So, it’s been eight months since my last post. In that time I managed to finish writing my dissertation, complete a barrage of revisions, defend the thesis in a three-hour inquisition, pass the defense, graduate, and accept a teaching and research fellowship that will take my wife and I to Los Angeles for at least two years. It’s all a bit surreal to think that my doctoral project is finally over.

Four hundred and fifty three pages later, the result is “Sound from Start to Finish: Professional Style and Practice in Modern Hollywood Sound Production.” Count me among those who were floored at its eventual length — for some reason I have a tendency to under-estimate word counts and page lengths with my writing.

What is most amazing about these past eight months is that everything to do with this research project reached a level of intensity that I had not experienced before. I’m still processing it all. But completing the project definitely felt more anti-climactic than exultant. After a prolonged period of not knowing how the project would be received by the thesis committee, or how much time any revisions would take to complete, or if the defense recommendations would interfere with my post-doctoral appointment, everything actually…worked out well.

In the coming weeks and months I’m aiming to return to this blog with some frequency to hammer out some new ideas and describe the monumental task of moving from Toronto to L.A. and working within the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

To start, I thought I’d share some ideas on the nature of Steven Spielberg’s “suburban animism” that I tried to describe in an article I wrote a few years ago that I never published. After seeing Super 8, and reading Matt Zoller Seitz’s piece on the nostalgic glare of J.J. Abrams’ film, I thought this might be a good opportunity to explore some of the fine-grained features of Spielberg’s early sound style as evidenced in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and Poltergeist (yes, I know Tobe Hooper directed this one, but we can all see Spielberg’s fingerprints on it).

In 1991, Spielberg was asked to provide an image from one of his films that typified his visual style. Indelible as it is enigmatic, Spielberg chose the moment in Close Encounters where little Barry Guiler is caught in the doorway between his home and that “beautiful but awful” outer light. The dichotomous relationship between the familiar image of the family home and that of the unfamiliar alien presence serves to spotlight the significance and simplicity of this moment in the film; it also reflects the prevailing notion of suburban disruption in the filmmaker’s work. Arguably, however, the extent to which we can study Spielberg’s style by focusing on this “master image” is limited, as it does not account for the sound that accompanies and surrounds it. Sound defines the domestic setting of the scene. It introduces the familiar noise of a family home, while disrupting it with an unfamiliar, alien presence that reverberates in both the aural and visual spaces.

Within the boundaries of Spielberg’s early works, the domestic melodrama finds a home amidst the fantastic. Unlike its generic antecedents, the science-fiction films by Spielberg offer a rich, textured, and ambivalent notion of the American suburb. Part domestic bliss, part domestic nightmare, these films are often transgeneric models that blend elements of horror, sci-fi, and family melodrama into a cohesive whole. What can be termed Spielberg’s “fantastic” cinema, the defining feature of this generic model is his attention to to the functionality of the contemporary American family (or, as it were, the 1970s family): how domestic space is divided, sewn, and often torn apart by familial tension. Spielberg’s domestic scene is painted with few frills; instead, his portraits of suburbia are eerily plain and realistic.

In their biography of the director, Donald Mott and Cheryl McAllister Saunders note, “Spielberg’s characters are usually suburban types very much like the suburban moviegoers sitting in the shopping mall theaters watching them.” Noting the important connection between Spielberg and his middle-class roots, biographer Joseph McBride amusingly suggests, “It is possible to imagine John Ford never having seen Monument Valley, or Martin Scorsese never having walked New York’s mean streets, and it is equally impossible to imagine Steven Spielberg never having grown up in suburbia.”

Described by Tom O’Brien as “suburban animism,” Spielberg’s early sci-fi films personify the everyday. The realities that govern a middle-class experience are paramount in Spielberg’s world. O’Brien writes:

Watch Spielberg’s pizzas, watch his toys, dolls and train sets. In E.T. watch his use of Coors beer and Pez candies. On one level, this mass of details explains part of the appeal of his films — the lovingly nostalgic recreation of American life, particularly suburban life, that engages viewer sympathy, tickles humor, and establishes credibility for the weird events about to happen. On another level, however, these physical, almost palpable recreations of the material world are not the antithesis to Spielberg’s interest in the uncanny; rather, their intensity explains it.

Bridging the gap between genres, Spielberg introduces the supernatural and extraterrestrial into domestic, suburban settings. Put another way, the fantastic finds its way to the homes of Roy Neary and Barry Guiler, Elliot, and Carol Anne.

As if connected by a common narrative thread, Close Encounters focuses on the disintegration of the traditional family unit, while E.T. and Poltergeist reflect, expand, and comment on the results of this breakdown. As Roy Neary boards the mother ship to be born again, to re-discover his life’s purpose, his wife and three children are left to clean up after him and to go on without him. In E.T., Elliot is without a father, and watches as his two siblings and mother learn to cope with the abandonment. Indeed, E.T. begins where Close Encounters ends, with a family in disarray, and a child without a father. In Poltergeist, the scenario is taken even further. Vivian Sobchack has suggested that signs of paternal failure are visible in the “ethically lax, real-estate salesman Dad whose willful ignorance of the ground of his business practice jeopardizes his children.” While Steve and Diane Freeling are seemingly happily married, their home becomes the site of a haunting, which results in their youngest daughter being kidnapped by evil spirits. The disappearance of Carol Anne fuels the Spielberg thematic of familial separation and subsequent disorder and division.

More generally, all three films exhibit a distinct suburban animism that resonates not only visually but, more importantly, sonically. The Spielberg suburban thematic has often been discussed in visual terms, as evidenced by this review of E.T. and Poltergeist by Vincent Canby:

The Spielberg films are distinguished from most other American films with which they might be compared by the richness of their gently satiric social detail. The gallant youngsters…do not live in some unlocated American Never-Never-Land but in California, in an all-too-real real estate development. The houses, which look not as if they’d been built but laid by a giant hen, come equipped with every possible kitchen gadget, hot tubs, suspended staircases, and walls that are probably paper-thin. The kids eat dreadfully over-sweetened cold cereals and waffles defrosted in toasters, and they sleep in beds that are often full of potato chips. They play with remote control toys, drink colas that rot their teeth even as they’re being straightened, and they go to sleep to the hum of television sets that are no longer being watched.

Canby’s review, while rich in visual description, only hints at the sound of Spielberg’s suburbia. The director’s objets d’art crackle with a palpable sense of realism and temporal immediacy. They are the sounds of the domestic landscape: the multi-layered conversations among family members, the noise of electronic toys, and the distant but familiar sounds of dogs barking and garbage cans rolling in the street.

What is more, Spielberg’s characters listen. As they all learn to communicate with each other and the fantastic, the aural environments provide a rich canvas of sounds, noises, voices, and musical tones that provide a modicum of meaning to the supernatural and other-worldly events.

Disembodied Voices

The home itself takes on a living, corporeal identity in each of these films. The first time we enter the Neary home in Close Encounters, Roy is framed in close-up, seated at a living room table with his train set, attempting to help his oldest son with a math problem. While their dialogue dominates the sound track, a flurry of background noise is distinctly audible. One child causes the destruction of a playpen, another cries for attention, and Roy’s wife carries on a conversation with her husband with or without his participation. Beyond this sonic dynamism, the noise of toys being broken and the murmur of a distant television compete to be heard. The juxtaposition that emerges here is that of an uncluttered frame — a two-shot close-up — that is accompanied by a cluttered and overwrought sound track. Occasionally, Spielberg fulfills the sound hermeneutic, revealing the multiple sources of these sounds. When the sounds are revealed, the anamorphic widescreen frame takes on an expansive but claustrophobic quality thanks, in part, to Spielberg’s deep focus compositions. In this way, everything is in focus and everything speaks.

Furthermore, the sound track emphasizes important narrative points through variation, including dissipation. Roy is often framed in isolation from his family in order to advance the notion that he is no longer a pat of the household. At a dinner scene, he stares at his plate while his wife and children carry on different conversations. Framed on Roy’s face, the sound track compensates to fill in the rest of the scene. The resultant flow of sound surrounds Roy in his domestic space: his daughter vies for attention by repeating “There’s a fly in my mashed potatoes,” against the clattery noise of silverware. Mesmerized by the mound of potatoes, Roy begins to sculpt a mountainous shape from the food on his plate. Soon the sound of the family dissipates, as if on cue to signal the moment of his realization. The silence is marked by several shots of his wife and children, staring at him, bewildered and frightened.

Similarly, in E.T., Elliot struggles to be heard at the dinner table as he must compete with the common household sounds. Again, Spielberg chooses to framed Elliot in a medium close-up, which de-clutters the image but stacks the sound track with the sound of rattling dishes, a radio, and the dialog of teens playing Dungeons and Dragons. These sounds prevent Elliot from informing the family of his discovery of E.T. He is only able to assert control over the ambient sounds by dominating it: he screams “Listen!” Silence then follows, as Elliot finally receives everyone’s attention. Finally, in Poltergeist, while the children eat breakfast, an array of foreground and background noise is silenced when Robbie’s milk glass breaks (presumably) on its own.

The acousmatic appropriation of domestic phenomena is best explained by the presence of television in the home. Incorporating the work of theorists Raymond Williams and John Ellis in his study of television sound, Rick Altman posits an intriguing notion that he calls “household flow.” Altman contends that television consists of a continuous sonic flow that spreads from room to room to communicate its message. Essentially an aural medium, television “must organize itself in such a way as to harmonize with the household flow on which it depends…at the same time, renewed emphasis is laid on the message-carrying ability of the sound track, which alone remains in contact with the audience for fully half of the time that the set is on.” Therefore, in terms of this idea of household flow, television is dependent on the sound track to transit meaning and information. It is possible, then, for a television to communicate without having anyone watch it. Even when there is nothing on TV, its static signal beams through the home, uninterrupted, as in the opening scene of Poltergeist.

Conceived as a wandering acousmetre, household flow is as pervasive as it is invasive in Spielberg’s suburban thematic. The television is ever-present in his domestic spaces. If it is not placed within the visual space, then its sound can be heard throughout the home as an omnipresent character. Some critics have noted that its presence assists in creating a viable suburban realism, however, this serves as its most obvious purpose. In most instances, the television communicates cultural details that reflect the generic heritage of the three films. In Close Encounters, Roy is awakened one morning by the sounds of a Looney Tunes cartoon featuring Marvin the Martian; in E.T. and Poltergeist, television becomes a receptacle for old Hollywood fantasy films, including This Island Earth (alien visitors) and A Guy Named Joe (the spirit world).

The television in Poltergeist takes on more of an ambivalent status. The television set itself is the portal through which Carol Anne is abducted. After this point, she communicates with her family solely through sound. Her family can hear her on the other side, but are unable to see her.

Carried outside the home, acousmatic (or, disembodied voices) find a place among adult characters. In E.T., adults and figures of authority are shot in characteristic fashion by Spielberg: waist-down compositions that hide faces, or ones bathed in shadow. Recalling the child-views of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip, Spielberg limits the physical view of adults onscreen, while allowing them to retain their voices offscreen. The scene in Elliot’s science classroom is Spielberg’s most overt attempt to avoid showing the teacher’s face.

Certainly, acousmatic sounds serve a further purpose in these films, one that concerns the degree to which characters listen. Hearing sound is as much an audience activity as it is one for major characters. For instance, we listen as attentively for Carol Anne as Steven and Diane do.

“First Day of School” – A Lesson in Communication

The cluttered suburban soundscape that governs Spielberg’s animism often prevents the main characters from successfully communicating with each other and with those who seek to disrupt the familial structure. Overlapping voices compete with foreground and background noises. In her study of dialog in classical Hollywood films, Sarah Kozloff articulates the notion of verbal excess by situating it within a temporal framework. She argues that the 1970s brought an awareness of documentary realism to Hollywood, resulting in the adoption of an aesthetic she calls “verbal wallpaper.” Characteristic of urban dramas such as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Kozloff insists that the sound track transmits the sonorous richness of a city street or a restaurant dining room: “a proportion of dialogue in every film serves primarily as a representation of ordinary conversational activities.”

The effect of the “verbal wallpaper” technique on Spielberg’s works is pretty clear. However, Spielberg also assuages any sonorous excess by setting up two different strategies to simplify the sound space and allow his characters the ability to communicate. The first strategy echoes Spielberg’s general distrust of adult authority by having his adolescent characters speak in simple, colloquial, and often endearing terms. During Elliot’s first morning with E.T. in his room, he shows the alien an array of action figures and toys that help Elliot describe many facets of human life. Just read (or listen) to Elliot’s monologue:

Do you talk? You know, talk? Me human. Boy. Elliot. Ell-i-ot. Coke, see. We drink it. It’s, uh, it’s a drink. You know, food. These are toys. These little men. This is Greedo. And then this is Hammerhead. See, this is Walrusman. And then this is Snaggletooth. And this is Lando Calrissian. See. And this is Boba Fett. And look, they can even have wars. Look at this. (Simulates ray-gun noises) And look, fish. Fish eat the fish food and the shark eats the fish. But nobody eats the shark. See, this is Pez. Candy. See, you eat it. You put the candy in here and then when you lift up the head, candy comes out and you can eat it. You want some? This is a peanut, you eat it. But you can’t eat this one, ’cause this is fake. This is money. See, we put the money in the peanut. You see, bank. Seee. And then, this is a car. This is what we get around in. See, car. (E.T. begins to chew on the toy car) Hey! Hey! Wait a second! No! You don’t eat em. Are you hungry? I’m hungry. Stay. Stay. I’ll be right here.

Elliot’s simple lesson cuts directly to the heart of the matter without unnecessary disruption or confusion. When the two say goodbye at the end of the film, E.T. tells Elliot, “I’ll be right here,” mirroring the lesson Elliot taught him their first morning together. During the course of the film, E.T. and Elliot communicate with rather simple speech: “ouch” represents both physical and heartfelt pain; Elliot asks E.T. to “stay,” while E.T. replies “home.”

In Poltergeist, Steve and Diane must learn to communicate with Carol Anne with stern verbal efficiency. Diane must compose herself to instruct her daughter to stay out of the light.

Close Encounters offers the clearest example of the desire and search for effective means of communication between people and interplanetary beings. The film posits the extraordinary challenge of communicating without resorting to conversational, verbal logic. Since the acousmatic voice resists clarity and yields an excess of noise, Spielberg suggests that language itself must be redefined in order for interaction to be productive. Charlene Engel writes:

Close Encounters is about language: verbal, electronic, and musical — communication and its limitations, language and its possibilities; and it is about the ineffable things which are beyond speech or imaging — things having to do with emotion and yearning, things touching upon the spiritual and the supernatural.

Engel goes further by suggestingt hat the extraterrestrials have come to Earth not to inhabit the planet, but rather to “see if humans are capable of rapidly learning to communicate in an abstract language of light and sound.”

Importantly, Lacombe is initially baffled by the meaning of the vocal chant sung by the Indians. By contrast, the five-note musical pattern is harmonious and immediate. John Williams has stated the genesis for the five notes resulted from Spielberg’s request for a musical signal rather than a melody. A melody, according to Williams, would require too much time to state, while a signal or short phrase would connote the immediacy of a doorbell chime: “we’re here.” Lacombe’s inability to fully articulate the meaning o the signal is based, in part, on the fact that the first time the tones are heard, they are enunciated by human voice. The voice — as I have suggested — has the ability to disrupt, hide, and confuse. In response, Lacombe translates the vocal harmony into a visual sign system. Lacombe adopts the sign language system designed by Zoltan Kodaly that was meant to aid deaf children in understanding music. During a meeting with government and UN officials, Lacombe demonstrates the Kodaly method: first, the vocal rendition is played on tape recorder, then Lacombe performs the hand gestures that accompany each note, and finally the signal is translated into electronic pulses. Click this link for a full clip of this sequence.

During the climactic conversation sequence at the end of the film, the acousmatic sounds of the suburban home and government authority dull to a whisper as one engineer says to another, “It’s the first day of school.” Indeed, as E.T. learns to communicate with simple eloquence, so too do the scientists in Close Encounters. As music and image coalesce in one epiphanous moment, the struggle for communication is overcome: Lacombe extends his hand and greets the extraterrestrial with the Kodaly hand gestures. Synchronized with Lacombe’s gestures, the five notes are played non-diegetically, thus sewing Williams’ score to the diegesis.

Similarly, in Poltergeist, the rescue of Carol Anne unfolds in a dizzying display of diffused light and orchestral bombast: Jerry Goldsmith’s score score fluctuates between ethereal opulence and a gentle lullaby motif by Carol Anne. Also, in E.T., the final reel is joined to Williams’ score. In fact, the light on Elliot’s finger illuminates to a dramatic brass cue, adding one more connection between music and image. E.T. tells Elliot, “I’ll be right here,” a symbol of Elliot’s teaching and a reminder that even the most complex of emotions can be expressed with remarkable clarity through simple words and music.

Parting Notes

The domestic landscapes of these three films are visually denoted by the rows of semi-built homes in E.T. and Poltergeist, and the crowded living room in Close Encounters. But more so, Spielberg’s suburban animism is denoted through the sounds of his domestic spaces. These soundscapes are often cluttered, descriptive, and dynamic; they are also excessive and claustrophobic. Spielberg’s suburban ambivalence reveals a common tension in all three films: as characters attempt to overcome the cluttered nature of their environments, the search for communication becomes paramount. In order for this goal to be achieved, the world of noise is ultimately replaced with a simpler method. Dense, speech-laden environments are replaced with rudimentary, simplistic dialog between characters. Additionally, dialog is abandoned altogether in the climaxes of all three films in favor of a musical language that expresses triumph over the confines of the family home.

Just as Spielberg offered as “master image” little Barry Guiler opening his front door the unknown, we may add as “master sound” the noisy living rooms in Close Encounters and E.T. and the droning presence of television in Poltergeist. Maybe it’s the interplay of music and image. In its suburban familiarity, Spielberg’s master sound may exist in our own homes at this very moment.

“It’s all a big experiment.”

This was Hans Zimmer’s summation of his work on Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster Inception, which is fast becoming one of the composer’s more commercially popular scores. This summer, a viral video on You Tube revealed the origins of the thematic two-note motif that provided Inception with its musical signature. The augmented horn blasts were, in fact, based on a slowed version of a passage from Edith Piaf’s “Je Ne Regrette Rien.” Of course, the song itself played an important role in the story world: it was the thematic slumber music by which Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) forces himself back into consciousness.

The two-note brass motif represents a surprisingly small section of Zimmer’s much larger musical work for the film, but has become the chief signifying element of the score. The trailer music, composed by Zack Hemsey, builds an effective motif around a more robust version of the horn blast, which itself has gone viral — in cat videos, no less.

Interestingly, the liner notes of the soundtrack listed the cues that featured “interpolations” of the Piaf song. While some may think Zimmer simply lifted the motif without providing due credit, the decision to augment the original song and integrate it into the sonic tapestry of the film was made by Zimmer and Nolan early in the film’s production. What is truly remarkable about Zimmer’s relationship with Nolan is how early he gets involved. With Inception, for example, Nolan began consulting with Zimmer at the script stage before shooting had even begun. At that point, Zimmer began working out certain musical ideas based on their conversations and his initial impressions of the screenplay, which, to his mind, faithfully conveyed the film’s visual aesthetic in “novelistic” terms.

In the end, the Piaf motif became only one of several musical dreamscapes in the film. The main theme, as it could be called, revolves around another two-note (this time, ascending) motif that is fully developed in the final scene of the film. Zimmer hired guitarist Johnny Marr to add his voice to a selection of cues, including the incredibly expansive “Mombasa” action set piece, which blends Marr’s humming guitar with some driving drum and bass motifs.

Like much of Zimmer’s work, the music is less reactive than it is proactive. The shards of melody and chord swells tend not to work as counterpoint but parallel to the picture. That is not to say he doesn’t hit certain sync points or underline certain dramatic moments, but his stylistic signature remains the “slow burn” technique I outlined in an earlier post. In a motif that echoes the close of The DaVinci Code, Zimmer builds his original two-note motif and adds a cluster of ascending and descending chords in addition to Johnny Marr’s guitar riff for the final minutes of Inception. There’s a clear sync point when Cobb clears customs and is greeted by Miles (Michael Caine) in the airport, which transforms the motif in a more driving figure for guitar, brass and strings. In a narrative sense, the music builds to a climax, but as an audience we’re unsure where we’re going — he’s certainly leading us somewhere, but the music is not necessarily being led by the picture.

In a certain sense, the music could be a projection of Cobb’s character psychology. In other words, Zimmer is following Cobb’s emotional arc in that final sequence. I’m usually not drawn to such flights of psychoanalytic fancy but this might explain how Zimmer approached the emotional tone of the scene. Since the score was mixed particularly high in the film, it is certainly fair to suggest that music plays a greater role in establishing a sound world tapestry that is not entirely locked to every picture beat. It’s precisely that organic quality that eschews clear definitions of point/contrapuntal music. The music leads — but to its own beat, it seems.

In those final minutes we eventually see where he’s been leading us — to Cobb’s home and his children. When we enter Cobb’s home and he spots his children playing in the yard, Zimmer drops the motif and replaces it with a much sparser musical world: a piano arrangement of the two notes built around a rising string figure and the thick undercurrent of an electronic drone, the marker of what might be yet another dream, which is confirmed moments later when Nolan pans left to reveal the spinning top. (The music does not clearly indicate if it’s a dream, though.)

Zimmer cleverly satisfies the desire for a classical denouement by introducing an anthemic quality to the film’s main motif without contradicting the open-ended nature of Nolan’s final image. The repeated motif and thick undercurrent are hallmarks of earlier dream worlds, and Zimmer is not about to scrub the final scene of those markings. If it’s yet another dream, the moving music has fooled us into believing Cobb is safe; however, if he’s reunited with his children, then we are left with a musical reminder of what it cost to get there. That final scene is, indeed, a microcosm of the entire film for how music functions within it.

In addition, Zimmer’s current stylistic fingerprints are all over the sound world of the score. Zimmer’s current axiom seems to be that fewer notes work best. What this basically amounts to is a series of small melodic parts stretched and augmented over a period of time. Although Zimmer shies away from being called a minimalist — Anne Thompson tried to assign the label to him in a recent interview — because, to his mind, every film presents a different field of possibility with which to experiment. In other words, he’d rather not be pigeonholed as a “minimalist” composer who simply likes to use two or three notes extended and stretched like Gabe Louis’ “soundscape” projects on The Office.

Zimmer did, however, reveal some thoughts about his creative process in a series of online interviews that coincided with the release of Inception. One particular answer popped up in more than one place and struck me as fascinating and even a bit contradictory. Here’s the full quote from one of the interviews, where he was asked about composing “heroic” music for characters such as Batman, and if his style has changed over the years. Zimmer said,

Yeah, I think so. It’s evolutionary. For instance, I wouldn’t be able to write a tune like Gladiator anymore because it feels like it’s inappropriate for where we are. I think I have a very good sense of that other devilish German word “Zeitgeist”—the heartbeat of the times. If you wrote a big overtly heroic theme, it would just feel wrong. I think I’m getting better at what music can do in a film, thank God. [Laughs] Maybe it’s just because my interests have changed. I’m not interested in the massive heroic tunes anymore. I’ve been there, done it, got the t-shirt, even the crew jacket [Laughs]. Now, I’m interested in how I can take two, three or four notes and make a really complex emotional structure. It’s emotional as opposed to sentimental. It’s not bullshit heroic; it has dignity to it.

In effect, Zimmer is discussing two very different things but they appear conflated in his answer. First, he states that stylistically he has reached a point in his career where he prefers to use “two, three or four notes and make a really complex emotional structure” out of them as opposed to building a series of long-lined motifs. Second, he raises the ever-so-popular notion of “Zeitgeist,” or what can be called the “cultural barometer.” He notes that it is not necessarily fashionable to signify characters or events with grand orchestral “themes” in the vein of Gladiator. This is also applicable to his approach to Nolan’s Batman films, which eschew the Wagnerian textures of Danny Elfman’s scores for Tim Burton’s two Batman films (Batman and Batman Returns) in favor of a more cellular approach. Writing that kind of bold theme would just sound “wrong,” he says.

He conflates the two issues by noting how he feels he has reached a point in his musical education that he can better deal with such film music moments than to revert to past practices (i.e., the grand symphonic tradition of classical Hollywood). In an October interview with Anne Thompson, Zimmer touches on the same issue when he says, “I couldn’t write like Gladiator — Gladiator would not fit into this movie. I was using the language that was appropriate for this movie.” He tones down the rhetoric and simply argues that Inception did not require a grand thematic score, but did not venture an opinion about the use of such an approach in ALL films.

It’s pretty obvious from the examples I’ve cited above that Zimmer has fully embraced the minimal note approach to which he refers. He is keenly aware of his current mode of practice, and is one of the only commercial film composers who openly discusses his creative process with journalists and researchers, and often neatly contextualizes how his approach for one film informs his greater overall style and “evolution” as a composer.  Other composers, including John Williams, prefer to speak generally and opaquely about their methods, as if musical ideas simply appear before them as tangible options.

Zimmer’s honest self evaluation has also led him to suggest that certain musical options are no longer tenable. But here’s where Zimmer seems to confuse what isn’t tenable for himself and what aspects of film music do not reflect the current Zeitgeist. We can waste a lot of digital ink debating the key characteristics of our socio-cultural milieu and what constitutes the current cinematic Zeitgeist, but I think it’s fair to say Zimmer is primarily talking about the modern treatment of epic filmmaking, spectacle, and heroes. As he says, his approach is “emotional as opposed to sentimental. It’s not bullshit heroic; it has dignity to it.”

It’s unclear what exactly he means by “bullshit” heroic and heroism with “dignity.” It’s also unclear whether or not long-lined themes are still effective options for film music. Three examples might help illustrate this point. Consider the main title sequences from three acclaimed super hero scores and films: Superman: The Movie (1978), Batman (1989), and The Dark Knight (2008). The first difference between these three title sequences is that The Dark Knight does not have one.

Both John Williams and Danny Elfman used the title sequences in Superman and Batman, respectively, to set a dramatic tone for the films and introduce the key musical motifs that structured their scores. The themes were also unabashedly heroic, featuring driving, up-tempo brass writing. Each theme is comprised of several parts, including fanfares and marches, A-motifs and B-motifs.

On the other hand, Zimmer had very little time to introduce any musical ideas into the first few minutes of The Dark Knight since the only real title — aside from the corporate logos — was a foggy black bat signal emerging from a haze of blue flame. No heroic fanfare, just near-silence. What we do get is a thin, sustained string chord that tracks over the bat signal — an embryonic statement of the Joker’s theme. In a certain sense, Zimmer saves the large orchestral flourishes — grand theme and all — for the film’s final sequence. During Gordon’s hero speech, Zimmer develops the two-note Batman motif into a powerful anthem that reaches its crescendo just as the screen goes black. Then, as the title appears on screen, the reverberant horn blasts become more structured and resemble a fairly “heroic” fanfare that takes us into the Joker’s creepy sustained string chords.

Is Zimmer’s Batman motif more “dignified” than Elfman’s? Is Williams’ Superman too sentimental? Hardly. Each composer responded to the material they were given and worked to create a musical sound world that fit the aesthetic parameters and narrative focus of their films. Obviously, each composer imbued the material with their own musical voices — could there be anything more John Williams-y than that famous preparatory phrase? Burton’s take on the Caped Crusader inspired Elfman to seek a cathedral-like quality to his score. The mix of gong and organ to signal the entrance or exit of Batman perfectly captures the excessive romanticism and Gothic textures of Burton’s visual style.

What is really at issue here is the kind of films Zimmer and Nolan are making and how they do not seem to lend themselves to the romantic tendencies of these other super hero examples. But, in a way, Zimmer’s un-heroic (or dignified) themes simply represent a slightly more modern (i.e., new) way of characterizing the same themes, symbols, and myths that populate these super hero narratives.

That is not to say the “old fashioned way” isn’t palatable anymore; it’s just not currently very popular. In another interview, Zimmer noted that he didn’t believe he could write another Gladiator-type score again because the lyrical, long-lined melodies and romantic tone seemed out of place in the current milieu. It seems that scoring films with fewer notes and more “soundscape” elements — that is, expanding and varying one- or two-note motifs into lengthy suites — will be with us for a while. Even fairly long-lined writers like John Debney have recently tried their hand at writing more immediate, “slow burn” material (see Iron Man 2).

Despite Zimmer’s claim that he has abandoned certain classical tropes of film scoring, he hasn’t completely done away with long-line writing and grand themes. The current Zeitgeist may emphasize a darker and “less-is-more” approach, but the Pirates of the Caribbean series begs to differ. Zimmer’s score for At World’s End, the third film in the series, contains a set of sprawling themes that evoke the action writing and romantic material of composer Jerry Goldsmith. The blocky whole-note writing is still there, but Zimmer cuts through the heavy undertones with a sweeping love theme that is augmented to fit into several different contexts, much the same way that Elfman’s Batman fanfare could be treated delicately to suggest romance or recklessly to suggest anger.

It’s possible that At World’s End represents an anomaly or a serious attempt to re-capture the romanticism of classical Hollywood swashbucklers like The Sea Hawk. The Zeitgeist may forgive attempts at pastiche. Indeed, Madagascar could be riffing off the winding John Barry melody from Born Free.

In any event, it is difficult for any artist to see past their current stylistic impulse. Obviously, Zimmer finds himself working in particular narrative environments that do not lend themselves to the kind of music he wrote for Gladiator. That is not to say, however, that the Zeitgeist precludes those kinds of scores from being acceptable. Studio executives may not find them all that appealing, but there is an appropriate context for them.

With Inception, Zimmer may have composed a thoroughly contemporary film score that rejects the “bullshit heroism” of an earlier era, but it would be a mistake to conflate the suitability of a particular approach to all film with its applicability to a composer’s particular working style.

It seems fitting that my first post in eight months should reflect on some of my recent film-related adventures. This long absence was not intentional, but as I dove into my dissertation I had a hard time turning away from it. Since my last report on James Cameron’s use of sound in Avatar, I have been mired in the cagey world of production and post-production sound. The good news is that, after a summer spent indoors, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Ten chapters down, two to go.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to return to blogging on a more regular basis now that the bulk of my tome on modern sound practices has been written. One of the highlights of this past summer occurred when I received an e-mail notification from Paul Brunick at Film Comment / Slant Magazine stating that this site was named one of the top film criticism blogs on the net. It was just the kind of thing to keep me motivated to keep writing. So, despite being late to the party, I would like to thank Mr. Brunick and Matthew Connolly for profiling my site and placing me in such amazing company with other noteworthy blogs like Glenn Kenny’s Some Came Running, Dennis Cozzalio’s Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, David Bordwell’s Observations on Film Art, Matt Zoller Seitz and the gang at The House Next Door, Jim Emerson’s Scanners, and many others.

While I’m name-dropping film sites, I’d like to also mention the outstanding work of Michael Coleman and his crew at SoundWorks Collection, who have been producing some pretty amazing video profiles on the post-production sound work of major Hollywood releases, including The Social Network. I’d been following Mr. Coleman’s work at Mix Magazine for some time, but last year the SoundWorks project really came into its own as a leading voice in the film sound community.

It’s always nice to see sound editors and mixers talk about the nuances of their work, the challenges they faced, and the creative solutions they devised. Often, filmmakers get short-changed by critics and academics, especially when they talk about their work. We can always learn from what filmmakers say about their work, even if we don’t always believe them or agree with their assessments. In the last few years, the internet has provided a way for filmmakers, especially sound and picture professionals, to speak about the technical and creative aspects of their work. Profiles by SoundWorks and David Poland’s ongoing DP/30 series offer filmmakers a forum to engage with journalists on a variety of issues related to their films in a manner that is more provocative and revealing than your average “Making Of” DVD featurette or Electronic Press Kit.

I had an opportunity a few weeks ago to see Apocalypse Now Redux and hear Walter Murch speak about his sound and picture duties on the film. The newly minted Bell Lightbox in downtown Toronto, which is the new home to the Toronto International Film Festival, has been running their 100 Essential Cinema series, which features 35mm, 70mm, and digital presentations of classical and modern favorites, including Apocalypse Now. Murch was in town to participate in a Q & A after the film and to present an original lecture the following night entitled, “The State of Cinema,” which speculated on what would have happened if cinema had been invented in 1789, one hundred years before its actual birth.

It’s seriously about time Toronto had a repertory house for cinema. New York and Los Angeles have a rich tradition of retrospective screenings (with pristine 35mm prints) and special Q&A screenings with filmmakers. The Bell Lightbox project aims to bring the same kind of attention to film classics, and it’s even more impressive that TIFF is inviting filmmakers to speak about their work.

I’ve never met Walter Murch, but his legendary status among sound and picture professionals was in evidence during most of my conversations and interviews with Hollywood sound people. Many contemporary sound editors were eager to discuss particular stylistic aspects to his work, but also reflect on his film-theoretical writing. One conversation in particular about Murch’s “Rule of Two-and-a-Half” inspired me to ask him a question during the Apocalypse Now Q&A.

Over the years, Murch has discussed a series of “rules” and self-imposed limitations in his sound editing and mixing work, but none are more prominent than the “Rule of Two-and-a-Half.” Any sound re-recording mixer must balance a bevy of material in order to compose a comprehensible final track. It’s not uncommon for most sequences to feature dialog, music, and a variety of effects elements that must be married to the picture in a way that does not distort or “step on” the other. Every element has been designed to contribute to the sequence in ways that often go beyond mere redundancy (see it/hear it). In a film as dense as Apocalypse Now, Murch had his work cut out for him.

In the essay “Dense Clarity/Clear Density,” Murch outlines the mixing challenges he faced on the film, and offers a theoretical primer on the nature of film sound and how human brains process sound information. In effect, Murch argues that in order to maintain clarity and density — the two key components of any good mix — one could not include more than two-and-a-half elements from any one group of sounds. Let’s say you have a group of five people walking down a long corridor with linoleum floors. It’s pretty clear that we’re going to need to hear their footsteps, but do we need to hear all five sets of them? Not according to Murch:

Somehow, it seems that our minds can keep track of one person’s footsteps, or even the footsteps of two people, but with three or more people our minds just give up – there are too many steps happening too quickly. As a result, each footstep is no longer evaluated individually, but rather the group of footsteps is evaluated as a single entity, like a musical chord. If the pace of the steps is roughly correct, and it seems as if they are on the right surface, this is apparently enough. In effect, the mind says “Yes, I see a group of people walking down a corridor and what I hear sounds like a group of people walking down a corridor.

To illustrate his point more finely, Murch tells the story of one of Eduoard Manet’s students who was asked to paint a bunch of grapes. “Manet suddenly knocked the brush out of her hand and shouted: ‘Not like that! I don’t give a damn about Every Single Grape! I want you to get the feel of the grapes, how they taste, their color, how the dust shapes them and softens them at the same time.’” With our five characters walking down a hallway, what is important to convey sonically is not the diligent reproduction of each footfall, but the impression of their movements. Three represented the threshold whereupon a group of sounds can be deciphered as parts of a whole and an unintelligible mass.

The Dagwood Sandwich is another Murchian concept. This particular “rule” was applied to a sequence in Apocalypse Now when Kilgore’s men land their helicopters on the beach and begin their combat operations. The sound crew produced six pre-mixes of all the necessary sound elements, presented below in the order of importance:

1. Dialog

2. Helicopters

3. Music (Valkries)

4. Small Arms Fire (AK 47s; M16s)

5. Explosions (Mortars, Grenades, Heavy Artillery)

6. Footsteps and other Foley

Mixing these sound groups together, Murch found that the sound was overbearing. He had created a sound sandwich with too many layers. Everything sounded brown. There was no clarity, just density.

So in this section of Apocalypse, I found I could build a “sandwich” with five layers to it. If I wanted to add something new, I had to take something else away. For instance, when the boy in the helicopter says “I’m not going, I’m not going!” I chose to remove all the music. On a certain logical level, that is not reasonable, because he is actually in the helicopter that is producing the music, so it should be louder there than anywhere else. But for story reasons we needed to hear his dialogue, of course, and I also wanted to emphasize the chaos outside – the AK47’s and mortar fire that he was resisting going into – and the helicopter sound that represented “safety,” as well as the voices of the other members of his unit. So for that brief section, here are the layers:

1. Dialogue (”I’m not going! I’m not going!”)
2. Other voices, shouts, etc.
3. Helicopters
4. AK-47’s and M-16s
5. Mortar fire.

Under the circumstances, music was the sacrificial victim. The miraculous thing is that you do not hear it go away – you believe that it is still playing even though, as I mentioned earlier, it should be louder here than anywhere else. And, in fact, as soon as this line of dialogue was over, we brought the music back in and sacrificed something else. Every moment in this section is similarly fluid, a kind of shell game where layers are disappearing and reappearing according to the dramatic focus of the moment. It is necessitated by the ‘five-layer’ law, but it is also one of the things that makes the soundtrack exciting to listen to.

In this sense, feel dictated that the music be removed because it affected the general clarity of the scene. Hence, the “Rule of Five” was born.

I asked Murch about his proclivity for sound rules and if they continue to shape his sound mixing work. The short answer was yes, they do. He spoke briefly about his commitment to a dense but clear soundtrack, one that is full of rich details but not overpowering or overly thick. For example, he said that the same sets of conceptual rules governed his mixing work on Cold Mountain.

This sort of rule play guided some of my discussions with other sound supervisors and mixers. Some practice the art of sound mixing using Murch’s principles as a guide or sound Bible. The philosophical aspects to his approach appeals to many top-tier Hollywood sound professionals in much the same way that writers cling to certain well-worn principles of screenwriting. Others, however, expressed a more reserved acceptance of a rule-based account to sound editing and mixing.

One editor in particular dismissed the need for such strict boundaries. Indeed, one can imagine that the Rule of Two-and-a-Half and the Rule of Five might not apply across the board. In some modern action mixes I am fairly certain that more than five sound groups are operating at one time. In a special editorial for Designing Sound, Transformers sound designer Erik Aadahl explained his pre-mixing strategy for that film’s densely packed sound track. Below is a spreadsheet Aadahl prepared for his pre-dubbed “food groups.”

Notice the sheer amount of FX tracks and BG (background) tracks. There are Foley groups, Background groups, Weapons groups, Hard FX groups, Robot groups, Vehicle groups, Impacts groups, Sweeteners, and miscellaneous groups (”swish/whooshes”). Most of these could theoretically play at one time since they represent actions that can occur simultaneously.

A judicious mixer, according to Murch, must negotiate what food groups constitute “warm” sounds and “cool” sounds, and to try to achieve a balance between them. Too many “cool” sounds — metallics, for example — and you risk oversaturating your “cool” palette; too many “warm” sounds — music, room tones — and you risk the same thing. But it seems likely that in the case of Transformers the Rule of Five was ignored.

This is not to suggest that Aadahl and the Transformers re-recordists simply saturated the sound track without a plan. A short sequence from the first film illustrates how sound can be absent even though we perceive it to be there. The battle between Optimus Prime and Bonecrusher on the L.A. freeway is a sequence that could very quickly devolve into a muddy, noisy mess. But the final sound mix clean, precise, and surprisingly sparse.

Director Michael Bay breaks up the visual action into clearly defined zones. Using medium-long shots, Bay handles the car-into-bot transformations with a measured approach that respects the spatial geography of the scene and individualizes each action. First, Bonecrusher transforms and proceeds to chase after Optimus, which is followed by a separate shot of Optimus transforming in his own space. The two meet (collide?) in a slowed-down long-lens two-shot. The entire build-up is among Bay’s cleanest from a visual editing perspective.

Sound is equally uncluttered during the build-up. Muting the sequence gives you an idea of how many sound options were available to the filmmakers. Besides the mechanical sounds of the transforming robots, there are stacks of other materials and elements that could be layered into the mix, including pavement being ripped up by the ‘bots, explosions, car impacts, car tire skids, adjacent car engines, background traffic, police sirens, and the vocal “grunts” from the transformers. All of these sound food groups are present at some point during the sequence, but not all at once. Just as Walter Murch eliminated music from the continuous action for a brief moment, the Transformers sound crew emphasized only certain sounds during the continuous traffic chase.

The clip begins with a low-angle tracking shot approaching the Bonecrusher construction vehicle. The camera passes the Decepticon police cruiser with its siren on, and then settles on Bonecrusher as he transforms. The police siren drops out completely and Bonecrusher’s transformation takes center stage, sound-wise. In addition to the servos and hydraulics we also hear the grit of pavement being torn up, followed by some robot vocalizations.

A cut to the rear side of Optimus’ big rig eliminates the other sounds, and we are introduced to Optimus’ “sound world.” Again, traffic backgrounds begin to drop away as he begins his transformation, which is dominated by another set of unique servo and hydraulic noises, pavement and debris elements, and more vocalizations. Keeping a low angle on the action, Bay emphasizes Prime’s claw-foot hitting the ground — cue the impact — which nearly takes out a nearby Cadillac sedan — cue the brake skid.

Each sound element is treated as a unique event, separate from the rest of the FX and background materials. We might even say each sound is its own “shot,” which emphasizes certain key elements. There is very little overlap; in fact, the sequence does not rely on a real-world sense of sound space. At times, the robot vocalizations drown out the FX elements even though there is no reason to suggest they couldn’t share the space with the other sounds. Erik Aadahl and the mixers made a conscious decision to spotlight certain elements and eliminate others completely. It made more sense to them to highlight the vocal personalities of the ‘bots than to continue to emphasize the car/road carnage.

The linear treatment of sound whereby one sound follows another follows closely to Murch’s concept of “clear density” without owing to the rules. Murch found that he could remove a piece of sound from an otherwise busy sequence and the audience would not be consciously aware of it. Similarly, the Transformers freeway chase works on the same principle. As long as hear/see certain spotlighted actions, we don’t need every sound to be continuously employed. We don’t question why, suddenly, Bonecrusher’s destructive transformation drops out when we cut to Optimus Prime.

Some sound editors and mixers refuse to believe they work within a set of rules; in fact, some call themselves sound anarchists, believing that every film presents its own set of challenges and creative options. But it is difficult to imagine that, when faced with a complex action sequence like this one, sound designers and mixers do not adhere to some basic unwritten principles. They may not be the same strategies Murch has used, but they do tend to underscore the same goal: balance. How modern editors and mixers achieve the goal of a balanced sound track depends on who you speak to, but Murch’s career-long pursuit of a perfectly clear and dense track is also one shared by other sound professionals. They might not want to admit it, but even sound anarchists want balance in their work.

I came across this panel discussion a few days ago and thought it would be fitting to re-post it here. With the awards season well under way, it’s customary for filmmakers to convene panel discussions that showcase the art and craft of the Academy’s “technical” crafts like sound and visual effects. For Avatar, the sound team, along with director James Cameron and producer Jon Landau, took the stage at the Zanuck Theater on the Fox lot for a 45 minute discussion of how sound worked in the film. Joining Cameron and Landau was supervising sound editor and sound designer Christopher Boyes, and re-recording mixers Gary Summers and Andy Nelson.

Over the last year I have written about Avatar indirectly, preferring instead to cover the broader technological and aesthetic issues that surround the film, including 3-D imaging and its place in Hollywood cinema. With this in mind, I found the panel discussion to be extremely illuminating. I want to briefly highlight four points that were made at the session that relate back to some of the things I’ve written about in the past.

The sound team makes the important point that Cameron was very concerned about narrative intelligibility, which meant sacrificing some effects work in favor of pushing character dialog and sounds to the front of the mix. Boyes recalls a moment in the film when Jake’s avatar is being chased, and his heavy breathing was not present enough in the mix for Cameron’s taste. He reasoned that we need to hear Jake in order to better feel his fear. In the weeks leading up to the film’s release, Landau and Cameron emphasized the importance of story and the emotional attachment to characters even as many in the press were touting the film’s use of 3-D technology and advanced CGI.

Boyes discusses how early he was involved in the process, which goes back to 2006 when he first started designing the creature sounds. As much as Cameron and company may claim the film is a cinematic “game changer” (how I have come to hate that phrase), I believe the film’s lasting effect and its true innovation is in the way Cameron reconfigured the production process. Cameron has arguably created an entirely new workflow for high-profile pictures that involves the collaboration and involvement of crafts like sound much earlier in the process than usual.

Cameron’s home base in Malibu became ground zero for editorial. Music cues, sound effects, and visual effects shots could be sent to this production center so Cameron could continue to tweak his workprint, adding music or effects here or there. With respect to the visual effects workflow, check out this lengthy interview with Cameron, where he details the ways in which the film’s innovative production framework allowed him to work more freely within “3-D space.”

One of the key aspects to my own research on contemporary film sound is the concept of balance within the mix. In a large film like Avatar, there is the potential for sonic overload: dialog competing with effects competing with music competing with more effects. Cameron and Boyes go through the destruction of Hometree sequence, and how dramatic pauses and various kinds of explosions built a sonic architecture around the action sequence. “Clarity is king,” as Cameron puts it later in the talk. With hundreds, if not thousands, of individual tracks the crew worked in a reductive process, stripping away sounds that were deemed to be unnecessary or excessive.

Finally, the crew confirms something that I discussed in an earlier post about 3-D sound. With all the focus on 3-D imaging, mixers have not really changed the way they work with sound in a 3-D space. In fact, Avatar was mixed in 2-D. However, the crew makes an interesting observation about watching reels silently in 3-D, which had them imagining what sounds were appropriate for a specific 3-D moment. In effect, they worked with the silent images to figure out what sounds to feature in the mix, and where to place those sounds in the 5.1 space.

Andy Nelson’s “3-D” treatment of James Horner’s score was also illuminating. By “hanging” certain instruments in the theater space, Nelson adds depth to the sound space in a way that is usually reserved for traditional effects. I’ve only seen the film once and can’t remember this foregrounding effect, but I’ll be interested in hearing how it worked on my second viewing.

Fascinating stuff. Hopefully we’ll get additional panels from the other sound nominees in the coming weeks.

If there is one stylistic technique that has reached a point of saturation in Hollywood, then it must surely be the Snorricam, otherwise known as the “reverse steadicam” or the “chestcam.”  I would go so far as to suggest that it may even qualify as the technique of the decade. (Ok, that may be an overstatement).

It is normally used sparingly, limited to one or two uses in a film for a few seconds at a time. The Snorricam presents a reverse point-of-view shot, which positions the camera close to the actor’s face and is, most crucially, connected to the actor’s body so it responds to the actor’s actual movement. As a camera technique it has not been limited to uses in particular genres; much like the Steadicam, it has been successfully used in disparate genres, from horror films to romantic comedies. Unlike the Steadicam, though, the Snorricam is a plainly evident and rather pronounced camera technique.

The history of the technique is vague: a Google search results in a number of websites that provide DIY instructions for a home-made chestcam, but very few articles on the technique itself and its history in the movies. Modern use stems from a contraption devised by Einar Snorri Einarsson and Eiður Snorri Eysteinsson, the creative team who work under the name The Snorri Bros., though they are not actually related. According to the pair’s website, the Snorricam was created for a music video “years ago for an all girl punk band. It has since become world famous.” Indeed it has, but why have so many films of the aughts turned to this technique?

Its diffusion in contemporary film and television is certainly owed to the Snorri Bros., but the technique itself is not new. Versions of the mounted camera appear in John Frankenheimer’s loopy Seconds and Martin Scorsese’s breakout film Mean Streets. Both films use it to convey the drunken disorientation of the main characters, which also characterizes the way it has been used in more recent films, such as Requiem for a Dream (more on this film a little later). The intervening decades proved to be unremarkable for this technique, perhaps overshadowed by the far more popular Steadicam, which came to prominence with Bound for Glory and Rocky in the mid-70s. I haven’t been able to find any notable uses of the chestcam in the 80s and 90s outside of Jacob’s Ladder and Malcolm X. Were characters in the 80s not getting drunk, dashing around in a disoriented way? Hardly. Were filmmakers not interested point-of-view shots to give some sense of character psychology? I’m pretty sure they were. So, how did this nifty device not gain traction? Well, on a purely functional level, the apparatus had not yet been refined, so weight and mobility could have been a problem. It is also a fairly disruptive technique, and by that I mean it can be disorienting for the viewer — purposely so, I suppose. So, there is good reason to believe that its design is a bit radical, especially in conservative filmmaking circles.

So, how can we explain the resurgence of the Snorricam in the latter part of this decade? It might be productive to look to Darren Aronofsky’s extensive use of the device in Requiem for a Dream and Pi. On its own, Requiem has become a film student’s film, quotable not so much for its dialogue but for its dizzying visual and sound style. Its stylistic palette even became fodder for The Simpsons. Out of the various techniques Aronofsky used to convey the troubled (and troubling) lives of his characters, the chestcam shots are distinctive for two reasons. First, he holds on the shots for some time, giving the impression that the technique is actually doing something more than providing a momentary visual gimmick. Second, the shots are not mere manifestations of subjective drunkenness, but instead suggest an out-of-body disassociativeness, which are neither purely omniscient nor particularly subjective.

The chestcam appears three times in the film: when Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) flees the gang murder scene, when Marion (Jennifer Connolly) leaves the scene of her first trick, and during one of Sara’s (Ellen Burstyn) paranoid delusions. Marion’s sequence is arguably the most visceral, lasting for over a minute. Aronofsky uses two different camera rigs, one in front and one behind her, to capture her walk from the john’s apartment, down an elevator and outside into the rain where she throws up onto the lens. Overall, the dizzying quality of the chestcam works well in the film mainly because it feels connected to the other overly-stylized elements.

In 2008 and 2009, the chestcam made cameos in The Hangover, Slumdog Millionaire, Rock’n'Rolla, District 9, The Lovely Bones, and Orphan among others. It has found favor among filmmakers like Spike Lee, who has used it in Malcolm X, The 25th Hour and Inside Man. It has even found its way onto television shows like House and CSI. Similarly, the taxi cab sequence in Zodiac accomplishes the same effect when the camera is virtually mounted to the moves of the car. The camera is locked to the CG taxi in a way that is slightly disorienting. The camera moves are too perfect, too still, which makes it all the more eerie.

The technique certainly calls attention to itself, which is perhaps why it is used so briefly. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s an effective technique even though it seems to be the go-to device for contemporary directors looking to add a sense of distorted subjectivity to a particular sequence. Peter Jackson recently spoke to Ain’t it Cool News about its use in The Lovely Bones, where he opted to have Stanley Tucci carry a small camera in his own hands, pointed at his face, while running through the house in one of the film’s climactic scenes. But I’m afraid that by this point it’s reached a point of real saturation, where it’s no longer as effective at creating the needed sense of urgency or “raw” movement. While not quite a gimmick, the Snorricam reminds me of how the slow Steadicam creep-in became a de-facto horror film convention after John Carpenter used it to such great effect in Halloween.

When used in an otherwise plainly shot film, the chestcam feels out of place. By this point it’s become a standard option in a director’s bag of tricks. Directors seem to be working off of each other here, borrowing the device to convey similar points. There are other ways of portraying interior states of mind, but this one seems to be the device du jour.

Late last week Variety broke the story that Steven Spielberg was no longer attached to direct a remake of Harvey, the 1950 James Stewart fantasy about a man and his friendship with an imaginary six-foot rabbit. According to the article, production was expected to begin in early 2010 for an expected late 2010 release. At this point we don’t know why the bottom fell out of this project, but Variety hints that creative differences between team Spielberg and Robert Downey, Jr. (who was set to star) are at least partly to blame. The announcement comes after two years of similar stories about Spielberg’s “next project,” which never seem to go anywhere.

Perhaps no other director in Hollywood is attached to direct more projects than Spielberg. There is the Abraham Lincoln drama based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, starring Liam Neeson. Tony Kushner, who co-wrote Munich, is apparently doing rewrites. There is The Trial of the Chicago 7, about the protests that erupted at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, which is now scheduled for release in 2010 with Ben Stiller directing. There is The 39 Clues, an adventure story based on a series of popular children’s books about a globe-trotting family, which is also in rewrites. There is Oldboy, supposedly based on the Garon Tsuchiya comic not the Chan-wook Park film. There is talk of a Matt Helm project, based on the Donald Hamilton espionage novels. There is Interstellar, the sci-fi project written by Jonathan Nolan. In recent months there has also been speculation that a fifth Indy adventure could be in the cards, along with a fourth Jurassic Park movie.

All of these projects have been spotlighted by trade papers like Variety, which in turn feeds the blogosphere, fan sites, and forums, where speculation often turns into geeky hysteria. The recent Talkback for the Harvey story at Ain’t it Cool News offers commentary from all sides: “FINALLY!!! Something Spielberg ISN’T doing for a change,” “Why, it’s Spielberg’s canceled project of the week,” and “This didn’t need to be remade.” It’s not surprising that there’s interest in these projects, but what happens when they are never made?

Never Mades

On one side, we follow the production status of these projects to the point where we can often imagine the completed film before it’s released. Casting decisions, leaked production art, covert on-set photography, script leaks, and the ever-reliable word of mouth from “sources close to the production” all contribute to our attachment to these projects. On the other side, the productions themselves have often spent millions of pre-production dollars developing the script, casting, sketching out storyboards and concept art. What happens to all this work? It’s either stored somewhere or thrown away, rarely to be seen again, unless the film itself is resurrected at some future point.

The Harvey story got me thinking about all the films that reached some stage of pre-production but were ultimately never made. Spielberg’s catalog of almost-mades is large indeed, but several of these films have gone on to be made by other directors. For years, he held on to Memoirs of a Geisha but finally released it to Rob Marshall. If it wasn’t for Spielberg, then Kubrick’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence would never have been made. But some things like Harvey just don’t go anywhere (yet). And we’re likely never to see Spielberg’s notes, art, and design for the film.

What do these never-mades tell us about the filmmakers behind them? When we consider a filmmaker’s output we never consider the films that were almost made. Would it be a stretch to say that we could learn a lot about the creative process if we could study these almost movies? These phantom projects can provide real insight into a filmmaker’s stylistic palette at a particular time in his/her career. Besides knowing what happened to sink the ship, we could learn valuable information about what attracted a filmmaker (not limited to a director) to the project.

Almost, But Not Quite

Alfred Hitchcock was to have made The Short Night after Family Plot, but the director’s deteriorating health derailed the project at Universal. A completed screenplay was published by the author, David Freeman, in the book The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock. Wikipedia even has a page devoted to  Hitchcock’s unproduced projects. In 2007 Martin Scorsese put together a short film based on a bare-bones 3-page treatment prepared for Hitchcock, called The Key to Reserva. It can be viewed here. You gotta love Scorsese’s passion for the material: “It’s one thing to preserve a film that has been made. It’s another to preserve a film that has not been made. … I’m obviously not going to shoot it the way I would. But can I shoot them as Hitchcock? I don’t think so. So who will I shoot them as? This is the question…this is the process.” Priceless.

There’s no question that Scorsese shot the sequence with Hitch in mind. The camera angles, pacing, and even the music suggest an oddly familiar Hitchcockian flavor. Some of these choices were inspired by the script treatment, while others seem to represent Scorsese’s attempt to channel the stylistic signature of the old master. He is right to say that the result isn’t quite Hitchcock, nor is it Scorsese. It’s Hitchcock through Scorsese. I can only imagine a filmmaker in forty years channeling Scorsese from an unproduced treatment. Say, the long gestating Sinatra project.

The Scorsese experiment reveals very little about the aborted Hitch project or Hitch’s own stylistic impulses. Since he never made the film — or The Short Night, for that matter — we can only speculate as to how he would have approached the tone, look, and sound of these projects. Scorsese indulges in a way that any of us would with an unproduced Hitchcock script: he interprets the material as he knew Hitch would. Or, the way we assume he would.

In Hitchcock’s case, health issues were the determining factor in sealing The Short Night’s fate; Harvey seems to have suffered from “creative differences.” But budget considerations seem to be the biggest factor in Hollywood’s ability to sink projects that are in some form of production. Which leads me to the one of the most storied never-mades in film history: Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon project. In fact, Taschen books has just released a mammoth volume which compiles all of Kubrick’s notes, photographs, script treatments, and other pre-production materials in the aptly titled “Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made.”

Allison Castle, who previously published the Kubrick Archive for Taschen — an outstanding collection of Kubrick’s sketches, notes, and other materials from all of his films (and some of his never-mades) — has seemingly done the work for film scholars by packaging the bulk of Kubrick’s notes and other research materials in one place. I say “seemingly” because I have yet to actually see the tome myself. Castle’s work on the Archive was outstanding, so I expect nothing less here. Then again, I would be satisfied with anything released on the Napoleon project.

I remember hearing about the film a dozen years ago when I was just getting acquainted with Kubrick’s works. Back then there was still hope that he might mount a return to the film, but that sadly never happened. There was also The Aryan Papers, which receives some attention in the Archive. It’s rumored that Kubrick abandoned the film in the early 90s after he learned that Spielberg was producing his own Holocaust drama.

Scholarly Matters

Even with internet leaks and trade press attention, we are rarely given access to actual production materials from unfinished projects, which makes it extremely hard for budding film scholars to uncover very much. Castle’s work on the Kubrick archive is special but incredibly rare. Indeed, the Kubrick Archive revealed for all to see that the final act of A.I. was planned that way by Kubrick not by Spielberg. Here is one instance where early concept art and story notes have been used to dispel rumors and conjecture that Spielberg diluted Kubrick’s vision by tacking on a “happy” ending.

I have always been fascinated with the markings of the creative process: handwritten revisions on a screenplay draft, development conversations and roundtables, concept art, musical outtakes and alternates. When the Star Wars scores were re-released in 1997 (to coincide with the theatrical re-releases), I was amazed to find a selection of outtakes from the main title, which were “hidden” on an unlisted track. Included were the first few takes of the cue, which contain slightly different orchestration and timing. It felt as if I was transported to that London scoring stage back in 1977 and was hearing it for the first time along with the engineers and orchestra.

These uncompleted projects all share a certain cachet because they are shrouded in mystery. We will never know, but we can certainly imagine how good they could have been. I doubt Napoleon was going to be the greatest film ever made, but we’ll never know, will we? All we have are the frayed pieces of the puzzle. To be sure, I have only scratched the surface with films that were never made. If you have a favorite, please share it. I’d love to compile a list of almost-mades.

Variety Reserve

On a completely unrelated note I was very disappointed to find out that Variety is ending its three year “experiment” of free access to its online content. From now on, unsubscribed users will have extremely limited access to the site, amounting to something like a handful of articles per month. From now on the site will charge upwards of $250 for an annual subscription that will provide full access to its digital content. Turns out that the trade paper is happy to narrow its readership to industry-only folks, leaving the rest of us to either pay up or move on to other sources of industry news. According to a Huffington Post article on the matter:

“The vast majority of Variety’s subscribers are in the entertainment industry, and so are the advertisers. Because these agents, studios and other companies in the trade seek readers in the industry, they care less about the general audiences that had read the site for free, Stiles said. About 95 percent of Variety’s advertisers buy spots on the Web site and in print.”

I, for one, count Variety as an incredible resource for my research and general interest in the Hollywood film industry. The film reviews are concise, thoughtful, and well-rounded pieces of pop film criticism — especially those by Todd McCarthy. Their attention to fine-grained details like editing, scoring, sound design, and photography is unique among trade press and newspaper reviews. I also find their broader articles on trends, profiles, and other matters of craft to be pretty informative. So it’s disheartening to see the publication go the way of the pay wall. Oh well, either I’ll pay the piper or try The Hollywood Reporter, which still remains a free resource.

On a brighter note, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! I’ll be back soon with some thoughts on the decade that was, including a year-end list that has been ten years in the making.

It’s the end of November, which means Wright on Film has been dark for nearly two months. Yikes! I think that’s a record. With my thesis and teaching load, I have had little time for anything else, especially things related to cinema. As my course winds down for the term I thought it might be time to share some of what I’ve been up to.

Lately, I’ve been mired in the practical world of sound production, learning how to write about the norms and conventions of this particular facet of modern Hollywood. Like any element of the American film industry, the sound chain represents a site of cultural production. There are union dynamics, hierarchies within the employment system, shared aesthetic conventions, and complex relationships with technology. The sound chain itself is a spider’s web of different duties and departments, which are amazingly connected by one governing rule: the story.

At every level of the sound chain, story remains the guiding light for nearly every element of sound style. From Foley to the final mix, every squeak, tweak, and dub is motivated by the oldest question in the Hollywood playbook: how will this affect the story? This Hollywood chestnut anchors the sensibilities of the sound crew, so that everyone is on the same creative page. Go too far with a bone crunch and it loses its meaning within a scene; don’t go far enough and it loses its emotional impact. Dialog editors, too, are gatekeepers of clear and intelligible speech. If someone swallows their line or the production track is too noisy, the main goal of any dialog clean-up artist is to sift through alternate, usable takes. Here, “usable” means intelligible.

You might think that this is a fairly constrained way to work, but artists in most mediums work within some set of boundaries. For many sound professionals, constraints offer creative flexibility — however strange that sounds. But limitations in the form of norms and conventions can be profoundly liberating, especially when working under tight schedules and even tighter budgets with which modern Hollywood sound crews are faced. A re-recording mixer recently told me that there is still room for experimentation even in the most programmed summer blockbuster. But that room is quite small. The mixer suggested that if you needed to work in a creative environment without boundaries, then Hollywood sound production was not for you. At the same time, those same blockbusters offer the sound artist unparalleled access to new technology and, perhaps most important, the chance to collaborate with other creative types who are at the top of their field.

In this sense, my work in film sound has revealed the extent to which boundaries inspire creative decisions. James Horner, the composer of Titanic and the upcoming Avatar, has suggested that unlimited creative options can often be more constraining to one’s work than simply working within a bounded set of options. Which is why story appears to dominate the goals of most Hollywood sound practitioners. Given the demands of the narrative, sound can shape its contours and emphasize (or de-emphasize) certain elements that the image cannot properly convey. In the case of Avatar, Horner’s musical score is “more accessible. We tried some experiments with really weird stuff and ended up alienating the visuals. It was so overwhelming. It’s good to be a little more conservative.”

We often separate the work of composers from the rest of sound production, but Horner’s sensibilities are no different than the work of sound editors. Faced with an elaborate car chase, the sound editor must choose certain elements to emphasize and others that will be sacrificed for the sake of narrative clarity. Unless otherwise directed to include a particular sound element, the editor composes the sequence the same way Horner works with the picture to emphasize certain gestures and movements with his music.

While Avatar afforded him an opportunity to create new sounds for the alien Na’vi culture, the horizon of possibilities was ultimately too wide, and he returned to more familiar orchestral territory. This may enrage critics of Horner’s work, who accuse him of recycling his own melodies in score after score. But I believe the calls for plagiarism have less to do with compositional conservatism than with aesthetic convention. Horner has often stated in interviews that the function of his music should serve the dramatic arc of the story and character goals. Without a clear sense of the narrative, he admits that he has trouble finding the purpose of the music. This reliance on story can also explain why he favors certain orchestrations and instrumentations. It is also why composers often return to familiar idioms when faced with action sequences, love scenes, or comic moments. There is no mistaking a Jerry Goldsmith action cue or a John Barry love theme because these types of scenes sound a certain way to these composers. Goldsmith hardly spoke about the mechanics of his working style because for him it simply made sense to score a scene in a particular way. “How did you come up with that theme?” is one of the most common questions that composers are asked, and yet their answers are rarely satisfying. When asked by Peter Bogdanovich how he shot a particularly memorable sequence in Stagecoach, John Ford famously sniped, “With a camera!”

The intangibility of the creative process offers us few avenues of insight to this particular problem, but shifting our focus to questions of “why” may yield some greater insights into the conventional logic of composers like James Horner. Why were certain tonalities chosen over others? Why a particular focus on this character? Why no music in certain passages?

As original and fresh as the Avatar score may be, Horner’s compositional approach has not changed; indeed, the function of his music remains the same. The orchestral colors may be new, but the structural DNA of the music reflects Horner’s conventional logic. In this sense, convention is less a pejorative term than one that defines an aesthetic approach, including the function of music in any particular sequence.

Hollywood craftspeople have been complaining about shrinking budgets and shorter schedules for decades. And yet I have never read of a composer or sound editor admit that extremely long schedules produce better or more innovative work than shorter ones. Perhaps this may not be the case with visual effects artists, who often require more time to fine-tune FX shots. Horner has experience at both extremes. Ransom and Troy were scored in fewer than 14 days; The New World and Avatar were written and scored over a period of months due to picture changes. And yet even with so much time, he needed to adapt quickly to the editorial changes and sometimes drop or rewrite entire cues to fit the new assembly. Alfred Newman once said that if one was not prepared to work quickly and sacrifice personal taste in favor of what was needed to better tell the story, then one should avoid work in film music. As much as craftspeople complain about short schedules, there is nothing quite like a deadline to inspire the most creative solutions and innovative breakthroughs at all levels of production.

There is still so much to learn about the process of film production, especially the structured environment of Hollywood post production. Not surprisingly, it’s also one of the hardest things to teach, because film students at the undergraduate and graduate levels are generally accustomed to analyzing films for broad-based cultural, social, and authorial meanings. To study a group of films and ask why certain choices were made is difficult not only because we rarely have access to filmmakers, but also because we have yet to develop a solid framework with which to study these issues productively.

This is not an intentionalist argument, since I am not concerned with intention as much as I am interested in the process that led to a particular decision. For example, James Cameron might have given Horner a particular direction for his score — an intent — but I am interested in studying how Horner juggled that request with his own frames of reference and horizon of possibilities.

Update 11/28/09: A new interview with James Horner has been posted by Daniel Schweiger. Although not as long and in depth as the 2006 discussion, Horner provides some context for this creative decisions on Avatar, and speaks a little about the current state of film music. It’s definitely worth a listen.

Editorial note: I have tried to locate a lengthy interview Horner gave to Daniel Schweiger from “On the Score” in 2006, but the links have disappeared. Hopefully the audio will be reposted at some point, because it offers a candid and honest discussion of the composer’s style and his ideas on the functions of modern film music.

Earlier this month, while flipping through the Toronto International Film Festival program guide, I glanced past the inclusion of a spotlight on Tel Aviv filmmakers, which encompassed a set of ten films. Frankly, I didn’t think much of it, since it’s common for the Fest to profile a city or country with a vibrant and emerging film culture. I made a note of the other Israeli films on offer, as I normally do, and moved on to other categories. Around the same time, I started to hear the faint murmurs of a protest aimed at TIFF, with the Tel Aviv selection at its focus.

At first it seemed to be a local skirmish, covered by the Toronto papers, with brief mention on local news — but nothing broader than that. Then, within a day or so, there was a group of names attached to the protest: Jane Fonda, Harry Belafonte, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, John Greyson. I was in disbelief that a group of prominent Canadian and American personalities would try to censor the work of Tel-Aviv filmmakers simply for being from Tel Aviv.

Surprisingly, they did not call for a boycott of the Festival. Remember, some of the voices of dissent had films premiering here (Viggo Mortensen with The Road, for one). So instead, they aimed their outrage at the Festival programmers and organizers who chose Tel Aviv as the spotlighted city. Around went a petition, encouraging more dissenters to lend their names to the growing protest. I guess they wanted ticket-buyers to avoid the Tel Aviv program, or at least share an unkind word with Cameron Bailey and Piers Handling, the Festival’s co-directors.

Arguing that TIFF is helping to support “brand Israel” and promote the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s new advertising campaign, the protesters stated that the Festival “has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine.” Strong words from a group of people who had yet to see the ten films comprising the program. No matter if the films glorified or critiqued Israeli domestic policy, these folks were acting on principle. Never mind that these films were made by talented individuals, who likely spent months or years making their film projects. In my view, these artists deserved better than to be the subject of a misdirected attempt to raise awareness to a controversial subject.

I felt compelled to respond to this story not because I saw the need to defend fellow Jews, but because so much of this protest is misdirected, uninformed, and ignorant. We can speculate on the reaction that another controversial choice may have garnered — say, Tehran. Iranian filmmakers have for decades been lauded for pushing cultural, aesthetic, and political boundaries within their own film community. Would the same folks who protested the Israeli spotlight have had the same worries over an Iranian focus?

Obviously, not all Iranian films support Iranian government policy. Several Iranian films have attempted to push back against the fundamentalist nature of the government regime (see the films of Mohsen Makhmalbaf). The fact is, Israel and its cities remain politicized targets, even as Israeli filmmakers attempt to reach a global audience with thoughtful stories and commentaries. Why should an intimate story (The Bubble) about dealing with modern life in Tel Aviv, warts and all, be treated as a site for international conflict? Why not celebrate the technique and artistry of the film, as well as its confrontation with some very delicate issues, including homosexuality, fundamentalism, and nationalism.

In fact, one voice of dissent, Canadian filmmaker John Greyson lamented the lack of focus on Palestinian films at TIFF 09 to offset the strong Israeli contingent. Actually there were a handful of films by Palestinian filmmakers on the Festival roster. I seriously wonder if the next time Greyson applies for a funding grant from the government of Canada if he will see the irony in that decision. Anyone on this side of the border knows that Canada Council grants and others like it aim to promote a certain–some might say restrictive–image of Canadian arts to Canadians and a global audience. Some might call it “Brand Canada.”

The double-standard at play here seems pretty obvious. I may not support everything the Israeli government does, but that should not preclude me from supporting individual filmmakers, who have a story to tell.

In the last few days of the Festival a counter-protest finally emerged. On the front page of the Toronto Star were two sets of photographs — one with Tel Aviv supporters and the other with the original protesters. Of course, most of the counter-protesters were Jewish personalities in film and television, which will simply reaffirm the notion that Jews will support Israel at any cost. I can’t speak for people like David Cronenberg and Natalie Portman, but maybe these filmmakers also realize that censoring a group of filmmakers for belonging to a city, a culture, and a religion should not be tolerated by anyone, especially those who seek to speak for minorities. You don’t have to be Jewish to see that.

Now with that out of the way, here are some thoughts on a few of the films we caught at TIFF this year.

Waking Sleeping Beauty

The highlight of the Festival was, for me, the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty. Getting its world premiere here in Toronto (after a sneak preview in Telluride the previous week), the film offers a glimpse behind the scenes of one of the most celebrated periods in animation history: Walt Disney Studios’ resurgence in the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties. From The Black Cauldron to The Lion King, filmmakers Peter Schneider and Don Hahn utilize found footage (mostly home videos) to explore the corporate culture at Disney and the relationship between Disney animators and the executives who wrote their paychecks. The tone of the film is captured best in an early scene, where we are shown outtakes from a corporate video presented by Michael Eisner, Disney’s CEO at the time. Eisner smiles and congratulates the crew of The Lion King on a job well done, then looks off camera, loses the smile and snaps, “That good enough?” He looks tired, defeated, and angry. Apparently, he was. While the Disney animators have a lot to say in the film about their work and crazy schedules, the picture belongs to Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who emerge as great Shakespearean characters at a time when the company was producing some of the most memorable and successful films. Eisner comes off as the better man, even after his two-faced display in the corporate video. While Eisner seems genuinely interested in the quality of Disney animation, Katzenberg has trouble connecting to his employees — the animators. He struggles to communicate, and when he does he ends up angering them even more with his aloofness. Interspersed with the found footage are high-def snippets of the films themselves, which have never looked better — from The Little Mermaid to Aladdin to Beauty and the Beast. It’s all topped by a moving section that details the work of Howard Ashman, the co-composer of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, who died of AIDS before Beast was completed. We were told that the film will be released in April. When it comes to your town, be sure to check it out.

The Hole

I was excited to see Joe Dante’s new film, which turned out to be the first 3-D film ever exhibited at TIFF. The Hole is a predictable, if somewhat uneven, horror tale that represents the first live-action 3-D film I have seen since Captain EO back in the eighties. Dante’s use of 3-D is surprisingly underwhelming since he avoids the obvious z-axis stingers and arranges his 3-D mise en scene with subtle depth. Foreground and background planes are noticeably more pronounced, but focal problems were apparent. This may not be a glitch with the 3-D process, but a rack-focus error that occasionally threw the background into sharp focus when the foreground action was unintentionally blurry. In several sequences, Dante is in fine form, as he cleverly mixes humor with genuinely frightening imagery. The bathroom sequence is a real highlight, as is any scene with the demonic clown doll. During our screening, however, the fire alarm was pulled fifteen minutes before the end of the film, which forced us to abandon our seats and exit the theater. Looks like we’ll have to catch the rest of it some other time.

Get Low

This is a low key affair with Robert Duvall in a rare starring role and Bill Murray in another memorable supporting part. This might be Bill Murray’s first period piece, actually. The film takes place in the early part of the 20th century, with Duvall playing a feared recluse who one day decides to drive into town on his donkey-drawn cart to ask the local priest for a living funeral. He intends to “get low” (i.e. down to business) and wishes to stage a funeral so he can hear what people really think of him. Duvall plays it close to the chest, emoting only when he absolutely must. As Murray’s character says late in the film, “Is it just me, or is he extremely articulate when he wants to be?” It’s still looking for a distributor, which will hopefully happen, since Duvall and Murray are terrific in the scenes they share together. First-time feature director Aaron Schneider stays away from “homespun” cliches and lets the story breathe on its own without showy editing, camera movement, or musical choices. Getting to see Murray and Duvall in person was a real treat, along with Richard Zanuck whose son Dean produced the film.

Les Herbes Folles

I was looking forward to Alain Resnais’ newest film, Les Herbes Folles, but left the screening scratching my head. Was he being deliberately playful with his narrative structure and tone? It was slowly building to a romantic pay-off, or at least an ironic punchline, but instead Resnais pulled out the rug from under us, and we were left with a seemingly unrelated and unmotivated question: when a young girl becomes a cat, will she be able to eat cat munchies? The audience, almost in unison, shouted “Huh?” when the screen cut to black. For most of the film Resnais hooked me with a rather simple love story that begins with a woman losing her purse and a lonely house husband retrieving it for her. He falls for her and finds it hard to stop thinking about the stranger whose wallet he found. He fantasizes about her, while she seems completely uninterested in his advances, and seems only content flying her plane. Maybe someone needs to explain this one to me.

Good Hair

Lastly, I wanted to mention Chris Rock’s documentary on African-American hair, called Good Hair. As a white man myself I never knew the complexities associated with black hair. Rock does a good job as on-camera interviewer and voice-over narrator, taking us through the many ways women style their hair. As the father of two young daughters, Rock sees himself as protector and educator. He digs deep and examines the social and cultural roots of what constitutes “natural” black hair (i.e. white Eurpoean hair), and the lengths black women will go to achieve straight, bouncy hair. There’s the highly toxic chemical, sodium hydroxide, which is the main ingredient in most relaxers. Rock and a scientist show how prolonged exposure to the hydroxide will disintegrate a soda can, even though it is commonly used on toddlers and young girls. To explain the origins of weave hair, Rock travels to India and finds that thousands of young women routinely shave their heads as part of a religious ceremony. This hair is then processed, dyed, cleaned and eventually sold to African-American women. Rev. Al Sharpton offers some insightful commentary, as do several other prominent celebrities.

Reading up on TIFF coverage in Variety and other trade sources, it sounds as if this was a pretty mediocre year in terms of film quality and acquisitions. Some blame the recession on the slow acquisition of titles by major distributors, others blame the quality of films for the slow sales. The film Creation, about the relationship between Charles and Emma Darwin, left the Festival without an American distributor, leaving some to wonder if its subject matter would prove too controversial for American audiences or if the film just isn’t that good. I was surprised to see Get Low leave the Festival without a major distributor either — even though the film’s pedigree (produced by the Zanucks, starring Murray and Duvall) suggests that it would be a no-brainer for anyone interested. Which is why I was relieved to hear that Waking Sleeping Beauty will actually get a release, unlike the 2002 behind-the-scenes-at-Disney doc, The Sweatbox. Many other notable features went home without a deal, making it the topic of conversation in the TIFF post mortem. Check out Roger Ebert’s blog post about some other titles that may not be coming to a theater near you.

It’s always a shame that none of the films my wife and I love are ever recognized by the TIFF award juries. This year, Precious: Based On the Novel Push By Sapphire won the People’s Choice Award, which seems to be building Oscar momentum. Last year we thought JCVD was a shoe-in for the audience prize, but then Slumdog Millionaire premiered. As a consolation, it was nice to see that the documentary category finally became eligible this year for the People’s Choice Award. Which is why we were keeping our fingers crossed for Waking Sleeping Beauty to take home that prize. Oh well.

With a busy summer winding down, I’m staring down an equally busy fall. Unfortunately this summer produced fewer blog essays than I intended, as I was busy conducting interviews and developing other research for my doctoral project. I hope to remedy that in the coming months, as I prepare for another round of festival-going at TIFF and take on a teaching challenge at my alma mater, the University of Toronto, where I was offered a full-year course on the history of American filmmaking in the studio era. So, along with my usual thoughts on film style and technology, there will be plenty of film for thought to keep this blog busy.

Today, a few more thoughts on 3-D.

In transcribing some interview material from my conversations with sound practitioners, I came across an interesting point made by a notable re-recording mixer. In addition to finding the right balance among sound effects, this effects mixer is often responsible for placing sound effects in the 5.1 sound space. This means, for example, spreading explosions across the front channels or sending a variety of “bys” or passes from the front to the rear surround channels.

Before the re-emergence and hype surrounding modern 3-D presentations, 5.1 audio represented one way to immerse the audience in the space of a film. Sound mixers routinely envelop audiences in different sound spaces as a way of conveying the spatial geography of a scene; to provide clues to the location of a scene; and to embellish the sound signatures of a particular locale. Sound was a natural choice to convey immersion, since it fills the entire theater space with speakers not only behind the screen but along the side and back walls of all modern auditoriums. But now with 3-D all the rage, it seems that immersive 5.1 audio may not be immersive enough.

Speaking casually about sound technology and the aesthetics of modern film sound, this mixer — who has some experience mixing for recent 3-D fare — expressed frustration with the state of sound in relation to the 3-D format. Here’s the whole quote:

“At the moment I feel it is just a strictly visual experience. With 5.1 you can’t make it sound like special venue sound. In a standard theater, you just can’t do it. You try. You try to exaggerate surround. You try to get more special with things. But you can only do so much because you don’t have a speaker over your head. You don’t have a wall lined with them, like they do in some theme parks.”

With so few films being prepared for release in 3-D, the reality of this situation has yet to be felt by the majority of Hollywood re-recording mixers. Many have noted that norms and conventions have yet to be augmented to better suit 3-D because time, resources, and the small number of actual 3-D films prevent people in sound editorial and mixing to re-conceptualize sound style. While visual effects departments get the time and financial resources they need to refine and complete shots, sound departments are routinely told by post-production supervisors that there isn’t extra time or money for fringe benefits like reconfiguring the 5.1 layout.

The traditional press, along with the blogosphere, have had a lot to say about 3-D (including my own essay on the subject), but few have noted how the sound track might work in relation to eye-popping imagery. I naturally assumed that the 3-D sound track must be exploring new avenues of immersion, or responding in some way to the illusions of depth. If hardware firms like IMAX and Dolby are spending millions developing 3-D technology and studios are readying a growing number of 3-D releases, then surely sound must be part of the innovation party. Well…yes and no.

No one can say for sure what the future will bring, but at this moment the state of the 3-D sound track is unchanged. That is not to say that mixers aren’t working with sound differently than with traditional 2-D films. As the effects mixer noted, they will sometimes push more “hard” effects into the split surround channels to mimic an action that sends the image “into” the theater. Backgrounds (also known as ambiences) may also be treated with more gusto. In this sense, mixers are pushing more sound into the theater space to complement the visual push. It also helps that most 3-D movies has been animated, a genre which often affords mixers greater play with sound level and placement. Things can be more lively, full, and bright with films like Monsters vs. Aliens and Coraline.

Mixers are, therefore, tweaking current practices to suit the new image. They are not, as one might imagine, re-configuring the sound of sound. Why not? Well, a new delivery system for sound would be costly for exhibitors, who have already had to install digital cinema projectors to offer films in 3-D. A new sound system may involve not only new processors, but also more loudspeakers behind the screen and along the side and back walls. For years Tomlinson Holman has been arguing for 10.2 surround sound, which adds a pair of left and right overhead channels, a pair of wide left and right channels, a second subwoofer, and a center rear channel (which Dolby introduced in 1999 with the release of Star Wars: Episode One — The Phantom Menace). This layout would add the overhead channel desired by our effects mixer, and gives more latitude to the behind-the-screen channels to localize sound more precisely.

This report from Audioholics points out that psychoacoustic experiments suggest that human sound localization is far greater on the horizontal plane and front hemisphere than on the sides or rear. Unfortunately, the home theater industry continues to emphasize the importance of surround channels, and continues to add rear channels to the home array as some 7.1 systems demonstrate.

In Japan, NHK has proposed a 22.2 system to complement their super high-def television technology. Another re-recording mixer introduced me to a new sound system out of Germany called IOSONO. Here’s a brief excerpt from their description of its cinema applications:

An IOSONO system really comes into its own with IOSONO-encoded material. Sound designers can place up to 32 independent sound objects anywhere outside of, or within, the theater, either far behind the walls or right next to any member of the audience. What’s more, these sound objects can be made to move along any given path, at any desired speed. Ever experienced a helicopter slowly flying into the middle of the theater and hovering right above your seat? With IOSONO, you can.

Here is a description of the technology itself:

A computer controls each loudspeaker separately and actuates it the moment the desired wave front would pass through it. To synthesize a spherical wave front originating from a point behind the speakers, for example, the speaker closest to the virtual source is actuated first, followed by the speakers to the right and left of it. This results in a wave front with a relatively large radius and a virtual source point outside of the listening space. Reversing the order of actuation (where the speakers closest to the virtual point source are actuated last) results in a wave field corresponding to that of a source within the listening space.

The result is a stable wave field in which the listener can localize the virtual sound sources as if they were emanating from actual objects. The loudspeakers themselves, however, cannot be localized. Wave field synthesis thus creates a stunning illusion of acoustic events in a space, adding a whole new dimension to audio in the entertainment and other industries.

Beyond the marketing language of the IOSONO system, it is easy to see how this type of application could be attractive to Hollywood sound mixers who seek to augment the soundscape of a 3-D film by adding more localized channels. As the effects mixer stated, 5.1 is not broad enough to pin-point sound in space. In fact, several mixers agree that 5.1 is a digital compromise between exhibitors and industry practitioners. More channels may represent greater creative control, but it inevitably costs more. And, according to Tom Holman, 5.1 achieves the minimum number of discrete channels required for an immersive sound field.

In practice, mixers often avoid pin-pointed sound in 5.1 sound space because of its potential to distract audiences from the screen. Which is why many supervising sound editors and final mixers aim to fill the rear channels with rich but undefined backgrounds. Very rarely is dialog placed in the rear for the same reason. With 3-D, mixers are faced with an image that calls attention to itself, so why can’t sound do the same thing? If an arrow is shot out from the screen and lands somewhere to the left-rear of the viewer, why not indicate the arrow hit with a sound effect in the left-rear of the auditorium? As I mentioned earlier, mixers already use the rears as transport channels for fly-bys or car-bys or other moving objects.

As much as mixers are frustrated with the financial constraints to 3-D sound, there are some theoretical issues that still lurk in the shadow of 5.1. Mixers may want more channels capable of reproducing localized sound, but they must first overcome the conventional logic of surround sound mixing: avoid localized sound in the far left, far right, and rear. Tom Holman once quipped, “In Top Gun, when jets fly left to right across the screen and then exit screen right, what may be perceived aurally is the jet flying off screen as well, right into the exit sign.”

That is why Holman, among others, has opted for immersive film sound not localized film sound. Unlike a theme park ride which often directs your attention through sound cues placed in a 360 degree fashion around a room (think of the Hall of Presidents in Walt Disney World), cinema sound must contend with a two-dimensional screen on which audiences must stayed focused, even with 3-D presentations where your eyes remain fixed on a general axis, where any movement outside that axis might reveal the images to be cardboard cutouts — a phenomenon all too familiar to me.

The call for special venue sound for 3-D presentations seems to be an unlikely reality given the cost and small base of films released in the format. The desire for special venue sound also hides a fundamental aspect of Hollywood filmmaking that James Cameron continues to emphasize, even as he touts his upcoming Avatar as a veritable “game changer” in the way we experience our movies. In an interview with the Daily Mail he stated,

The irony with Avatar is that people think of it as a 3D film and that’s what the discussion is. But I think that, when they see it, the whole 3D discussion is going to go away…That’s because, ideally, the technology is advanced enough to make itself go away. That’s how it should work. All of the technology should wave its own wand and make itself disappear.

He is emphasizing story clarity and intelligibility, two of the most fundamental building blocks of American cinema. As much as the technology can wow our eyes and ears, the experience is in service to something else: the story. So as much as Cameron is prepared to awe his audience, he’s acutely aware that the illusion will fail if the audience isn’t taken on a journey that means something more than eye-popping visuals.

Filmmakers, including sound professionals, have always had to reconcile the spectacular nature of technology with the need for narrative invisibility. This is especially the case with sound mixing, where their art is based on the fine balance of story comprehension and environmental immersion. It is, therefore, hard to imagine sound acting any other way than it currently does in 3-D environments, especially if directors like Cameron subscribe to the story-is-paramount ideology.

]]> http://www.wrightonfilm.com/?feed=rss2&p=696 4 http://www.wrightonfilm.com/?p=626 http://www.wrightonfilm.com/?p=626#comments Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:54:46 +0000 Benjamin Wright http://www.wrightonfilm.com/?p=626

After being off the air for nearly a decade, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988-1999) is perhaps more popular now than it was during its initial run. While it has maintained a loyal fan base since its cable access launch in 1988, it continues to attract new fans — or MSTies — thanks to the release of 15 DVD anthologies of some of the show’s funniest experiments. Not to mention the countless websites devoted to the series and its satirical treatment of bad movies. Some of these movies have even re-entered popular discourse after being featured on the show, such as Manos: The Hands of Fate. Despite its strong niche popularity the series remains an acquired taste. Its mixture of broad shtick with esoteric observation is not hard to grasp, even for the uninitiated. Still, however, some viewers might find it hard to take pleasure in watching others watch bad movies.

The premise of the series is simple enough that the show’s original theme song distills its basic plot quite nicely:

In the not-too-distant future — next Sunday A.D. — there was a guy named Joel, not too different from you or me. He worked at Gizmonic Institute, just another face in a red jumpsuit. He did a good job cleaning up the place, but his bosses didn’t like him. So they shot him into space. We’ll send him cheesy movies. The worst we can find (la-la-la). He’ll have to sit and watch them all, and we’ll monitor his mind (la-la-la). Now keep in mind Joel can’t control where the movies begin or end (la-la-la). Because he used those special parts to make his robot friends.

The “experiments” sent by the evil Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) are among cinema’s tragic failures, which are lampooned by Joel Hodgson and his robot pals, Crow T. Robot (voiced by Beaulieu), Tom Servo (voiced by Kevin Murphy), Gypsy (Jim Mallon) and Cambot. We watch the cinematic travesties with Joel and co., who sit in a row of theater seats silhouetted against the movie. They laugh at the screen and make self-reflexive wisecracks that highlight the often uncontrollable badness of the movies they are forced to watch.

Unlike its premise, the history of the show is rather convoluted. After a mid-series network switch from Comedy Central to the Sci-fi channel in 1996, the show changed hosts (Mike Nelson replaced Joel), Trace Beaulieu was replaced with Mary Jo Pehl as Forrester’s evil mother, Pearl, and the voice of Crow was replaced with that of another series writer, Bill Corbett. Despite the acting replacements and the loss of Beaulieu and Hodgson, the writing staff remained relatively unchanged throughout the series’ run. The show’s most commercial outing was with Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie in 1996, which skewered the now revered Universal sci-fi flick, This Island Earth. In fact, the feature film represents a bridge between the “Joel years” which preceded it and the “Mike years” that followed it on the Sci-fi channel. An “almost but still not quite complete history” of the show is available here.

Part of the show’s longevity stems from a request by the writers to “keep circulating the tapes,” which would appear during the credits of each episode. In the days before streaming internet video, home recorded VHS tapes were traded among fans who might have missed an episode or an entire season of the series. The trend continues to this day with some sites selling bootleg DVDs of episodes not yet released officially on video. In fact, some of the best episodes remain unreleased due to copyright claims and licensing restrictions. Until they are all released, I’m sure the show’s creators would like you to keep circulating those tapes.

Postmodern Silliness

We, the audience, are back-row participants in the fun. Put rather dryly, the humor derives from the double-exposure of watching the film and listening to Joel and the bots simultaneously. The jokes are timed to interrupt the narrative as little as possible, thereby allowing the audience to experience the film in a rather unobstructed sense. Much of the humor is observational and thus tied to the happenings on screen, yet some of the most effective jokes are broad reflexive gags that highlight outmoded social and cultural attitudes, or point out inter- and extra-textual meanings across a wide range of films. In this sense, the show demands the audience to be schooled in the finer, if somewhat marginal, aspects of pop culture. How else can we explain the inclusion of a Herbert von Karajan reference in the offbeat 70s horror film, The Touch of Satan? Without veering too far into high theory, Mystery Science is postmodern humor without pretension. It unearths the forgotten disasters of cinema to pick them apart, line by line, and call attention to their relationship with other films. In one of the show’s best “meta” jokes, the cast spends the final minutes of Laserblast reading Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide in hopes of finding other films that were also rewarded 2.5 stars out of 4 by the editors of the Guide. To the cast’s dismay, Maltin’s Guide suggests that Amadeus, Being There, Unforgiven, A Fish Called Wanda, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom are on par with this utterly hilarious 70s sci-fi bomb.

I came to know Mystery Science in 2001 when it had already been canceled by the Sci-fi channel. My wife, who was then my girlfriend, introduced me to her collection of VHS episodes, and in a very short time I was hooked. With a name vaguely reminiscent of George McFly’s favorite TV show, Science Fiction Theater, the show appealed to me with its high-brow assault on some very low-brow movies. As an antidote to the sarcasm of the movie segments, the show’s bumper sequences are often silly, campy riffs between Joel/Mike and the evil earthbound scientists. Some of the funniest host segments feature the cast in a recreation or “homage” to that day’s film, where Joel/Mike and the bots don costumes and reflect the attitudes and behavior of the characters.

Not everyone understands the joy of watching the gang skewer a particularly bad movie. In his review for the feature film, Jonathan Rosenbaum snickered, “Of course making up your own wisecracks and passively listening to the wisecracks of ersatz spectators aren’t precisely the same activity. The potential creativity of the audience has been usurped…” Usurped is a strong word. I think this critical hesitation says something about our relationship with movies and how we watch them, which invaraibly leads to a feeling of being left out of the fun. Rosenbaum believes that passively listening to someone else make jokes somehow undercuts the whole enterprise of back-row heckling. In a way I see his point, but film viewing requires passivity. I would argue that the show rubs some viewers the wrong way because it asks its audience to forgive moviegoing etiquette and incorporate the wisecracks into the narrative. Whereas we might normally criticize the hecklers up front for ruining our moviegoing experience, Mystery Science Theater asks us to loosen our 1:1 relationship with the screen and participate in a weekly roast of a cheesy movies. It might not be active participation, but then again, why not? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about MST3K screenings where people shout the jokes back at the screen like a Greek chorus.

The List

With nearly two hundreds episodes to its credit, dozens of classic lines and memorable moments, and some perfectly roasted films, Wright on Film presents its Top Ten Favorite Moments from Mystery Science Theater 3000. The list comprises a selection of the funniest lines, gags, or entire films featured on the show. Join the chorus with your own favorites, if they aren’t among the ten chosen here.

10. The Skydivers (1963)

“Somebody with Attention Deficit Disorder edited this film.” This Colman Francis gem about a group of professional skydivers is a bleak and dreary exercise in cinematic boredom. Not much actually happens in this movie, except for the frequent discussion and enjoyment of … coffee. “Coffee? I like coffee,” says one character. Mike replies, “Thus we peer into the complex inner workings of this character.” The film itself is almost unwatchable, due in no small part to the dreary grayness that saturates every frame of this film. Not much happens here, as evidenced by this exchange: “Wonder how high they’re gonna jump.” A guy responds, “I don’t know.” Crow quips, “Wow, they really captured that kind of situation.”

9. Soultaker (1990)

No, that’s not Martin Sheen as the Soultaker, it’s his brother, Joe Estevez, a veteran character actor who has appeared in dozens of direct-to-video genre pics, frequently with Robert Z’dar, another DTV favorite. Two of the funniest riffs by Mike and bots have to do with the size of Z’dar’s face: “He looks like a catcher’s mitt with eyes!” and — as Z’dar looks at Estevez — “Man, that guy’s face is small.”

8. Puma Man (1980)

An international co-production about a super hero with the powers of the ancient Aztec Pumaman (who might also be from an alien planet). It’s hard to determine what is funnier, the film’s visual effects or Donald Pleasance’s overwrought performance. The rear-projection flying sequences are completely inferior even for the period. Luckily the poor effects don’t go unnoticed by Mike and the bots: “I’m falling at a 60-degree angle, defying all the laws of physics!” Pleasance’s oddly affected British pronunciation of “Puma Man” (more like “Pee-yoo-ma-man”) never tires of being funny, especially since he seems to be relishing every syllable. Honorable mention also goes to the film’s funky disco score, which only adds to the joy of this 70s mess.

7. Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders (1996 and 1982)

“Rock’n'roll martian…” So, basically this film purports to tell one story about the mystical sorcerer but is actually two different films by the same director cut together. It’s not that obvious, unless you happen to notice the 180 degree plot shift, the change in film stock, the different lighting styles, and most fundamentally the different fashion styles. One was made in the mid 90s, while the other reeks of the early 80s. Looking past the blow-dried hair and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial references, the film’s most memorable character is a skeptical newspaper columnist who claims to eviscerate new businesses with his influential reviews. Of course, he sets out to review Merlin’s shop by leafing through his book of spells and making sarcastic remarks into a tape recorder. We’re not sure if the actor is overdoing it, or if the character is that ridiculous, but he nevertheless provides plenty of fuel for Mike and the bots. When his wife complains of his lack of tact and sympathy, the bots chime in: “If she had a store, I’d crush her!” Later, during one of his tedious interior monologues, Servo adds, “I talk to myself a lot. Long monologues complete with sarcasm.”

6. Boggy Creek II: …and the Legend Continues (1984)

“Can I borrow a cup of shirt?” A professor and three of his students head for the Arkansas backwoods in search of the legend of Boggy Creek, a woolly behemoth that is not unlike Bigfoot. Along the way, we must contend with the professor’s droning monologues, a sweaty swamp hillbilly, and Tim, the kid who refuses to wear a shirt. There are several jabs at Tim’s shirtlessness, Arkansas, hillbillies, and some technical oddities like the film’s inconsistent look: “My flashback wasn’t color corrected when it came back from the lab so it was kind of dark.”

5. Cave Dwellers (1984

One of a few MSTied movies to feature a main title credit sequence with footage from a completely different film. Thanks Film Ventures International! Set somewhere in the middle ages, this Miles O’Keeffe vehicle is about a He-Man named Ator, whose quest is to keep the Geometric Nucleus out of the hands of Zor. This one is very popular at our house as the one that started it all. It was the first VHS my wife bought. At the time, her youngest sister was taking the train in to the city for a weekend visit, and she wanted something fun for them to do. One look at Zor’s silly swan-topped black battle helmet, along with Crow’s apt quip, sealed the deal for the two of them: “You know that hat has a slimming effect on you.” It’s a small moment of silliness that was capped later in the episode when Joel and the bots donned the same oversized helmets during one of their host segments.

4. The Final Sacrifice (1990)

“So, Rowsdower, is that a…stupid name?” Arguably the most popular title not to be officially released on DVD, this also happens to be one of my favorite Canadian films. When an ancient cult idol is found by a boy, he sets out to discover the truth behind his father’s death. Incidentally, he must evade capture from the Ziox cult and its evil leader, Sartoris, by hiding in the back of an unsuspecting Canuck’s pickup truck, who may or may not be a former cult member. This God among men is Zap Rowsdower, our beefy anti-hero with a priceless mullet, thick Ontario accent, and penchant for stonewash denim. Ridiculed endlessly by Mike and the gang, most of the Rowsdower jabs are hilarious, including a few about his hockey hair. However, my favorite is a dig at the kid. He asks his grandmother if he is like his dead father. Crow replies, “No, he was masculine and likable.”

3. This Island Earth (1955)

Granted, this is the feature film “experiment” and not from the original series. We’ve included it here since it contains some of the show’s best riffing. That is not to say that there are more jokes here than in an average episode or that they are funnier, but the source material definitely provides much to be satirized. In a recent interview, Mike Nelson spoke about the elevated status of the original This Island Earth as one of the “best” 50s sci-fi flicks and noted that it’s still not very good. Perhaps the same people who have such reverence for the film haven’t actually seen it. Or maybe they haven’t seen the MSTied version, which points out many of the film’s shortcomings. Or maybe they have seen the Mystie version and can’t help but hold the original in higher esteem (what I like to call the Manos effect.) The “science and technology” montage is wonderfully silly, as is the “Normal view” song. My wife was lucky enough to see this movie during its theatrical release and while MST3K is hilarious on the small screen, the jokes feel even bigger with a large audience. For my wife, MST3K: The Movie still holds the title for the most she has ever laughed at a movie. Ever.

2. Time Chasers (1994)

“So in the future kids become gay agents?” I’ll admit that it was hard to get over the loss of Trace Beaulieu as the voice of Crow and initially I wanted nothing to do with Bill Corbett. Then came the release of Volume Five of the MST3K DVD collection and the awesomeness that is David Giancola’s Time Chasers. We are introduced to the less kind, more acerbic Crow T. Robot who is clearly unhappy with the casting of Matthew Bruch as our hero, Nick the time-traveling scientist. Crow yells “Hey wait a minute. This isn’t our star, is it? I will not accept this as our star, sorry.” This new Crow isn’t afraid to get angry and hold a grudge, “Movie! Hey Movie! Can I see your supervisor? This will not stand.” And who can blame him? Our hero is dressed in stonewash jeans, sporting a mullet and riding a 10-speed. And he looks to have a dinner roll attached to his chin. At least Rowsdower had a pickup. One thing is for sure, the crankier Crow gets, the funnier the jabs become. One of the best set pieces is the mezzanine office of the evil J.K. Robertson, which looks like it was filmed at a public library. The host segments are also very strong, with a hilariously gruff “alternate reality” Mike taking over mid-way through the film.

1. Mitchell (1975)

Who’s the puffy guy who is a big blurry sex machine? Mitchell! That’s right, Joe Don Baker is the pushy, puffy, greasy and sleazy cop who manages to bust up John Saxon’s crime ring and bed Linda Evans (a “loser actor bouquet” indeed.) Where to begin with Mitchell? Joe Don Baker’s face and girth make good fodder for the guys. You’d think there was a limit to how many fat, lazy and drunk jokes can be funny. But there isn’t. And it’s even funnier in song: “Mitchell, Mitchell — eye on the sandwich! Mitchell. Hearts poundin’. Mitchell. Veins cloggin’, Mitchell!” Not to mention that this is the episode that sees Joel’s escape from the Satellite of Love and introduces us to Mike. Unlike several episodes, Mitchell is a fairly watchable movie with actual Hollywood actors, including Martin Balsam and Baker (who has appeared in a few James Bond outings). Its humor, then, isn’t based on the unprofessionalism of the filmmakers but instead on the contrived plot and uncharismatic title character. Which are endlessly funny. Not to mention the low speed car chase. We’re still trying to figure out why Mitchell is eating an orange at an upscale restaurant. Apparently Mitchell doesn’t care for the ways of society and chooses to live by his own rules.

Keep circulating those tapes.