by Mr. Woody Stubblefield

There is no denying the allure of working on big-budget, AAA Hollywood productions. They pay well, they’re star-studded, and they have the power to transport audiences to worlds and realities completely unlike our own. However, not every production has the resources or the budget to tell stories at this scale. There is a whole world of creative and innovative stories being told on lower budgets and the filmmakers who thrive within these limitations are some of the best in the business.

Back in 1998, I was a music producer for Ice Cube and his music production company, Street Knowledge Productions. I was involved in the music videos for the songs I produced as on-camera talent, but had no idea that I would be pursuing a new path as a film production sound person for the next twenty years until one day, one of my childhood friends called. He had been a gang member, had been shot multiple times, and sold drugs to make a living. He called to ask me to do sound for his film project. I couldn’t imagine him having had any interest in filmmaking. He somehow got into USC’s film school and decided to do a film on one of South Central Los Angeles’s biggest drug lords, Freeway Ricky Ross, an older guy we knew well from the same neighborhood.

My friend approached me about doing sound for the film because he knew I did music and assumed this would be easy for me to do because, as he explained, “All it is, is a itty bitty mix board, and you already know how to work on the big boards, so you can do this!” I tried to talk my way out, but I couldn’t. I thought, well, I’ve damn near spent all of my royalty money and I’m doing some hustling in the streets that could go bad at some point so, I ended up in a production office on Melrose in a new environment of people, and trying to figure out how this relates to a movie. I met the Production Manager who explained how and why I was here and said I had no idea about what my childhood friend wanted me to do.

“I do rap music. I don’t know anything about this,” I told him.

He sat me down in front of a computer, which was the first time I touched a computer, and he pulled up a list of names and numbers. I ended up contacting Lionel Ball, a Production Sound Mixer—now deceased—and told him that if he taught me about sound in film, he could do my friend’s film and I would work with him. I started with Lionel making $50 a day for 18-hour workdays on low-budget projects. Some were lightweight porn, and some other low-budget shows. From there I started booming and I liked the set atmosphere enough that I decided to stick with it and see what could happen.

After years of booming for Lionel Ball, he would have projects that had one or two pick-up days and he would say, “You think you’re ready to get your feet wet? You know this stuff, you have the background, you can do it!” And there I was with a Mackie mixer, a 416 Sennheiser, and a DAT machine that Lionel loaned me to start me off. This was not like a recording studio, nor the protocols we use in the studio. I was advised by my mentors to not EQ the track. We only recorded in mono, not stereo. We used condenser mics and not dynamic mics for singing. We needed good strong clean recording levels. We didn’t mix the audio after it’s recorded to tape. All recordings were dry with no effects like we used in the studio. These were some of the things I had to adjust my thinking on.
Now I was at the helm of the mix ship. I was so active, battling with DPs who seemed to be causing obstacles to getting good sound and moving onto the next setup or scene without considering if I had good sound and if I was happy. I wasn’t having it. I became like Lionel Ball and Oliver Moss; fighting for good sound like it was my money being spent. I also started thinking it was my time to do things that I quietly thought my mentors should have been doing. Like most young people think, I figured I knew a little better. Still, after 20+ years in the game, I call my mentors Oliver Moss, Veda Cambell, and Reggie Dunn. There were also the technical guys like Mike Paul and Robert Anzalone at Location Sound and John Hicks at Trew Audio.

Of course, some helped me along the way as I started getting other sound jobs. In 1999, I was working on a movie and a Key Grip and Gaffer named Johnny Martin owned two big trucks full of equipment. I would be on set with my equipment set up on a folding lunch table from production. The boom guy and I would grab both ends of the table and move it to stay out of the shot or carry it from set to set. One day, Johnny came over and said, “Hey kid, I like you and I made something for you.” Johnny had the grips cut wood from the truck to create a tabletop shelf and attached it to what I later found out was a Magliner, so I could move around more easily. I was hella thankful. It felt like I was given a new Cadillac. At the end of the show, I rolled the cart back over to Johnny’s truck and he said “My gift to you, keep it.”

I was so damn happy, I rolled it over and started putting it in my back seat when one of the grips came over and said “Hey dude that goes in our truck.”

I said “Oh no, he gave it to me.”

In disbelief the grip said “No way dude, those cost a lot of money.”

I didn’t budge, so he went to Johnny as I loaded my new cart into the car. As I was in my car about to drive off, that same grip appeared once more and said, “Dude you’re one lucky mother F>>>>.”

I smiled and drove off. That Magliner is still my main cart to this day. And there was Frank at Coffey Sound, now deceased, who helped me stay in the game by renting me equipment by charging me for a single day on weeklong rentals. That helped me keep a little money in my pocket and have access to equipment that I couldn’t afford to own myself. Between Frank and Lionel, I was able to start acquiring my gear.

When you work on low-budget films, you don’t make enough money to invest in better equipment or even new equipment. I’ve worked on so many low-budget jobs where there wasn’t enough budget for wireless packs for every actor on set. I had to fight for time to get coverage of all the actors on the boom mic. I was taught that wireless was an aid to getting sound in wide master shots or shots where you just couldn’t get the boom in. Nowadays it kind of feels like the boom is the backup or the fill-in to the wireless mics. You work a lot harder on low-budget films because the producers and directors are trying to make a shoestring-budget film look like or feel like a multi-million-dollar film. Most of the time, those films look like the budget productions they are.

Low-budget films can allow you the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. I once had the opportunity to visit the post editor working on a project I recorded and boomed at the same time. I thought I had done a good job until he let me hear some takes and then allowed me to sit at the computer, line up the takes, and pick the best audio of all of the takes for the edit. I learned that I had recorded some bad audio that couldn’t be fixed in certain scenes, and the audio had to be discarded. The producers were going to be told that it was unusable and they would have to pay to have actors ADR the scenes or just go with what they had. I felt like crap. I learned that there’s more to sound recording than sticking the mic out there in any environment and expecting the recordings were going to be good or acceptable. Good sound in a low-budget film is just as critical as it is in a big-budget film. Good sound on a low budget can make that film worth watching. When I hear bad sound or bad moments of sound in a movie, I wonder what was the cause of that. To this day, I will still work with students from AFI, UCLA, USC, L.A. Film School, and some low-budget union projects of people whom I’ve met along the way trying to get their careers as a director or producer off the ground. In my first years of working on low budgets, I didn’t think about big-budget films. My focus was my call to do the job. The trust a producer had in me or heard from someone about me to be the one to call had me pumped as if I was on a big-budget film. I always felt like my work may make this project blow up like The Blair Witch Project or something. I thought if they can do it, this might be the one and I’m a part of it. It’s a pleasure for me to collaborate with these filmmakers in the creative process of bringing their projects to life and providing them with high-quality sound, and ensuring that they won’t need to spend excessively on post-production audio fixes due to skill and planning.

One bad thing about low-budget productions is they don’t have the budget to adequately fund each department according to what the script calls for. Why do they push ahead and come at us like “This is what we have and we don’t have anymore so you’re just going to have to make it work.” You have to at that point decide if moving forward will stress you and also hurt your reputation in the end.

One other bad thing about low-budget films is some start production without all of the funds in place and they’re not upfront about that with the crew. At some point, you will start to hear and see that there is a budget problem. Usually, you’ll overhear the producer’s issues or get wind of some of the crew members not getting their checks on payday. In low-budget films, there are a lot of young people and some seasoned folks who need to make some money to pay the bills. I remember one film where I was the line producer’s first call. They had budget issues. No one had gotten a check for three weeks. The crafty lady told me she was borrowing money for gas to get to the set. Crew members were counting on those checks because the money was already spent as soon as they cashed the check. I encouraged the younger folks on set who didn’t know what to do to have a conversation with the producers. They were scared and skeptical. Afraid of making a wave or being blackballed.

At lunchtime, I walked over to the producer’s table and said to them, “I think it would be good if you guys could speak to the crew about their pay, because most of them are saying they don’t want to work anymore if they don’t get paid.”

They talked to a few of the crew and I saw crew members walking away with unhappy faces. The line producer that hired me was paying my rental rate so I was a bit less alarmed even though I was missing three checks too. Then I started calling crew members passing by my cart to come over and tell me what happened. One young lady had tears in her eyes, so I went and talked to the grips about how they felt and we decided it was time to shut it down. I told them I would hold the sound for everyone until we all got paid. We held a meeting with the producers and let them know we were standing down. They were furious, except for one producer who was pretty understanding. Now everyone who was holding tension began to express their issues about not getting paid. They decided to wrap the day early.

My line producer came over to me and cursed me out. She said, “You’re getting some money, why are you doing this? I brought you on, you’re making me look bad. I’m getting blamed for bringing you on.”

I said that the kids needed their money. She said we were done. I was okay and not okay because we had done many projects together. The producers got the crew to agree to finish the project and, in the end, they understood that I would hold the sound for the rest of the shoot until they got the payroll to pay the crew even after we wrapped the show. So that’s what happened. A few days after we wrapped, everyone got a call to meet up at the production office to get their checks. Each crew member called me or texted me to say that they got all of their checks. I handed over the sound after being the last one to get checks. A crew member told me about the wrap party that I wasn’t invited to. I walked in and the looks on the producer and director’s faces said, “You really showed up, huh?” but as soon as the crew saw me, they cheered my name and clapped. The DP called me over and said “Honey, this is Woody, the guy who got us our money. Woody this is my wife.” He called for a beer for me, then a toast. We chilled and partied.

One thing I would like to see is, low-budget films not viewing the union as the bogeyman, coming to take the money that they could be spending on production or feeling contained. The lead-up to the production being “flipped” to union creates a tense vibe in production that spills out onto the set. I would like to see the ultra-low budget agreement or side letter agreement look identical to the basic agreement. Eventually, you want to work on the bigger budget films, so that you can purchase the latest equipment to help you with the advancing ways films are shot these days. You want to be able to see some equity from your labor. When you hear sound mixers talking about how they dropped 80 grand on extra equipment to rent back to production as a side business. How they own rental properties and drive cars costing over 50 grand; you want that too. And it’s not going to come from low budgets even though I did buy my house off a mixture of decent low- to no-budget projects. I bust my ass, often doing double shifts—wrapping one shoot at night, driving straight to the next set, sleeping in the parking lot until call time, and repeating this routine for days. That’s my spill on low budgets.

by Richard Bullock CAS and Steven Morrow CAS

Being invited to join the team bringing a new iteration of The Color Purple to the screen, based on both the book and the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical no less, was an incredible honor. We know how important the original 1985 film is to so many people as well, it’s often the film they watch annually when getting together with family. The fact that this would also include twenty-six on-screen music moments and lots of incredible choreography, dancers, and musicians made it that much more exciting for us, plus the enthusiasm and passion that Director Blitz Bazawule brought to the project was infectious. On top of that, the cast was an absolute dream and a pleasure to work with every day.

Steven Morrow CAS: I was brought on quite early by Executive Producer Michael Beugg, who I’ve been working with since Little Miss Sunshine in 2005. Our credits together include La La Land, Babylon, and so many more.

I knew from the start that I had a schedule conflict with a project I promised to do much earlier. I had the idea that the best approach for the show was to bring on my friend and colleague, Richard Bullock, to do the show with me so Richard could take over the department head duties when I would need to leave about halfway through. Happily, everyone was on board with this approach and in retrospect, it was a very successful strategy. Having the two of us there from the start was a real luxury and provided the continuity that was necessary considering the scope of the job.

Richard Bullock CAS: When Steve proposed that we work on The Color Purple together, I was elated. I knew it would be an incredible and truly meaningful project, the kind that doesn’t come along very often. I was coming off a very busy schedule myself, which included a Western and a musical. Going straight into a project of this scope might not have been logistically possible if it weren’t for sharing it with Steve, who had been working in pre-production for many months at this point. I was thrilled and honored.
SM: Filming was to begin in early 2022 in Georgia, where The Color Purple is set. During prep, Blitz got all the actors together for a table read, which he asked me to record. That was a unique and thrilling experience, and a fun challenge. It was great to meet all the actors ahead of principal photography and get a feel for how they project and how the transitions from dialog to singing might play out. Not to mention at the end of the day, I was left with an audio recording of the entire film before we ever started. Pretty fun!

RB: Yes, I loved having that table-read recording during prep. It gave us real insight into the scope of the project, plus a familiarity with the songs, dialog, and tone, and it really got me excited to get started.

SM: Principal photography began on the beach at Jekyll Island, GA. This really set the bar for the location-related logistical challenges we would face, as well as the complex nature of the live singing, playback, and musical accompaniment that would be a regular workflow of The Color Purple. We began with young Celie and Nettie, played by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi and Halle Bailey, singing and running through the trees on the beach, eventually settling on an off-speed version that would give an ethereal effect at twenty-four frames. We decided to do this beach scene with earwig playback only, no loudspeakers. As the scene spread a long distance on the beach, we wanted to make sure the distance from the audio and the lip-sync didn’t change. If you get too far from the source, you could unintentionally add delay to the song. This was also a great opportunity to get good clean tracks of the ocean, as well as laughing and Foley from the actors, without having music all over the track. For all the earwigs in the film, we used our trusted Phonak Roger earwigs. I believe our largest earwig count for a scene was forty-one. In addition to the actors, we had a lot of dancers and a choir.

Also, whenever possible, we would use earwigs so we could capture a live singing performance at the beginning and end of a song, dropping out the speakers. This allowed editorial to have a more natural sounding intro and outro to each song, where the transition from dialog to singing would just flow.

Some songs we would record the vocals in their entirety on set. One of these was “I’m Here,” sung by Celie, played by Fantasia Barrino, who also played the role on Broadway. Due to the camera moves, we needed to do a hair mic for this. Fantasia was used to that from all her theater experience and the hair department was excited to help make that happen. Fantasia has such an amazing voice. The new Phonak Roger earwigs, with their clear and loud qualities, made it possible for her to hear the musical accompaniment playback.

RB: On day two, we were back on the beach, this time with Mister, played by Colman Domingo, on horseback serenading young Nettie while playing banjo. This was accomplished with Executive Music Producer Nick Baxter playing the banjo off camera, which we were feeding to Colman’s earwig. We were recording Colman singing live, as well as his dialog with Nettie of course. It worked great. Nick had recorded all the songs for the film in-studio before production began (mostly!) and was an invaluable member of the team. A member of IATSE Local 695, Nick also served as our Music Playback Operator, which was great. His intimate knowledge of the recordings and his relationship with the actors during those recordings made for an efficient shorthand when adjustments needed to be made on the fly. We would repeat this workflow later in the schedule at Mister’s house, with Colman playing banjo while talking with Nettie. We planted a mic inside the muted banjo Colman was playing, so Nick would have a precise record of when Colman was plucking the strings.

As Steve said, speaker placement during playback scenes was very important for sync. Sometimes this would require one of us to walk just off camera alongside the actor as they sang along with playback. The Director of Photography, Dan Laustsen, had a beautiful vision for The Color Purple and was fond of long dolly shots that used to be a common part of filmmaking but is becoming more and more rare. Those dolly shots sometimes made speaker placement a moving target, but that challenge just added to the fun.

SM: Working on a period movie generally provides some pretty great opportunities to record interesting sounds from vintage props or vehicles. We did quite a bit of this, putting plant mics, mostly DPA 4097 CORE, on the bumpers of passing cars or horses, or close miking squeaky screen doors. If at all possible, we do nothing to mitigate those sounds, but instead, get a good recording of them. It saves a lot of time recreating things in post, and it adds authenticity. We had a stellar team, and Boom Operator Charles German and Utility Sound Technician Kelly Lewis were always on the lookout for these opportunities. I like to think of our job as having an aspect of “mining” for sound. We gather absolute everything we can during production and then the editors have that material to choose from. Even if it just helps in determining what to Foley, it’s still valuable. Sometimes a car sound is wrong for the period, but the timing of the ignition or the mashing of gears can help the Foley team create the right thing. When possible, we would also deploy a stereo mic for atmosphere. We did that in the swamp where Harpo’s Juke Joint is located, as there were lots of interesting noisy bugs and great sounding birds and frogs.

RB: We actually went to the swamp a couple of times on the weekends to handle playback for rehearsals, which was really fun. It was nice to be on set but in a much more laid-back environment. We brought bagels for everyone, and enjoyed having a little more time to chat. There were several other locations where we came in just to provide playback for rehearsals. Everyone was very appreciative, and we got a sneak peek at scenes and the choreography, which helped us make a solid plan when it came time to film.

The swamp location definitely had its logistical challenges, too. During a night scene, Shug Avery, played by Taraji P. Henson, arrives on a small open boat, singing all the way into the dock before landing at the Juke Joint, where the song goes into full swing. We were able to hide a Mackie Thump Go speaker in the bottom of the boat for playback. It’s pretty loud for a battery-powered loudspeaker and gave us the proximity we needed to record Taraji for the first section of the song. We had lots of speakers hidden throughout the Juke Joint to handle playback for the rest of the scene, which took place both on location at the swamp and on stage later.

SM: We also had the Thumper working quite a bit. Invariably, the times it was called for were the locations that were the hardest to get to! One such location was a bare rock hillside at Stone Mountain Park, east of Atlanta. We were filming Workin’, where Harpo, played by Corey Hawkins, and his gang are driving spikes into the rock with sledgehammers. The Thumper was needed to keep them all in-sync, but getting it up there required a gator and a trailer and a lot of hands for the final one hundred yards. I’m certain we were the last department off that mountain at wrap that night, but the right tool for the job makes all the difference and the effort was worth it. Once again, we filmed it off-speed at forty-eight frames, so the rhythmic hitting of the spikes with the sledgehammers was quite a feat and sync was that much harder.

RB: We’ve all had experience filming in the rain, sometimes naturally occurring but often provided by SPFX. There is a scene out back at Mister’s house in the pouring rain that was a particular challenge. SPFX was providing a deluge of rain that would cover a large area, including the corrugated metal roof of the porch. Charles and Kelly put down yards and yards of hog’s hair on every surface possible, including covering the 4×4 floppies that were protecting the cameras. It made a huge difference and allowed us to get very clean recordings. We used DPA 4061 lavs and Kelly blew them out after every take. Charles was also remarkably able to boom that scene, which was a real lifesaver, as the dynamics were extreme with lots of yelling. It sounded great.

SM: We were often treated with live vocals from Fantasia as Celie. She has an incredible voice and always preferred to sing live, which is a real treat from a sound perspective. We used a DPA 6061 in her hair for the performance of The Color Purple song; usually actors will sing along to a playback track or lip-sync, but in this case, we had a pianist play live into her earwig so she could drive the performance, allowing for emotional timing. Later, that piano track would be covered by the full orchestrated music.

RB: We also successfully deployed forty-one earwigs for a shot when the entire town gets together on Main Street. We had critical dialog at the same time as our dance team had to keep dancing, so we handed out the small army of earwigs and we were able to get what we needed for the shot to work both musically and dramatically.

This was one of the most collaborative jobs I’ve ever done, and that is definitely something special. Having a great team, from the director to the producers to the DP to the sound and music departments that we worked with side by side all day, was such a privilege. We are all very proud of the work we did on The Color Purple, and thrilled to be there to support the incredible work of the cast.

SM: I couldn’t agree more. One of the things I love most about filmmaking is the collaboration, and a movie of this scale requires much more of it than the typical project. We had quite a little sound village set up around our carts every day, from mixing to playback to music producers and music supervisors and choreographers. Oftentimes, there was an electric piano or a guitar ready to be routed into earwigs. It was great fun.

by Lee Orloff CAS

One of the benefits of having been in the industry for quite some time is that I can now find myself discussing work on a project I first caught wind of nearly twenty-five years ago, Michael Mann’s Ferrari. The filmmaker and I had initially worked together in 1994 on Heat. There’s a reasonable chance a few of you might not yet have been born. I first learned Michael Mann was developing his film to tell the story of Enzo Ferrari roughly between 1999’s Ali and 2003’s Collateral.

The film is set during the summer of 1957, a volatile time for Ferrari when his business is being threatened by bankruptcy. His marriage, battered by the recent loss of his son, Dino, and his long history of philandering, has culminated in Enzo struggling to acknowledge his son, Piero, with Lina Lardi. The domestic drama runs headfirst into the preparations for, and running of the grueling cross-country race, the Mille Miglia. I was familiar with the period, having read Brock Yates’ biography, Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, during the years when the film was in development.

Michael Mann has long been associated with Ferrari, dating back to his 1980’s series Miami Vice. One of the most memorable scenes for many fans of the show occurred in an episode in Season 3 when Crockett’s Daytona Spyder is blown up by the Stinger-wielding arms dealer, leading to the Testarossa’s introduction in the series. Michael drives a Ferrari. I remember seeing the latest model he’d received while we were shooting either Collateral or the HBO series Luck. I am aware of a relationship he developed with Piero Ferrari, the Vice Chairman, without whose trust this film could have never been made.

Ferrari is a testament to Mann’s decades-long efforts to bring his passion project to the screen. He brought his deep appreciation and understanding of racecraft to portray the drivers and the part his race cars played in the open road Mille Miglia with an unwavering commitment to authenticity and through the sharp focus of his legendary attention to detail. But it is the struggle and triumphs witnessed in the characters’ lives that resonate at the heart of the film and drive it to its conclusion.

I and longtime Boom Operator Jeffrey Humphreys were brought to Italy to shoot the drama portion of the film …certainly an atypical arrangement for me. However, by July, rather late in pre-production when we were hired, I had already been committed to another Atlanta-based project which was scheduled to begin principal photography in October. An Italian crew was hired for the race portion, and fortunately for us, we were able to hire Luigi Pini, who would continue on the show as Boom Operator once the Italian mixer, Angelo Bonanni, took over to start the production with us, providing valuable continuity during the entirety of the shoot.

Having many of the same U.S. crew members onboard who had previously collaborated on Michael Mann’s films helped to expedite the process of bringing multiple departments together to develop solutions for production challenges as needed. Being an Italian citizen and having periodically spent considerable time there over the past few decades, I was quite familiar with the practical and cultural differences we would encounter during the summer shoot in our principal base in Modena, as well as in the surrounding areas of Emilia-Romagna. Although since I was last there, all of Italy seemingly has embraced WhatsApp as its primary choice for nearly all forms of communication.

I can count on no more than a few fingers the number of elevators we happened upon during the shoot. I owe my deepest respect to Jeff and Luigi for all their teamwork. I also emailed Ron Meyer @ PSC for the spot-on research that went into nailing down the specs of his trusty PSC Eurocart. Although it had been designed during a much simpler time when production sound didn’t carry nearly the quantity of items we currently do, it adapted well and turned out to be one of the very few wheeled carts anyone was able to squeeze into one of the two-person lifts. Moreover, it provided me with a handy platform for keeping the bag rig off my shoulders during our shoot. It allowed me to set up in more storage closets, pantries, and balconies than I ever would’ve sandwiched into otherwise—complete with monitors and a mini forest of Teradeks which allowed us to keep up and kept network cabling and umbilicals right where they ought to be—in sealed cases on the truck. Elevators probably took a close second to the rarity of finding air conditioning, though that didn’t stop production from finding ways to bring A/C into every set, with industrial-sized units crowding the narrow streets and alleys, thereby making both ingress/egress and navigating through the tight interiors even more challenging. In their defense, production didn’t have much choice. Europe was suffering through a blisteringly hot July and August, but all of the power and flex hoses really added to the challenges of buttoning up interiors from the intrusive exterior sounds of modern-day Modena and Reggio Emilia. Many thanks for the help from the unit, production, and electric crew.

As an example of challenges and solutions in getting set up for the day’s work: one of the scenes we were shooting was in the garret of a stately five-story villa with a fragile old stone staircase with wrought iron railings overseen by a persnickety property manager, or possibly owner. Thankfully, gear could be hauled up in the basket of an exterior lift and then pulled in delicately through a barely large enough opening. A portion of that day’s work concerned a flashback scene with Enzo, Laura, and a very young Dino that was a component of a central montage in the film involving a performance of an aria from Verdi’s La Traviata. In addition, there was all the usual gear required for music playback. Typically, I would be handling playback, except for the two days in which we were recording live performances, one of them being when we had Angelo with us for the shoot of the aria at the Teatro Comunale Luciano Pavarotti-Freni di Modena Opera House, and the other when we brought Alessio Ombres on for the choir at the Workers’ Mass scene, which intercuts with the Orsi brothers’ time-trialing their Maserati 250 at the Autodromo.

How the iconic period cars at the very heart of the story were brought to life on the screen visually and aurally requires more than a simple relating of the approach used to protect production dialog in order to ensure integrity of the performances. Race cars of that era and publicly available street versions configured with similar drivetrains are either largely gone forever or are now considered to be precious museum pieces of handmade industrial art. Now worth many millions of dollars, they are cherished trophies in privately held international collections. In fact, we were shocked at the number of original, drop-dead gorgeous cars which showed up on set to add an unmistakable mark of authenticity. All of which were given the appropriate star treatment, with motorsport teams rolling them into position with gloved hands while the shooting crew were instructed to respect the strict no-encroachment perimeter protocols that were put into place. Many of the background cars were driven by their proud owners. We were regularly treated to awe-inspiring parades of rare period examples. Most of the hero cars with few exceptions were builds from the ground up done in the UK, with custom fabricated coachwork, constructed around chassis housing modern turbo four-cylinder engines designed and engineered for the unique demands of the production. The discussion on how to best limit the undesirable impact of these inauthentic race engines on the production tracks had been brought up from the outset. I was cognizant that Michael Mann’s approach to the action would necessitate engines to be running in and out of dialog in many of the scenes such as ones at the Autodromo test track and in the pits, both at Brescia and Bologna. As a solution, we agreed that by having the actors keep their levels up as would naturally occur in these situations along with the use of lavaliers, we should be successful in improving the balance between dialog and the turbo four’s sound. According to Supervising Sound Editor Bernard Weiser and Re-recording Mixer Andy Nelson, that approach proved to be enough to allow post to dial it out sufficiently and to be covered by the accurate and beautifully recorded sounds of the Ferrari V-12s and Maserati V-8s captured by the UK’s Sound Effects Recordist Chris Jojo. As can be well imagined, it turned out to be no small feat finding owners of the appropriate vehicles who were willing to bring them to the country racetrack and run them at race speeds in order to capture everything that was needed. Re-recording Mixer/Supervising Sound Editor Tony Lamberti explained that the path leading to finding the right owners involved considerable research. In the end, they needed to lean into the support of Pink Floyd founding member and drummer, Nick Mason, his family members, and others asking for favors of members of that elite club of Ferrari owners to cement the deals.

In some ways, Michael Mann’s approach to the sounds of the race cars in Ferrari reminds me of his approach to the prominently featured gunfire on Heat in the shootout on 5th Street in downtown LA. This was not destined to be business as usual. Stunt Coordinator Robert Nagle, another longtime Mann collaborator, and “Biscuit” Rig Operator, was brought in during post as a race advisor at an effects spotting session as the team was developing that aspect of the sound design. Rather than have the post team pitch shifting and/or time stretching the recordings to shape engine and exhaust sounds, Michael’s command was for them to be captured naturally to replicate authentic race-craft, so that any racer experiencing those scenes in Ferrari would feel them as real. Tony and Chris had multiple Zooms in which they thoroughly dissected the highly detailed race and time-trial blueprint for each of the up/down shifts, revs, and the frequency interplay between engine combustion and exhaust volume in determining the best microphone configurations and perspectives to utilize for the sound effects recording session.

The “Biscuit” or more accurately the “Biscuit, Jr.” is the second generation of Allan Padelford’s innovative camera car originally developed in the early 2000’s for Seabiscuit. Among its numerous design features is a driver’s pod which can be shifted around the platform to accommodate various camera positions. On Luck for scenes at the Santa Anita racetrack where it was rigged with a mechanical horse, the “Biscuit” allowed Michael to shoot actors immediately alongside the field of ponies. Due to the length of the racetrack oval, we embedded audio into the microwave video transmitter for sends. On Ferrari, that option was available, if necessary, to provide audio to Michael Mann in the Sprinter command van if he chose to be stationed there for the extended Mille Miglia sequences. As things worked out, much of the race work was a combination of mounts and/or the Pursuit vehicle. Recorders tucked away and lashed down in the race cars provided confidence and redundancy while the mix utilized RF links to chase vehicles.

“We’re going to record the opera live.” With those seven words delivered from Michael in pre-production, the marching orders were set. There was a slight wrinkle, in that there wasn’t a music supervisor on the show, but anything’s doable if there’s enough time to discuss it all, reach a consensus, and then have multi-department coordination. All of which we had, if not necessarily within an ideal timeframe. The aria is “Parigi, o cara,” La Traviata, Act III. The reference Michael had for the aria was the 1981 Decca recording performed by Dame Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti with the National Philharmonic, conducted by Richard Bonynge, Sutherland’s husband. The film’s performance of the aria, a duet between soprano and tenor, would take place at Modena’s iconic Pavarotti-Freni Opera House. The aria was only one of many scenes to be shot that day which Michael’s first AD, Joe Reidy, had us scheduled for. It included cast entrances, orchestra tuning up, various points of view from the upper boxes, and a scene involving gamesmanship between Enzo and one of the Orsi brothers of Maserati.

It turns out the venue was booked for another performance the evening before the art department’s prep day. The orchestra members had arrived the afternoon before the prep day for fittings. The same was true for the soprano, although the tenor had been in town previously as he had been needed for other scenes. Pre-records of the vocals and the orchestra would be required, since if we were going to shoot the hero coverage of the duet live, we knew based on established operatic convention that we’d be limited to no more than two takes from the vocalists. All the wide shots and overs and all the coverage of the audience would be done to playback. Based upon my familiarity with Michael’s shooting style, I was fully aware we would never be given sufficient time to do a simultaneous live recording of both orchestra and duet. Since it was clear after doing extensive research that there were no appropriate recordings available of the famous aria with separate orchestral stems, a decision was made to do a pre-record with the cast orchestra and vocalists. The prep day for art, electric, and others (us) was a main unit shoot day. There weren’t any nearby studios large enough for an orchestral recording and Rome was just too far away. The art department was too pressed for time to take any of it out from their build day for us to be in the opera house doing pre-records. However, there was a nearby town, Carpi, which I had cycled through on a day off that had a beautiful, if slightly less grand, recently renovated opera house that would fit the bill. Fortunately, Angelo was available to travel up from Rome to handle pre-records. We had already shot scenes containing the aria and decisions had been made regarding the entire sequence, including at which point the flashback scene would occur. Our Editor, Pietro Scalia, participated in the session to supervise, providing the click and timing. Angelo and his assistant removed the first four or six rows of floor seating for the orchestral placement, so the recording would better replicate where they’d be heard in the scene from the deep pit of the Pavarotti opera house. The three omni heads on a Decca tree plus a pair of outriggers were supplemented with an Ambisonics mic, figuring those additional tracks from the classic horseshoe-shaped opera house might prove useful. After a couple dozen or so headsets were distributed as needed, everything was set. Ultimately, the conductor said he couldn’t conduct to a click track, so after a couple of rehearsals, they were dropped, but Pietro was satisfied with the timing of the freely run recordings. The final scene came together well.

Having Michael include Jeff and me on this deeply personal project was highly satisfying. Being back in Italy for the shoot reminded me of how much I had been missing it.

A Conversation with Mark Ulano

What was it like working for an iconic director like Martin Scorsese?

Well, first and foremost, filmmaking is my religion. I was born and grew up in New York City. My coming of age as a filmmaker was in the late ’60s, early ’70, and Martin Scorsese’s emergence into the iconography of cinema was at its beginnings then, so working with him now has been very significant for me. I believe he was an adjunct teacher under Haig Manoogian at NYU in those days. Haig really created the NYU film school, which eventually has become one of the giant places of learning for cinema and for emerging filmmakers. This was at a time when film school was really looked down upon in Hollywood, and even the New York community as an affectation. It’s very different now. Marty’s scholarship, then and now, and all the time in between, speaks to a very important part of my life.

To be asked to join the very evolved community around Marty at this point, and on this particular project is one of the high points of my career and my life, so it was very special. I consider it a profound privilege for the actual engagement, the sense of community it provides, and for the work itself. I think this film is a work of substance that will stand on its own indefinitely, a very rare thing. I’ve been blessed in this regard with various directors, but Marty is … well, if I had a string of pearls, he could be considered one of the most special gems. I’m very, very glad that at this stage of my life and career that we had the chance to work together. To partner with his family team, Tom Fleischman, his Re-recording Mixer, oh my God, thirty years with Marty, and Thelma Schoonmaker, sixty years working with Marty in the editing room, since Woodstock, the movie, and through all of the other films, that partnering. To be invited inside the secret halls of that friendship, to contribute day-by-day, it doesn’t get better.

You share your work with John Pritchett.

Absolutely. John was originally brought on to do the show through the Producer, Daniel Lupi, who I’ve also worked with in the past, and the same with the First AD, Adam Sumner. John had to leave the show very early on for personal reasons unrelated to the film and I was asked to come in. Obviously, this prevented my normal preparation. I was diving into a group of super professionals at the AAA list level. I’ve done that before. The DP and I, who I admire enormously, Rodrigo Prieto, the Gaffer, Ian Kincaid, many people in the crew, above and below the line, were people with whom I had creative work history. I got to overlap slightly with John’s last day of production. It was on a Friday, and I was taking over on a Monday, and we were together that whole weekend, me prepping my gear and my team. John was characteristically generous about helping me get in alignment with the show. If I had questions regarding continuity, we collaborated.

My friendship and experience with John actually began forty years prior, when I was asked to do a Robert Altman movie. John was not available, and he walked me through the setup in 1987 which was ½” reel to reel Otari 8-track. In my opinion, John Pritchett is one of the giants in our field. He’s had one of the most iconic careers in production sound. John’s history has been an amazing balance of the high-end tentpole projects, and the purposeful, passionate, independent art side of the work.

My team included Doug Shamburger, Patrushkha Mierzwa and Nick Ronzio, Brandon Loulias and Gary Raymond. All contributed enormously and knew we were on a special project with a special film family.

When you’re called on to be in a circumstance at the highest level, it’s like going to the summit. Marty has enormous vitality, he has enormous respect for the content of his projects. He worked for a very extended time in preproduction building trust with the Osage Nation, including them in the run up to the work and their participation both at the concept, the emotion, the story level, and physically in the film. Many descendants of this event, these tragedies are participants in front of and behind the camera.

The Osage community that exists today, that emerged from these tragedies from the 1920s, represents a unique piece of American history. All the parties seem to have a great sense of appreciation for the respect shown in telling this story. Key creative relationships contributed to this journey. Robert De Niro and Marty have done ten films together. Leo and Marty have done seven. Combined with this ensemble, Lily Gladstone, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Charlie Musselwhite, the list goes on. Everyone wanted to come and be a part of this film, and to join a seasoned filmmaker like Martin Scorsese in full possession of his powers, up close and personal, shot by shot through COVID and 108 degree in-the-shade weather, never flagging. It was rockin’ man. It was just rockin’.

Killers of the Flower Moon was filmed in Oklahoma.

We based out of a town called Bartlesville, which is the central town of the Phillips Oil Company and has a lot of Oklahoma history in terms of its oil wealth. In fact, there is a very significant Frank Lloyd Wright building there that is in the middle of this prairie universe that is beloved and well cared for. Bartlesville is about thirty miles out of the towns where these tragedies took place. Killers of the Flower Moon is the title of David Grann’s nonfiction book that was published in 2017. The book takes a deep dive into the events that this film is based on.

We filmed in the real places where these events took place, where these conspiracies and murders were hatched and executed by this community toward the Osage Nation. They turned the town back into the 1920s, they hauled in tons of dirt to return the paved town roads back to the period of the murders. We used an avalanche of ’20s period vehicles and horses for the background crosses. Basically, we time traveled to the early 1920s Oklahoma and everything around you was of that era, all the production design, costume design, etc., were lovingly created in great detail to evoke the period and bathe the cast in that special environment. We were forty-five miles from Tulsa, where almost simultaneously, the Black Wall Street tragedy was taking place. The two tragedies are unrelated in terms of individuals and shared conspiracy but are connected by the endemic racism in the local community, and the hostility toward the successful progression of people of color.

In Tulsa, it had to do with an emerging affluent, African American community. In Osage County and Washington County, counties that were inside the Osage Reservation, the members of the Osage Nation were per capita, the wealthiest humans on the planet Earth due to the oil wealth that befell them as a community. The first stages of the emerging toxic racism appeared when the local white community successfully lobbied governmental entities to create a corrupt gatekeeper system of the wealth of the Osage members. They were declared legally incompetent to manage their own financial affairs and had to self-declare, “I am incompetent.” Each time they would come before these attorneys, or local business people who decided whether or not they could spend their money the way they wanted to, they were told that they had no legitimate authority.

Then came the larger conspiracy, which is centered around the notion of marrying the Osage women. Men were marrying the women and then murdering them, their siblings, their parents, their children, to acquire and concentrate the mineral rights or the head rights of the oil wealth. The conspiracy’s leader is the character played by Robert De Niro, based on a real person, William Hale. Hale used his acquired fluency in the Osage language to gain the trust of the community as the prime liaison with the white community. The vocal tonality employed by Robert De Niro for his character becomes a tool for deception. His nephew, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is ultimately a conflicted henchman torn between his love of his wife and family and fear and greed enveloping him in his uncle’s conspiracy. There were over two hundred murders, primarily people in their mid-to-late 20s, and only a very few were investigated.

To this day, there’s controversy over the roles played by all the parties, but the facts are indisputable. Being in those actual places, in those rooms, in those buildings, in the physical space of where these things happened, created a kind of special energy that you don’t often experience on a film. It tore away some of the artifice, creating a sense of authenticity for this story. There were moments that were moving from fiction into reality and back, that were almost surreal.

The mindset was Indians were lower than dogs, and you could murder them without worry of any consequence. They went to the President of the United States to get help, and that’s how the early FBI got brought into this situation. We filmed in those places where it happened, it was kind of spooky. The only other time I’ve had this kind of experience was on Inglourious Basterds where we were shooting in the Vermacht headquarters in rooms where Hitler and Goebbels and others walked the floor of the rooms with all of the power and insanity at their disposal. This was similar in a certain way.

What is Marty’s style in terms of the way he shoots and how did that impact your work?

Well, when you have a great conductor, composer, and leadership of an orchestra, the first order of business, usually for those who have risen above the rest, is that they bring a community, an ensemble around them of like-minded artists who will come and contribute at the maximum level of their capacity without reservation. 150% all in for the entire tour of duty. That’s his history, and that’s his methodology. He’s old school, and I mean that in the most respectful and appreciative way, because it’s not common. He understands the power of a director is through delegation to advocates who understand his intent and execute that intent flawlessly in concert with the other disciplines adjacent. When that happens, your percentages of achieving a magic above the mundane are greatly increased. Rodrigo Prieto, as a filmmaker contributes, he’s a cinematographer who is always about serving the project, not about serving territory. It shows in his body of work. Marty’s the same, he limits his communications in terms of the obvious and is generous in his communications in terms of the choice of options before him. Knowing the difference between these two is a joy to witness in the day-by-day, shot-by-shot process. It just warms my heart.

His process is completely focused. What are we doing? What is this shot? Where are we in the moment of the moments of this shot where the camera should be for emphasis. All of the other elements are tied to that idea of the grammar in place. It’s not, “Let’s get a bunch of stuff and then figure it out later.” It’s, “What do we need the audience to be experiencing at this moment and be around that realization all day long?” So, he does, and he expects everyone around him to have that already as part of their tool set. You have to be up to that game. You have to have that fluency in your work. My sense is that if you are not, and he knows it, you lean, I would suspect more toward disappointment than anger because he’s invited you into his house and you’re a guest in his house. “Please, I love the most that you can do, please bring that to this project because this project matters.”

With your long work history with Quentin Tarantino, is there any similarity or are there differences between Quentin and Marty?

Great similarity in this piece, in the predisposition to do the homework in advance of coming to the day. They’re both absolute students, perpetual students of cinema. That’s not a static thing. They haven’t packed up two pounds of film knowledge and figured they’re on their way. Every day they’re still learning by what we’re doing in the day, and they’re still learning at night because they’re watching everybody else’s contribution in the work. They’re archivists, they’re historians, they’re passionate about, “How do I best do my piece? How do I maintain my fluency as a filmmaker through the work? How much can I learn by the work of others?” So, there’s a great commonality. Also, their day-to-day shot approach. They don’t micromanage. They manage from above, they don’t waste their resources on second guessing. They made that investment in the people they chose to bring around them in the first place. And that frees that energy to be where it needs to be.

How about your crew?

We discussed the transition that I took over the show very early on. With minimal to zero prep, but had the good fortune of having had many pre-existing relationships with key departments, in particular, the entourages of Leonardo and even Bob De Niro, but also the Director of Photography, the Gaffer, the First AD and others were people that I had had done deep intensive projects with in the past, the Line Producer, etcetera. Also having a very healthy friend relationship with John Pritchett, who was gracious and helpful in the transition. My usual long-standing professional marriage with Tom Hartig as my colleague and Boom Operator since 1999, and Patrushkha Mierzwa, also Boom Operator colleague and alternating UST since 1982 or ’81. Tom was unavailable, he was involved in another project, this came up rather suddenly. He was committed to me for the following project, which was the Whitney Houston film, but he wasn’t available for the sudden arrival of the Scorsese project. So, I got very fortunate, I reached out to Doug Shamburger, who is one of the greats. He’s boom royalty who has a long, long history with many of the best mixers. Most recently, with Willie Burton on Oppenheimer. Doug and I have been trying to work together for literally fifteen years, twenty years. When I would call him, he’s not available, when he’d call me. I’d already be under way with my regular team.

It was kind of a running joke for us for years, and we’re friends socially, he and his wife and Patrushkha and I. But he was available, coming off another show, there was a slight overlap, he worked that out because it was another Apple show, and Apple was also in support of Marty. So, Doug was in, and came to Oklahoma. Patrushkha was not available for the beginning of the show. She helped with the run up and the transition, but had other commitments initially. Nick Ronzio, who’s fantastic, came on as our UST, Utility Sound Technician, and so I had this amazing team of Doug and Nick to start and to get us going, hitting the ground running.

The tricky part was they were not immediately familiar with my packages, my regular crew was, but the compensating part was they’re both such bulletproof hardcore veterans that didn’t matter in the least. They immediately were right at speed, which was great. Nick had a limited availability, so this was a bit of a patch work, which is really unusual for me, but he stayed on for, I think approximately the first 40% of the show, something like that. Patrushkha was still not available, so we had Brandon Loulias.

Brandon came on to be the interim third until Patrushkha could break free and come and do the rest of the show. Brandon worked his butt off and was also an important contributing factor. One of his special skills was his knowledge of electronics, his engineering knowledge of Yamaha gear. That came in very handy because some of the environments we were in were particularly unfriendly to that gear. Although I have redundancy, there were moments where we needed to tear something apart, and Brandon had a skill set that could take care of that in the field.

Then Patrushkha came on, completing the team. She also had prior relationships with other crew members like the Gaffer and others that were forty-year friends and working relationships. Ian Kincaid, a shout out to one of the most brilliant artists in the film world as a Gaffer. Our department is not a vertical hierarchy, we all share very different but overlapping responsibilities, and I look at us as a jazz trio if you will, or jazz quartet, depending on the situation.

We had a local trainee from the Oklahoma community, John Martinez, who continued from the week or two that he had with John Prichett’s crew, and that was very, very helpful. He worked very hard, he had excellent social skills, and was a quick learner. We needed that because of the physical geography and the environment, the weather and relentless heat, dust and assaulting factors, all pushing us to our better selves.

Was there music playback?

We had playback. Gary Raymond came and did several playback scenes for us that were very important. We had a giant scene with a huge body count of extras. It was an evening, with a large band. We also had a wedding sequence that Gary did for us that was intertwined with dialog, dancing, giant crane shots, and music playback.

Was there any live recording of music?

There was a little bit on a piano. There was a little bit at the wedding party. There was a thing with a guy with a guitar, which I don’t think made it into the film. They did a bit of additional material in New York with Tod Maitland, who had worked with Marty in the past, so there was a very good established relationship. Tod did that additional material. It’s the 1930s radio show, that was Tod’s work. They did a live recap with Marty cameoing in the scene, which is fun, kind of a delicious button, really. It’s a surprise. Tod did another couple of days of pickups in Oklahoma, much later in the year.

Was that the final coda?

The final coda was the high angle shot, with hundreds of extras. This is a big film, it’s an epic film, and structurally, very akin to a Bolero, a climbing crescendo in plot, character arc and musicality. Robbie Robertson’s final film score, sparce and percussive is the ideal cohort to the film’s other elements.

This was my fourth film with Leonardo, and my second with Bob De Niro. Those prior relationships, particularly with Leo, created an immediate environment of trust. Leo, in his generosity, basically introduced me to Marty on set in front of others, which doesn’t always happen with a huge warm embrace and a, “Yeah, we just started right now.” So that was a good thing.

Were they all practical locations or was there some stage work?

The radio show in New York was stage work. We had some stage work that was done in airplane hangars. They built sets that were repeats of some of the actual practical exterior locations. So it was a blend, I would put it at about 80/20 practicals to stage work, maybe 70/30.

During the production, it was also the 40th anniversary of Raging Bull, and so for the Tribeca Film Festival, which is Bob De Niro’s baby. They set up a live streaming interview with Leonardo as the moderator interviewing Bob De Niro and Marty, to reflect on their journey together making Raging Bull. Marty could have done stand-up as an alternate career. He was hilarious, and the auditorium was absolutely packed to the gills, but it was being sent back to New York live streaming for the Tribeca event. There was a lot of good-will and good humor involved.

There was a fair number of driving sequences with period vehicles.

Along with that factor, there was a tendency to have frequent background crosses with period vehicles at full bore. I did engage passionately with our picture car department, because every time we were in the town or anywhere, that was always a visual code for the period. We incorporated spark suppression when possible. Can we get the quietest versions, working with the ADs, so that their choreography of a vehicle passing during a dialog scene wasn’t during the most intimate and significant information being said? It required an enormous amount of cooperation on the part of many people, primarily the production, AD department, and my team with Transpo. We worked it out shot by shot.

And they accommodated you?

Certainly, most of the time. If we were at a point where the scene’s information and the character revelation were at true risk and the threshold had been crossed, we’d engage in refining the coordinated timing. My threshold of concern, generally, is if there’s a competing element breaking the connection between the characters and the audience. You don’t want discordant, anachronistic sounds that disrupt the flow. But if it doesn’t break my threshold, if it doesn’t break the connection between the characters and the audience, and is functional in terms of how it can be handled editorially later, then we’re in the zone. That’s a moving target as we have more and more post-production tools that allow us to legitimately, through algorithms, separate certain elements after the fact that would, in the past, to be intrinsically married. But I also know that if you don’t become a student of that closely, you can make problematic assumptions about how much that can be applied.

If we go to the heart of the movie itself, the fundamental motivation of making the movie has a kind of purity to it, a social relevance. Not a bleeding-heart version but a just version of that. This was a stark indisputable, complex, profoundly racist event that took place in the 20th century in the American culture. The duality of the rights of man and the lack of perception that certain communities did not get recognized as full human beings is deeply explored. It was an extension of the Dred Scott decision in the 1800s that helped set the table for the Civil War. You’re looking at this whole community that conspired, in multiple murders, around the idea that the Indian Nation was less than human and non-deserving of what they acquired. They had been forced away from their native homeland into un-arable terrible property which they had the foresight to purchase inclusive of the mineral rights and ironically turned out to be the wealthiest oil strike in American history, twenty years hence.

The oil wealth led the Osage to live like wealthy white Americans.

Before they got their arms around the Osage Nation as a group, and had many of them legally declared incompetent to manage their own money, they had lived the way any one of those in the white culture would have themselves. Yes, they had the most Pierce-Arrows in the United States in one place, they bought furs, they sent their kids to European universities. Wouldn’t you? They had achieved a kind of cultural iconography of wealth in the 1920s, that was in parity to what wealthy Americans did in the 1920s. That just enraged the locals. They had multiple pricing schemes for the Indians who would pay ten, fifteen, twenty-five times for the same groceries and sundry products. It was brutal. Even so, the Osage took it all in stride, philosophically, un-materialistic, generous to a fault, carrying themselves with great dignity.

There are certain emotional and creative takeaways I had from this project that I think are significant. One is, Marty and company are among the few places where the tradition of stories that matter, being done with authenticity and integrity, can survive the gauntlet of interference that the industry provides frequently. It’s too rare, but it’s also an example of the possibility. When you are invited to enjoy the privilege of participating in that kind of environment, you can, and I did, have a spirit reward of being in the elevated place of the purity of intent.

It was a subject that had deep roots in significant issues that resonate beyond its own time, being done with the maximum integrity possible by great artists in their work. We were part of that. That affects you emotionally. It affects you creatively. It rewards you. It’s a kind of food that can’t be had in a grocery store. [laughs] It’s a kind of food that lets you know that you’re realizing your maximum potential and applying it in a worthy purpose. That doesn’t happen often enough, but it is sort of… It’s addictive.

Are there scenes that carry some importance to you?

Yes. Several. One scene is when the De Niro character as the uncle, and the brother of the Leonardo’s character bring him to the Mason Hall and literally paddle him for his dissonance to their conspiracy. They punish him for not being on board completely for the murders and the consolidation of the mineral rights. We were in the real Mason Hall, one that carried the framed photo of the criminal Hale on its walls as stalwart member of the Local community. We were using real props and furnishings, and the environment was in the real place. This is the unveiling of De Niro the puppet master behind all of this. His facade to the community was as the benevolent intermediary between the Osage Nation and the white community, which was a cover for his true evil nature.

That was a very powerful scene to me, and it was also very challenging with huge wide framing, and a reverberant space. All the things that are sort of technical questions when you’re gearing up. I felt very, very happy about how we were able to take all of those challenging elements and somehow merge them into a coherent approach to the scene. We didn’t lose the space of the room, but we weren’t lost in the distance of the room, we were able to emphasize the accent points in the scene in terms of what the characters were doing by mic placement, by mixing, by levels, by all the different tools that seem like innocuous solely engineering things, but they’re actually paintbrushes. The way a camera can slightly move in on somebody for emphasis at a key moment, and to also do that with sound emphasizes that.

Another scene that really comes to mind that was hugely significant on an emotional level. This was the scene inside the ritual structure where the tribe was having their strategy session to send an emissary to Washington, DC to plead with the American government for some kind of relief for these continuing murders that were not being investigated, that were being ignored by local authorities, and state level. They met with the President of the United States. Consider the courage it took for the Indian Nation to go and create access, because their standing legally was as a separate nation. To be seen by the President of the United States, it was Calvin Coolidge, and to get a response. They’re one of the first cases of the FBI. That’s a central piece of the story in the original book.

During that scene, in between setups, one of the Nation’s present-day leaders who’s in the scene and is one of the principal characters, stood up and made a speech spontaneously to everyone present. We were not shooting, this wasn’t part of the film. He spoke about how significant this was and what it meant to them as a community, and the authenticity of Marty’s team to be stringent about respecting their story and the meaning of their story. Not only to themselves, but to the larger community of the country, and how much it meant to them. He was passionate and it was personal. As he started to speak, and I will be proud about this because I said, “Doug, get in there, aim that mic at the speaker, be delicate about it but do it.” I hit record and I got the whole thing. I felt great because I went to Marty at the end and I said, “Marty, we have that whole thing, it was recorded. Marty’s such a New Yorker, and he just lit up. He was like, “Fucking great. Oh my God.” He went back into the set and re-positioned the camera to zero in on this speaker to repeat for the camera as an honest improv, which is now in the movie. So that was another moment where we were moving from fiction to reality, because a lot of these people are descendants of those murdered people, and this was their story. It’s complex, and yes, the book was a New York Times bestseller but here this is all being distilled into a movie which is potentially a more significant cultural event in our present-day culture.

(Part 2 of this discussion will continue in the spring edition.)

I was no stranger to the Mission: Impossible series and have worked on several films with Tom Cruise. Dead Reckoning Part One was my third outing in the Mission: Impossible franchise, following Fallout and Rogue Nation, all directed by Christopher McQuarrie and of course, starring Tom Cruise (TC). I also worked with Chris McQuarrie (McQ) when he was the writer on another TC project that I worked on called Valkyrie.

One of the advantages to having the writer as director is that on the previous two films, the script was continually evolving during production and even in post production. It is not unusual to complete principal photography and then return for several weeks of additional shooting to hone the plot and storytelling arc. This, my third film in the series, not counting some work that I did on the first Mission: Impossible, was to be different. We didn’t have a script at all! That is to say there was no script in pre-production and we would often only be given scenes on the day or a few days prior to shooting a sequence. During pre-production, McQ would call all HoDs to a meeting and tell us the plot and how he saw each scene developing, what stunts were being considered and hopefully, what requirements could be expected of us. Of course, this meant there was also no traditional scheduling. We mostly just worked from a block calendar. Good communication with the director and production would be key to making this work.

My first contribution to this latest episode started in October 2019 when I was already working on Black Widow. I had a message from TC’s team to say that he was in training for a speed-flying sequence that would be featured in the film but that it was not due to start shooting until February 2023. Fortunately, I was about to travel to Atlanta without my UK team so was able to send my 1st AS, Lloyd Dudley, to look after this aspect of pre-production. As always, TC needed communications for this stunt sequence and also as usual, there would be some dialog. Though it is well known that Tom always performs his own stunts, long ago I suggested that giving him dialog during the stunt sequence would also confirm to the audience that this is him and not a stunt double. I have sometimes come to regret that suggestion.

On every Mission: Impossible, the stunts get bigger and seemingly more dangerous though I should say that for Stunt Co-ordinator Wade Eastwood and his team, safety is paramount. As part of the safety requirement is good communications with TC and the stunt team, I decided to utilise the bone conduction technology that I had developed for use in the last Mission: Impossible (Fallout). The system uses custom ear moulds that are both microphones and earpieces. A small conductor is designed to sit on a specific part of the ear to pick up speech with minimal background noise. Though you may imagine speed flying to be near silent as opposed to the helicopter sequences that I had previously used bone conduction for, the wind noise could be quite high and difficult to keep off a conventional microphone. There were also safety considerations that we did not want a lot of loose cables that could interfere with the parachute when deployed. We were now using Audio Ltd. (now Sound Devices) A10 radios in simultaneous transmit and record modes as we are able to do outside of USA. Communications were using digital Motorola radios that gave good long-distance coverage to a base station setup. In conjunction with my long-term technical collaborator, Jim McBride, and his son Mark, custom interfaces were made to integrate both recording and comms systems. Lloyd and Mark spent most of the rest of 2019 with TC on various locations, including the Lake District in UK and in South Africa.

Having finished on Black Widow, I started my prep early in 2020 tech scouting various locations, including Venice where we were due to start shooting. It was on the tech scout that when standing in line for the buffet breakfast with McQ behind a large party of Chinese tourists, who were coughing and sneezing, that McQ remarked, “I’m not going to stay here when we shoot, you don’t know what you’ll catch.” Though it was said as a joke, we both requested to stay in different hotels, though for me, it was to a hotel that I had previously stayed in when shooting Spider-Man: Far from Home, because it had a very good space for equipment storage and better boat access than the typical tourist hotels. It was also in a part of Venice that was away from the tourist areas and a better place to spend several weeks in Venice.

We were a couple of days away from our first shoot day and testing our record function of the A10 radios for a boat sequence. Here, I planned to record on the body-worn A10’s and some well-placed A10’s for sound FX. I had recently been working with Paul Isaacs of Sound Devices to develop conform software so that all the recordings could be conformed to what is shot on camera and available for dailies as a poly wav file. We were testing with stand-ins on the canals when we started to hear in the news about COVID-19 causing some concerns in areas of Northern Italy not far from Venice. It was a matter of days and the day before we were due to start shooting that we were closed down and evacuated back to quarantine in the UK. A small number of the crew had symptoms but were unsure whether it was COVID or the flu and fortunately, no one suffered any serious effects.

We spent the rest of the year up until September expecting to restart as the epidemic grew bigger and more serious. The rest is history for all of us but McQ and TC were very keen to restart production as soon as possible but it was to be six months of downtime.

Before we eventually started back to work in September 2020, I spent some of the downtime looking into communication systems that could allow us to work efficiently whilst maintain social distancing and also that could allow remote working in the event that director, DP, or any of the key crew were forced to isolate. I discovered the BOLERO system from a company called Riedel https://www.riedel.net/en/products-solutions/intercom/bolero-wireless-intercom/.

The system was mainly used in F1 motorsport and big sporting events and allowed full duplex communications over large areas. I made contact with Paul Rivens, who ran the Riedel UK Operation. Good news for us was that due to the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, there were lots of units available. Paul kindly set me up on a training course at Riedel in UK and then set up a demo for production. The producers asked me to specify a system which they then bought. I passed on most of this information to the British Film Institute, who were also investigating ways to get us all working again and many other productions in UK adopted the BOLERO system. We bought twenty-five BOLERO handsets for key HoDs, then integrated with our Motorola walkie-talkies so that everyone could communicate effectively from a safe distance. I also integrated my directors talk-back system and the video assist system and sent production audio to the BOLERO handsets so that there was no need to wear an IEM or to carry a walkie-talkie. A BOLERO antennae typically covers an area the size of a soccer pitch and multiple antennae connected by an Ethernet cable can be used to cover vast areas. I was even able to integrate cellphones when much larger distances needed to be covered, for example, when shooting the car-chase sequences in central Rome.

We restarted production in Norway. The first sequence was shooting the big motorcycle off the mountain stunt that was seen in most of the press and teaser trailers long before the film’s eventual release. Once again using the Bone Conduction Tech to communicate with TC and to record any dialog. We recorded this to a body-worn A10 and to my Scorpio and CL16 main unit cart setup.

COVID was still a big problem, so to create a bubble for the crew and actors, we all stayed on a Hurtigruten cruise ship. This was a brand-new ship that had only just come into service and was now laid up because there were no cruises operating. The beauty of being on the ship in addition to the comfort and great food was that when we needed to move to another location, we did so overnight waking up to the sound of multiple helicopters ready to ferry us to set.

We then stayed in Norway to shoot much of a sequence on trains that involved cast members on the roof of the train carriages and sequences inside the train. The majority of interiors were completed much later in UK in rail carriage sets built on the backlot at Longcross Studios.

Also, in Norway we shot some of the speed-flying and parachute sequences with TC often jumping from a helicopter. The Bone Conduction Tech once again allowed dialog to be recorded, as well as enabling communications with helicopters and cameras.

After Norway, we moved to Italy to shoot in Venice and Rome. We shot fairly conventionally in Venice using our BOLERO system for communications which McQ, our director, had fallen in love with, as it allowed him to speak directly to his DP, AD’s, Gaffer, Key Grip, Operators, and to the Voice of God system if necessary. This included a big party sequence in Palazzo Ducale. Boat sequences and chase sequences through the streets and alleys of Venice were shot using body-worn A10 transmitters and the tracks conformed to a poly wav because it was neither possible for us all to be in the boats or for us all to cram into a following boat. The Rome car-chase sequences presented similar issues and employed similar solutions. This sequence has a lot of cars and a lot of dialog. We rigged the cars with A10’s and fitted them to the actors putting everything into record. There were no follow vehicles except when using Russian Arm or similar vehicle-mounted cranes or tracking vehicles. Mostly the cameras were mounted on the action vehicles the director was watching by high-powered video transmitters which were not always in range. I sent guide production audio to the video transmitters and also used cellphones connected to the car hands-free systems to communicate back to the BOLERO system to keep the cars always in communication. When we broke dailies at lunchtime, we did not actually break for lunch as we always work continuous days, I would conform the individual files recorded on the audio A10 and A20 transmitters to a single poly file for the editors. I did the same at the end of the shooting day. As explained earlier, this process is relatively simple. The best way is to leave all of the transmitters in record for as long as possible and not to stop them in between takes. The metadata for slate and take information is entered onto the main recorder, in this case, a Scorpio with a CL16. Even if there was no useable audio, the Scorpio is put into record just to capture the metadata info. Making a sound report in a CSV (Comma-separated Values) format creates an EDL (Edit decision list) that is used to conform all of the individual A10/A20 recordings into poly files for each take ignoring anything recorded between the takes using SD-Utility https://www.sounddevices.com/product/sd-utility/

This means that from an editorial perspective, they receive a single poly file for each take that is similar to what they would expect in conventional shooting. I became very fast at conforming, meaning this did not take up too much time at the end of the day. Of course, it did mean that my team had to be particularly vigilant at timecode synching all of the A10 and A20 radios. It was not until toward the end of production that the Nexus was available which made the whole process much easier. With the Nexus, all transmitters are automatically timecoded and it is possible to remotely stop and start recording on each device, as well as making other changes like file naming, sleeping/unsleeping, changing frequencies, and adjusting power levels. This has been quite a game changer for me since we now set up a network making access to the transmitters possible for any of my team from a phone or iPad.

We had several shutdowns due to COVID but on the whole, probably managed to keep going more than most productions.

After Italy, our next location was Abu Dhabi. The good thing here was that there was already a vaccination program in place for any of the local crew and hotel staff we were likely to come into contact with. However, we were all still unvaccinated as there were as yet no vaccines approved in UK or Europe. We shot primarily in an airport that was under construction and yet to be opened, and for the first time, shot in a fairly conventional manner. We also shot the desert sequences which were tricky to protect so much equipment in what was intended to be a sandstorm. We worked mostly in Land Cruisers that we had fitted out. However, COVID was becoming a real problem in the UK with yet another wave and new strains of the virus being discovered. We had to leave Abu Dhabi before we had shot everything needed because the UK government was about to introduce an isolation program that on our return to the UK would force us to isolate in specific hotels for two weeks. We made it back just in time and eventually rebuilt parts of the airport set in a shopping centre in Birmingham, and the desert sets in a quarry, to complete the sequences.

Most of the remainder of the film was shot on sets at Longcross Studio either on one of the two stages that we had specifically built for us during the COVID shutdown or on the backlot and on UK locations.

It is often said that “Necessity Is the Mother of Invention,” and in this case, the necessity to comply with COVID restrictions forced us to investigate new ways of working. Mainly with a complete change of how we shoot and record car and chase sequences to avoid the crew being jammed into follow vehicles by using the recording capabilities of radio mics and the ability to conform to a single poly file, and as well as the use of duplex communications to avoid having to work too closely together on set enabling us to communicate efficiently.

Certainly, as far as the Mission: Impossible series is concerned, I do not think there will be any going back on the changes we made during the COVID pandemic. We have proved that recording on radio mics, particularly now that the A20 has 32-bit float and SD Utility has the capability of conforming the files for editors, is the way to go. I’m not certain that other productions will continue with the BOLERO communication systems but our director, Christopher McQuarrie, has requested the system to be expanded for Dead Reckoning Part Two which is already in production, though currently on hiatus due to the industrial action taken by writers and actors.

We are already planning how we will record dialog and facilitate communications for some even more daring stunts, including using some new technology to record underwater. Currently, I am not permitted to write about this or the even more amazing stuff that we are doing but look forward to telling you all about it in 2024.

Due to the extended schedule because of COVID, we had a number of different team members for the shoot. These were the following: Lloyd Dudley, 1st AS/Additional Production Mixer; Tom Harrison, 1st AS/Boom Operator; Luigi Pini, 1st AS/Boom Operator (Italy); Freya Clarke, 1st AS/Boom Operator; Hosea Ntaborwa, 1st AS/Boom Operator; Ayesha Breithaupt, 2nd AS.

by James Delhauer

It very much feels as though Hollywood is at a crossroads. The #MeToo Movement began a cascade of high-profile scandals that continue to this day. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the industry from a “Cinema First” to a “Streaming First” model that’s proven financially disastrous. The 2021 IATSE Basic Agreement & Area Standards Agreement negotiations unveiled a longstanding custom of worker abuse through platforms like the IAStories Instagram account. Throughout 2022, Variety and Deadline reported on the deteriorating working conditions in visual effect companies. The oversaturation of CGI-heavy blockbusters had created a crunch culture of unpaid overtime and exhaustion. Then on May 2, 11,500 members of the WGA put down their pens and walked off the job in protest of the poor wages, conditions, and job security protections offered by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. On July 14, they were joined by more than 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. For a combined 191 days, film and television productions across the country shut down and the industry nearly went dormant. Now the strikes have come to an end and production is beginning to resume. According to the Milken Institute, the strikes have cost the American economy approximately $6 billion. So as the dust settles, let’s take stock of what’s just happened.

Throughout early 2023, there was a growing sense that production was beginning to slow in anticipation of the strikes. The Motion Picture Industry Health & Pension Plans have reported a steep decline in reported working hours as early as February compared to 2021 and 2022. By April, the plans had seen almost a 20% reduction in working hours. Perhaps this was merely a result of the studio’s realization that they had overcommitted on the development of streaming content during the pandemic, but that’s a hard narrative to accept. Early on during the strikes, Deadline and Variety reported that studio execs were going to “bleed out” the unions, that “The endgame [was] to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” and that the studios said they were indulging in a “cruel, but necessary evil.” Such public statements make it clear that the goal was to break us; not just the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, but all of labor.
This adversarial relationship that has cropped up between business and labor is to nobody’s benefit. The studios did not save themselves any money by allowing a strike to go on for 191 days. The concessions that were made in September and November could have been made in May and July, and we’d all be $6 billion better off for it. Nearly 40% of the Los Angeles economy is tied to the motion picture industry, which translated to a very real cost for almost 4 million of the 9.83 million Los Angeles County residents. That is to say nothing of entertainment workers throughout the rest of the country and world who were impacted. Now both business and labor are trying to recover from wounds inflicted upon one another as we stare down the IATSE and Teamster contract negotiations set to take place next year.
A more productive relationship between both sides going forward is essential. In my experience, filmmakers don’t want to go on strike. Getting into this business is a dream that many have and the select few of us who managed to get our foot in the door want to keep chasing that dream as far as we can. We want to make movies and shows that we can share with millions of people around the world. We want to explore our crafts and become better and more skilled craftspeople than we were yesterday. We’re proud people who are proud of the art we create. But before all of that, we’re human beings. We have families. We have needs. We want to be our employers’ proud collaborators.

But this isn’t a collaboration. Setting out to bleed your partners dry and watch them lose their homes is not partnership at all. Worst of all, it didn’t even work. Labor banded together. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA were not alone on the strike lines. They were joined by the IATSE, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Basic Crafts, and the labor community as a whole. Workers from labor unions that have nothing to do with entertainment joined us in solidarity on the picket lines. What’s more, we worked hard to take care of one another.

During the strike, our partners at the Motion Picture Television Fund (MPTF) and the Entertainment Community Fund moved mountains to support out-of-work casts and crews, offering a combined total of more than $15 million in grants to workers whose jobs were impacted or suspended by the strikes. Both the IATSE and the Teamsters set up more than $4 million each in relief funds for their respective memberships in order to create a safety net for those who were out of work due to the strikes. Similarly, Local 695 contributed another $250,000 specifically to support our members and various other locals across the country set up similar support systems for their members.

Numerous food and grocery drives were set up, helping hundreds of workers put food on the table for their families. Thanksgiving saw the IATSE, the Brotherhood of Teamsters, and Basic Crafts joined with Labor Community Services to provide up to 2,500 families with Thanksgiving meals to celebrate the holiday. Those on the strike line created a sense of comradery with music and performances for one another. This is the strength of the labor movement: Unity. It feels almost redundant to have to say this, but the power of unions is that we are unified. Our core principle comes down to the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all. So when our brothers, sisters, and kin took to the strike lines, the whole of the labor community flocked to support them.

As of November 14, more than 366 labor actions have occurred in the United States in 2023. We are seeing a swell within the labor movement as strike after strike results in new and fairer deals being made between labor and business. For the first time in almost sixty years, Gallup has reported that 71% of Americans support unions and our cause. The momentum that we’ve built will continue into next year as the IATSE and International Brotherhood of Teamsters go into their negotiations with the AMPTP. Labor is united. The employers should remember that.