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Ron Bochar on ‘Angels in America’

by uncredited
written by uncredited 10 minutes read

by Peter Tonguette

In 2003, after sound editor, sound designer and re-recording mixer Ron Bochar, CAS, completed work on Mike Nichols’ miniseries Angels in America, he felt good about what he and his sound colleagues had accomplished. He felt so good, in fact, that part of him wished he could simply call it a career.

Ron Bochar.

“At the end of it, I think every one of us said, ‘OK, this should be the finish now. We should all be 80 years old having done this, so that we wouldn’t have to do anything else,’” Bochar recalls. “That was pretty much how we all felt.”

Fortunately, he has continued to work in the industry, but hasn’t changed his opinion of Angels in America, Nichols’ richly imaginative interpretation of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the AIDS epidemic in 1980s-era New York City.

The two-part miniseries, which aired to widespread acclaim on HBO in December 2003, featured Al Pacino as the late real-life attorney Roy Cohn, whose infamous career included a stint in the employ of anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy and who is widely rumored to have been gay. Patrick Wilson and Mary Louise Parker co-starred as a married couple whose relationship is beset with uncertainties, while Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson and Jeffrey Wright were featured in multiple roles — including the heavenly emissaries named in the title. The miniseries was edited by John Bloom, ACE, and Antonia Van Drimmelen.

“It’s the perfect film,” Bochar reflects. “It had an amazing story, it had an amazing cast and it had sound opportunities galore.”

A native of Parma, Ohio — a suburb of Cleveland — Bochar began his journey to post-production far from the heavenly heights of Angels in America. In high school, he participated in a vocational television program in which students provided content to a local public broadcasting station. Encouraged to pursue a career in entertainment, the future sound editor and mixer attended Ithaca College in New York, where he studied film. “It was great hands-on stuff,” he comments. “You basically did your whole show: You’d shoot it, you’d cut it, you’d have to do the sound on it and you’d have to mix it. We had very crude gear to do it, but it was fun.”

Upon graduation, he eventually found work with a trailer maker in New York, Michael Spolan. “He would cut advertising campaigns: trailers, commercials, what have you,” Bochar remembers. “At the end of a campaign, he turned to me and said, ‘OK, get it ready for a mix.’ I looked at him and said, ‘What? Uh, I’ve never really…’ He said, ‘Come on. You’ve got the narration, you’ve got the production from the set and here are a bunch of sound effects.’”

Ron Bochar working on Angels in America in 2003.

Although Bochar, who served as a first assistant editor on George A. Romero’s Creepshow (1982), harbored dreams of becoming a picture editor, he soon realized that his accidental introduction into sound made for the steadier paycheck. “You finally reach that point in life where you want a family and a little more security,” he says. “I woke up one day and said, ‘I’m good at what I’m doing in sound. Why don’t I just make that my career?’”

In 1987, he received his first credit as supervising sound editor on the Albert Finney-starring theatrical adaptation Orphans — the first of a series of films with noted director Alan J. Pakula. While working on Pakula’s Consenting Adults (1992), the young sound editor was introduced to picture editor Sam O’Steen, ACE, who, several years later, brought the sound editor onto Mike Nichols’ Wolf (1994), a horror film starring Jack Nicholson. “Mike had an established crew that he’d worked with and loved,” Bochar comments. “But Wolf had this other layer of sound design — a character turning into a wolf — and they were having some issues time-wise with the sound crew. Sam called me up and said, ‘Hey do you think you could come on and help us with some of this stuff?’”

By the time the film was finished, a collaboration had been born. “Mike pulled me aside and said, ‘I never knew we could do some of this,’” Bochar recalls. “I said, ‘Well, maybe it’s because some of the technology we’re playing with these days is allowing it.’” He was part of the sound crew on most of Nichols’s subsequent films, including such acclaimed efforts as The Birdcage (1996), Primary Colors (1998) and Closer (2004). The director was fascinated with the possibilities of sound. “Everything was about character for him,” the sound editor/mixer observes. “Footsteps were characters.”

Nichols’ philosophy resonated with Bochar, who, in the late 1980s, co-founded the New York-based shop c5 sound, inc., with Skip Lievsay, CAS, Bruce Pross and Phil Stockton, MPSE. “The one thing that all of us in New York both appreciated and grew up with was that it was always about the story,” he maintains. “When I supervise, I always make the production the ‘god track.’ The production is that part of the movie that is telling me the story, and it’s also telling me what to put into the film.”

In fact, a number of the filmmakers with whom Bochar has worked indicate sound effects or design at the script stage. “The Coen brothers kind of tell you what to put in sound-wise,” he reveals. “Elaine May, when she punched up a script for Mike, included sound notes.” Sometimes, though, he had to disregard such directions and let the film guide his choices. “You can go to a spotting session and people can tell you what to put in the film,” he adds. “Once you’re working on it, sometimes what they tell you to put in the film isn’t really what you need to put in the film.”

Angels in America. HBO Films/Photofest

On Angels in America, however, Bochar was left to his own devices to a striking degree. “Mike loved the project, but from a sound end, he let me do whatever I wanted,” the sound editor/designer/mixer relates. “We never spotted the film. The project just shouted to me: ‘Do this’; ‘do that.’ We would play Mike reels and, for the most part, we would do a few adjustments of levels. He never dropped a sound effect.”

Bochar, who was working on ProTools, found himself exhilarated by the possibilities of telling a story that could conceivably unfold at any length. “We weren’t limited by time,” he says, since the project was slated to air over multiple hours on HBO. “It could have been six hours; it could have been nine hours. We settled somewhere around six-and-a-half hours.”

Angels in America was divided into two core sections, the reality-based “Millennium Approaches” and the more otherworldly “Perestroika.” The sections were worked on independently over the course of about a year, and certain rules governed the sound world of each. For the first section, Bochar wanted to tone down background sound. “It’s more about the music, it’s more about the characters,” he reflects. “Mike wanted to develop them without any distractions. We didn’t have to do anything weird.”

Angels in America. HBO Films/Photofest

In fact, so subtle was the ambient noise in “Millennium Approaches” that, while Nichols was recuperating from a bout of pneumonia, an executive objected. Bochar insisted that there was enough background sound — just not too much. “Mike wasn’t there at the mix that day,” he remembers. “I muted the dialogue production track totally, and the whole room was just alive with the Foley and the background. I said, ‘You know, maybe you’re having this reaction because it was so well-placed within the context of the show that you weren’t being distracted by anything.’” In the end, upon Nichols’ return, the mix remained as it was.

On the other hand, “Perestroika” was meant to explode on the screen — both visually and aurally. “The angels crashed through,” Bochar remarks. “All of a sudden, we had this new component, and from that point on, the city is wild. The angels are there. I mean, it just goes crazy.” Much discussion was had over the sound of the angel wings affixed to, for example, Thompson. The sound editor felt that the angels should not sound like birds. “We don’t even want to hear feathers,” he observes. “We went with wind. It’s a lot of wind moving her around. There’s a downstroke, an upstroke and a constant gentle breeze that accompanies it all.”

Angels in America. HBO Films/Photofest

When the first installment of the miniseries premiered on HBO, Bochar and his colleagues tuned in with anticipation. But, right off the bat, it was clear that something had gone seriously wrong in preparing the show for broadcast. “It came out with massive compression on it, so when Roy Cohn slams down a phone, the entire track would go away and slowly come back until the next big, loud thing hit,” the sound editor/mixer recounts. “I had to turn off the TV. I couldn’t watch it.” About 30 minutes in, an adjustment was made in that opening-night broadcast, but for the next night, the show had to be remastered.

By then, Angels in America had won praise as one of Nichols’ most memorable undertakings, an assessment with which Bochar agrees. “It’s hard to look at anything else that I’ve been part of that has had every single cylinder firing at 100 percent,” he comments. And his colleagues concurred: Along with fellow re-recording mixer Lee Dichter, CAS, and production mixer James Sabat, CAS, Bochar was honored with both an Emmy and a Cinema Audio Society Award for the show.

“To get that kind of acknowledgment meant more to me than anything else,” Bochar concludes. “Nominations are terrific, but to win is pretty spectacular.”

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ColumnsMy Most Memorable FilmWeb Exclusives

Anne Goursaud on ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’

by Peter Tonguette
written by Peter Tonguette 9 minutes read

by Peter Tonguette

In the early 1990s, when film editor Anne Goursaud, ACE, learned that Francis Ford Coppola was directing an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 horror novel Dracula, she thought it was a perfect pairing.

“My first thought was, ‘Oh God, this is perfect material for Francis — he’s going to do a fantastic job with this,’” remembers Goursaud, who, years earlier, had edited Coppola’s One from the Heart (1981) and The Outsiders (1983).

Anne Goursaud.

Yet the French-born editor had no inkling that she herself would be well-suited to the material. In fact, when the director contacted the editor about coming aboard the film — eventually titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula — she scoffed at first.

“I said, ‘Francis, why me? I’m French. I don’t know anything about vampires,’” she recalls. “He said, ‘OK, have you ever read that novel?’ I said, ‘Nope, sorry.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m sending you the novel and I’m going to send you the script.’”

As it turns out, the editor connected with the story and its undercurrents. “I read the book, and I thought, ‘This is genius — of course it’s for me,’” she explains. “Suddenly, the whole story came to life for me as how repressed Victorian female sexuality expresses itself through this passion and the metaphor of Dracula.”

The film, released by Columbia Pictures in November of 1992, assembled a sparkling assortment of stars to portray the famed characters of Stoker’s book, including Gary Oldman as the lead vampire, Count Dracula; Winona Ryder as Mina Murray; Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker; and Anthony Hopkins as Prof. Abraham Van Helsing.

Goursaud, who joined the film late in post-production, shared credit with fellow editors Glen Scantlebury, ACE, and Nicholas C. Smith, ACE.

The French Connection

Goursaud, though, grew up far from the glare of A-list Hollywood productions. The future editor was born and raised in the city of Tours, France.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Columbia Pictures

“Most Americans have never heard of it, although it’s the third most-visited area of France for tourism,” says Goursaud, who grew up in a working-class family. “My father was an electrician and eventually had his own business as a contractor,” she says. “My mother put an emphasis on being a good student. From an early age, I wanted to go to Paris.”

The future editor received a degree in art history from the Sorbonne in Paris, although she admits to feeling like an outsider when she finally arrived in the City of Light. “Maybe that’s why I befriended so many foreigners,” Goursaud recalls. “Most of my friends were expatriates, and mostly Americans, and I got along with them — all sorts of Americans. Everybody said, ‘You’ve never been to New York? You have to go to New York.’”

Following an initial trip to New York, Goursaud relocated to the city for good to work on her thesis. Deciding that academia did not suit her, she accepted a job as an assistant to a fashion editor — “It was exactly like The Devil Wears Prada [2006] but my boss was super, super nice,” she says — before, at the suggestion of some friends, she began taking cinema classes at Columbia University.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Columbia Pictures

“I finally found what I wanted to do — something that went with my artistic desire, something that I realized I would be really good at,” recalls Goursaud, who harbored the goal of directing but felt she could earn a living in the cutting room in the meantime. “My instinct of survival told me, ‘Well, do that, and then once you’re very good at that, you can go back to directing,’” she says.

Among the editor’s earliest projects was a documentary about the cheerleaders of the Dallas Cowboys, A Great Bunch of Girls (1979). The film, co-directed by Mary Ann Braubach and Tracy Tynan, brought Goursaud to the attention of Coppola. “It was told to me that when he saw the documentary, he said, ‘She can cut,’” the editor states. “In a documentary like this, you had lots of montages and different variations. You had to really come up with editing solutions to tell the story, and so in a way, it made my editing shine.”

After hiring her to work on the bold, brilliant musical One from the Heart — which had been started by another editor — Coppola assigned Goursaud a sequence to cut, and after two weeks of toiling in isolation, she presented him with her results.

Anne Goursaud during the editing of One from the Heart.

“He arrived, he looked at it and he said, ‘That’s what the whole movie should look like,’ and I was the editor,” Goursaud says.

On the final film, the editing credit is given to Goursaud, plus Randy Roberts, ACE, and Rudi Fehr, ACE, but for Coppola’s follow-up, the S.E. Hinton-based adolescent drama The Outsiders, Goursaud worked solo from the outset.

“This man changed my life,” she says of Coppola. “He went into a haystack, and he found this little thing in the haystack and pulled it out — and he said, ‘She’s a star.’”

By the time of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, however, the tables had turned: Goursaud had become an established, sought-after editor — her credits included Bruce Beresford’s Crimes of the Heart (1986), Hector Babenco’s Ironweed (1987) and Jack Nicholson’s The Two Jakes (1990) — while Coppola was struggling with creating his horror epic: The film had been cut, but a preview had not gone as well as expected.

“Everybody thought the movie was in big trouble,” Goursaud remembers.

Initially, Coppola turned to Goursaud to add interest to the love scenes. Yet, when the editor joined the production, she screened the complete cut and decided to tackle the montage of Dracula arriving in London. “It was a big, big montage with lots of elements: the boat, the wind, the garden, the maid, and then Dracula showing up,” recalls Goursaud, who worked alongside associate film editor Gus Carpenter on the Montage editing system. “Of course, Francis was gone again. When he came back, my montage was almost done, but not done — and I hadn’t touched at all the scene with the girls, of course.”

Coppola was at first perturbed that Goursaud had spent her time working on a scene they had not discussed, but once he had a look, he encouraged the editor to have a fresh look at the film as a whole. “The only scene that I did not rework in that movie was the crypt scene,” she remarks. “That I didn’t touch — it was perfect.”

Some scenes needed finessing; others required more intricate work. “Slowly, I worked my way through everything,” the editor explains. “Francis was very adamant: ‘You didn’t do this one yet; you didn’t do that one yet.’”

Yet, up to the evening before the film was mixed, producer Fred Fuchs was concerned that Bram Stoker’s Dracula lacked a proper opening. In a moment of inspiration, Goursaud had the idea to follow the film’s prologue set in 1462 — which more or less worked from the get-go — with Jonathan and Mina each writing diary entries: he on a train on his way to Dracula’s, she at home. “The movie never really got going and we didn’t know what to do,” she says. “Finally, we could go back and forth between him in the train and her, so that this dialogue of letters and narration back and forth was established. That absolutely made the movie work.”

Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Columbia Pictures

The editor, who worked on the film from April through October of 1992, found the process of re-imagining a film to be thrilling. Instead of starting from scratch, Goursaud built on the work of the editors who came before her. “I discovered I love re-cutting something and making it work — really fun, fun, fun,” she says. “You’re not starting with a roll of clay. You have something that’s not quite built the right way, and you solve it. Maybe you need a couple images of this, a couple images of that.”

Goursaud viewed the experience of “solving” the puzzle of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a fitting conclusion to her collaboration with Coppola.

“As I was making scenes work, I was thinking, ‘How cool is that that he put me on the map, and now I’m helping him make this magnificent movie work?’” she reflects. “I never said that to him, obviously, but that’s what I was thinking.”

In the end, Bram Stoker’s Dracula opened to solid receipts at the box office and largely respectful reviews; it received three Oscars out of four nominations: for Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Best Sound Effects Editing for Tom C. McCarthy, MPSE, and David E. Stone. The film has acquired status as a cult classic in the 26 years since its release.

And, as it turns out, Goursaud was not done with the vampire genre: Three years after the release of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the editor was hired to direct her first feature film, the direct-to-video horror film Embrace of the Vampire (1995), starring Alyssa Milano. “I thought, ‘This is so ironic — here I am doing a vampire movie,’” she laughs. “It was very, very successful. It cost nothing, was bought by New Line and made lots and lots of money.”

Today, Goursaud continues to make her own films, most recently directing, writing and editing a documentary about former United Artists executive Marcia Nasatir, A Classy Broad (2016) — but, if Coppola ever needs an editor to have a look at a project, she remains available.

“Francis,” she says, “is a special case.”

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ColumnsMy Most Memorable Film

Beth Stiller on Los Angeles Lakers Road Telecasts

by uncredited
written by uncredited 10 minutes read

by Peter Tonguette

Beth Stiller.

Beth Stiller is not a professional basketball player. She isn’t known for shooting from the three-point line or for scoring fast-break points. In fact, she prefers surfing to basketball. But, for about eight years in the late 1990s and 2000s, Stiller found herself on the road with the Los Angeles Lakers.

From the 1998-1999 to 2005-2006 NBA seasons, Stiller served as the technical director on Lakers road games shown on KCAL in Los Angeles. Although her job was strictly behind-the-scenes, she nonetheless felt connected to the excitement that was happening on the court. Any Lakers fan can call to mind the electricity of those years: Head coach Phil Jackson was cooking up plays on the sideline while players like Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal were working their superstar magic at game time.

“It’s such a trip to be on the front of a wave,” Stiller says. “You felt that synergy both with the production team and with the sports team itself. We always felt like we were little barnacles on the side of a whale, just flying along with them.”

For Stiller and her colleagues, the stakes weren’t quite as great as winning or losing a championship, but the pressure of delivering games to viewers tuning in at home could be intense. “We work as a great organism together, and if one of us is derailed, another member has to take over,” she explains. “If you’re thinking about, ‘Oh, did I take the laundry out?’ or ‘Did I forget to turn off the heater?’ or silly little things like that, it can derail the train.”

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Stiller moved with her family to Los Angeles when she was 10. She did not grow up as a sports fan in general, or a Lakers fan in particular. “Personally, I don’t enjoy watching sports too much, but it’s really fun to technical direct,” she comments. And, with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, her ultimate career path in show business was not a foregone conclusion, either. “I love literature,” she explains. “I love stories.”

Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant flies high for a rebound against the Houston Rockets in January 2003 in Houston.
Photo by Pat Sullivan/Associated Press

Upon graduation, the TD-to-be planned to return to New York, but before she could make the trip back to her hometown, she had a chance encounter with an acquaintance who ran an audio studio in Los Angeles. “He invited me to learn how to audio engineer,” she remembers. “I said, ‘Oh, what the hell’ — I was young.”

Then, in the early 1980s, Stiller learned about an internship at a small television station called KSCI, UHF channel 18 in Long Beach, California, which was then associated with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi — the guru to, among other notables, the Beatles. “At the beginning, all of the programs were focused on Transcendental Meditation,” she recalls. “The work environment was extremely chill. It was kind of run by his monks, and there were 30-hour workweeks.”

Three years into her gig at KSCI, Stiller transitioned from audio to a succession of other jobs, including field camera and, eventually, directing/technical directing. “I learned that I really like technical directing,” she comments. “At the time, it wasn’t as complicated as today. It was more about overseeing the engineering area, switching cameras, and adding graphics and a couple of transitions.”

In the late 1980s, she left KSCI to have her first child — Stiller and her husband, an executive at Voice of America in Washington, DC, are parents to a daughter and a son — but, after about a year out of the workforce, she got the itch to get back in. She initially worked as a TD on game shows in Miami, but by the early ’90s, opportunities in sports programming were starting to explode. “The technology was growing — the amount of people, the number of cameras and the money,” she says. “There were a lot of jobs there.”

Stiller, whose early sports-related gigs included technical directing broadcasts of the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim professional hockey team, enjoyed telling the story of a game through shots, transitions and graphics. “We’re the keeper of the grammar of television — correct and timely transitions between shots, replays and pre-packaged clips are necessary to keep viewers in the flow of the game,” she explains. “If the grammar or timing of a transition is incorrect, it can shock viewers, and then they’re not with us anymore. In addition, there can be errors we intercept. We’re the gatekeeper of whatever hits the air, and it’s live.”

In 1998, she got the call to technical direct the Lakers road games on KCAL (Channel 9 in Los Angeles, then owned by Young Broadcasting) — though not the team’s home games, which, at the time, were only shown on cable. “The broadcast shows were the shows that went on the road,” Stiller explains. “They thought that if you broadcast local games, nobody would show up at the arena. The whole model is completely different nowadays.” Not that the shows produced on the road were anything less than first-rate. “It was one of the premier shows,” she adds. “Probably the Lakers and the [New York] Knicks had the most money — and they could do the most elaborate shows.”

Under the supervision of producer/director Susan Stratton, the crew set up about six hours ahead of tipoff. “I had an incredible boss,” Stiller recalls. “She put together a team that was from all ethnicities, all genders and, theoretically, we were all at the top of our games.” At the front bench of the mobile unit, the technical director would be stationed at the switcher while both live shots and replays were being called. “We had a minimum of six cameras,” she explains. “There were also clock cameras because, at that time, you had to show a picture of the game clock and the shot clock. And we traveled with a field camera operator, Victor Smith, who would go out and shoot interviews and whatnot.”

Beth Stiller, center left, at the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC, home of the NBA’s Washington Wizards, in March 1998 with the Laker Road Show team: Back row from left, Chick Hearn (play-by-play announcer), Bobby Matthews (stage manager), Seth Shore (graphics coordinator), Stiller, Victor Smith (camera and tease producer), Susan Stratton (executive producer/director), Cathy Glynn (graphics operator/chyron), Stu Lance (color announcer); front row, Doug Coffland (associate director), Norm Larson (linear/nonlinear playback/replay), Antony Hurd (audio mixer), Vance Edwards (linear/nonlinear playback/replay) and Rich Rose (video control). Courtesy of Andrew D. Bernstein Associates Photography

The assorted cameras gave the team an array of options, from a game camera that displayed the entire court to a tight camera that zeroed-in on the player with the ball at a given moment. “It’s pretty fun because you have to predict what’s going on before it happens so that you’re ready,” Stiller remarks. “The director is always looking not at the shot that’s on the air, but the next shot.”

Most games would wrap up within three hours, but many — including those that went to overtime — could go even longer. Stiller remembers a game during which Bryant broke his latest in a succession of NBA records. KCAL had a crew in place with first dibs on the player’s post-game interview, but the higher-ups at the station wanted to cut away before it could be broadcast. “There was another show that was coming up on KCAL that was very important to the people at the station,” the technical director recalls. “They told us that we should get off the air, but Susan didn’t. We sat there and we broadcast the interview. You really want to be able to serve the audience and give that to the audience.”

At the end of each game, the crew packed up and flew with the team to the next stop. “We stayed in the Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons,” Stiller says, though accommodations were not quite as luxurious as what the players could expect. “For us, to order a cup of coffee was the entire per diem,” she laughs. “You learned to travel with your own tea and immersion heater. They didn’t have them in the rooms at that time.” She also had to spend chunks of time away from her family. “I was very lucky to have a really good husband who looked after the kids and worked while I was gone,” she says. “We were so blessed.”

By and large, though, the technical director is grateful for those years on the road. “We’d go into different cities and they each had different labor characteristics,” she relates. “Texas is a right-to-work state, and people don’t make very much money, but they made sure that everybody eats and they’re very hospitable. And then you got into Boston, which is super-organized, but they had horrible conditions for the crew.”

Over the course of Stiller’s run as technical director of the Lakers road games, television itself was going through changes. “We went from standard definition to high definition,” she points out. “When you’re in one format, that’s cool; when you’re in another format, that’s cool. But the transition between one and the other is very difficult.” The one constant, of course, was the top-level play. She remembers Bryant stringing together nine 40-point-plus games, including a memorable contest with the Utah Jazz in 2003, but she appreciated any game in which he went airborne. “It seems the man could magically fly through walls,” she marvels.

Stiller’s experiences with the Lakers led to other opportunities in the sports world. “It helped me career-wise,” she says. “I worked on the NBA Finals for the NBA. I went to four Olympics with NBC — including snowboarding in Italy, which was really great — and Australia.” Eventually, she left sports to move on to entertainment programming, including stints technical directing NBC’s The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien (2008-2010) and its successor, TBS’ Conan (2010-present).

But Stiller will always remain grateful for her years with the Lakers. “Something magical happened during those years,” she reflects. “It was something just to be there.”

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Mary Lee Parisi on ‘Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy’

by Peter Tonguette
written by Peter Tonguette 9 minutes read

by Peter Tonguette

When colorist Mary Lee Parisi sits down with a show for the first time, she often focuses on the picture alone. “When you first get the tape, you kind of shuttle through to get an idea of what it’s about,” she says. “A lot of the time, while you’re working on the picture, you might just go through it with the audio off because, as you’re shuttling back and forth, it can be a little bit of an ear sore to listen to.”

Mary Lee Parisi.
Photo by Cameron Paris Cloud

That was not the case, however, when Parisi was assigned to work on the popular reality series Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy. Airing for three seasons on Fox from 2004 to 2007, each two-part episode featured a pair of real-life couples who consented to exchange spouses for a seven-day period.

With its outrageous premise and equally memorable participants, Trading Spouses demanded to be listened to — after all, how else could the colorist possibly follow the action that was happening on-screen? “With this one, I had to listen to it to find out what was going on,” she comments. “The participants were such characters. It was very watchable.”

And, through her contributions as its colorist, Parisi helped make the show more watchable, too. Working on Trading Spouses at Level 3 Post in Burbank until it concluded its run in 2008, she was integral in refining the appearance of the program. Instead of attempting to correct the fluctuations of light and color inherent in reality television, she decided to embrace such qualities for their dramatic potential. “I built an S-curve to make the video look a little more like film,” she explains. “That gave the image a little more punch, more contrast. It might’ve been even slightly harsher on the eyes, but it gave a dramatic effect so that it wasn’t just plain footage.”

A scene from Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy. Courtesy of Fox.

A native of Murray Hill, New Jersey, Parisi grew up with several strands in her life pointing to her future career as a colorist. Her father was a chemical engineer at Bell Labs (now Nokia Bell Labs), which gave her an appreciation for the latest and greatest in technology. “They had a display in the lobby, like a little museum, and they had the first TV phones,” she remembers. “You could go play with them. There were all kinds of cool things like that — text-to-speech, where you type something on the keyboard and the computer would speak.”

Parisi also had an artistic bent that served her well in her subsequent job. While at Hunter College, from which she earned a degree in film, she also pursued her love of painting. On the day of her final project as a senior, the future colorist remembers scrambling to finish by 11:00 a.m. “I got into the zone, and I was just slapping colors up there,” she recalls. “Hours went by, and I didn’t realize there was a crowd of five or six of my fellow students coming into class. They’re not saying anything, so I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, how bad is this?’ One of them says, ‘I wish I could paint like that.’ And I still have that painting hanging in my dining room.”

A scene from Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy. Courtesy of Fox.

Later in life, Parisi found herself getting into a similar mindset while working as a colorist. “You want to keep the same level of energy and concentration,” she comments. “In the end, you’re like, ‘I can do this.’ Your hands are going faster than your brain is thinking. As in any profession, you’re channeling something and it’s happening.”

After entering the film business at Precision Film Labs in New York, she relocated to Los Angeles in 1992 and found employment at Starfax, where she mostly worked on commercials, before landing at Level 3 Post. “They were called Ascent Media at the time,” remembers Parisi, who entered the Editors Guild the same time the facility became a union shop. At the time, she was working on NBC’s sitcom Just Shoot Me! (1997-2003) starring Laura San Giacomo, George Segal and Wendie Malick, on which she transferred dailies. She calls the job of colorist a “technical artist” position: “You’re an artist on the client’s work, and yet you’re still sitting there trying to hit all the buttons like on Star Trek.”

Mary Lee Parisi working on Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy in the mid-2000s.
Photo by Gregory Schwartz

Although Parisi has worked extensively as a final colorist on episodic TV shows at Filmlook, Inc., including the Disney sitcoms Hannah Montana (2006-2011) and That’s So Raven (2002-2007), done with Filmlook 24p, at the time she received the assignment to take on Trading Spouses at Level 3 Post, she had not worked too much on non-scripted projects. “Unless it was a music video, or you’re shooting live at an amusement park or something — that’s what the equivalent would be,” she says. The difference between the genres is stark: On a scripted show, the colorist’s goal is to fix flubs on an otherwise consistent palette, but on reality TV…well, there is no palette to start with.

“The camera was all over the place — indoor, outdoor,” Parisi says of Trading Spouses. “There was not a set where everything was perfect. I had to embrace that there was going to be one color coming through one half of the screen, and another on the other half, because there was lighting coming through a window or from the incandescent lights in somebody’s house.”

Parisi settled on her approach after watching the opening credits to the show, which were rendered in 1960s-style animation with silhouetted figures standing out against vibrant backgrounds; think the opening of Steven Spielberg’s feature film Catch Me If You Can (2002). “It was very mod,” the colorist says of the opening to Trading Spouses. “It had bright colors — violet and yellow — and the silhouetted characters on top of it. It was exactly something I would do if I were doing my own animation.”

The stylish, tongue-in-cheek look of the animation gave her a good idea about how to approach the series’ color correction. “I remember a shot that I pulled up where the participants are in the kitchen and the back door is open,” she recalls. “I saw all this blue light, and then the other person is in the kitchen by the stove, and it’s all orange. I remember thinking, ‘This is not a time for power windows. Embrace what it is.’ So I made it more saturated, made it more colorful and made it like those beautiful back plates that dictate that this is a colorful show.”

Parisi utilized the da Vinci 2K Plus color correction system (before it was purchased by Blackmagic Design, and re-spelled DaVinci, in 2009), on which she already had significant experience. “I used to be full time with them as a power-user trainer on the da Vinci 2K,” she explains. “That was important because, once I was able to master the advanced functions, I could then have better control and artistic ability. I wasn’t hindered by not understanding the full potential of the da Vinci 2K.”

A scene from Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy. Courtesy of Fox.

The colorist received each two-part episode one episode at a time, after editing was complete. “I would get the tape for part one as they were still editing part two,” she remembers. “Like everyone else, I didn’t get to see the finale until I got part two.” And, also like the viewing audience at home, she found herself getting wrapped up in the plotlines. “There were some reality shows that were painful, but this was more enjoyable to watch because it was like a soap opera,” she explains, referring to one of the most memorable participants, an exceedingly opinionated, booming-voiced woman called Marguerite Perrin — better known, across vast swaths of the internet, as “the God warrior.” Parisi attests: “She really put this show on the map.”

The shows were aided by top-notch post-production under the guidance of post supervisor Ryan Abbott. “The music was excellent and really kept the pace,” she says. “The editing was very well done and really told the story.” And the colorist made an equally important contribution. “I wasn’t trying to fix the show,” she explains. “I was trying to be the equivalent of the sound engineer with the score, and the editors with the cutting of the story. I tried to be equal to the level that they were doing in their work.”

A scene from Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy. Courtesy of Fox.

After Trading Spouses came to a close, the colorist continued to apply the lessons she learned on the series on future projects. “I took from that how you can put curves on a show,” reflects Parisi, who currently runs the company DCP Movies in Los Angeles. “Today, everyone has got Photoshop, and you can make these curves, and it’s very popular. But back then it wasn’t. This was an advanced feature and very deep into the system.”

Most of all, though, Parisi remains grateful for the chance to “paint” Trading Spouses. “It didn’t have to be ‘correct’; it had to be stylized in some way,” she says. “It was definitely the right choice.”

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ColumnsMy Most Memorable FilmWeb Exclusives

Gregg Barbanell on ‘Breaking Bad’

by Peter Tonguette
written by Peter Tonguette 11 minutes read

by Peter Tonguette • stills courtesy of AMC

Like most Foley artists, Gregg Barbanell, MPSE, aims for his work to go undetected by audiences. After all, footsteps should sound like they are emanating from the shoes of the actor who appears on screen, not the Foley artist behind-the-scenes, right? “Your work as a Foley artist has to blend in,” Barbanell declares. “All of the work that we do is invisible in that sense.”

Gregg Barbanell.

Sometimes, however, the sounds created by Barbanell and his colleagues are meant to stand out. From 2008 to 2013, the Foley artist worked on the AMC TV series Breaking Bad. Created by Vince Gilligan, the series revolves around teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston), who uses his lung cancer diagnosis as a pretext to enter a riskier, but more lucrative, line of work: drug dealer. The series also featured prominent parts for Aaron Paul (as White’s former student, Jesse Pinkman), Anna Gunn (as White’s wife, Skyler) and Bob Odenkirk (as White’s attorney, Saul Goodman).

The show’s Foley was meant to be expansive, encompassing sounds both loud and intimate. From the beginning, Barbanell realized that his work was not only being retained but featured. “It was motivating,” he recalls. “When I heard how they were using our stuff, that motivated me for the next five years to make sure everything I did on Breaking Bad was as perfect as I could make it. It was a Foley dream job.”

His “dream job” came about three decades into a career that had already encompassed more than 400 jobs in film and television. A native of San Francisco, the future Foley artist entered the School of Theatre at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Santa Clarita. Then, after his freshman year, he petitioned to enter the film school, the dean of which was acclaimed British filmmaker Alexander Mackendrick. “I submitted a script I wrote, and he liked it,” Barbanell recounts. “Not only was I able to get in, but he took me under his wing.”

A scene from Breaking Bad.

Mackendrick — whose credits included Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) — hoped that Barbanell had the makings of a great writer, but the student quickly realized his heart wasn’t in writing. “I have tremendous respect for writers, but it takes discipline I do not have,” he concedes. Nonetheless, he adds, “I loved CalArts. I refer to it as the best four years of my life.”

Upon graduation from CalArts, Barbanell entered the film business as an assistant picture editor on Michael Miller’s Jackson County Jail (1976), starring Yvette Mimieux and Tommy Lee Jones, and edited by Caroline Ferriol. Not long after, he found himself working on an independent feature directed by B-movie actor Keith Larsen, Young and Free (1979), which provided him with his first entrée into post-production sound. “I did a little bit of everything,” he explains. “Keith was looking for someone to cut sound effects on a film that was basically shot MOS. I said, ‘Hell, I could do that’ — even though I had never done it.” With his friend from Cal Arts, Ron Horwitz, he rented an editing room (actually a former film vault) at Sunset Gower Studios and began assembling a sound library using material from sound editor Gene Corso at Sunset Editorial.

A scene from Breaking Bad.

Young and Free was mixed at MGM, where the sound department was so impressed with Barbanell and Horwitz’s work that the pair was invited to join the studio as sound editors. Instead, recognizing how much sound work was then being done off the lot, Barbanell opted to join forces with Horwitz to co-found a sound editorial company, Mag City.

“I became the effects and Foley guy, and Ron cut dialogue and ADR,” recalls Barbanell, whose projects at Mag City included Peter Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack (1979), John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) and Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981). “When I first started doing Foley, we were generally asked to get the feet done, and not necessarily all of them, as well as some props,” he recalls. “During the flourishing of Foley in the ’80s and ’90s, the demands on us became greater and greater to the point where we were eventually asked to do most everything.”

In the mid-1980s, Mag City was sold, but before Barbanell had a chance to plot his next move, he began receiving job offers as a Foley artist — offers that have kept on coming to this day. “While I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next, the phone kept ringing,” he says. “I started building a reputation rather quickly, and fortunately, it’s still a good reputation that I’ve managed to somehow not screw up.”

Gregg Barbanell on the Foley stage on the last day of Foley for the final episode of Breaking Bad.

For years, the Foley artist focused his energies on feature films — including such notable projects as Carpenter’s They Live (1988), Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life (1991) and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001) — but he also found himself working consistently on television projects, contributing Foley effects to such series as Columbo (1971-2003), Moonlighting (1985-1989) and Silk Stalkings (1991-1999). “If they called me, I’d do it,” he relates. “To this day, I have a reputation of not saying no.” Today, like many in the industry, most of his work is on projects for the small screen.

The Foley on many TV projects, Barbanell said, is relatively straightforward and done on quick turnarounds — sometimes as little as a single eight-hour session for a one-hour drama. That was not the case on Breaking Bad, which he — then the staff Foley artist at Widget Post — first learned about from sound editor Kurt Nicholas Forshager.

“Out of the blue, I got a call from Nick, who said, ‘Gregg, I have a project I think I want you to do,’” Barbanell remembers. “He said, ‘But it’s really different and unusual, and it’s going to require a lot of you.’” Forshager explained that Foley would be integral to Breaking Bad. “We weren’t going to be running a lot of music,” Barbanell recalls. “It was going to be quiet, intimate and everything would matter — everything. It’s not big, bang, shoot-’em-up, explosions, car chases.” And the team would have the time to seek perfection. “Going into this, Nick told me they wanted two 10-hour days per episode, which equals two-and-a-half days,” the Foley artist continues. “Every single episode we handled like a feature. We would redo this, we would finesse that…”

A scene from Breaking Bad.

Just how serious were the show’s producers about this approach? A few episodes into the first season of Breaking Bad, Barbanell — who selected Foley artist Dominique Decaudain as his partner for the series — encountered a cue that read as follows: “Stick bug walking.” He explains: “It’s a camera-on-the-ground shot out in the desert. We’re going, ‘What? I don’t see a stick bug. What stick bug?’ Someone said, ‘There. Down. About center. Down low.’ And you can see a stick bug walking across. I’m thinking, ‘There is no way this can be played.’ But we did it.”

To replicate the sound of the stick bug walking in the sand, Barbanell made use of a pair of matchsticks. “I got the mic literally three or four inches from the sand,” he says. “I made it so that it wasn’t too soft, and I very, very delicately did the feet with the matchsticks.” Sure enough, when re-recording mixer Eric Justen showed the episode to the Foley artist, the stick bug sounds remained. “Eric played the scene, and you could hear the stick bug,” Barbanell remembers. “He said, ‘We’re featuring your stuff. Not only are we playing it, we’re relying on it.’”

On seasons three through five, post-production moved from Widget Post to Warner Bros., but Foley artists Barbanell and Decaudain — as well as most of the sound team — remained with the show. “I was able to stay with the show thanks to the producers,” the Foley artist relates. “This goes to Vince Gilligan and the producer, Diane Mercer. They are true to their people, and they’ve served them well.” For each episode, the Foley artists would be sent the picture to preview about a week before work began. “At home, I watched the episode, made notes and gathered props. If there was something I needed, I would go out and get it,” says Barbanell, who in preparation for the fifth season episode “Dead Freight,” had to determine how to bring alive the sounds of a train heist.

A scene from Breaking Bad.

“There was jumping on the train, and the characters were undoing these big, heavy, metal hatches with chains,” recalls the Foley artist, who made a trek to a junkyard where he spent hours combing through potential props. “I pulled out $300 worth of metal props,” he comments. “I loaded up the back of my SUV with all this stuff and took it to the stage.” For this particular episode, Barbanell realized that the time allotted would not be sufficient to complete the Foley. “We didn’t abuse this, but when we needed more time, we always got it.”

Other memorable episodes for the Foley artist include “Live Free or Die,” also from season five, featuring one scene in which White and Pinkman position a huge magnet outside of an evidence room (with the goal of wrecking a laptop inside). “Every single piece of evidence is attracted to the magnet, sending objects crashing to the ground and flying across the room, slamming into the wall,” Barbanell explains. “That was another scene that took at least 15 tracks.”

And, if he was once asked to imagine how a stick bug sounded, Barbanell was tasked with contemplating the noises produced by a fly in “Fly” from the third season. “There were several extreme close-ups of a fly; I remember one in particular, where it filled the screen,” he remembers. “We spent 30 minutes doing that one shot of the fly. We had to work to get the wing flutter just right. And then when it shook its little head and moved its little feet…”

A scene from Breaking Bad.

For their work on Breaking Bad, Barbanell and his colleagues received four Emmy nominations for Outstanding Sound Editing for a Series. When the show wrapped up its acclaimed run in 2013, his career continued as it had before, but he admitted to feeling a little let down. “I became emotionally attached to it,” he reflects.

Yet that sense of loss was lessened by an unexpected offer to join Gilligan’s follow-up/spin-off, Better Call Saul. Last summer, Barbanell and his crew provided Foley for season four and will continue this coming summer for season five. “Dominique was otherwise busy, so my talented partner from Universal, Alex Ulrich, and I are doing the Foley for Better Call Saul,” Barbanell comments. “We started watching, and they’re playing our stuff again, and it’s awesome.” In fact, it’s almost as rewarding as his experience on Breaking Bad.

“Breaking Bad is the pinnacle of my career,” he continues, in conclusion. “As a body of work, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to match it — before or since.”

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Jeannette Browning on ‘The Milagro Beanfield War’

by Peter Tonguette
written by Peter Tonguette 9 minutes read

by Peter Tonguette

From early in her career in the film business, Jeannette Browning recognized that she was something of a rarity. “I was really interested in dubbing, but I realized that there were no female dubbing mixers,” she says. “I thought, ‘Maybe if I succeed, I could be one of the first female dubbing mixers.’ It’s the kind of cool stuff you think about when you’re invincible and young. And then reality hits you.”

As she tried to gain a foothold, Browning ran into some roadblocks but ultimately found her place in the business as a recordist. Since the early 1990s, the successful dubbing and ADR recordist has made her professional home at Walt Disney Company.

On her very first union film, Robert Redford’s The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), Browning encountered two women whom she saw as role models on the journey ahead: picture editor Dede Allen, ACE, and supervising sound editor Kay Rose.

Jeannette Browning.

While working at the recording facility Sound One in Los Angeles, Browning served as the projectionist/dummy loader on Milagro. The Universal Pictures release unfolds in a made-up town in New Mexico, where a mercenary developer (Richard Bradford) finds himself locking horns with a mild-mannered farmer (Chick Vennera) in a fight revolving around the local water supply. The film featured Rubén Blades, Sonia Braga, John Heard and Christopher Walken in supporting roles.

Equally important to Browning, however, were Allen (who collaborated on the film with Jim Miller, ACE) and Rose. “You hear about the challenges women face in a predominantly male workforce, but these ladies had done it, so I felt, ‘OK, I can do this,’” Browning reflects. “It gave me hope and inspiration.”

A scene from The Milagro Beanfield War. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

As Browning tells it, the legendary picture editor and equally revered sound editor were supportive and nurturing colleagues. “They were quite delighted to see a woman in the machine room,” she says. “I felt the respect and the appreciation went both ways. They were very kind to me, they shared stories and I learned all sorts of interesting things.”

A native of the San Gabriel Valley, Browning was a film buff as a youngster but decided to pursue accounting and pre-law while a student at UCLA — up to a point, that is. During her senior year in college, she switched gears to marketing and advertising. Then, following her graduation in 1981, she found work as a driver for a trailer company, Cimarron. “They made the coming attractions for the films,” she explains. “I loved those, and sometimes they were the best part of going to a movie. We’d count how many we got to see, and then how many of those films we’d want to go see.”

A scene from The Milagro Beanfield War. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Although she enjoyed her time as a driver and glorified “film schlepper,” Browning was grateful when an opportunity arose for her to contribute creatively at Cimarron. “The sound girl — that’s what it was called then — left,” she remembers. “I did the transfers from quarter-inch to mag from the narration sessions, and one-to-ones of the production work tracks. I ended up building a sound room with a console, patch bay and speakers.” Immediately, she connected with the musicality inherent in working with sound. “I played piano growing up, so it was familiar,” she reflects. “I loved music. I also felt that trailers were an emotional rollercoaster ride totally driven by sound. It was all about the sound, and how it was utilized, to get you to want to see that movie.”

A video image of Jeannette Browning working in the same machine room in which she worked on The Milagro Beanfield War a year or so later.

Browning immersed herself in post-production, taking classes at UCLA and Los Angeles Valley College, and eventually landed at Sound One where Milagro was mixed. It represented her first project as a member of IATSE Local 695 (the sound technicians guild, whose post-production members merged into Local 700 in 1998). “I joined the union as a Y9 recordist position, but on Milagro another fellow employee was the recordist and I was the projectionist/dummy loader,” she explains. “I was responsible for the machine room, the playbacks and the projector. I was just thrilled to be on the show.”

Rose, whose credits as a sound editor include acclaimed films by directors Peter Bogdanovich, Mark Rydell and Martin Scorsese, left a vivid impression on Browning during their time together in the machine room. “She’d come up with a cigarette dangling in her mouth,” the future recordist recalls. “We’d run up to get her an ashtray, but Kay said, ‘No, no.’” Then, when Rose wanted to review a track, she instructed the crew to leave it on the machine. “She’d just tap her cigarette on the track where the gate mark had been made and walk away,” she continues. “I was like, ‘What was that all about?’ Then we’d hear over the intercom, ‘OK, that’s better.’ There had been a click, a snap or a pop on the audio track, and she just got rid of it with a little cigarette ash. That was not something you would learn in film school; she didn’t even have to bench it.”

“We pre-dubbed the dialogue, then the ADR, the backgrounds, the Foley and the sound effects,” Jeannette Browning explains. “Then the music came in and we put all of the pre-dubs up with the music elements, and start mixing the final master stems.”

Browning also heard Allen explain how she contributed to the shattering of glass ceilings on Bonnie and Clyde (1967) at Warner Bros., despite the opposition of studio head Jack Warner. Enter producer and star Warren Beatty. “Dede told us about working on the film and getting locked off the lot because, to quote Jack Warner, ‘No woman was going to cut any of my films,” she recalls. “She called Warren Beatty from the Smokehouse Restaurant and said, ‘I can’t get on the lot.’ He said, ‘I’ll be right there,’ and went over and brought her on the lot. Needless to say, we all know she cut that film.”

From a recording standpoint, Browning remembers Milagro as a very typical show. “We pre-dubbed the dialogue, then the ADR, the backgrounds, the Foley and the sound effects,” she explains. “Then the music came in and we put all of the pre-dubs up with the music elements, and start mixing the final master stems. It was a 4-track back then.” Each evening, the team had to be ready for playback for Redford, who, earlier in the decade, had been honored with a Best Director Oscar for Ordinary People (1980). “There was pressure because he was Robert Redford, but he ended up being so nice, calm and relaxed,” she says. “When we called him ‘Mr. Redford,’ he said, ‘It’s Bob.’ And we all went: ‘OK, Bob!’” The teamwork at the facility paid off, however. “We had our A game,” she adds. “We had very fast and efficient reel changes.”

A scene from The Milagro Beanfield War. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Although The Milagro Beanfield War received tepid notices from critics, and failed to ignite at the box office, the film received its due as far as sound was concerned: Composer Dave Grusin received an Oscar for his score. For Browning, the impact of the film was incalculable. Following several short-term gigs, including a second stint at Cimarron and a position at Universal, she found her way to Disney, first in sound transfer, then as the recordist in the main theatre and finally on the ADR stage. Her films as an ADR recordist at the studio have included M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2000), Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018). “Getting into the union opened doors,” she comments. “The first time I thought I was the luckiest person in the world was when I got put in the main theatre. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh — this is the stage where Fantasia was dubbed.’ And the projectionist/dummy loader, and my co-worker ,was a woman!”

The recordist never worked again with Allen or Rose, but did get a chance to reunite with Redford when the two crossed paths on his subsequent directorial effort, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000). On that project, the opportunity arose for her to express her appreciation to the filmmaker. “I thanked him so profusely for bringing Milagro to Sound One,” she comments. “I said, ‘You got me in the union and I’m here now.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you.’” Browning couldn’t let the director leave, of course, without getting a few autographs for assorted family members. “I said, ‘Would you sign something for my stepmom and my aunt?’” she adds. “He said, ‘Sure.’ I had these 8×10 pictures of him from years before and he signed them, which was really cool.”

A scene from The Milagro Beanfield War. Courtesy of Universal Pictures

More than an autograph, however, Browning got a career out of The Milagro Beanfield War. “It was the film that changed my life,” she reflects. “I would like to think that if it hadn’t been that film, it would have been something else. It could have been this or it could have been that — but it wasn’t. This is what happened, and this is where it has led me. And I am very grateful.”

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ColumnsMy Most Memorable Film

Tommy Vicari on ‘Road to Perdition’

by Peter Tonguette
written by Peter Tonguette 10 minutes read

by Peter Tonguette

You might say that Tommy Vicari, CAS, is the beneficiary of good timing. A few years after director Sam Mendes and composer Thomas Newman were the toast of the film world for the Academy Award-winning American Beauty (1999), Vicari was asked to serve as scoring mixer on their follow-up film, Road to Perdition (2002).

Tommy Vicari.

The crime drama, which unfolds in Illinois during the Great Depression, stars Tom Hanks as Michael Sullivan, a worker bee in the Mafia operation of John Rooney (Paul Newman). Adapted from a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, the storyline takes off when one of Sullivan’s sons with wife Annie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Michael, Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin), is an inadvertent observer to a Mafia hit. Having themselves become targets, father and son skip town in flight from the mob operation, including Rooney’s son Connor (Daniel Craig) and menacing photographer/killer Maguire (Jude Law). With its potent blend of humanity and thrills, the DreamWorks Pictures release received admiring reviews and impressive box office receipts, grossing over $100 million during its summer release.

“Imagine this: Sam Mendes wins Best Picture for American Beauty, an incredible movie; and Tom Newman is nominated for Best Score,” Vicari reflects. “This is their follow-up, and they’ve asked me to do this movie. This is my first major motion picture — the first time that I’m the engineer: ‘This is my movie.’”

Although Road to Perdition was Vicari’s most significant film to date, he had worked in the record business — and flirted with the film business — for decades. A native of Southern California, he grew up in a family of music-makers. “My mother was a singer in a big band; my uncles were musicians,” he recounts. “I remember listening to Ray Charles when I was a child — and Sinatra, Jackie Wilson, Nat King Cole and Dean Martin. As a teenager, I loved the British invasion with the Beatles, and I loved the Phil Spector records.”

Vicari parlayed his passion into a career in the early 1970s when he joined Capitol Records. His first jobs, however, were in the mailroom and then in the data-processing department — not exactly what he had in mind. “That was pretty much as far away from the record business as I could get,” he recalls. “I got a job with an independent record producer who had worked at Capitol Records, and we had a little company for about a year, but I got a connection with the daughter of our secretary — who was the secretary of [A&M Records executive] Jerry Moss.”

After completing a three-month engineering apprenticeship program at A&M, Vicari won employment at the legendary label, working first as an assistant engineer and then as a full-blown engineer. “A&M was the hub of the record business at that time,” he remembers. “Every day when you went to work, it was Joni Mitchell, Burt Bacharach, Barbra Streisand, Joe Cocker, Billy Preston, Paul Williams, Gino Vannelli, Cat Stevens… It was just a plethora of amazing music — some of the era’s most memorable artists.”

Tommy Vicari, left, working with composer Thomas Newman on the score for the pilot of The Newsroom series in 2012.

Four years later, he accepted a position as staff engineer at Sound Labs and eventually went independent. “I was the executive producer of Prince’s first album for Warner Bros., when he was just 17,” Vicari comments. “One day I introduced Prince to Sly Stone. I remember standing in the Record Plant, thinking to myself, ‘This kid is going to kick your ass!’”

As he was making waves with music, however, Vicari was getting a taste for film. Early in his career, he received a sound credit on the Joe Cocker concert film Mad Dogs & Englishmen (1971), while his association with Williams led to his work as a scoring mixer on Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise (1974), which featured Williams in a leading role. Other film assignments followed, including the Streisand-Kris Kristofferson A Star Is Born (1976) with music producer Phil Ramone. Yet the then-engineer always had a clear sense of his career priorities. “I was never in the film business,” he offers. “I was in the record business.”

In 1996, Quincy Jones, executive producer of that year’s Academy Awards, invited Vicari to mix the music for the Oscars telecast, a gig that continues to this day. Feature film assignments quickly followed. Although his approach to mixing remained constant, he had to adjust to the different technology of film, as well as to the presence of dialogue and sound effects. “When I did Payback [1999] for Mel Gibson, they said, ‘OK, let’s hear the cue,’” Vicari recalls. “I played the cue, and I had pinned Mel up against the back wall because it was so loud. I was used to being a record mixer. I said, ‘Oh, this dialogue is kind of important!’”

He first crossed paths with Thomas Newman when the composer needed a mixer for an ultimately unused track in Martin Brest’s Meet Joe Black (1998). “It never made the movie, but I was incredibly honored,” Vicari says. Subsequently, he mixed Newman’s main theme to the HBO series Six Feet Under (2001-2005). Then came the offer to join Road to Perdition. “I was being inserted into a group of people who’ve been working together for a long period of time, and I didn’t feel completely comfortable,” he recalls. “But I felt completely honored to be in their presence, and I wanted to do the very best job I could.”

The three-month scoring process on Road to Perdition began at Paramount Stage M, where pre-records were done with individual instrumentalists, including Jon Clarke, Eric Rigler, Steve Kujala, George Doering, Steve Tavaglione, Michael Fisher and Rick Cox, among others. “Tom usually comes in with a skeleton guide, which we then embellish,” Vicari explains, adding, “Keep in mind, this is a totally analog movie. Every 10 passes, I have to make a slave and then bounce it all back to two multi-tracks. This was quite an involved situation, and I was helped by [guitarist] George Doering and [score recordist] Paul Wertheimer.”

Road to Perdition. DreamWorks/Photofest

After the pre-records were completed, the team went to the Newman Scoring Stage (named for Thomas’ father, the legendary composer/arranger/conductor Alfred Newman) at 20th Century Fox to add the orchestra with Armin Steiner. “Armin was one of the world’s premier scoring mixers, and my mentor,” he relates. “He scored the orchestra after I did all the pre-records.” The crew then returned to Signet Sound, where Vicari merged the orchestra and pre-records into the final mix. With the help of mix assistant Tom Hardisty, the final stems were mixed to Pro Tools.

The final mix of music includes many original pre-records, such as the haunting scene in which Sullivan and his son drive to the warehouse where the murder that launches the plot takes place. “That whole piece of music is all pre-recorded, and then you have strings coming in at a certain point to add emotion,” Vicari recounts. Other scenes, including the journey of Sullivan and son to Chicago, stand out for other orchestral appeal. “The ‘Road to Chicago’ is one of my favorite orchestral pieces,” the scoring mixer offers. “The melody is really beautiful, and it kind of builds. When the kid sees Chicago, the camera pans around, and then the music really crescendos until he gets past all the people having dinner and then gets to an elevator.”

As the scoring mixer describes it, the composition itself was completed during the mix. “There are a lot of elements that get put on tape, and then Tom sits with me in the mix and we audition it,” Vicari explains. “I can pretty much tell whether it’s going to make it or not, but we put it on, because you never know. It may be a good piece here, a piece there. It all added to the mosaic Tom created.”

Newman, he added, was part of the process each step of the way. “He’s involved in the direction that the musicians go all the way to the end of it,” he reports. For his part, Mendes was impressed with the mix of music — and how prominent it was in the film’s overall soundscape. “The way that the sound effects and the music co-exist in that movie is revolutionary,” Vicari maintains.

For Vicari, the adventure of working on Road to Perdition went beyond working on a memorable score. Despite his past experience on other projects, the film served as his official introduction to the world of major feature films. “I was new to the film business,” he says. “On one of the scoring dates, Sam Mendes came in with cinematographer Conrad Hall. Now I did not know who Conrad Hall was. I used to wait for the credits to roll, but I was usually looking for music. That movie is so beautifully shot. It was Conrad’s last film.”

It was just the beginning for Vicari, who went on to a multi-film collaboration with Newman. The two worked together on such films as Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man (2005), Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E (2008) and Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015), as well as two more films for Mendes: Jarhead (2005) and Revolutionary Road (2008). “As far as growing up, all of this stuff with the record business was fun — and I was young,” he reflects. “But these are great movies; Tom picks great movies.”

Today, the scoring mixer is as active as ever, working with composer Nicholas Britell on Moonlight (2016) and last year’s acclaimed If Beale Street Could Talk, but he remains partial to the unique power of Road to Perdition. “If Road to Perdition was the only movie I ever got to work on in my lifetime, that would be OK with me,” he says. “It was one of the highlights.”

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ColumnsMy Most Memorable FilmWeb Exclusives

Christine Culler on ‘Minority Report’

by Peter Tonguette
written by Peter Tonguette 10 minutes read

by Peter Tonguette • stills courtesy of 20th Century Fox / DreamWorks

John Ford directed Westerns, Billy Wilder made cynical comedies and David Lean helmed historical epics — right?

Although those directors each made a wide variety of movies, they will always be associated with certain genres. And, no less than directors, story analysts can get typecast, too. While working at 20th Century Fox in the early 1990s, story analyst Christine Culler was assigned a steady diet of romantic comedies and children’s books. Then, in 1995, a different sort of project came across her desk: Minority Report, adapted from a short story by Philip K. Dick, was a futuristic suspense film, heavy on action and low on meet-cutes.

Christine Culler.

“As a female reader, it was great to be associated with a muscular action/sci-fi film,” Culler comments. “You don’t want to be the girl that always gets the romantic comedy.”

Directed by Steven Spielberg, Minority Report starred Tom Cruise as John Anderton, a police officer in 2054 who makes use of the law-enforcement technique of “pre-crime,” in which the psychic capacities of three siblings are harnessed to anticipate acts of lawbreaking. When he is implicated as a future criminal, Anderton evolves into a skeptic of pre-crime. Colin Farrell (as Justice Department official Danny Witwer), Samantha Morton (as one of the so-called “precogs,” Agatha) and Max von Sydow (as pre-crime originator Lamar Burgess) co-starred in the film, which Fox released in the summer of 2002 to widespread critical praise and gigantic grosses — over $350 million worldwide.

For Culler, the project was gratifying not only due to its genre but also because she felt her feedback as a story analyst was integrated into the final product, thanks in part to the support of Fox executive Jorge Saralegui, himself a former story analyst. “When I gave my notes, I felt truly that Jorge actually listened and took them to the writers,” Culler remembers. “I would see some of my suggestions actually emerging in the script, which was totally cool. I loved that.”

Culler, whose father was employed at the United States Rubber Company (Uniroyal), grew up overseas. “I lived in Iran, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala,” recalls Culler, who acted in productions at UCLA for four years as a Theatre major, and then later attended the American Film Institute to focus on writing screenplays. “I was at AFI the second-to-last year it was at the Doheny Mansion,” she remembers. “When I got out of AFI, I supported myself waiting tables while writing scripts and a couple novels.” In 1984, she was hired as a reader at Creative Arts Agency. The following year, she accepted the same position at Lorimar — and her career as a story analyst was born.

A scene from Minority Report.

“It supported my writing habit,” Culler maintains. “The idea was, ‘Oh, being a story analyst is kind of like waiting tables for me, which I’d been doing for years already. I’ll just do this and do my own writing.’” After leaving Lorimar, she freelanced as a reader for several years before joining the story department at Fox in 1991. As her career progressed, she discovered the creative possibilities of her profession. “What I loved the most was getting a novel and figuring out how it could be adapted into a screenplay,” she relates. “The other part is just simply being in on the whole process of observing how a movie gets cast, and the type of actors that they end up picking. Sometimes you can’t imagine they would be doing these parts, and then suddenly it comes to life on screen.”

In the case of Minority Report, the project was initially set to star Arnold Schwarzenegger as Anderton — unsurprising since the first iteration of the screenplay was penned by Gary Goldman and Ronald Shusett, who were among the screenwriters of Schwarzenegger’s 1990 hit Total Recall (directed by Paul Verhoeven and, like Minority Report, derived from a story by Dick). “You could see how the early drafts of the script envisioned the character of Schwarzenegger as an old-time cop,” Culler explains. “And, since the two writers on it had also done Total Recall, right away I realized, ‘This is going to be a big action thriller.’ It wasn’t like I was going to be picking nits over character development.” Jan de Bont, best known for Speed (1994), had been slated as director.

A scene from Minority Report.

Intrigued with the project, Culler sought out the story on which it was based, The Minority Report, and found that several key elements were missing from, or underrepresented in, the adaptation. “I wasn’t even asked to do coverage on the short story, so I just read that on my own,” she explains. “The part that was helpful was the notion of fate versus free will. Anderton’s character arc had to really address that; is he going to change his destiny?”

Although Culler was an admirer of the action sequences in Total Recall, she stressed in her coverage that there were too many such scenes planned for Minority Report. “There was a tremendous amount of action, almost to the point where the writers really heaped it on,” she opines. “One of the things I said was, ‘Tone this down; it’s just too much.’ It was also very confusing.”

The story analyst also saw the possibilities in making the precogs more central to the storyline. “I figured that one way of making it more emotional, and something that audiences would really relate to, was to not just show the precogs at the beginning but to really bring them in, especially the female precog, whose name was Rose in the script,” Culler explains, referring to the character who was eventually renamed Agatha. “Of course, I intimated that it could conceivably be a romance of some sort, where Anderton rescues her.”

Story analyst Christine Culler in her home office (with co-worker Oliver) in 1995, about the time the first draft of Minority Report crossed her desk.

Culler also recommended heightening the rivalry between Anderton and Witwer. “I felt that it was important they consider upping the ante on the emotional conflict between the two central characters in the next rewrite,” she says. “That came about in several ways. In the early versions, it became an ugly rivalry between the young cop/old cop, but then later, in the movie version, age wasn’t the issue since Schwarzenegger was no longer Anderton, so it became about how Witwer was trying to find out why pre-crime wasn’t going to work.”

Some changes were made during the initial round of rewrites in 1995, including relocating the film from the unlikely setting of the Grand Canyon to Washington, DC (as it is in the released film). “There were a lot of special effects with people on air boots flying around the Grand Canyon,” Culler comments. “It was maybe inspired by Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior [1981], this near-future, post-apocalyptic desert world. But by the second draft, still in 1995, it was switched to Washington.”

A scene from Minority Report.

Two years later, the project returned to Culler, who found that a new version by novelist Jon Cohen had integrated many of her suggestions, including a bigger part for the female precog, Agatha. “I was so excited about it; it felt like an entirely new script,” remembers the story analyst, who, in her coverage of the new script, praised the altered conflict between Anderton and Witwer, as well as a more imaginatively conceived world of the future. In fact, some of the most vivid images that made it to the finished film — including the chase of Anderton through a car factory and the presence of creatures resembling spiders that could scan people’s eyes — originated in Cohen’s draft. “This was apparently his only screenplay,” Culler reflects. “He came up with some amazing ideas.”

By this point, Tom Cruise was intending to star and Steven Spielberg to direct. “As soon as Spielberg and DreamWorks got involved, it was out of my hands,” Culler explains. Without the involvement of Culler, Cohen’s screenplay was revised by Scott Frank, who added substantial twists and turns to the plot — a move applauded by Culler. “Spielberg turned it into more of a murder mystery instead of a political thriller,” she says. “I thought that was really clever, because I think audiences in this case relate more to that.”

Meanwhile, the precogs — especially Agatha — were given the prominence Culler felt they deserved. “There is a scene where Tom Cruise rescues the girl from the precogs and it’s raining outside, so he protects her with an umbrella and disappears into a crowd of people also carrying umbrellas,” Culler recalls. “Well, that’s like an homage to Hitchcock. That must have come from either Spielberg or Scott Frank, because I don’t recall that being in one of the other drafts.”

A scene from Minority Report.

The ending, in which the precogs are released from their state of servitude, was also a Spielberg-Frank innovation. “In essence, the precogs go into the witness-protection program,” Culler says. “That’s the thing I admire so much about Spielberg: He knows how to please an audience. I’m sure that if Philip K. Dick had anything to say about it, the ending would have been more grim, but not as many people would’ve gone to see it.”

After her involvement with Minority Report, Culler was assigned other projects that moved her further away from the terrain of romantic comedies and the like, including Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2001). “At that stage of my career as a reader, I started getting stuff that was a lot darker and more challenging,” she reflects. “I recall someone told me there was some discussion among the executives: ‘Oh, Chris is really good with violence.’ And I thought, ‘Great! I’m in!’”

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ColumnsMy Most Memorable Film

Nancy Parker on ‘Kickboxer’

by Peter Tonguette
written by Peter Tonguette 10 minutes read

by Peter Tonguette

As a Foley artist, Nancy Parker, MPSE, is tasked with creating the sounds of major life events for characters on-screen. “I go to work and I may perform open-heart surgery, or I may saddle, bridle and ride a horse,” she says. “Every day is different, and coming up with the sounds and the energy for each cue is a rewarding challenge.”

Nancy Parker.

For one of her most significant early films, however, Parker had to ask herself: What does a kickboxing match sound like? In 1989, she was assigned to work with fellow Foley artist James Fisher on the hit film Kickboxer. The globe-trotting action thriller stars martial-arts-maestro-turned-actor Jean-Claude Van Damme as Kurt Sloane, a kickboxing trainer who ends up partaking in the foot-heavy sport himself. 

Co-directed by Mark DiSalle and David Worth, the film was successful at the box office when released by the Cannon Group in late summer. After all, remember what John Cusack called kickboxing in Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything… (1989): “the sport of the future.”

In the film, Van Damme did the on-camera kicking and boxing, of course, but to simulate the sounds of the fighting, the production turned to Parker and Fisher — and a side of beef. “We brought it onto the Foley stage for me to hit with my fist, a gloved hand, a stick or a club to create the sounds for the blows to the body,” she remembers. “They would want different things for each part of the body: the shoulder, the chest, the hip, the back. It was fun — and brutal.”

A native of San Gabriel, California, Parker grew up with an interest in fashion. Her mother was the Discovery Charm School instructor at the Sears in Pasadena and head of the department store’s Fashion Team Board. “She’d take me to work and I’d help dress the models for fashion shows and get to do some mannequin modeling,” says the Foley artist, who later found work at a boutique on Rodeo Drive. By then, however, Parker had studied film at Saddleback College and knew she wanted to break into the industry. 

“A producer walked into the boutique and instead of saying, ‘Can I help you?,’ I said to him, ‘I want to work in the film business,’” she confesses. “Luckily, he was a producer who introduced me to Dino Conti, Dino De Laurentiis’ right-hand man.” Parker learned that De Laurentiis would soon be producing a remake of John Ford’s The Hurricane (1937) in Bora Bora. “My parents happened to be going to Tahiti on their 25th wedding anniversary,” she says. “I explained to them that I must join them on their trip because I was determined to get a job on the film.” As soon as she arrived, she managed to secure a meeting with De Laurentiis. “He said, ‘I have a lot of problems,’” Parker recounts. “I said, ‘Well, if you have a lot of problems, you need me.’” She joined the film, eventually titled simply Hurricane (1979), as a costumer.

Upon returning to Southern California, Parker began working with Sound Trax, a post-production house run by Jeremy Hoenack. As an account executive, her job was to steer projects to the company, but in the process she received an education in filmmaking. “I was introduced to post-production sound — the sound effects, cut effects, Foley and ADR — in his little studio,” she relates. “He said, ‘This is what we provide on films after principal photography.’”

Parker brought in Mel Damski’s Yellowbeard (1983), a comedy starring Graham Chapman, Peter Boyle and Marty Feldman, and began to learn to do Foley on the swashbuckling film. “I’d have to find props, so I went in my parents’ garage and found a golf ball retriever in my dad’s golf bag, and I used that to help with the telescope,” Parker says.

The experience proved revelatory. Now, when Parker visits a dentist’s office, she listens for the sounds generated by the tools. If she hears the rustling of jewelry on someone nearby, she wonders what kind of bracelet the person is wearing. “I’m always listening,” she comments. “It kind of made it cool for my whole life.”

After leaving that job, Parker ran a casting company in Santa Barbara, and also produced corporate communication films and commercials in San Francisco, but longed to return to the creativity she had found on Foley stages. “I was fortunate to find two Foley artists, Alyson Dee Moore and Patsy Nedd-Doski, who were looking to train someone they could work with,” she explains. “It was just like I struck gold at that point.”

In 1987, she teamed with Moore and Nedd-Doski to work on episodic television and miniseries, including the Western Lonesome Dove (1989) and David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks (1990-91). “We would go to all the great Foley stages all over town — Ryder, Disney, Directors Sound — which we need more of now,” Parker reflects. “We brought our bags of shoes and specialty props. Alyson and Patsy made room for me in the Foley world, for which I am so grateful.”

Nancy Parker in 1989 on the Disney Foley stage for 
A Mother’s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story.

Yet Van Damme also had a part to play in Parker’s career evolution. After meeting Fisher at Glen Glenn Sound (later Todd-AO), where she, Moore and Nedd-Doski were then working, the Foley artist received the assignment to work on Kickboxer. “I was just a year or two in,” Parker comments. “I was lucky to have the opportunity to work on an action film like Kickboxer.”

During the Foley session on the film, she collaborated for the first time with Foley editor Karola Storr. “We clicked,” Parker recalls. “It was extremely significant to work on that show with her. She was just a champion of Foley in sound.” As Storr sat with the re-recording mixer in a booth, she would use the talkback button to communicate with Parker about the meaning behind a particular cue. “We’d be working on a cue with someone handing money through a jail cell,” the Foley artist says. “Karola would say, ‘Nancy — bribery!’ And I just went, ‘I got it!’ She made it contagious; I just wanted to be really good.”

She and Fisher divided their duties on Kickboxer, but Parker knew she wanted to be responsible for recording many of the body hits. “You kind of split up the characters right down the middle, like, ‘I’ll do that guy and you do him,’” she explains. “But I just wanted to get into the crux of the show and create these sounds. I said, ‘Let me jump in and do those hits; this looks like fun.’”

To help the Foley artist generate the sound of a fist — or, in the case of many scenes in Kickboxer, a foot — hitting skin, a side of beef was needed on the Foley stage. “They would bring it in,” Parker recounts. “Then, of course, you’d have to get fresh meat the next day.” More complex, of course, was deciding the sound of one hit versus another. “The main thing in the movie was kickboxing,” she explains. “So, what does the foot sound like? The foot sounds different than the hand. And are they barefoot? You want to make each sound different so that they are distinguishable: ‘Okay, they just hit his shoulder, so there’s some bone there…’”

Kickboxer.
Cannon Film Distributors/Photofest

Under the guidance of Storr, with whom she would work on several later projects, Parker walked away from Kickboxer with her eyes — and ears — opened. “Karola focused so much on the nuance and the value of sound, and how it can bring out the character and the story,” she says. “I really thought, ‘I’m not here on the stage. I’m on the screen.’ You have to be that person.”

Even if that meant imitating an action star like Van Damme: “With Jean-Claude Van Damme, you just want to be big,” she comments. “Even though I’m five-foot-nothing, I have to come up with that energy, and I did. There’s a way to do it.”

Although Kickboxer was Parker’s first foray into the action genre, it was not her last. She later served as a Foley artist on such action-driven films as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), The Bourne Supremacy and Spider-Man 2 (both 2004). “I always enjoy doing some kind of a tussle, even if it’s not quite the punch but the jerking back and forth,” she explains. “It’s energy, and you get your aggressions out.”

And Parker, whose love of Foley continues on projects at Universal Studios, Warner Bros. and Sony, also made another movie starring Van Damme, 1990’s Death Warrant (collaborating with Foley artist John Post; Storr again was the Foley editor). “That was more of a prison movie, but he’s always fighting,” she says. “I was lucky because Karola worked quite a bit, and having that relationship, she knew what I could handle and was willing to give me those chances.”

Years after both films, Parker met Van Damme face-to-face when she was doing the Foley on an animated project at a studio in Burbank. “He was looping there,” she remembers. “I told him, ‘Oh, we worked on Kickboxer,’ and he said, ‘Oh my God, that’s great!’ I had one of the kneepads that I used to keep my knees protected if I was doing something on the ground, and he signed it for me with a drawing of himself. He’s a pretty good artist.”

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ColumnsMy Most Memorable FilmWeb Exclusives

Jan Yarbrough on ‘The Godfather’ Restoration

by Peter Tonguette
written by Peter Tonguette 11 minutes read

by Peter Tonguette • film stills courtesy of Paramount Pictures

When Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was released in 1972, the film was celebrated by critics. In The New York Times, for example, Vincent Canby called the frequently beautiful, always intense crime film “one of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment.”

Audiences were no less adoring. The Paramount release — featuring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and James Caan as members of an extended family of mafiosi — was the top box office draw of the year, ranking ahead of Ronald Neame’s The Poseidon Adventure and Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? 

Jan Yarbrough.

Millions may have seen the movie, but, during its initial release, colorist Jan Yarbrough was not among them. “I don’t think I saw it when it came out,” Yarbrough says. “Lots of bits and pieces and scenes, but not the whole and complete and entire movie.”

Three decades after its release, however, Yarbrough was given the opportunity to study The Godfather more closely than any mere audience member. In 2006, the colorist was assigned to work on the restoration of the film at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging in Burbank. Under the leadership of film preservationist Robert A. Harris, Yarbrough helped to restore the richness, depth and texture of the cinematography of Gordon Willis, ASC. As the colorist recounts it, the year-long process was painstaking.

“For a year prior to working on it, we researched and found every piece of image that exists on The Godfather in this world,” Yarbrough recalls. “Every element got inspected and reviewed. We looked at every piece and found the best images we could for every shot.”

A native of Southern California, Yarbrough had the goal of becoming a cinematographer himself when he was young. “I grew up with a father who loved photography, and early on, he put a still camera in my hands,” he explains. “I did a lot of darkroom work for him until college, and always enjoyed working on film prints and creating images. I thought I was going to go in and become a big cinematographer since I knew camera pretty well.”

However, upon entering Los Angeles Valley College, Yarbrough found that there were more opportunities to work with sound than pictures. “A lot of people wanted to become big cinematographers,” he says. “I always liked electronics, and electronics was my minor in school, so I did sound work.”

A scene from the restoration of The Godfather.

After transferring to the USC School of Cinematic Arts, from which he graduated in 1974, the colorist-to-be found work as a production sound recordist on independent films and television shows, but soon tired of the instability of freelance gigs. “Student loans came due, and I needed the comfort zone of having a consistent income, so I started looking for an in-house job,” says Yarbrough, who managed to secure a job in the videotape vault at the post-production facility TransAmerican Video (TAV) in Hollywood.

He parlayed the entry-level position into a job as a videotape operator. “I soon learned how to do video through Bill Buck and another mentor colorist by the name of Walt Coleman,” says Yarbrough. After working as a colorist at TAV for several years, he went on to Ruxton Ltd. and Starfax, where he worked on television shows that integrated images shot on film cameras with images from electronic video cameras. “It was all kind of the same thing: color-correction, whether it was on a video image or a film image,” he recalls. “We were taking the wide dynamic range and color palette of negative film and twisting it to match a very limited video image, making it look seamless to the client’s eye.”

A scene from the restoration of The Godfather.

For the past 24 years, Yarbrough has hung his shingle at Warner Bros. MPI, where he has worked as a digital intermediate colorist on such major new releases as Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) and David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). He has also worked on several high-profile restorations of classic films, including John Huston’s The African Queen (1951). “The company’s projects encompass both new films and restorations, but for some reason, all of a sudden word got out and restorations started to happen,” he explains. “And I ended up getting a good portion of them.”

Whether working on a new film, or an old favorite, his job remains the same — or al least similar. “On new films, the DP often doesn’t have time to do what he wants to do on the set, so we, as colorists, end up having to add depth, some shadow work and some highlight work,” Yarbrough reveals. “We have to do that, too, with the old films, but we also have to keep in mind what the original intent of the filmmaker was.”

A before and after comparison of images during the restoration of The Godfather.

Yet when Warner Bros. MPI embarked on the task of restoring The Godfather — as well as its acclaimed sequels, The Godfather: Part II (1974) and The Godfather: Part III (1990) — several principal behind-the-scenes artists were available to participate in the restoration process, including Coppola and Willis (who died in 2014).

“It started out as an effort with a lot of hands attached to it, and that always makes it difficult to know what’s what,” Yarbrough confesses. “In the beginning, they had invited the original timer, and they also brought in Allen Daviau, ASC, the well-known cinematographer.” He found the artists’ input to be valuable, but in the final analysis, he trusted what he found on film. “I’ve dealt with negatives since the age of five,” he says. “And I know what a negative is and isn’t telling me.”

In the case of The Godfather, the negative had mostly bad news to communicate to the colorist. “The Godfather is probably the Paramount movie, and from the beginning, requests would come from VIPs for a print to view at their homes,” Yarbrough relates. “Instead of sending a print that was already in the vault, common practice at the major studios was to create a new one-off print each time from the original camera negative. The negative over time accumulated an abnormal amount of damage that comes with a lot of physical handling and running on high-speed printing machines.”

A before and after comparison of images during the restoration of The Godfather.

Given the negative’s precarious state, Paramount undertook a search for everything from interpositives to prints to find the best versions of specific scenes or even individual shots. “We ended up replacing or piecing together 70 percent of the original camera negative,” Yarbrough comments. “A lot of our time was spent picking the right pieces, putting them in and making sure that it all flowed and worked properly.”

For some shots, the team retained some sections of the negative but had to add material from a different source for other sections. “We started noticing certain parts where they may have spliced in a few frames of a dupe neg to cover up previous breakage,” the colorist recalls. “There were a couple of shots where we actually took a portion of a frame from a different source and put that in to replace something that was, say, torn badly.”

During one particularly challenging shot featuring the exterior of a church, the right side of the frame was damaged, necessitating the addition of a different element. “With the kind of shrinkage that every film element goes through, I was able to take it, twist the geometry a bit and get the color to the point where the whole section was just beautifully matched,” Yarbrough remembers. “Things like that are just fun to do — and a good challenge. They’re a great reward when you can get them to look right.”

A scene from the restoration of The Godfather.

He also had to reckon with the characteristically dark cinematography of Willis, recalling, “Gordon had a different way of using a light meter. He purposely underexposed.” By the time Yarbrough encountered the negative, however, its individual organic color dye layers had begun to fade unevenly. “We were starting with an underexposed negative to begin with, and now had to deal with all of the deteriorating organic issues of an old piece of film,” he says.

The restored The Godfather premiered at the Steven J. Ross Theatre on the Warner Bros. lot in 2006.

Yarbrough used the tools available on the BaseLight color-grading system to retain the film’s deep blacks without shortchanging detail. “You can use one part of it to paint the picture the way you want it, then you can add specific correction layers where you can take the blackest part of the black and actually make it a little more black,” he explains. Black-blacks were a part of Gordon’s color palette.” The colorist also sought to even out — but not eliminate — the grain in the film.

Throughout the restoration, Yarbrough periodically checked in with Willis, who was then based on the East Coast and frowned upon traveling. “We’d send him a cassette every once in a while, have him look at it and then get his comments on it,” says the colorist, who speaks with admiration of the legendary cinematographer. “He had an image, and he knew how to get it. The gentleman was just a genius when it came to images.”

In the end, Yarbrough’s meticulous attention to the palette of The Godfather reaped rewards. In 2008, when the restored trilogy was released on DVD and Blu-ray, New York Times home video columnist Dave Kehr commented, “Mr. Coppola’s three films seem to have reclaimed the golden glow of their original theatrical screenings… The tight grain of the image, so important a component of Mr. Willis’s original low-light photography, has returned to particularly spectacular effect in the four-disc Blu-ray edition.”

“Paramount said it was the film that kicked off the restoration and preservation program at the studio,” says Yarbrough, who has continued to specialize in restorations, armed with tools and approaches he honed on The Godfather.

“I found new ways of doing things on that film that I never would have thought about doing for a good 10 years down the road,” he reflects. “I’m working on a restoration of The Goonies [1985] right now, and using similar techniques as I was back then.”

Jan Yarbrough, left, with cinematographer John Seale at the American Society of Cinematographers Awards in 2011.

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