Never Say No To A Rock Star

by Berger, Glenn

  Nevertheless, when I asked her, despite her attempt to be cool, I could tell she was a little jazzed to be going to a private screening of an as-yet unreleased motion picture. She was as much of a film buff as the rest of us were at that time.

  When we arrived at the funky midtown screening room, Bob was there to greet us, and when he turned his klieg lights on her, I saw a change come over her that I did not expect but completely understood, as I had gone through such a zaubersprüche myself. My tough German friend became a little fanlet. Bob turned his Eros full force on her, and I could swear she got wet under his gaze. By the time she got to her seat, she was a convert. I began to have hope that maybe she’d come around. But first we’d have to see what the movie was like.

  We were blown away. This was a radical film. We didn’t quite know what we had seen yet. The cutting was severe, faster than anything we’d encountered. The theme was dark. It was like no musical we’d ever seen. The version was rough, but we could still feel the movie’s raw power. We gripped each other’s hands during the ride. When it was over, we looked at each other agog, hearts pounding. Holy shit. I wasn’t only working on a major film. I was working on a great one. Ivy effusively went up to Bob.

  He held both of her hands and got close to her face. “You like it?”

  “Yes! I LOVE it!”

  We floated out of the room to the creaky elevator. A bunch of us crammed into the little box. One man, rather gray, in a floppy hat from the Army and Navy store, spoke somewhat critically. “I thought it would be more finished than that.” It was clear he wasn’t saying more. It was Woody Allen!

  We got out into the street, giddy. New York, 1979. We were peaking. “So, can we stay a few more months so I can get this thing done?” I asked.

  “Of course!” she said, her voice vibrating with excitement. We ran through the midtown crush, holding hands, in love, thrilled to be at the height of our New York moment.

  SCENE FOUR:

  I Quit

  Although A&R had built up this extraordinary staff, the times they were a changin’: everyone was going “freelance,” and working all over town. It seemed to be a good deal; you’d make a higher hourly and get to control your own taxes. Plus, clients might want to work with you, but not at your studio. I was far from the first to make the move.

  The first person I went to at A&R to announce my decision to quit was Milton Brooks.

  “Brooks, this is it. Fosse has asked me to do the re-record with him over at Trans Audio, and I figured this was as good a time as any to go freelance.”

  Brooks squashed out his cigar stump hard. I’d never seen him like this. He’d always seemed to be able to take everything in stride. “I see,” he said through his teeth.

  “Berger, we invested in you. We put up with you sneaking into the studios on weekends and stealing tape, because we were cultivating another hotshot. The only thing on my mind was, who was going to replace Ramone? He wouldn’t be around forever. He’s spending half his year in Los Angeles these days. And we built you up. Got you in with Charlap, and Burns, and Fosse. And now, just like that, you’re out of here? Well, good luck, kid.”

  “Wait, Brooks, the thing is, the truth is, it’s not like I’m going to be working anywhere else. After this project, I’m leaving New York. I’m burnt, man.”

  “What? Where are you going to go?”

  “Ivy and I are going to move up to New England, and I’m going to study music for a while.”

  “Berger. Do you realize what you have here? Do you know how many people would kill for your slot? You are on the verge of… you’re a hot shot! You’re going to throw the whole thing away? Are you out of your mind?”

  Now I started to get mad. “Do you have any idea of all the shit I’ve put up with over the last seven years? The crap I’ve had to take from Sterling? How I’ve had to beg for a five-dollar raise from Ward when I’m billing hundreds of thousands of dollars? To say nothing of Ramone and Simon and the rest of the freaks around here? I’m sick of this crap! I’m done! I don’t owe these people anything! Sure, they’ve given me opportunities, but I’ve paid for it all in blood, and they’ve gotten plenty back!”

  Brooks looked at me with pity and understanding. “Alright, Berger. I’m not going to fight with you. I just hope you don’t regret this one day.”

  “What am I going to regret? Look, it’s not you. I hope you don’t stay mad at me forever. This is just something I gotta do.”

  By the time I went over to the other side, everyone knew. Sterling, drunk as usual, came up to me and said, “It’s about time. I told you you’d never last, you faggot. I coulda told Ramone he was making a big mistake with you. You’ll never amount to anything in this business.”

  I was used to this kind of treatment and just answered it with a fuck you.

  Next, I ran into the assistant who was gunning for my chair. “What a great move, man! You are so brave! I wish I had your guts!”

  Yeah, right, scumbag. You just want my gigs, that’s all.

  I went to say goodbye to my mentor Susan Hamilton. She said, “You know, when somebody leaves, I just cross them off my list, like they never existed. People get one shot in my book. When you leave this town, you don’t come back.”

  What do I care?

  Bloodied, I went back to the production room to see Plotnik. He sat down with me and smiled. “Berger-queen, I wish you the best of luck. You gotta do what’s right for you. I’m sure that whatever you end up doing, you’ll be great, you little piece of shit ya!”

  I thanked him, and we hugged. I took a long look at the big room and wondered if I’d ever see it again. Then I walked down the back hallway to the freight elevator, maybe for the last time. Inside, Reverend Blalock said, “Well if it isn’t the chicken hawk. You catch any chickens lately?” He’d said that to me so many times, and I was still not sure what he meant.

  I got out onto the familiar corner at 52nd and 7th. I walked a few steps downtown to look at the plaque that read A&R. I remembered how I had felt on my first day in the studio, full of hope, fear, determination, and clarity of purpose. I still had the fire, raring to move on to my next adventure, but the clarity was gone. I was no longer sure that my answer to everything was “yes.”

  ACT FIVE: THE NEXT STAGE

  SCENE ONE:

  Louder! Harder! Bigger!

  Once I stepped onto the dubbing stage I entered a different dimension. Now, I was truly on Fosse time. As we got deeper into the re-recording, our days got progressively longer, first eight, then ten, twelve, sixteen hours a day. The days stretched into weeks, weeks into months. I wouldn’t say Bob and I were ever friends, but by the end we were spending every waking minute together and so had formed some kind of deep bond.

  The control room at Trans Audio was a large box about thirty feet from back to front. The front was covered by a large movie screen, about ten feet high and eighteen feet across, and the mixing console was about three-quarters of the way back toward the rear wall.

  Dick Vorisek (the guy who handled the dialogue and sound effects) and I set up the mix around 8:30. Bob showed around nine. He would park himself inches from the screen, at its lower right hand corner. He rarely got up. He was invariably pleasant, professional, focused, and soft-spoken but relentlessly demanding, mostly on himself.

  When I’d finish mixing the music for a scene, Fosse would say, “Let’s do it one more time. What I asked for was all wrong. I think we can get it better. Let’s make the ending bigger.”

  I never wanted to tell Bob we couldn’t do something, so I pushed the meters as hard as I could. Vorisek, a big guy from the Bronx, with a sizable gut from spending too many years behind the console, looked at me and grimaced. Under his breath, he reprimanded me, saying, “You can’t do that! The system just won’t handle it!”

  I’d try to pull back a little, but Fosse would come right back, telling me to push harder on the throttle, taking the plane higher, reaching for the stratosphere, closer to the speed of
sound, we’d feel the whole thing rattle, on the verge of falling apart. I started to get the idea that Fosse liked living on the edge, and maybe he’d take us all down with him.

  With Fosse in one ear, “Louder! Harder! Bigger!” and Vorisek in the other, “You’ll kill us!” I flew that console right to the edge of disaster and destruction, in search of brilliance. This went on relentlessly, detail after detail.

  SCENE TWO:

  The Optical Track

  During a break, Vorisek turned to me with a serious look that telegraphed if you keep going like this you are going to do us all in. “Look, you gotta unnerstand. You just can’t cram this kinda volume on a mono optical track.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t want to say: what’s an optical track? I was supposed to be an expert. But slowly, I began to gather the information.

  In the world of analog that we lived in before the 1980s, every medium of sound reproduction had gross limitations. I knew this from making records and, worse, cassettes. So I knew well the disappointment of not being able to reproduce for the listening audience what we created in the studio. But nothing prepared me for the shock of the mono optical track on movies.

  When we transferred a reel of our mixes to optical to hear what the final product would sound like, I was horrified. The sound sucked. That’s when I learned that up until that time, sound reproduction had only changed marginally, with a few technical improvements, since the first feature-length talkie came out in 1927. That was another movie with jazz in the title, The Jazz Singer, about a Jew who did not want to follow the spiritual path laid out by his forebears but instead wanted to become a show-business star.

  There are three basic elements to reproduced sound, and the optical track’s technical ability to handle all three of these were from the dark ages. The first was frequency response. The human ear can hear sounds from the low boom of thunder and the thumping bass from your sub-woofer to the sheen of cymbals and the sweet transparency that comes from high frequencies where the air vibrates about 18,000 times a second.

  Sound, as it is, exists way above 18k; our ears and brains just can’t reproduce it. Cats, dogs, bats, mice, and dolphins can all hear frequencies far higher than humans, for some stretching to 150,000 cycles per second.

  This astounding, inspiring capacity of our animal friends stands in contrast to the pathetic range of that movie optical track, which only reproduced frequencies accurately between about 100Hz and 2000Hz. This is basically the sound of an old telephone. No thunder, just a tap on a cardboard box; no tingle down the spine from great highs, just a muffled sound of someone singing through a towel.

  The second disappointing attribute of the optical track was that it also had a limited dynamic range. This means that the soundtrack could only get so quiet before being overwhelmed by hiss, or noise, and could only get so loud before the medium could take no more and would distort or simply stop getting louder. Bob’s soundtrack, with its wild ups and downs of volume, was like a blivit on the optical track; it was like trying to shove ten pounds of shit into a nine-pound bag.

  The third aspect of this optical track that made it embarrassing was that it was in mono. All the audio was crammed onto a single track, with all of the stuff coming out of one speaker. I was used to glorious stereo, which turned the musical canvas from a point to a plane, just like a movie screen. If something happened on the left side of the screen, the sound should come out on the left. With stereo, the sound is far more lifelike, rich, and interesting. It is far easier to hear all the different parts, because different sounds are coming to your ear from different locations. Instead of your film soundtrack sounding like it was coming from an enhanced version of Carnegie Hall, with the mono optical it sounded like you were listening to an orchestra playing through a tin can.

  I had no idea that this was the case before I started this gig, and I was depressed to find this out. But there was hope for something much better.

  SCENE THREE:

  The Dolby Disaster

  1979 was a turning point in the history of sound in the movies.

  In the previous couple of years, a company called Dolby had come out with a process for getting stereo sound onto an optical track with a much wider frequency response and broader dynamic range. You could, theoretically, get a sound that was better than any you could hear at home, because it would be played through huge speakers, at a nice volume, in a big space. The sound would be rich, loud, and large… if it worked.

  Making its first appearance in 1975, it had been used on a few big films, like Star Wars. The system slowly began to catch on, and a few major theatres started to install the system, but it was far from standard or ubiquitous, and in 1979, for Fosse, it was still exotic.

  Fosse was open to the idea of using the Dolby system, but, like all things, it made him nervous. His New York film directing buddy, Sidney Lumet, had used the system on the film version of The Wiz, which had been a terrible flop. One reason that the film fared so badly, Sidney told Bob, was that the Dolby system was so fucked up. Afraid that the movie was one bad decision away from failure, Bob, like all show biz people, was superstitious about such things. Nevertheless, Bob agreed to test it out.

  We sent a reel of our mixed film to the Dolby labs to make a test copy for us. A group of us, including Bob, went to a movie theatre to listen to the results. I was excited to hear how our film would sound in the theatre with this great, new reproduction system. When we put up the film, there was no picture, and all we heard was a 1000Hz tone, that is, a non-stop, obnoxious-sounding beep. Obvious to my ear, this was a “test tone.” I’d heard this sound innumerable times in the studio. It was the standard sound used to align the tape machines. It is not a pleasant sound, and through the loud speakers at the theatre, it hurt!

  Whenever something went wrong like this, we all instantly looked over at Bob. By this time I knew that Fosse had had triple bypass just a few years before. He still chain-smoked five packs of cigarettes a day and was taking copious amounts of amphetamines. He told us that he wanted to die on opening day, because he would do anything for a bigger box office. We were just hoping he wouldn’t hit the big stop button before then.

  We were just waiting for some disaster to strike that would make him keel over and croak, and this, we feared, was that moment. Fosse was a light shade of puce. We tried to reassure him that this was some terrible, inexplicable mistake, and that it could be fixed. He didn’t look convinced. He lit another cigarette and walked out of the theatre slowly, head bowed. He was always expecting the worst, and this seemed to validate his view of the universe.

  I left the theatre, too, furious. It turned out that Dolby had sent us a reel of test tones intended for the Army and had sent our reel to an Army post in St. Louis! Bob was ready to throw out the whole idea, but we explained this to him and convinced him to try it again.

  We got another test reel, and this one at least had sound and picture, but it sounded like shit. The “intensity” was so off that it was completely distorted. Fosse had no capacity to contextualize. However something was at that particular moment was how it had always been and how it would be forever. Since the sound on the test reel stank, he assumed that was the way the mix would always sound. He was terrified. When things didn’t work right, he always blamed himself and went into a panic that it was unfixable. It took a tremendous amount of hand-holding to convince him that this was just the way this one bad copy sounded and had nothing to do with our master mix.

  But while we were trying to assuage Bob’s panic, I was starting to feel my own. I knew that Fosse was against this Dolby idea, and this latest cock-up on the technician’s part would significantly diminish my chances of getting great sound for this movie for Bob, and the awards that would go along with that for me.

  My fear was well founded. Fosse bagged the Dolby system.

  No one really asked me for an opinion, and I didn’t know exactly how to assert one. Once the great director made a decision, th
ere was no way to influence him to change his mind.

  Ralph Burns and I commiserated in despair. “Ralph, we’ve got to do something! There’s got to be some way that we can get decent sound on this thing. I mean, mono? Really? And how can we even get what Fosse wants this way? He’s always wanting everything bigger, louder!”

  “I know. Let me see what I can do.”

  Burns came back to me with what seemed like good news. “OK. We got Bob to agree to go with a 70mm system for the opening in New York and LA. This is really the best thing out there. It is a four-track system, it’ll be in stereo, with better sound than anything.”

  I felt renewed, hopeful, again. Wow! Maybe we’d have something better than Dolby! The best! 70mm four track! Maybe I still had a shot …

  SCENE FOUR:

  The Burden and the Transcendence

  The arduous process ground on, as we mixed the film every day, day and night. Most films take a few days, a week or two at most, to mix. Not this film. Not Fosse. We worked on it for four months.

  Not only was sound primitive in those days, but the whole process of working on film was totally analog and painfully slow.