve done.  It’s just that often these are made to look like work that it is not.  Be honest, straight-forward, put the real deal out there and you will get your shot.  Trust me I get credit lists from highly experienced crew whose resumes are filled with shows I’ve never heard of.  That’s the sad fact about the work we do, there are many shows that live in obscurity and don’t have the recognition factor you’d expect from someone with years of experience.

The wind-up:

So what is one to do?  Here’s the post in a nutshell: take the interview seriously, dress well, look good, act confident and be truthful.  Show the employer that you are there to work, work hard and do what it takes to move your career forward.

Don’t pad or inflate the resume.  Put all of the relevant experience there and if you worked as a restaurant manager for three summers in college – write it down!  It will show that you are responsible, trustworthy and motivated.  By the way some schools have resume templates.  The only reason I know this is because I get resumes that all look alike and have the exact same information on them.  Only the names are changed.  This again is not a great indication of why you are better than the other guy or gal.  Make your resume your own, you are not your classmates.

This one I hate but I have to say it -  be persistent and follow up.  Ask if it is alright to stay in touch, send resumes every six months or if the employer may have advice in getting ahead.  You’d be surprised how much that can help.  Here’s a crazy example of what happened to my summer interns – I met with a number of potential interns.  I chose one who said they were leaving town and would contact me when they returned.  After a couple of weird and incomplete emails and unanswered calls they never did arrive for the internship.  I lost three weeks waiting for that person after having turned down other qualified candidates.  I then met with more interns to replace that one and again chose, what I felt was the best one.  I called to tell them that they got the internship but never returned my call!  I did not and would not call repeatedly to have them come in.  I feel that if I needed to draw them in to a job they were being offered then their internship could also be problematic.

By the way, it may not seem like it now but I can tell you – Hollywood is a small town.  The person you blow-off or disregard today can be the same person with the choice gig you crave only a couple of years later.  Be polite and don’t burn bridges if at all possible.  Your future career can really depend on it.

Keep your head down, be respectful, don’t have all the answers, have all the questions.  Be willing to come in early and work late.  Show initiative if you get the job, work hard and learn.

Good luck out there!

WOODY: How long have you been a music supervisor?

DOMINIQUE: Going on 5 years last month.

WOODY: What was your first project? Was that a film or tv show?

DOMINIQUE: Actually it was a short film, The Spin Cycle which had a pretty good festival run. My wife was the screenwriter and our production company co-produced it with director Chris Ohlson of 824 Pictures..  At the time I was more active in my music publishing. I had this background of music licensing and that kind of activity and music supervision, at that time, wasn’t even on my mind. And then we went through a screening of the 1st cut with the director and the editor. The editor had picked the song It Must Be Love by Don Williams. And the song fit perfect but we needed to clear the rights to it. And that right there is the genesis of my music supervision. I went into it with the, I’m a publisher, I know what to do. It just was a different side of music licensing and I was so intrigued. I immediately started looking for other films to work on and it grew from there. Publishing faded to the background. Our catalog slowly diminished as the reversion clauses were coming due and everything was reverting back to the songwriters. I just didn’t have the time to deal with the publishing. I was just overwhelmed with films and licensing. That was the moment – in the editing room.

WOODY: So your background was as a music publisher. What did that work entail?

DOMINIQUE: I would get submissions from songwriters and bands looking to get their songs cut by other artists. I would listen to the music that they would send me. I would make the decision whether I would become publisher of their song and pitch to the A&R departments at RCA and Sony and various artists in hopes to get the song cut by one of these big country stars up and coming in the community. That was the gist of my publishing experience at the time. That was a very difficult and competitive venture for me because I was an unknown music producer in the Round Rock Austin area. In the Nashville area publishers were walking right up to the A&R dept at Mercury and Sony and others. It was discouraging. So when music supervision came into my vision it was something positive, something that I could do that didn’t involve someone else’s career and I gravitated to that. The publishing companies are still active; in fact, they are like a sister company to the film production company we have. If we need someone to write specific music to one of our films that we work on then our publishing company will handle the publishing and the administration of the songs, but that is a very tiny part of the business.

WOODY: Are you a composer or musician yourself?

DOMINIQUE: I have been songwriting and playing instruments since I was a child, and when I was in my late 20′s I really wanted to take my songwriting to the next level. I bought a $2000 keyboard and a 4-track recorder and I just started taking years and years of wanting to write music to the forefront of my life. I started writing music and lyrics, and putting them together and, sadly enough [LAUGHS], performing the vocals on [the compositions]. My excuse was, It was just to get the idea across, I was not bragging that I was a singer. But I had a couple of songs played on the radio in San Antonio in 1989, so I honestly wanted to be somebody, not as an artist but as a songwriter. I wanted my songs to be recorded by other artists. I would send my songs to publishers just like writers do to me, but this was back in the late 80s and early 90s.

WOODY: So this was prior to you getting into publishing yourself?

DOMINIQUE: Yeah. Well, what happened was I ended up moving to Nashville, back in 1993 and I was there for eight years. I left San Antonio, and went to Germany to visit my brother for four months, and when I came back to the states I didn’t have anywhere to go. I wanted to start somewhere new and I told my self I would either go to New York or Nashville. And in my decision I figured that Nashville would be more my scene, so I moved to Nashville and shortly after that I was working on music row at Mercury Records. There I would just immerse myself in what the A&R folks were doing and try to learn as much as I could, and I learned a lot about how the record industry works from the inside, from the Mercury Records point of view. Shortly after that, across the street was Acuff-Rose Publishing and I ended up getting a job over there working in the copyright department. I was fascinated by the phone calls and faxes that would come in from film production companies wanting to license music from their enormous catalog. That germinated in my head for about four years until finally in about 2002 I moved back to Texas, and that’s when I decided that I wanted to pursue publishing and I started two publishing companies, one affiliated with ASCAP and one affiliated with BMI. And that’s how that launched. But my own music writing kind of fell to the wayside when I was in Nashville. I had a roommate, who was an artist trying to make it and I saw what he was going through and the doors closing on him – and he was leagues ahead of me. I thought, There is no way I’m gonna make it as a songwriter. But I still write lyrics to myself right now, when things come to mind I have this box that is just full of lyrics and I’ll jot things down. I figure one day, when I get older [LAUGHS], I’m going to get me another studio just for my own pleasure.

WOODY: The urge to write music doesn’t go away. I started out as a songwriter and musician, and came to Hollywood for all that, too. Twenty-five years later I’m not going to be discovered, but you know, maybe one of my songs will.

DOMINIQUE: Exactly, and that was my whole point there, I didn’t want to be the famous guy, I just wanted someone to record my songs. Back then, Billboard magazine was like my Bible. I would always look at who the songwriters were on the charts, and think to myself, one day my name is going to be up the in the parenthesis – right there as songwriter. So, that gleam was in my eye.

WOODY: So let’s talk about what happens once you have been brought on board a feature film. What steps at that point happen for you as a music supervisor?

DOMINIQUE: Well, it really depends on what point I come on board. There’s pre-production, there’s production when they are actually shooting the film, and post-production. Some directors have no musical vision, and some are very music savvy. So that also plays into what my role will be. If I come in, for example, in pre-production, I’ll get a copy of the script. I love reading the script, and then highlighting certain scenes where I feel that, a song needs to be here, or score here. Find out, not necessarily what song needs to be where, but just that, a song needs to be there, and then I will compile it on my worksheet. When I have a meeting with the director we’ll share notes and we go through that. Then as the film is being edited and the scenes that should have music are actually ready to view, that makes it much easier to make a decision what song will actually fit each clip because you can actually see it. You get a feel for the characters and how the dialog is delivered. So the process just goes on until post-production, and usually the songs, if they are actually picked, go to the editor. The editor then drops songs in on the scenes and then once the editor puts together a rough cut then we can all sit down together and take a look at it. I usually run with that copy and try to make decisions with the director. And usually right off the bat I’ll say, This song is a great song, but with the music budget you’ve given me, there’s not enough money to license that song, so we are going to have to find a replacement. Then I go out to all my music resources and say, This is the song that we have in the scene, this is the scene, I need something that we can afford that is comparable to – whatever song we had originally chosen. And I get bombarded with submissions and I filter through them and I find two or three that I feel that the director might like. I will cut them into the scene myself, send a Quicktime to the director and editor and then have them take a look at it and if they like it then the editor will get a copy of the song. I am not an editor I just do the best I can to get the musical idea across in the scene. So that is if I come in during pre-production.

WOODY: It must be a difficult process if you come in and they have already temped the music, because I have worked with people and they bring in their film and they are using Blur, and the Rolling Stones and the first thing I say is, what are you going to do about these music tracks? Because you are going to have to get the rights to these songs? But they always think that everything is fine, and then they sell their film and they come back and say, We have to find new music, and I say yup.

DOMINIQUE: Yes, that is the frustrating part for me. Because immediately, what you just said is exactly what goes through my head and what comes out of my mouth, and then I get the look on their face, and I know, Oh boy, we’re in trouble now. So there are times when I try to convince them, You know, this is the prime time now to place the song, before we get to that point where we are back peddling, struggling, and stressed out. I have even found replacement songs for a film I am doing right now for a song that I think is not going to make it in the final distribution process. I know that they are going to come back to me, and I don’t have time to be stressed out, I have got a ton of other projects. So when I get some free time, I will go through those tons of CD’s I have, and go through Myspace, so that when that time comes I am ahead of the game. The worst situation for me is, I get a call, email, or I meet someone at a networking mixer and they say, Yeah man, we’ve got like two weeks to get these songs cleared, and one of my biggest questions is, Why did you wait? Then I negotiate my fee, and I get the information from them, and the majority of the time they still don’t make the deadline. Because the publishers are not going to rush for one specific film.

WOODY: For a festival clearance, or something like that?

DOMINIQUE: Right.

WOODY: So ideally you would like to get involved with them with a script in pre-production, would that be right?

DOMINIQUE: For me, that would be the ideal situation. Because I am there at the very beginning, I can make suggestions early on, and especially in the case where they have on camera performances where I have to clear the song before they even shoot the scene. So getting involved early on makes my life easier, it makes my job easier, and it makes things less stressful for the directors and the producers etc., and I like it more from a creative standpoint.

WOODY: Since the movie process takes so long – from script to screen can take an unbelievable amount of time do you have a variable fee schedule for that? Like if you got involved in a project and you were there all the way through versus getting involved in a project a month before they finish?

DOMINIQUE: I have been in both situations. I have film right now, Conflict of Interest, which I think back in March of 2008 I came on, script in hand, started reading the script, and listed out requests for particular tracks that I thought would work. The entire film was shot, and the executive producer wanted the entire film to be complete by the Presidential election, because it was a political thriller. We were in post a month before the election, and it was just, completely, not right. And they decided that they were not going to release it yet, and keep working on it. They went on a three month hiatus, hired another director who re-shot 79 pages of an 84 page script, and we just had a test screening last Thursday. They interweaved the new footage with several scenes of the old footage. I had all the license agreements for the music ready to go out for signatures, but I didn’t send them out because I didn’t know what songs were going to remain in the film. Well, none of the songs that I found remained in the film. So I am pretty much starting over. So to answer your question about my fee structure, sometimes it varies, but I try to do either half up front and half upon completion of my job, or one-third in pre production, one third in production and when I finish it’s the final third. On this film, I was looking at my Quickbooks last night, and the one for Conflict of Interest is going on 294 days from the day I sent out the original invoice. I also did the Overbook Brothers. I met with the director and one of the producers and they said, We’ve got 30 days to clear all this music and it was like, Bam, bam, bam, every day. We hit the deadline, 30 days and it was done, in and out. And those are good. I like those.

WOODY: I was going to say, that’s probably better.

DOMINIQUE: The director had already picked the songs, but he had put some forethought into it. He didn’t go for the top tier artists, or the top ten songs, he found Indie artists on Myspace. So when I came onboard I saw a couple of them were upper tier indie artists, but I was still able to negotiate. In fact I came in with, I think, $250 dollars to spare on budget. There was a lot of negotiating and working with artist management, and the artists themselves. But it worked out great, everyone was happy. The director was happy because he didn’t have to go out and find more money and he had his songs in the film. One song we couldn’t use, they were hard balling us, and we did find a quick replacement for it and it was a done deal. 30 days.

Conflict Of Inte

WOODY: If someone finds a few tracks for a production are they then the “music supervisor?

DOMINIQUE: That’s probably one of the biggest misconceptions out there, and it’s getting worse in my opinion. People think that because they find a song that works well in a film that they are a music supervisor. And that is, to me, a music provider, someone who has provided music. I have a blog myself, and I wrote about the real role of the music supervisor, and the bottom line is, about 30% of [a music supervisors job] is the song selection, the creative side. The administrative side takes up about 70%, and sometimes more. So a music editor usually has a great ear, and finds a great song, pops it in there, and the director likes it. But they don’t have the relationships with the publishers and the record labels to get in there and do the negotiating, the licensing and the clearing; all of the administrative side to music supervising. The music supervisor brings the whole pie to the table, and anyone else who just finds music is only bringing a slice of the pie to the table.

WOODY: I would like you to go into the 70% a bit more deeply, because in a way I always thing of the music supervisor as a music producer. Not in the sense of a record producer, but a producer in the film sense of a producer. In that context, you are fulfilling all the producing functions for that music, you are finding the music, contracting the music, budgeting the music. People have a misunderstanding about music supervision, they don’t have a firm understanding that a great portion of the job is contracting, and negotiations, and budgeting, and clearance and so on. Can you elaborate on that?

DOMINIQUE: Yeah definitely, and before you even get to that point of negotiating etc., you have to find out who even owns the music. In today’s music world, it has been so diluted that you can’t even go to ASCAP and look up a song and see who actually owns it because it might say, Bob’s Music Publishing. Well, Bob’s Music Publishing is administered by Universal Music Publishing Group. So you have to dig down until you get to the company that administers 100% on behalf of all the other music publishers. So just getting to the right person, that can give you the contact information, that you can send your license request form to is a big hunt. And it’s not always right there in plain sight. A lot of people will go on ASCAP and BMI and see that publisher name right there and think that that’s who they have to deal with and a lot of times it’s not. Even sometimes, where the songwriter is from the UK and you have a US production going on, it might say Warner Chapel Music Ltd. and they are in the Performing Rights Society in the UK; plus you still go through Warner Chapel here in America and they do the approval through their sister company in the UK.

So there are a lot of things that you have to know before you start negotiating and get the ball rolling, and once you have identified who is the proper copyright holder for the sync rights and the napster rights, that’s when you do your license request form. That contains the production company information, the composition, composition title, the songwriters, publishers, how are you using the song, if it is going to be background vocal, background instrumental, how much of the song you are going to use– 10 seconds, a minute, the entire length, and what rights you want– America, worldwide, what media– DVD, TV, theatrical, and term also– one year only? So all these things you have to piece together, they all have be gathered up and together on one concise form, sent off, and then the clock is ticking. How long is it going to take for them to get back? You have to follow-ups many times until you get a quote. And if you have got a full $5,000 in your music budget, and you get a quote for one song on the publishing side for $5,000, then you are in negotiation mode. And right there, if you don’t have a relationship with that publisher, chances are slim to none that you are going to get that $5,000 down anywhere near what it needs to be for you to be able to license any of the rest of the songs. So having relationships with the publishers and the labels and the people that you have to deal with is key. If you do get your fee negotiated down to a favorable amount, that will allow you to have money left over for the rest of your songs.

Then if it is a major publisher they will most likely draft a license for that song, if it is an independent they will say, Can you draft a license for us? So if you don’t have the proper experience to draft a proper license, it’s not one of the forms you just download off the Internet and fill in the blanks. You have to know what’s in there, because every licensing deal is different. So that’s the next step, and once the licenses are all done, and the tracks are cut for the music the cue sheet comes into play. And putting the proper information in the cue sheet is key because the songwriters and publishers rely on that cue sheet to get performance royalties down the road. So that’s pretty much the process from the song conception to the cue sheet.

WOODY: Could you just detail a little bit the different sorts of rights that people need to acquire for a motion picture?

DOMINIQUE: Sure, you know it really depends on what their plan is from the start. If someone is going to shoot a film, and it is going to go straight to DVD, well, pretty much the only rights that they need to deal with are home video DVD rights. But if they are looking for a broad release I always try to get “all media worldwide in perpetuity, that way their distribution options are unlimited. However, it does cause the fee to go up. So you have to balance how much money you can afford for licensing these songs and that’s when you have to chisel your rights down unless you get a step deal, which is something completely of a different topic. I usually ask the director or producer or whoever is going to be in charge of the distribution plan, What are your plans? Are you just going theatrical or are you going to TV? and once I know that I’ll know how I’ll gear the rights that I request. If they are only planning on having it broadcast in the United States, or North America, then I just request the US only, or if they have an actor who is big in Germany I will ask US only, and Germany. Just to specify the rights according to how the production plans on releasing the film.

WOODY: So if they have some success, and their distribution model changes, then the contracts have to change as well. If this was supposed to be a DVD only release, they get a bite and all of a sudden Universal says, Hey we’re going to pick it up and run it in sixteen cities, then you have to go back and renegotiate those rights?

She Pedals Fast

DOMINIQUE: That is correct. Go back to the table, present the new rights, and get a new quote and hope that either the distributor will pick up the additional costs for the music, otherwise the production company has to somehow come up with the extra money. We then revise the license agreements, we cut the new checks and then they’re good to go with the new distribution model.

WOODY: For those that don’t know, can you talk about the synchronization rights and other types of specific rights that have to be enabled for you to be able to use the music track?

DOMINIQUE: The sync rights are basically the publishing rights to the actual composition. If a song is being used in your film, synchronization rights have to be obtained. You don’t have to have the master rights, because you can do a cover song. Basically, you need permission to record that new song from the songwriter, or the artist who recorded it and licensed it to the production, or it was a work for hire and the production company might want master rights. So, the publishing rights, or synchronization rights, are something that you have to have regardless. The master rights usually belong to the record label or whoever owns the specific master recording rights. There can be many master recordings to a single composition, so whichever master recording you are using in your film, you have to find the label or owner of that specific recording. 99% of the time, publishers are your synch rights, or publishing rights holders, and most of the time record labels are the owners to your master rights holders.

WOODY: Do you recommend a certain percentage amount in terms of an overall production budget for the music clearance rights?

DOMINIQUE: I really never recommend a percentage. Usually they will know what they want to put aside for music. Once I see that number it tells me where I can shop for music or tell them what they can and can’t have based on what is in their temp tracks. There are rules of thumb out there that I’ve heard, 10% of your production budget, and stuff like that but I have yet to see that work. It’s usually the other way around. You just tell yourself, Ok I can put $10,000 on music. And that’s what you use to go shop for music. Of course music is composition, preexisting songs and it’s your composer, your music supervisor and sometimes your music editor. All of that falls under that one line item so you have to factor that in. And then once you pay the crew, how much do you have left over for the music itself?

WOODY: Do you work with first time filmmakers?

DOMINIQUE: Yes. Several times.

WOODY: And have they been surprised when you explain to them how much money it’s going to take for them to secure the rights for the music?

DOMINIQUE: Yes. They’re surprised only in the fact that now it’s reality to them. They have heard the horror stories from other people. A lot of those stories are like the AC/DC songs, the Rolling Stones songs, the ridiculous $100,000, million dollar deals. Because they hear those stories, when the small little artist where everyone knows them but they’ve never had a big song, and still his songs are demanding $5000 or in that ballpark, it is an eye opener. But still the whole world of music clearance is just baffling to most people.

WOODY:I did a picture where the filmmaker got the rights from Beck to use a song for the opening scene of his film for film festivals only. And if it sold then he would have to renegotiate the rights. He did end up selling it and was not able to secure the rights at that point and had to replace it.

DOMINIQUE: Yes, that’s exactly what happened to another film that I worked on, Yesterday with a Lie. They locked the film and only had festival rights. And they had the composer as the

Yesterday Was A L

music supervisor. It got to the point where they were getting broad rights for 4 songs, on average, it was about $20,000 per song in order for them to get the rights after the festival rights. So I came on board and told them that, I would try to get it down, but I didn’t think I would.

All four songs were cover songs, so I only had to deal with the publishers. I couldn’t get them down except on the one key song. But one of the artists did not want a cover version of her song used in the final film that was going out theatrically and she wanted her version in there. And as much as I tried and tried and tried, the use was denied. So they had to open up the film, pull the song out, and have another song recorded. So that is another frequent mistake made by the filmmakers.

WOODY: What advice would you have for a band, a singer/songwriter, or someone who had tracks of their own that they wanted to have placed in films but they didn’t know where to go? How would they find someone like you?

DOMINIQUE: Well, the best way is to get on the Internet and do a search on song placement, music placement. Some people don’t even know the term music supervisor, so just plug in whatever term you know. They have to do a little research and use a little diligence because it is their career in hand, and they should learn as much as they can about licensing music. The more they dig in, the more they will find terms and names and people who do what it is they need done to get their music out there. Then send an email make a phone call and inquire. Say, I have some music that I feel is very good, and I think it could be used in a movie, what do I do? I get a lot of emails. I send out a lot. In fact I have an email template, and I get these emails from either a songwriter who wants to get their music placed, or someone that wants to be a music supervisor. I just copy and paste an email and say, Hey, this is what I have been sending out, and give them some highlights and pointers to let them know what it is that they need to do to get their songs into films. And one of the important things that I always stress with songwriters is to get the administrative side of their business together. Get registered with ASCAP or BMI or whatever performance rights society is in their area. I’d like for them to get their music copyrighted. Take care of the business side so that when they get the call from me and I say, Hey I just listened to your song on Myspace and I want to use it in a film, and I need you to clear this today, we don’t have to go through all the paperwork and other stuff on their end to get their song ready. They should have their splits figured out with their co-writer – all of that side of their work should be done.

WOODY: That is terrific advice. So then they should already have their own music publishing company in place?

DOMINIQUE: They can, and it’s a choice. If they want to handle all of their own publishing and want 100% of their publishing rights they can. If they want someone else to champion their music and jockey it out there to the world and try to get placement and do a 50/50 split publishing deal then it’s their prerogative. The big thing these days is for the artists and songwriters to maintain as much control to their music as they can. But that is another thing. If you’re going to publish yourself you need to get yourself a publishing company. Get it registered with ASCAP or BMI or whoever you want to affiliate yourself with as a writer and just have your business side taken care of so when you get that phone call or that email you can jump right on the bandwagon and go. Because a lot of times, like when I had that 30 days on the Overbrook Brothers, I didn’t have time for someone to say, Oh, well let me get with my co-writer and see. We don’t even know if we are going to go 50/50 because he did more than I did. So it may be 30/70, and then it is like, move on to the next song. My thing about these new guys is to get your business together, and then get out there and learn how to get yourself played. Learn as much as you can so you can communicate with someone like me. When we start talking about sync, and Napster and cue sheet, you need to know what I’m talking about so we can have a professional conversation.

WOODY: What do you think of these song placement services out there, are they useful for you and the songwriters?

DOMINIQUE: There are places – Barry Coughlin has a company, musicsupervisor.com and I have been there. I know Barry, in fact he invited me to a panel at SXSW back in March, so I have been on their site looking for stuff. They put together some playlists for me to listen to. There are a lot of sites out there like that that are very helpful because I already have established relationships with them. They know me and I know them, and I can send them an email asking for some 1940′s era WWII music and then I can move on. Then I get an email just perfectly tailored to what I need. Then I click through, see if anything sounds good, if it does then I’ll put it in a folder for that particular film, and then I go back to it. There is a convenience there, that I don’t have to go listen to 200 songs, I’ve got some creative people on that end that will do that for me.

WOODY: So you don’t think that it is a waste of money for someone who is looking to have their stuff placed?

DOMINIQUE: Well on that side, I think it’s a good idea because you have someone that can expose your music. But the problem with it is that they have so much music that they can’t give your music the time that it needs. That’s why I would recommend that if you don’t, as an artist, have the time or desire to pitch your own music, I would find a publisher or a small music library that can champion your music and say, Hey, I’m going to work for this artist this week and see if I can get some placements. In fact in the FM Pro news group, or list, that was a conversation that they were having, about if anyone had any success using these types of services. Most of the people said no. So for me, I think, take some time and control of your own business and pitch your own music. If you have gigs on Friday and Saturday, let Sunday be your day that you get out there and find films that are in production, find out who their music supervisor is, get in contact, find out what they are looking for, and do it yourself. For me, that is the best route to go.

WOODY: I think you put your finger on it right there – filmmakers have the same problem. They don’t realize the business part of the show, and let that fall by the wayside. They just assume that their movie is going to be found and they are going to be the next Spielberg, or their music is going to be found and they are going to be the next Michael Jackson.

Harmony and Me

I saw a screening of Harmony and Me at the LA Film Festival, and after the screening they had a Q&A, and someone had asked specifically about the music, because the lead character, played by Justin Rice, is a musician himself. There are some live performances throughout the movie. I think some of the music was written by the lead actor, whether it was him performing live within the movie, or whether it was a recorded performance. Can you talk a bit about your involvement in that specific movie and some of the things that you had to deal with?

DOMINIQUE: Sure. First of all, this was another one of those films where I came in after the fact. The music had already been selected, and Bob Byington, the director, was very meticulous about the songs that are in the film. The highlight of everything, for me, was when I came on board I got a copy of the film. I watched it, and immediately I knew there were problems because a song that’s not in the film anymore is Elton John’s song entitled, Harmony. It was a perfect song for the film, but it was going to cost $100 per side to license it. Universal ended up denying the use because it was just wasted their time. The budget that we had available would not cover it, so that was the first song to get scrapped. The good thing is that a lot of the music in the film is by Justin Rice, who is the lead actor. You even see him performing, and you see a lot of musical performances in there. He and Bob Schneider did his song Changing in Mind.

WOODY: Is that in the wedding scene?

DOMINIQUE: Yeah, the wedding scene where they are at the piano together. Then Bob did the romantic performance to the bride. Bob Schneider has been working with Bob Byington on Bob’s songs. I did a short film, and I liked some of Justin’s music back in 2006. So Justin and I have had somewhat of a relationship prior to Harmony and Me. That is how he and Bob and I built our relationship and it made using all of his compositions, which is a majority of the film, a lot easier to work with. He is very easy going when it comes to licensing his music in these small films, especially the ones that he has a role in. That made it easier, but the bigger songs have been a struggle. The one thing that I preached to them, like I do to all the other directors or producers, is, I am playing the Devil’s advocate here, I am telling you the truth. I am not going to water it down and tell you that you might get this song. It is your job to take the truth and come back to me with a solution that I can take to the publishers and the record labels and try to make it happen. I am not I charge of your money, and I can only negotiate based upon what you have given me to work with.

WOODY: Right. Now if someone came up to you and said, Hey, I want to do what you do, I would love to be a music supervisor. What advice would you give them?

DOMINIQUE: Study! I would tell them to go on the Internet and Google music supervisor. There are books out there that they can read to give them the basics of everything that a music supervisor does from A-Z. There are websites that give a description of what a music supervisor does, on how to clear songs, what’s a sync license is, what a master license is. So if they really want to be a music supervisor then they are going to make the effort to learn as much as they can. Once they get a grip on the entire concept of what a music supervisor does, I would suggest going to a local mixer where people are getting together, talk to some people and find out who is shooting a film at a really low budget to bring you on. They probably don’t have any money to pay you, but you just want the experience, and you go and try to find a local band with the same situation. One with a few gigs every month and they want to get their songs in a film and they don’t care about getting a licensing fee. But, the thing about it is, what you’ll learn, is that you still have to follow procedure. Just because someone says, Yeah, you can use my song, and I won’t charge you and fee, you don’t just throw the song in the film and move on. You still have to do the paperwork. You have to do a licensing agreement. You state the in the compensation paragraph what the compensation is, and of course it has to be at least a dollar. Do the paperwork. That’s the only way you’re going to learn it.

WOODY: You go into this in some detail on your own blog.

DOMINIQUE: Yes, I have several postings on my blog. One is specifically named, So You Want to Be a Music Supervisor, and in there I go into detail about what you need to do, what you need to learn, and it points to a couple of different references that will help you to get one step closer. There are a lot of things that I have written about in my blog from three angles, from the music supervisor’s point of view, from the filmmaker’s point of view, and from the songwriter/musician’s point of view. Basically, the common thread throughout my blog, is – doing the right thing. Regardless of what side of the licensing deal you are on – just learn about it. Learn how it works so when you are in the midst of a licensing deal you know the language; you know what needs to be done. Then as a filmmaker or a musician/songwriter, if you’re in a deal and you hear something that doesn’t sound right, that knowledge that you’ve learned will cue you to say, Hey wait a minute, that’s not how it’s done. If you don’t do your homework and learn, that will go right past you and you won’t know that something happened that shouldn’t have happened.

WOODY: Let’s talk about the distinction about the music rights that you would cover versus the score, which generally is the composer. He’s been hired for the movie and is adding a dramatic through-line according to the picture edit and you are dealing more with songs that already exist. What sort of relationship do you have with the score composer?

DOMINIQUE: The director has a closer relationship with the composer during the scoring of the film because the director has his vision and knows where he wants the score to be dramatic, orchestral or something more subtle so they create that landscape together. Where I come in is I am the liaison – if the composer has an issue. He may come to me and say, Hey I’ve been talking to the producer or director about my contract, or, I haven’t been paid yet, or something like that. So on the non-creative side that I am there for the composer. On the creative side I might be looking at the film saying, Oh that montage. I’ve got a perfect song for that. And the director has just told the composer he wants that to be a very soft orchestral score to go over that scene. So we have to communicate so we know what I’m going to do versus what they are going to do so there is no overlap.

WOODY: So I would think that the director is the person you spend the most time with. When a director is deciding on the DP for instance they may go over the lighting in photographs or the style of some paintings to see that they are thinking along the same lines. Do you work in a similar fashion when meeting with a director on a project?

Year At Dang

DOMINIQUE: Definitely, particularly if it’s time to do a song replacement. If the director already has all the music that he desires, but we can’t license the songs, basically we’ll talk about alternate bands and he’ll mention someone. I might suggest such and such band; they are a great band here in Austin very similar to what you have in the movie. And if he hasn’t heard them before I’ll get him an mp3 and have him listen to them. He’ll tell me some things, I’ll take notes, and I’ll go out on the internet and try to find that band’s music and immediately do a quick clearance check to see who owns the rights to it. I make sure that we are not going into the same problem that we had before. We do sort of paint a picture for each other musically about what her/she feels could be the right song. We listen to some things until we decide which is the best song(s) for that scene and try different songs with the scene to see which one works best.

WOODY: What do you think that filmmakers misunderstand about music supervision?

DOMINIQUE: A lot of things. [LAUGHS] Probably the one thing that really gets me is the fact that they think that the music supervisor’s job is to find music. Especially when I am looking for a job they say, Oh we’ve already found all of our music. That’s when I ask them who’s doing the clearance, who’s negotiating the deals, the licensing, who is making the music cue sheets? Their eyes light up and they say, Hmmm, gee, I didn’t think of all that! So the role of the music supervisor, period, is just misunderstood in the film industry. And of course the biggest misunderstanding is of what it really costs to license a song and all of the work that goes into it. The whole idea of not knowing that we don’t just go finding songs is probably the number one misconception.

WOODY: And probably just the idea that things need to be cleared in the first place!

DOMINIQUE: Documentary filmmakers often don”t understand this. They’ll ask if I’m just going to use a few seconds of a song do I still have to clear it? Or in a corporate presentation do I have to clear it. I try to get detailed information out there about all of this.

WOODY: So tell me what you love about what you do.

DOMINIQUE: I love it from A to Z. Even when it gets complicated I see that I can come up with a solution that will make everybody happy on the film side and also on the music side. I will say that the one thing I really enjoy about being a music supervisor is getting the call or email from someone who wants me to be onboard. If they are in early pre-production and they give me a script and I go home, I read the script and my mind is focused on what a good song for the various scenes would be. Then I just take that to the end and then finally I’m sitting there with the rest of the crew and I remember the day that I found that one song. It’s the whole process from beginning to end – and all of the ups and downs to get to the end and how it all works out .

WOODY: What is it that you don’t like about what you do?

DOMINIQUE: Oh, things that frustrate me. This one film comes to mind, I just don’t like it when I have to struggle with the director. I am trying to educate the director, and they want the song no matter what, and I have already exhausted my efforts with the publishers. I don’t want to look unprofessional in the publisher’s eyes, as if I don’t know what music clearance is all about, because often the director wants me to do things that just go beyond the norm. So, the struggle with the directors is probably the least enjoyable part of dealing with what I do.

WOODY: Struggle defined how?

DOMINIQUE: An example of a struggle is when I tell the director that I have already negotiated the song that they want from $10,000 to $5,000 for the rights they are requesting, if they want it to go down anymore we will have to reduce the rights. They say, No we have to have these rights and this is all the money I have. Go back and try to get the price down more. And I say, I have already brought a 50% reduction on it. I’ll go back, but I am going to let them know that I understand their position but I have the director breathing down my neck and he wants to bring this thing down. Is there any way we can’t work something out? And when their reply comes back, No, this is the lowest we can go, we have already brought it down $5,000. And the director is still not happy with it.

So it is just stubbornness and an inability to accept the fact that what has been laid on the table is the final offer, a take it or leave it deal. It is beyond my control, and I have already put my expertise and my relationships on the line, and I have to reach a point where I don’t want my relationships to be tarnished because the director wants me to do what is beyond what has already been done. So I have to protect myself because I will be working with these record labels and publishers time and time again and almost every day I am back and forth with them with one project or another. As for the filmmaker, I might never work with them again. So I have to reach a point in my career where is say, I have done the best I can, I am not going to tarnish my relationships just to make this one deal work, when I have hundreds of deals going on right now. That is, for me, the most frustrating and difficult part of the job.

The King Of Texas

WOODY: Is there anything that I missed that you still want to cover?

DOMINIQUE: The one thing that I might add is to underline what I said earlier – that the creative side is about 30% and the administrative side is about 70%. I have become interested in Twitter. I like to see what the other music supervisors out there are tweeting about, as far as the bands that they like, and who they are listening to, because I look up to them. They are doing big TV series and the big films and the films that come in on the weekend box office that make $30-40 million. So I like to listen to what they are listening to, and get a feel for their interest in music. And sometimes I’ll watch their shows and see what music they select. That is a learning experience for me, but it’s just interesting to see. A lot of times I will listen to a link that they put up. I will go to a band website that they just listened to and like, and I’ll make my own personal assessment and say, Wow, if I would have had that song when I was working in that film it would have worked great over certain scenes. So it’s interesting to see what the other music supervisors are doing. It is kind of refreshing, and I aspire to be in their shoes, and have the experience that they have.

WOODY: Well, this has really been great. Thanks for your time, thoughts and expertise.

I generally ask the same types of questions and each and every time I get the same types of answers.  I’ll start by asking what format the project was shot with.  I’ll hear very excited answers about HD and HDV.  We’ll talk about interchangeable lenses and progressive frame rates.  This is where everyone is excited and maybe even showing off a little for the other folks.  They’ll crow about being one of the first to shoot with the RED camera system, or that they did a film-out from HDV that looked stunning, or that they played with the all the different flavors of HD but decided that 720P was the one that fit their project best.

I can see that we are on a roll so I’ll continue with the discussion.  I’ll hear about the beautiful lighting set-ups, challenges with lighting for green screen.  I’ll hear about using monitors on set and prepping for the DI.  We’ll talk about the ruggedness of the new cameras, the ability to shoot in adverse situations or with extremely low light.

Then I’ll ask about the audio.  “What microphone did you use?”  Quiet.  “Anyone?”  One person will mutter it was mostly boom but also some radio mics.  I’ll ask what brand.  Quiet.  “Did you use an outboard mixer or straight into a camera?”  Quiet.  “How about roomtone, did we all get clean roomtone for each location?”  “Well hmmm”  I’ll point out the discrepancy between the picture and the sound.  Do we see a pattern here?

In these filmmakers’ passion for the “perfect shot” they seemed to have forgotten that it generally has audio attached to it.  And in my experience they will expect the audio to be clear and seamless when they get to the final mix.  No matter how little regard they had for it on the day of shooting.

I’ll often ask these filmmakers if they can recall a behind-the-scenes photo from the set of a well-regarded feature or TV director.  I’ll ask if they notice anything significant about them.  I’ll hear they’ve got a special lens to view shots with, or hoods over monitors to keep out the daylight.  I’ll say there is usually one thing more.  If you look you’ll see that they are generally also wearing headphones.  An experienced director not only asks the DP if he “got the shot” or to “check the gate,” he’ll ask if the audio was recorded clean.  He (or she) understands what badly recorded audio will mean when they get their program to post.

There is an old adage “we’ll fix it in the mix.”  And indeed it will be addressed and fixed if possible by then but this generally a very poor approach to filmmaking. Many problems can be easily solved on set with an experienced production mixer and a couple of extra minutes.  There is a mistaken notion that since there’s “all these people here” we don’t want to have them “wait” for audio.  If A/C, refrigerators or computers need to turned off, sound blankets hung over reverberant spaces and quiet to be had for 30 seconds of recording roomtone it can literally save days  of time in post.  All the best directors know and understand the importance of taking the time to get the best audio possible.  Don’t be picture wise and sound foolish!