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MillimeterSounds Like Oscar!
Mar 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Blair Jackson
 Moulin Rouge earned an Academy Award nomination for
Best Sound, with honors going to Andy Nelson, Anna Behlmer, Roger
Savage, and Guntis Sics. |
February 12 was a very good day for the Pearl Harbor sound team. On that day, it nabbed richly deserved Academy Award nominations in the two sound categories — Best Sound and Best Sound Editing.
“It's very, very thrilling!” said George Watters, supervising sound editor for Pearl Harbor, the morning the nominations were announced. He'd had a steady stream of congratulatory phone calls that had taken him, momentarily, away from his work on the new Chris Rock action film, Bad Company. Watters was nominated, with Christopher Boyes, for Best Sound Editing. “I've been nominated before, and it's always exciting, but this was a case where I really believed in the sound of the film, and I loved the experience of making it so much that to be nominated seems even more special.” Watters has one win in five previous nominations — for The Hunt for Red October in 1991. Boyes was also nominated this year, along with three others, for Best Sound for Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, for which he was one of the re-recording mixers. He won an Oscar for Sound Editing for Titanic in 1998.
Across town, Pearl Harbor re-recording mixer Greg P. Russell interrupted his work on Spider-Man to field calls from friends and colleagues wanting to celebrate his nomination in the Best Sound category. Russell, with seven previous nominations (and no wins), shared the nomination with longtime re-recording mix partner Kevin O'Connell (14 previous nominations) and production mixer Peter Devlin (first-time nominee). “It never gets old,” Russell says of the nomination. “We're very excited about it. It's a nice array of films that we're up against. It was a very good sound year.”
 The nonstop action of Black Hawk Down earned a
Best Sound nomination for Mike Minkler, Myron Nettinga, and Chris
Munro. |
The film sound community is a tight-knit and supportive group as a rule. If there are minor petty jealousies and some division along regional lines — the West Coast continually dominates in both the amount of work and awards recognition — they are rarely articulated in public. First and foremost, they are skilled and creative craftspeople who have to work well in teams and groups; that's the nature of the job. As George Watters puts it, “I couldn't do the work without the mixers and the mixers couldn't do the work without us, and I'm one that firmly believes that all of us in the sound group, no matter what you do — whether its Foley or ADR or mixing or editing — we're all dependent on everyone else. It's only going to be as good as the people you're working with. Luckily, I've had editors who have worked 10 years or more with me — a lot of them down at Sony with Kevin [O'Connell] and Greg [Russell] — so they know what to expect from us and we know what to expect from them. There are no egos in the way, and no one is more important than anyone else. We all work together.”
As is the case with several other branches of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, members of the Sound Branch choose the Academy Award nominees themselves, and then the full membership of the Academy can vote in all categories. There are between 450 and 500 members of the Sound Branch — only a fraction of the total number of people working in the field nationwide, but still encompassing many of the biggest sound players. One need not be a member of the Academy to be nominated, or to win, but it helps to have friends in the Academy. Most voters probably strive hard to be objective, but a few undoubtedly vote for their buddies. That's just human nature.
On the surface, the nominations process is quite straight-forward. Members of the Sound Branch receive a list of eligible films (without sound personnel credits) and then rank their top five choices in each category. For Best Sound, the top five vote-getters are the nominees. For Sound Editing it's a little more complicated: The top seven choices are entered in what's known as the Bake-Off. In early February, members of the Sound Branch (and other industry types who can snag a ticket) assemble at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Hollywood to view 10-minute reels showing off the sound effects editing from each of the seven films. Those who are eligible vote on the spot, rating each film on a scale of six to 10. A film must average 8.5 to earn a nomination in this category, and only three films can be nominated. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the company that has overseen Oscar voting for decades, has representatives at the Bake-Off to collect the ballots at the end of the evening.
 Pixar's computer-animated Monsters, Inc.
received a Best Sound Editing nomination for perennial Oscar-winner
Gary Rydstrom and first-time nominee Michael Silvers. |
But nothing is as simple as it seems. There is no shortage of opinions about flaws in the system, both in terms of the process and the categories of sound personnel eligible for the two awards. There are even those who believe the two awards should be combined into one Best Sound award, with the same number of trophies handed out for the combined award that are handed out for the two separate awards.
As it stands now, four people can share the Best Sound award — up to three re-recording mixers and one production sound mixer. “The problem with this,” notes a leading sound editor who requested anonymity, “is that what happens most years is the film that wins Best Sound is an effects-laden job, so you often get one and possibly two people going up there [to collect an Oscar] who, relatively speaking, have little to do with why the film won. The first person is the music re-recording mixer — if there is a separate person — and the second person is the production mixer, who on a big action film, as often as not has most of his work replaced. The person who's not going up is the supervising sound editor. The argument is, ‘We have a separate award for that, for Sound Editing.’ Well, if there's one soundtrack up on the screen, they should take the number of statuettes for both of them and put them into one award. Under the current rules, certain people who should be up there never will be up there. For example, if you have an Evita or Moulin Rouge, the person who maybe spent six months or a year recording and premixing the music is not and cannot under current Academy rules be up onstage unless they were also a re-recording mixer, which more often than not is not the case. It would be nice for there to be more leeway.”
But Bruce Stambler, whose work as supervising sound editor on The Fast and the Furious earned him a spot in this year's Bake-Off (he won an Oscar in 1997 for The Ghost and the Darkness), commented the week before the nominations were announced, “I just don't think it would be fair to marry Best Sound with Best Sound Editing. I've always thought Best Sound should be called ‘Best Sound Re-recording’ because that's what it is. I like the title of Best Sound Editing because it does represent what we do. I don't think the Best Sound movie is necessarily the best edited. For example, Moulin Rouge, which could be a Best Sound nomination movie — is it a Best Sound Editing contender? Absolutely not. If a movie is 80 or 90% music, then obviously we [sound editors] don't contribute the music part. Say it's 60% music and 20% dialog — that means it's 20% sound effects or sound editing. Dialogue is part of sound editing, as well, but it's driven by the production sound generally. Whether the right people always get recognition in Best Sound is a different question, but I think Sound Editing is fine the way it is.”
Putting together the 10-minute reel for the Bake-Off is an art form in itself, and there are those who grumble that 10 minutes isn't enough to show the range of editing required in a full feature film. (The Visual Effects wing judges on the basis of 15-minute reels.) There have been rare occasions when a poorly edited Bake-Off reel has hurt a film's chances for a nomination. And the editors also have to keep in mind that their work will be shown in the company of six other films, most of which will be loud and laden with explosions and mayhem. The order is determined by lottery, which can definitely affect a reel's perception — a couple of years ago, the editor whose clip had to follow Gary Rydstrom's reel for Saving Private Ryan all but ceded the Oscar to his colleague. (And Rydstrom did, in fact, win trophies, in both sound categories.)
“I pretty much went whiz-bang, because that's what the movie's about,” Stambler notes of his Fast and Furious reel. “For my money, all the detail and the sound editing of the movie really are best illustrated in the sequences I chose. Obviously I can't show everything, but to be honest it wasn't a real delicate film. I put together 10 minutes that I think is very entertaining.”
George Watters of Pearl Harbor was perhaps a bit more strategic in his approach to the Bake-Off reel: “I ran the film a couple of times beforehand and I conversed with Chris Boyes on it, and essentially we felt we should try to make a clip that doesn't start out too big. We wanted to kind of ease in, sucking the audience in. So we started with a minute or two of the Japanese planes coming into the harbor, with the ominous sound of the planes and the low driving beat of the score. Then we went into the harbor and had the boats being hit by the torpedoes, and the gunfire and the planes maneuvering. Then the second half of the clip was the sounds of the [battleship] Oklahoma exploding and the ship going underwater, ending with the sailors trying desperately to get out. So we had airplanes and bombs and guns in the first half and lot of water and boat in the second half. But within that we tried to have some peaks and valleys so it wasn't just relentless bombs and guns. You know, a lot of times with seven films at high volume, the ear starts to get fatigued. So we went for more dynamics.”
This year, only two films got the requisite 8.5 average at the Bake-Off to earn Sound Editing nominations: Pearl Harbor and Monsters, Inc. (edited by seven-time Oscar-winner Gary Rydstrom and first-time nominee Michael Silvers). If only one film had received the 8.5-or-above rating, then Sound Editing could have been relegated to the category of Special Oscar handed out during the Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony, rather than on the telecast seen by hundreds of millions around the world. It's a state of affairs that has some sound editors upset. Watters speaks for many when he says, “I'm surprised there are only two films that made it because I really feel strongly that there are always at least five good films worth singling out. Three isn't enough, and I'm surprised we only got two this year. I think that's problematic. I think if we're allotted three, we should always nominate three.”
What doesn't seem to engender much year-to-year controversy is the actual selection of films in the sound categories. While certainly favoring big-budget spectacles, the Academy members don't automatically reward top-grossing films or critical favorites. Otherwise, such films as The Rock, Con-Air, and Pearl Harbor would never have been nominated. This year, there was a good variety to the films selected. The seven Bake-Off contenders were Pearl Harbor (sound design at Skywalker Sound, mixed at Cary Grant Theater, Sony lot), Monsters, Inc. (edited and mixed at Skywalker Sound), the quirky French comedy Amelie (audio posted at Audis de Boulogne Joinville), The Lord of the Rings (audio posted at The Film Unit, New Zealand), The Fast and the Furious (edited at SoundStorm, mixed at Wilshire Stages), A.I. (mixed at Skywalker Sound), and Black Hawk Down (edited at Soundelux, mixed at Todd Studio West). Nominees for Best Sound were Pearl Harbor, Moulin Rouge (Andy Nelson, Anna Behlmer, Roger Savage, Guntis Sics, mixed at Fox's Howard Hawks Stage), The Lord of the Rings (Chris Boyes, Michael Semanick, Gethin Creagh, Hammond Peek), Black Hawk Down (Michael Minkler, Myron Nettinga, Chris Munro) and Amelie (Vincent Arnardi, Guillaume Leriche, Jean Umansky.) Of those, only the inclusion of Amelie might be a bit surprising, but the sound professionals who voted for it recognized its interesting and unusual sound design, and the film's director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and lead mixer Vincent Arnardi, were already admired for their innovative work on past movies such as Delicatessen and City of Lost Children. The last time a non-English-speaking film received such high marks in film sound was Das Boot in 1982.
It's difficult to discern any trends in film sound from this year's list of nominees, and that's probably a good thing. Although there's no lack of bombs, explosions, and ricochets, it isn't just that. And in general, the mixers and editors I've spoken with believe that there is movement away from deafening sound jobs to ones that incorporate greater dynamics and more subtlety. Certainly there is greater realism than ever before — those are real B-25s and Japanese Zeros, and all the correct armaments blasting over the sound track of Pearl Harbor — but there is also greater imagination and sophistication to the overall sonic palette of most films. This truly is a golden age of film sound, propelled by the public's new-found hunger for quality sound in theaters and at home.
We'll give the last word to Pearl Harbor's Greg Russell: “I think that when it comes to sound, we're maturing. Early on with digital sound formats we were all pushing the envelope with level and how big can we make it. And with a movie like Pearl Harbor, with that amount of stuff happening on screen at any one given time, you could very easily go over the top. But we wanted it to be in what we call ‘the pocket,’ so that dynamically it's strong and bold where it needed to be, but it was really all about detail and definition. That was the biggest challenge for me. It was all about choices and an effort to create a track with definition and detail rather than level. Knowing the film was to be viewed not only by the survivors of Pearl Harbor, but also a sizable elderly audience that lived in that time frame, we wanted the mix to be dynamic but not overbearing. It turned out that was the best way to approach the film; that was the way to go.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
