Take 2 Extended Interviews

TAKE 2, POV BOX: MUSIC EDITOR

FULL INTERVIEW: TOM CARLSON

Tom Carlson has been working as a music editor in Hollywood since the early 1980s. His credits include main music editing duties on The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014). I asked him to walk me through the process of making film music from start to finish focusing on the job of music editor, and this is what he had to say.

JH: You’ve been in this business for forty years. How has the production of film music changed from the days of say, On Golden Pond (1981)?

TC: That would take up an entire book, but I’ll try to sum things up. One of the main differences from earlier practice is that nowadays you start with a temporary or temp score. That wasn’t done much when I started doing music editing in the early eighties. I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a temp in On Golden Pond. Nowadays, the temp score is a very large part of a music editor’s job, and some music editors even specialize in temp scores.

JH: The temp score comes before the film is finished and before the composer comes in. What’s next?

TC: Next is the spotting session, where the composer and a few other people like the music editor meet with the director and watch the film to determine where the music will take place. When I first started, everything at the spotting session was done with typewriters. We would often dictate our notes into a dictating machine and hire a typist to type up our notes.

JH: On an old-fashioned typewriter?

TC: Yes, on a typewriter. Nobody in our business was using computers at the time. In those days, the notes were pretty basic: “music starts here, music ends here,” and that’s all you would need. Nowadays, the spotting session tends to lead to more meetings afterwards.

JH: Does this have to do with the growing number of people at the spotting session compared to earlier days?

TC: Yeah, now it’s not just the director who shows up, but the producers and studio heads who show up. There are a lot more people involved at this early stage nowadays. In the early days of Hollywood, so before my time, the composer had a lot more say. In once case, they wanted to make a change to the music and the composer wasn’t in town, so they flew the edit down to where the composer was so that he could listen to it and approve it! Composers like Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann had a lot of power, in some cases more power than star actors. They could be tyrants—but benevolent dictators!

JH: Wow.

TC: So that’s one big change. The other is the use of synthesizers and mock-up scores. When I was first starting out, the composer would play his ideas at the piano. I worked on Dead Man Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), Miklós Rózsa’s last film, and he wrote everything out as sketches and play them out on the piano. More often than not, the first time that the director would hear the music would be on the scoring stage.

JH: So he would hear it for the first time when it was being recorded by the orchestra?

TC: Right. There was something both scary and liberating about that. People weren’t stuck on the temp score. They allowed the composer to experiment and make a unique score in a way that’s not done much anymore. Listening to many scores nowadays, you can hear the DNA of the temp score behind it.

JH: So the temp really comes out in the final score.

TC: Yes. It’s called “temp love,” where the director or producer falls in love with what they first hear, when it first worked, and they don’t want to change it. Another change, a huge chunk of our time that no longer exists, are the timing notes. Timing notes were a description of everything that was going in the scene and the dialogue to a hundredth of a second. We didn’t have computers to look at the film, so the composer needed to know exactly what happened. At five seconds and twenty one-hundredths of a second, somebody gets punched. The clicks were done manually with a machine called a Urei click machine, a digital click generator.

JH: Computers have changed things quite a bit then, eh?

TC: Yes, nowadays everything is synched up in digital workstation like Oracle or Pro Tools which has both the film and the music on it. A film’s Pro Tools operator is in charge of all the playbacks, the clicks and subdividing clicks, all of this in real time! There are people who work exclusively on Pro Tools for a living, it’s become a separate job in film music.

JH: So Pro Tools is one of the big differences between making film music nowadays and in earlier times, even in the 1980s when you were starting out. Why is Pro Tools so important to film music now?

TC: Pro Tools is kind of a miracle machine and one of the biggest changes to film music in the digital era.

JH: Getting back to the main stages of film music production, after the score is finished and written up, you’re ready to record with the orchestra.

TC: Right, we go through the composing process, the orchestration and all of that, and then you prepare your film for scoring. The music editor takes notes, all done by hand back in the day; now the music notes are done with a spreadsheet or database.

JH: This is during the recording session?

TC: Yes, these are notes or log taken during the recording session. You’re keeping track of which takes are the good ones. A lot of times, the Pro Tools operator will do this, even though it used to be the music editor’s job.

JH: Compared to earlier, have the number of takes or times the orchestra records a cue increased over the years?

TC: Vastly! There are way more takes now, because you can with digital recording. You’re not worried about splicing tape. A lot of times, the score is not recorded in Hollywood but in London. This was already starting in the late seventies, with films like Star Wars (1977). Over forty years of work, I have worked a lot in London, which is where a lot of Hollywood film scores have been recorded.

JH: After you’ve finished recording, are there changes, last minute changes?

TC: Yes. A big difference between then and now is that nowadays everything happens a lot faster. Again, digital technology is to blame for more and more last-minute changes to the film score. Because you can make picture changes instantaneously, and these have to be matched to the music, and so the music has to be completely re-worked because the director or producers might not like the cue. In the old days, that wasn’t really possible. For one, all the parts of the orchestra are recorded separately so that they can be manipulated. In the old days, you would record all of the orchestra together in one take. Nowadays, there is often one person who does what’s called intercutting, which is to clean up the recorded score, to time align all the different parts so that they’re working together. And this is all done with Pro Tools.

JH: Pro Tools again!

TC: Intercutting makes the performance a lot tighter, some would say less human. Then the music is mixed down. You might have 150 tracks and you mix it down to about thirty tracks.

JH: And now you’re ready for the final mix where music, sound effects and dialogue are all mixed together?

TC: Right. It’s known as the dub, as in final dub—but, yeah, the final mixdown. Nowadays, this is all done on digital workstations. All three elements are brought together, music, sound effects and dialogue. It’s a big battle for territory, each department—music, effects and dialogue—needs to come to a consensus as to what sound is going to come out throughout the film. Nowadays, the music editor’s most important job is babysitting the dub.

JH: Often the composer is not present at the dub?

TC: Right, the composer has usually moved on to other projects. And the final thing we do as music editors, after the dub, is a legal cue sheet which is a list of all the music in the film and how it’s used. Is it background, or is it something that you see onscreen? Is it vocal or not vocal? And the legal cue sheet is to ensure that later on, everybody involved in the music gets paid the proper amount.

JH: One last main difference with Hollywood films when you started around 1980 and now is the use of pop music and pop songs in a film score, right?

TC: Right. You might use a pop song in the end credits. The eighties was a transitional time in bringing more pop music into the soundtrack.