Mark Mangini, Oscar-Winning Sound Designer-Episode #382

Mark Mangini is a six-time Oscar-nominated, two-time Oscar-winning Sound Designer. He won his Oscars for Dune and Mad Max Fury Road. Mark’s also well known for designing sound for numerous films, including: Blade Runner 2049, Star Treks I, IV and V, Beauty and the Beast, TheFifthElement, Space Jam, Poltergeist,Gremlins, Aladdin, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, among many more.

Mark has spent his 49-year career in Hollywood imagining and composing altered sonic realities for motion pictures. He’s a frequent lecturer, an outspoken proponent for sound as art, and a guitarist/songwriter with compositions that can be heard in sex, lies and videotape, Star Trek IV, and more.

Mark believes that all organized sound is music. He sees his work in movies as every bit a composition as those of Beethoven and the Beatles. He just happens to use dissonance, melodic content and arrhythmia to its fullest advantage. His work is no less considered, designed, created or manipulated. It just isn’t usually what we think of as hummable.

His first job in the entertainment industry was at the age of 19 in the sound department of Hanna Barbera Studios making funny noises for children’s cartoons. His ears have been keenly trained by years of language study and playing guitar, which suited him well for a career of critical listening and creating unimagined aural worlds and fabricating sonic realities for motion pictures.

Mark founded and ran the successful post-production sound company, Weddington Productions, for 25 years. Today he works at Formosa Group in Hollywood, continuing his work as a Supervising Sound Editor, Sound Designer and Re-recording mixer.

Episode Transcript

Steve Cud (00:00):
On today's Story Beat
on Dune Part. 1 We were designing sound as themovie was shot and shot number 875 was a shot of a
worm breaching in the sand. Visual effects hadtimed it out as 21 seconds. So Denis said make
some sound for this because it's pretty dead withthis storyboard. No matter how much we tried to

(00:24):
make that 21 seconds long, it didn't work. Oursound we felt was compelling at 17 seconds. So
they put in the sound to the shot, cut out fourseconds. Guess how much they saved? It paid for
the entire cost of sound during production.
This is Story Beat with Steve Cuden. A podcast forthe creative mind. Story Beat explores how masters

(00:50):
of creativity develop and produce brilliant worksthat people. Everywhere love and admire. So join
us as we discuss discover how talented creatorsfind success in the. Worlds of imagination and
entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

(01:13):
Thanks for joining us on Story Beat. We're comingto you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. My guest today, Mark Mangini is asix time Oscar nominated, two time Oscar winning
sound designer. He won his Oscars for Dune and MadFury Road. Mark's also well known for designing
sound for numerous films including Blade Runner,2049, Star Treks 1, 4 and 5, Beauty and the Beast,

(01:40):
the Fifth Element, Space Jam, Poltergeist,Gremlins, Aladdin and Raiders of the Lost Ark,
among many more. Mark has spent his 49 year careerin Hollywood imagining and composing altered sonic
realities for motion pictures. He's a frequentlecturer, an outspoken proponent for sound as art

(02:00):
and a guitarist songwriter with compositions thatcan be heard in sex, lies and videotape, Star Trek
IV and many more. Mark believes that all organizedsound is music. He sees his work in movies as
every bit a composition as those of Beethoven andthe Beatles. He just happens to use dissonance,
melodic content and arrhythmia to its fullestadvantage. His work is no less considered

(02:25):
designed, created or manipulated. It just isn'tusually what we think of as hummable. His first
job in the entertainment industry was at the ageof 19 in the sound department of Hanna Barbera
Studios making funny noises for children'scartoons. His ears have been keenly trained by
years of language study and playing guitar whichsuited him well for a career of critical listening

(02:48):
and creating unimagined aural worlds and andfabricating sonic realities for motion pictures.
Mark founded and ran the successful postproduction sound company Weddington Productions
for 25 years. Today he works at Formosa Group inHollywood continuing his work as a supervising
Sound editor, sound designer and re recordingmixer. So for all those reasons and many more, I'm

(03:13):
truly thrilled to have the extraordinarily giftedmotion picture sound designer Mark Mangini joined
me today. Mark, welcome to Story Beat.
Wow, Steve, thank you for having me. can I copyword for word what you just said? And that's my
new bio. It's so beautifully put.
Have at it. You're more than welcome to it. Welldone. Well, it's yours. It's all yours. All right,

(03:37):
so let's go back, in time just a little bit andfigure out where all this began. How old were you
when you first started paying attention to moviesand sound?
Well, I started paying attention to movies veryearly. I have distinct memories of my mom and dad
taking us to the drive in and loving movies. Andthey had always been a passion of mine. So much so

(04:01):
that my dad went on a business trip to Japan andwas gifted a Minolta 8 millimeter home movie
camera. And this was a very novel item. It was astate of the art home movie, you know, on film,
home movie camera. And he gave it to me because heknew I loved movies. And that was probably at 8
years old. And I began immediately being a fan ofMonty Python and Terry Gilliam. I began making my

(04:29):
own stop motion and claymation, if you will. And Ieven attempted hand drawn from frame by frame
animation. And wow, that's kind of the seed of itall is my dad taking us to the movies and me
realizing that looks like a lot of fun. How do Ido this all? And I taught myself animation.
How old were you at that time?

Mark Mang (04:48):
Eight, I think eight.
Eight years old. That's young.
Yeah, but the sound part of it. We're gonna haveto jump ahead in your interview questions because,
ah, at eight years old, all I was interested inwas making little movies and, and I struggled with
sound. I don't know if you ever played with film,but there's 8 millimeter does not allow
synchronous sound. And I wanted to add music andsound effects and it was impossible. So I

(05:15):
struggled with my high school, movie classes. Itook courses to learn how to be a filmmaker. And I
would, the only solution was to put timing markson the 8 millimeter film. It would be like a flash
and that would trigger me to press play on acassette recorder, a non synchronous device. And I

(05:35):
would attempt to play back a cassette tape withsunk sound that would never, of course, never sank
with the film itself.
So I did the exact same Thing when I was that age,not quite that young, but as a teen I did the
exact same syncing up, trying to press go on acassette. Super 8 film didn't have that structure
stripe on the side.
No, it wouldn't. There was some very rare doublesystem versions with Super 8. I was working

(06:01):
Regular 8, the predecessor to Super 8, and youcould buy a double system magnetic version. But I
never had that. You know, when I think aboutsound, I wasn't thinking about sound. Came as an
accident, and we'll get to that as I get toHollywood. But I think because of. I was also
playing in bands all through, through my childhoodand high school and college. And so I had a really

(06:25):
good ear and that's a big setup for my oralacuity.
You already had going into the sound world, asense of sonic walls and all that sort of thing
from your music experience?
Well, yeah, as a composer, you know, as a writer,a music, you know, I was playing in a rock band
and I knew how to write lyrics. I knew how towrite chords and melodies and so I understood the

(06:50):
mechanics of sound and I knew how to listencritically because as a guitar I was a lead
guitarist and so I always wanted to be able to dosolos like Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck or Jimmy
Page. And that required me to record the songs andbe able to slow them down somehow enough that I
could pick out the individual notes, thecomponents of a, guitar solo so that I could

(07:14):
imitate it in one of my performances.
You were attracted to sound early on, obviouslythat's what it was. You just didn't know it, that
it had a function in the world that you could takeadvantage of.
Oh, I didn't know people do what I do for a livingtill I got to Hollywood.
Sorry. So let's go there. What, how did you getstarted in the business?
I wasn't a very, career oriented kid. And so eventhough I loved film, it was what, what made the

(07:38):
world go away when I was in the middle of it doingit. I never thought, well, film could be my
career. So I went to college as a foreign languagemajor and I was very good with foreign languages.
And I thought, well, well, let's make the best ofthat because I could be an interpreter at the un.
So that's where I thought I was going until mysophomore year of college when I realized I'm no

(08:00):
good at this. And I got to think of a newdirection for myself. And that's when I realized,
why can't I follow film? That spring, I saw theAcademy Awards on television and that was the
light bulb moment. Like, oh, wait a minute, I wantto be there, I want to do that. I want to win one
of those. And I know that sounds really crass,but. But I just want. I just realized that's my

(08:24):
calling. I'm going to la. Dropped out of college,told my mom and dad, I'm leaving, I'm getting in
the car, and I drove to la.
And they didn't try to, they didn't try to talkyou out of it?
No, my parents are. I have one of the greatupbringings of all time. I, had beautiful,
thoughtful parents who always supported me ineverything that. And I know they're deceased,

(08:46):
sadly. And I never got to ask my mom and dad if.
When I made this announcement, they were thinkingwithout saying, he'll be back in six months or
something.
They probably were thinking that as most parentsdo. Yeah, you know, it's not, it's not a business
that most parents think, yeah, go into it becauseit's insecure and you can't make any money at it,
Go for it. No, most parents would never say that.

(09:07):
Well, yeah, they didn't. And so off I went with$500 and the promise that I could stay in the
guest house of a friend of my dad's in la. Sodrove across country, landed in his guest house,
floated around for months, actually hanging out atguitar center and, you know, guitar shops. Because
I went to LA with a goal but without any plan totry to achieve it, I landed here. I didn't call

(09:32):
anybody at a studio. I didn't make any friends.
Until one day when the, friend of my dad's came.
He was always on business trips, so I never sawhim. And he came home one day and we crossed paths
and he said, how's it going? Not good. Well, whatdo you want? What do you like to do? And I said,
well, I used to make animated movies at home. Andhe said, okay. And that was that. The next day, I

(09:57):
have a phone number to speak with Art Scott atHanna Barbera Studios for a meeting. And I went to
meet Art and I panicked because I thought hewanted to hire me or offer me something in
animation. And I'm awful artist. I was only stopmotion. And he said that it was just a general
meeting, but if something come up, he'd call me.

(10:18):
Sure enough, that spring, the networks, ABC, NBC,CBS ordered five and a half hours of cartoons.
1976. And I got a call saying, would you like toget into a training program in the sound
department at our studio. So off I went. The nextweek I got into the training program, I graduated

(10:39):
at the top of the class, and they offered me ajob. And I started life as an apprentice sound
editor doing what they call track reading.
What is track reading? For those that don't know.
For cartoons, in case your audience doesn't knowthe sound comes first, imagine that you record the
voices in the studio.
Well, wait, wait, Mark. What comes first is thescript.
Oh, sorry. Busted. Totally right. There is ascript.

(11:04):
You can't get to the sound of voices until youhave a script. Hey, Steve.
First there's the script, but the next thing theyhave to do is record the voices so that the
animators know how to draw the characters and whento open and close the mouths. So that's the timing
of the mouth. So they record the voices, they sendit to the track reader who transcribes the literal

(11:29):
syllables, phonemes of everything that is said.
And the track reader transcribes it on a gridsheet that details every single frame from 1 to
24,000 in a 30 or 27 minute cartoon. So it's apainstaking process of critical listening and
finding out when Yogi says the H of hey and the Bof boo boo and the ooh of boo boo and. And you're

(11:56):
writing that in these little boxes. And those arethe very sheets, they're called exposure sheets,
that went to the animators and they would do theiranimation timings to the voice timings. So that
was my first job.

Stev (12:09):
And this did not bore you?
I was in Holly, my friend, I was in Hollywood,California, at 19 years old, working on cartoons I
had been watching three years prior. I was giddywith excitement. The whole thing was an, exotic
adventure for me.
Well, that's good to know. And by the way, I findit interesting that you went to school for

(12:30):
languages, because, correct me if I'm wrong, soundis a form of language all of its own.
Sound is what I like to call the silent narrativeof a movie. Think about that for a second. It
speaks without words.
So you use the word silent. It's not reallysilent, is it?
Well, it's be silent in that there are no wordsspoken. Narrative implies a, communication through

(12:55):
verbiage. I think sound is the silent narrative,but it is, in fact, sounded.
Yes, it is. In my experience, it is. The hallmarkof lousy film festival movies is poor sound
because people think it's an afterthought, but itisn't. It should be a forethought Correct.
Oh, boy, we're gonna get there. We're gonna reallygo deep dive on that. But yes, in low budget films

(13:18):
and of sp, especially student filmmaking, sound isthe dead giveaway because there's a microphone on,
the camera and it's 30ft from the actors and theyfeel like they're in another room. And it's the
first giveaway of something done very cheaply.
Absolutely, it is. Did you. So you didn't go toschool to learn sound, you learned sound by doing
it?
I learned it, through apprenticeships with mastersat Hanna Barbera.

St (13:42):
Who, who did you learn from?
I learned from. My first mentor was Greg Watson,who came from MGM with Bill Hannah Barbera. And he
started in their careers doing the Tom and Jerry'sat mgm. And he was one of those early pioneers
like Earl Bennett and Spike Jones, who were usingsound usually created through the manipulation of

(14:06):
live props, like, like vaudeville radio, themanipulation of live objects to generate sounds to
augment a production. And I learned through Greg,the techniques of, you know, boy, if you need the
sound of a hit on the head, well, here's how wewould record that in vaudeville. It'll probably be
a slapstick because it's funny, but what about afrying pan? Klang. And, you know, if people fall

(14:30):
over, you don't hear body falls, you hear bowlingpins. And so he taught me this critical tool of
how to use metaphor. How do you sound as ametaphor for what you're seeing and not be
literal? And that's been a godsend. I've keptthose, those skills with me to this day.
Well, that was a question I was about to ask andyou've just answered it, which is how. What have
you brought forward from those days? And that'sit.

(14:53):
I continue to this day to function as a high levelvaudevillian radio sound guy.
What a great way to look at it. Wow, that'sfantastic.
Well, because my day is filled with, you'd thinkwith digital this and AI that I'd be that guy, but
I am. I believe in acoustic sound and real sound,natural sound. And that's the source of almost

(15:20):
everything that I do. So, for example, on a movielike Blade Runner or Dune, both of which I created
on the order of 3,000 bespoke sounds, sounds noone's ever heard before. Of the 3,000, only about
four or five were made electronically or with asynthesizer.
Are you modifying those sounds or are they thenatural sounds?

(15:41):
Well, sometimes if you're really good, when you'velearned how to Use a microphone and put the right
microphone and put it in the right place with theright thing. If you're thinking metaphorically and
abstracting a sound from its source, if theaudience doesn't see what it is, you can pull the
wool over their eyes by recontextualizing it withthe new image. And so that's what I do. I'm just a

(16:04):
radio guy. I'm out with a mic every day recordingsomething in the studio or out in the field.
Field. And I'm tricking you into thinking you'rehearing something that you've never seen before.
Were you a fan of Fire Sign Theater?
Loved. Oh, how he read My mind.
So Phil Proctor has been on this show twice. He'sa friend. So I just immediately thought, you must

(16:24):
know Fire Sign Theater because of all the. Whatthey did with sound.
You just triggered a memory that hasn't occurredto me in 50 years. All through my teens, my
bandmates and I listened to Fireside Theaterreligiously over and wearing out the grooves in
the record.
Well, that's exactly what you would do. We werewearing out the grooves in a record. There was no

(16:45):
electronic sound. So how long do you think youworked at this in the business before you thought
to yourself, you know what? Well, first of all,you went from doing what you were doing in the
beginning at Hammer Bear, and eventually you gotinto sound design. And how long were you at sound
design, working at it before you thought toyourself, I am actually pretty good at this. How

(17:06):
long did it take that to happen?
It, took about three years for that to happen. Andit was triggered by that. That revelation or that
epiphany happened moments after I saw the firstStar wars film. And that's when I got another
light bulb moment. As I said earlier, I'm not ahugely motivated human being. I just. I like to

(17:27):
just sort of trot along and do well and have fun.
But that was the trigger that got me out of HannaBarbera. I saw, I heard sound used creative, you
know, Hanna Barbera, for all that I learned, was abit of a sausage factory. You know, you got your
22 minutes a week, and you. You put in the boinksand the zips and the whistles, and it was kind of

(17:49):
the same sounds over and over and over again. AndI was getting kind of tired of that. And then I
saw Star wars and I saw Ben Burtt's credit, and Ithought, I do that for a living. I'm not good at
it yet, but I want to do That I want to make adifference in a movie where sound is a big part of
the storytelling. And within weeks, I had given mynotice to move on to the next step for me.

(18:14):
All right, so aside from the obvious, and we'vetouched on this already a little bit in movies and
TV or motion pictures, I guess, is the best way tosay it. It's not just having cool sounds and
effects. It's not just the dialogue and the music.
It's what it does for the viewer, the audience.
It's how it impacts them. What do you think it isabout having great sound that is so vital to a

(18:38):
movie and TV show? To give the viewer some kindof, an insight into what's going on, probably
without them knowing it?
Well, that's. We're back to this whole idea ofsort of the silent storytelling or the silent
narrative. And anytime sound can work on somethingthat is not. And I'm going to use a big fancy
word, and then you can slap me in the faceanytime. You can use sound non diegetically, which

(19:03):
means. Diegetic is a fancy cinema term that meansrelating to something you see on screen. So if you
see a character with a gun and they shoot the gun,that's a diegetic sound. And that's. That's like.
That's what computers do now. We don't need humanbeings to do mechanized work like that. But when
sound can be functioning on another level, whereyou're getting some story information from

(19:27):
something you hear that isn't the text, that isn'tthe words, that isn't the dialogue, that isn't the
script, then sound is working on a much higherlevel and often can be an extraordinarily
efficient way of communicating in cinema. Here's areally dumb, simple example. Imagine a scene where
a character walks into a room and you're notreally sure where you are. and you. I can't do

(19:54):
this. This is a more of a visual gag than a sightgag. Well, here's a better way to describe it.
Imagine they walk in, walk into camera, and youhear their shoes squeaking. You look, maybe the
camera cuts to their shoes, and you see they havesome leather loafers on that. That's a tell.
That's a. That's a Las Vegas tell. If people withsqueaky leather shoes usually aren't very well to

(20:15):
do. And you can make an immediate assumption abouttheir. Their. Their economic status through the
use of a sound. Even if on the set they didn'thave squeaky shoes or creaky shoes, you can imply
that you can add that, and that tells somethingabout the character. That character now sits down
at the bank loan officer's desk, and you hear themfidgeting with their car keys in their pocket.

(20:40):
There's another tell. They're nervous, becausethat's what people do. They fidget when they're
nervous.
Do you need to have the image to go along withthat sound, or can you put that sound in without
us seeing the guy jiggling the keys?
Absolutely, because we all live in a world wherewe recognize those sounds. And what's interesting

(21:00):
is that there are universes opposed to each other,depending on our experience. I'll give you another
example. I did a movie called, Black Mass, aboutthe famous criminal in Boston, Whitey Bulger, and
the, Italian, Irish, you know, turf wars in Bostonin the 70s and 80s. And Whitey was always running
from the law. So I thought one way to amp up hisparanoia is that no matter where we were with

(21:25):
Whitey, we would always hear a police sirensomewhere off in the distance. And that that amps
up the kind of level of his nervousness and onedgeness that, like, he can't sit still for very
long and he's got to go somewhere else right away,which was part of the character development. Now
let's leverage that idea a little further. My wifegrew up in downtown Los Angeles. I grew up in the

(21:50):
suburbs with blue, jays and lawnmowers. And so weboth have differing experiences of how sound tells
a story to us. When she moved into my Bel Air homeat the top of a hill where the birds chirped all
day long, she was terrified because she hadacclimated. She thought those were the sounds that

(22:10):
indicated that the Hillside strangler wasimminent. He was crawling up the canyons. And yet,
when I went downtown to state, this is before wegot married, all I was subjected to was sirens and
jackhammers and jet. And both of those, believe itor not, were levels of comfort for us. The sound
spoke to us and put us in an emotional state. Andso it's the sound designer's job to leverage all

(22:38):
those kinds of ideas to put the audience in aplace the filmmaker wants them to be.
Well, I love this because, it enhances the notionthat screenwriters, I teach screenwriters, that
you want to write in subtext. You're going towrite a text, but there should be a meaning
beneath it. And you're then saying, this getsenhanced further by the audio portion of the. Of

(23:00):
the movie. Yeah.
Let me give you another Good example. Here's a.
Here's a simple one along those lines of howatmospheres affect us. I, did a movie about a
woman who goes into menopause and she. To. To sortof escape her local existence, she moves to Italy
and buys a villa and tries to run away from, alife she can't escape, which is her body is

(23:23):
changing. And so visually, the filmmakersestablished a gorgeous pastoral environment in
this villa out in the countryside. But we leechedevery scene with her. We leeched all the life. You
never heard birds when you're with her or in herpov, you never heard the life we would expect.

(23:45):
That is the comfort to us. We took it out and thatcreated an environment that reflected her inner
emotional state. When you're with othercharacters, you heard Tuscany as you would
normally hear it. And so we're subtly creatingthese contrast in ways that support what the
filmmaker is trying to do with the character.
And this is in concert with the filmmaker. You'renot doing this. Yeah, so. So it's a joint

(24:09):
decision. It's not unilateral.
As you know, filmmaking is a collaborative medium.
Nothing is unilateral other than they'll let me gooff and experiment. I can come with a new idea and
say, hey, what if we take out all the birdswhenever we're with so and so. And they might say,
great idea or no, that's not where I want to gowith this character. So often I'm given permission

(24:31):
to work unilaterally. But of course there isalways the moment of reckoning where we have to
submit the script or the sound and get. And takenotes. The worst part of our job, you.
Have to go through an approval process just likeeverybody else. Do you think of yourself in
general as an artist, a craftsman, a technician,a, combination? How do you think of yourself?

(24:53):
All of them? All of them. I think of myself asmuch as anything. As a composer. I like to lecture
about this a lot. One of my soapboxes is thatthere is very little difference. And you, you, you
touched on it in your introduction of me that allsound is music, all sound is organized. I am a
musician, and if you looked at my work, when itgoes to the final mix, just like a composer writes

(25:19):
all the notes and records all the instruments andthey bring their work to the final mix. There's no
differentiation between. Our work is methodical,considered creative, unpredictable. We use a
variety of timbres and tonalities. We use meterand rhythm. The difference is that, ah, a composer
usually has to live within some very strictconfinements of 12 tone scales. 4, 4, time. 6, 4,

(25:46):
time, 3, 4, time. I have the universe at mydisposal. My work is no less composed. If you ever
stopped and looked at my work on a granular leveland asked me, what about that sound? I could tell
you exactly why it's there and what purpose itserves. Just as you would with a composer, ask,
why did the flutes play that, that triplet figurethere? Well, this is a signature I'm using for

(26:11):
this character's loneliness. I can give you thosesame stories, but we don't get the credit for
being the creatives that composers are. Becausemusic is understood, sound is not. We don't
develop an education in sound.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong. Most of the timeyour work is not only not understood, but in fact,

(26:32):
it's invisible. People don't know that they'regetting something thrown at them. It just is part
of the wallpaper, so to speak.
yeah. Unless in the audience are people in thesound community.
Well, obviously, if they're sure. But I'm talkingabout. The general public doesn't have any idea.
They're just getting this wonderful music,dialogue, effects, et cetera, thrown at them, but

(26:56):
they don't have the capacity to break it down andunderstand what's actually happening.
That's the joy. Part of the joy of what I do isit's such a backdoor medium. It's so on such a
liminal or subliminal or subconscious level thatwe get to come in the back door and manipulate you
without you even knowing it.
But does that ever frustrate you because theydon't recognize what you're doing?

(27:18):
Massively good filmmakers do, but the publicgenerally doesn't. And that's a function of a
thousand years of musical literacy. I mean,remember, music has been played since the dawn of
time. I mean, wooden flutes, we know, go back100,000 years, but sound and the ability to record

(27:39):
it and reproduce it is only 130, 140 years old. Sothe literacy in music is so much richer and deeper
because it's taught and we understand thestrictures of music. We know what the forms are,
but nobody understands the forms of what I do. Andso it's harder to relate.

(28:01):
Sure, it's really hard to relate because. Andagain, it's attached to something else. If you go
to the symphony, you're getting the symphony. Ifyou go to a Paul Simon concert, you're getting
Paul Simon. That's why you're there. But when yougo To a movie, you're usually not there to listen
to the audio track. You're there for everythingelse.

(28:22):
You're there to listen to everything in, in itstotality. And that's where we have to be magicians
so that you never at any moment allow the audiencethe, the beat to think some subconsciously, oh,
that was a good sound effect. Worse. Oh, that wasreally good score. And I think that's incumbent
upon filmmakers to make sure that doesn't happenin their mixes. Because the moment you allow the

(28:48):
audience the luxury to step out of the conceit,you know, the trick of cinema, you've lost them.
You've lost them in your story for a beat. So wehave to always be vigilant about how obvious we
are with what we're doing.
Right? It's the equivalent of seeing a mic dropinto frame. It takes you out of that moment and

(29:11):
you go, wait a minute, we're watching a movie. Andyou need to have the audience willingly suspend
their disbelief.
Suspension of disbelief. That's what it's allabout.
And so that's why I say, and, I'm glad you saidyou were honest and said you're massively
disappointed or frustrated when they don'trecognize your work. But they're not supposed to

(29:31):
recognize your work. That's the problem. That's alittle bit of a catch 22.
Well, I would love to be recognized in thepecuniary sense, which is to say film composers
make a lot more money than I do when I think we'redoing the exact same work.
That's so interesting. And that, that then does goback thousands of years, in terms of the way

(29:52):
humans think about sound. Because motion picturesound, the stuff that you do, is really recent in
human history. It's really recent. But you can goback, you can find Bach and Beethoven and way back
before then with music.
There's some interesting psychological research onthis in a slightly different vein, which is that
we have been teaching visual acuity for thousandsof years. And if you look in the dictionary, for

(30:18):
example, there are more words that define how wesee things than how we hear things. It's a, it's a
nascent sense. It's sort of a. A second classcitizen in terms of our senses. And yet, oddly.
And when you look at the. The biologicalmechanisms, cite the visual cortex is sending

(30:39):
magnitudes, higher streams of data. If you want toreduce how we take in sensory information. The
visual Cortex is sending 10 times more informationto the brain than the oral functioning. And so it
is Dominant. Because that's just the way humanbeings are built.
Sure. Absolutely. Well, you know, when we teach.

(31:00):
Again, I'm relating this to writing a script,which is when we teach screenwriting, there are
only two senses that we're concerned about in astory. Sight and sight and sound.

Mark Mangini (31:12):
Really?
Because an audience is only going to get sight andsound. They only get two of the five senses.
Hold on a second. There's a bonus there. And nowyou have to think about this. When you hear,
you're actually getting two senses. What's thesecond you hear because the waves tickle the,
cilia in the inner ear.

Steve Cuden (31:30):
Oh, sure.
It's also tactile because waves are physicalwaves, and you feel them on your skin, however
grossly or imperceptibly. So it's a bonus sense.
And you're getting a lot more for your money.
Well, and sometimes, and we're going to talk aboutthis is that m movie theaters, I think, play the
sound too loud, and then you're feeling it, nothearing it. Would you say that there is an

(31:55):
identifiable style to a Mark Mangini track? Canpeople recognize your work in the business and
say, hey, that's Mark Mangini's work?
I've had producers and directors tell me they wentto a movie and knew it was a job that I had done.
I don't think I have a signature, per se, otherthan. And this is really oblique. I feel as though

(32:18):
my soundtracks are always honest. In fact, whenI'm in a prepping sound and I'm in a mix and I'm
control of a mix, I always defer to what's on thescreen. I have developed a very powerful muscle
that even though if it's a sound that I worked onfor months, if the director says, no, that's not
working, it doesn't work, and it comes out. And soin that regard, my soundtracks are very honest.

(32:43):
You'll never hear, hey, look at a, look at me kindof sound in one of my movies. And you'll always
feel as though there's some moments in all of mymovies where sound went in a direction that you as
a. Even you as a filmmaker or writer might nothave thought of. You'd think, oh, my God, that
sound told me something. Not the dialogue, not themusic, but sound just told me a little piece of

(33:06):
the story. I'd like to think that's part of mysignature.
Well, clearly you think of yourself, and you are ahighly creative person. Not. You're not just
filling in the blanks. Of sound to make somethingthe way people think it is.
Right. But if I wanted that, I could be anaccountant.
Well, as long as you're not accounting for sound,you're good. So let's talk about designing. Where

(33:34):
does it begin? Does it begin at the script level?
Do you read a script and know what you're thinkingabout doing before you even have a conversation
with the, director and producers?
everything starts with a script. And oddly, andmaybe in a very bizarre way for your audience,
especially if it's mostly writers. I advocate forsound starting as early as the script phase,

(33:58):
because I have directors who recognize that evenin the writer's room or when you're with your
writing partner and you've come across a,challenge that you can't solve, with words, I get
a call. You know, if they're writing for sixmonths, I get a couple of calls. Hey, Mark, we
have this conundrum. We don't know how to get frompoint A to point B. Can sound solve this problem?

(34:21):
And sometimes it does, and it gets written intothe screenplay. But more often than not, I receive
a script and I start the. The sort of foot of themountain, the climbing of Mount Everest. It's like
it'll. I look up and I think, how the f am I gonnaget to the top? And I make lists, and at some

(34:41):
point, the script becomes, a shoot, and the shootbecomes an edit. And somewhere in there, I'm
brought in to talk about what the script meant tome. And that's when the director and I get to sit
down and have a great creative discussion of howdoes sound tell my story. And this is where I get
to talk about my ideas with the filmmaker. Hey,what if we did this? What if we did that? Yes. No,

(35:06):
maybe push, pull. And let's stop on that for amoment about the value. Because film, cinema is
collaborative. There is a vital component tocreativity in cinema, which is the sharing of
ideas and figuring out where do you go with them.
Which ones do you pull the thread on and whichones do you not? And that's part of the joy for me

(35:28):
is sitting with a filmmaker, sitting at the Avidor whatever. You're just sitting at a coffee shop,
looking at it on your laptop and talking about themovie and saying, hey, what if we did this? This
would be really cool if we did that. Mark, youknow what? The scene isn't working, and I need
this can sound supply that. And those are the.
Just. That's. That's the beginning of the joy forme is the cogitation and experimentation.

(35:52):
All right, so once you have that initial burst ofdiscussion, this is what the movie is. Here's the
screenplay. Or, you know, once you have a movieback that's been shot, or are you. Are you on set?
Do you go on set first?
with very progressive filmmakers like DenisVilleneuve and George Miller, Joe Dante? Yes, I. I

(36:15):
go to set. I'm on during production. And this is,again, is anathema. I have had producers tell my
directors, the ones that recognize the value ofsound during the shoot, because why shouldn't
production design, cinematography, film editingand sound all work together symbiotically? They're

(36:36):
all part of a puzzle. Why would sound be left outof that till post production, when you're being
reactive instead of proactive? I can give you allsorts of examples about how effective that can be
if your filmmakers are open to it. But I can tellyou that the studios. Because everything studios
do is in a box.

Ste (36:55):
It's all about money, Mark.
Well, let me tell you a quick story. On Dune Part1. We were designing sound as the movie was shot.
You know, the visual effects had come in monthsbefore and storyboarded, you know, I don't know,
1500 shots. And shot number 875 was a shot of aworm breaching in the sand and then tunneling back

(37:20):
in. It's just a cutaway to a worm in the desert.
And then you cut back to Paul and Jessica, right?
Visual effects had timed it out as 21 seconds, andthey put in a slug. It said worm breaches. Right.
You know what, a slug. It's, you know, stuffplaceholder until visual effects finishes the
shot. So Denise said, make some sound for thisbecause it's pretty dead with this, you know,

(37:42):
nasty ass, storyboard. So no matter how much wetried to make that 21 seconds long, it didn't
work. Our sound, we felt, was compelling at 17seconds. So they put in the sound to the shot, cut
out four seconds. Guess how much they saved. Itpaid for the entire cost of sound during

(38:05):
production.

Steve Cuden (38:06):
Holy mackerel.

Mark Mangini (38:07):
One shot.
Because they didn't have to create that in CG.
No, they did create it in CG, but the shot wasbudgeted at 24 seconds. When you cut out four
seconds, which is 96 frames, every one of thoseframes is like $10,000 or something. So they
carved this huge chunk of money out of the budgetas savings, which now could be considered how we

(38:31):
paid for sound when we didn't think we could.

St (38:34):
Did they come and thank You.
Well, no, because Denis is brilliant. We hadalready done Blade Runner, where we did a bunch of
stuff like that on Blade Runner. And he was like,oh, that's so great. We saved all that money. This
is so good. And the movie is better because of it.
Because the shot really only needed to be 17seconds m long.
Well, the other interesting thing about creatingthings like this, and I've been through it myself

(38:56):
many times, is at the end of the day, the audiencedoesn't really know unless there's something
wrong, but they don't know that you're missingfour seconds of a shot.
It wasn't missing. It shouldn't have been there inthe first place.
Right. But I think that that is the creativeprocess. I think that that's what makes it
absolutely fascinating that you had to go throughwhatever drills you went through to look at this,

(39:19):
to decide that, to work it out at 21 seconds. Butreally it was only better at 17 seconds. That's
the process. I think that's really great. Onceyou're at the point where you are starting to make
sound for in post production, how much of yourdays are, spent on creating sound and how much of

(39:41):
it is laying the sound in?
There's no fixed number. Because I'm being hiredfor my. Ideas, I lean more towards the design
side, which is because it. Arguably, it's the morecomplex side. Because we don't know where
creativity. We don't know where idea. Where dosongs come from? Where do ideas come from? They

(40:06):
just land in the weirdest ways when we leastexpect it. Because that, I think, is a more
complex, mechanism. Because the synchronizing ofthe sounds once we've made them is fairly
straightforward. that's the mechanical part of myjob, which is, okay, I've made the sound of a
worm. Now I have to synchronize it with the shot.

(40:28):
And I've been doing that for 50 years. It'salmost. I can do it in my sleep. So I lean towards
the creative tasks of challenging myself andasking the tough questions. What does an
ornithopter sound like?
Well, what I was going to ask you that. What doesan ornithopter. How did you make that ornithopter
sound? What did you do?

(40:48):
That was. That was a long gestation. It wasfascinating because visually they had this
beautiful look. That's a. A weird sort of, Escherlike combination of machine and animal. It looked
like a dragonfly, but you could see pistons andbolts and connectors in metal. And you didn't
understand the interface between the two. So wewanted, we wanted to say insect to some degree,

(41:15):
but we also had to say futuristic machine to beprecise. It was made out of four specific
elements. One, a, cat purring. Because Iabstracted the wing fluttering as an envelope,
meaning a shape of a sound that goes up, down, up,down, up, down. Not around in a circle like a

(41:35):
helicopter. Flop, flop, flop, flop, flop, flop. Iwanted flap, flap, flap, up, down, up, down. And I
was browsing my library one day and I landed onsome cat purrs. And it was. And I thought, that's
the envelope meaning the shape. I didn't know ifit was the right sound, but it was the shape of
the sound. And that was the beginning of the idea,right? So then I was poking around some more in my

(41:57):
library and I found some sounds of a canvas tentstrap loose on a tent in 100 mile an hour storm.
And I thought, that's a good organic sound. Then Ithought, well, all right, I have to acknowledge
its animal or its insect origins. So my partnerTheo bought online and had delivered with like,

(42:22):
some kind of chemical that put it to sleep intransit. A giant beetle, like a beetle this big.
And we recorded the beetle's wings flapping,flapping up and down. Now, all of those, mind you,
are steady state sounds. A, purr is because it'sjust sitting in front of the microphone. But we

(42:44):
need ornithopters to have movement and haveDoppler shift. The sound that you hear when
something goes by you, it starts at a higher pitchand decreases in pitch for a variety of acoustical
reasons as it recedes away from you. And thatdefines movement and the speed of the movement. So
we had to take steady state sounds and appliedDoppler shift to them so that they matched what we

(43:08):
saw on screen of an ornithopter going. Slow downas it lands. So we had to apply all these
mechanical, processes to steady state sounds tomake them feel like they were actually in flight.
You are still making cartoon sounds, aren't you?
I can't help it. I use my voice. I have, by theway, In Dune Part 1, I. I am a voice of an entire

(43:34):
character.

Steve Cuden (43:35):
You are.
I am Captain Bashar in Seleucus Secundus. The. TheSardaukar captain who is importuned by, I forget
the. The character because they want his troops tosupport the Harkonnen attack on Atreides.
But obviously you weren't on. You didn't do thaton set. That Was in post.
No, Oddly, the Denis came back from the shoot andthey were in the midst of the. The director's cut,

(44:00):
the edit, and they had shot the scene in English,both characters speaking English. And Denis
thought this, this. I don't like this voice. It'sgot to be in Sardaukar. And so right before
attempt mix for an audience preview, they rung meand said, can you just get some kind of voice in
here? Can you just make up some Sardaukar and juststick something in for now and we'll hire

(44:24):
somebody. So they happen to call me at six in themorning when my voice is actually very deep and
gravelly. And I. Because I'm a language major. Sonow it's coming full circle. I wrote a proper
codex for what I thought Sardaukar should soundlike, and I voiced the character and I sent it to
them and they put it in and they liked it. And ashappens with movies, a month turned into two

(44:48):
months into three. And they grew. They grew usedto it and they grew to like it. And then they had
to keep, it in the movie.
So, you know, that's an interesting thing becausein movies, the adage that I was always taught is
there are no mistakes in the finished product.
Once it's complete, it is what it is. And soanything that's in it is no longer a mistake. But

(45:09):
this was. I won't use the word mistake, but it wasnot intended that way. So how often do you find
yourself in the studio and sonic accidents happenand wind up in the movie?
Constantly. And I'll tell you two stories aboutthat. for Dune Part one, again, the shields, we
have this. This great. What we call the trainingmontage in the beginning of the film. You know,

(45:31):
the shield is that electronic magnetic device thatprotects the wearer in this almost protective
cocoon so that you can't be taken by a blow ofsome kind. A, laser can't go through it, a bullet
can't go through it. And the sounds that we endedup using for that were a studio accident. And

(45:51):
sometimes you have to embrace. I think it wasMiles Davis said something. This may not be
appropriate. He said it isn't a wrong note untilyou decide what the next note is. Oh, how's that
for a beautiful piece of wisdom that's embracingyour mistakes and turning them into your
advantage.
That's jazz wisdom.
That's total jazz wisdom. Exactly. So now back tosomething you said just a minute ago about this

(46:16):
voice and finding mistakes. When Denise sent methe script for Dune, which I read in pre
production while the script was still beingwritten. We met, to talk about sound before he
started shooting. And one of the things I noticedis that the Fremen, who are the indigenous peoples
of Arrakis, speak this language called chakobsa,that comes from Frank Herbert. But in the script

(46:43):
they wrote the dialogue in English and inparentheses said, speaking Fremen. But nobody had
done any homework. So I said to Denis, we can'tput these words in these characters mouths unless
we invent chakobsa now. And what I suggest is thatyou hire the guy that did Game of Thrones because

(47:04):
he invented four or five amazing languages. Andthat is exactly what we did. And three weeks later
he was on payroll. He was writing and developingJacobsa, developing phonetic pronunciation kits
for all the actors, and then wrote them out in thesubsequent edition of the script. If that had not
happened, we would have been troweling inoverdubbed voices into lips that weren't the

(47:30):
right. And it would have felt the audience. Youknow what bad ADR is like automated dialogue
replacement. We all smell it and so does anaudience. And so I couldn't imagine that happening
on our film.

S (47:41):
And then you get rubber lips.

Mark Mangini (47:43):
Yeah.
So nothing's matching. Right. It's all, you know,it's been dubbed in.

Mark Mang (47:47):
I couldn't have that.
So, okay, explain adr. You've brought it up forthose who don't know. What is adr? How does it
work?
ADR is an acronym that stands for AutomatedDialogue Replacement. And it is simply a process
where you bring an actor back into a controlledstudio environment to re record their lines so
that they're clean. And when I say clean, that isbecause on set, a number of things can sully a

(48:12):
good recording. Like in Dune, if they were outsideand a plane flew overhead, you can't use that
track, even if you love that performance from theactor, because planes aren't appropriate on
Arrakis. So another good example is often when youshoot on a beach or near the ocean, surf is an
extremely insidious sound that pollutes good cleandialogue that you want to hear every syllable,

(48:38):
every fricative. And, and so we often have tobring actors back. They watch on a projection of
the, the edited version of the scene, theirperformance. They wear earphones and then as their
lines come up, they re speak them in as close async as possible. And then we take those and we
fit them and. And now we have nice clean dialoguethat replaces the dirty recording made during

(49:03):
production.
And part of the trick there, I assume, is makingit all blend together so it doesn't sound canned.
Well, that's a monumental challenge for soundpeople because the complexity of the acoustics.
When you're on location, you're in a cave oryou're in a hall or a nightclub, there's very

(49:24):
complex things happening that are oddly not easyto duplicate with electronic means. You can come
close, you can add reverbs and echoes and things,but it never sounds exactly like production. And
another reason is that the actor very often is notin the moment when they're on the set. They're
getting energy from the director and the DP andtheir fellow actors. And they are a different

(49:48):
character than when they come into a studio andthey're seeing their performance on screen for the
first time and they're being told to do stuff. Andthe performance level can be dramatically
different in such a way that those recordings,even if they're clean, may never fit the face
because the actor couldn't get back into. Youknow, what do actors say? They're back in

(50:09):
character. It's hard to get into character withoutall that feedback you get on the set.
Well, it's hard to be in the moment when you'redoing something that's false like that. It's not
natural or realistic. All right, so then whatthen, is Foley? What's a Foley stage? And what is
Foley?
Foley. Now, when you do adr, you are jettisoningthe recording made on set. And that recording, for

(50:32):
better or for worse, holds all sorts of beautifulaudio tells that makes the brain think this is
real because it was actually recorded with amicrophone in an acoustic environment. When you
throw that track away, it's not just the dialoguethat goes away. It's all the incidental sounds,
the props, the character. If the character isholding a newspaper, if the character has squeaky

(50:55):
shoes, if the character is walking on gravel, ifthe character has baggy pants or corduroys, you
hear the zuzing of the corduroy. All of thatreality has to be reintroduced in a process called
foley, where in a very similar environment, you'reprojecting the scene into a quiet room with a
microphone to pick up the incidental sounds. Andinstead of an actor reproducing the voice, we have

(51:20):
sound actors, or Foley artists, as we call them,reenacting those movements. And they're doing
their shirts rustling and they're scratching theirhead because every little piece of sound has to be
reproduced down to the smallest detail for you toattempt to sell the scene to which no longer has
its Original recording as real. So you have toaugment the ADR with the real sound that would

(51:44):
have been there when you captured it.
Are those considered to be effects or are thoseconsidered to be replacing reality?
Well, it's in my domain, so it's generallyconsidered a sound effect in that regard. But the
great artists in foley do extraordinary things totrick you into thinking it was actually recorded
on the set. So for example, I work with a team in,Toronto, Canada. They're Footsteps Studios and

(52:11):
they do a beautiful thing. Most ADR and most foleyis recorded in this sterile environment, the
recording studio that is dead quiet with noacoustic character to it. And it doesn't resemble
anything in real life other than it reproduces adead dry sound that you can then affect later.
What these cats do, and some they're not, the onlyones doing it, is that they will cast locations

(52:35):
and we will actually read, perform the movements.
So if a character walks down a 50 foot hallway,they are walking down a 50 foot hallway somewhere
in downtown Toronto to duplicate and as closely aspossible approximate what that really would have
sounded like acoustically. So I don't have to doit electronically or digitally in a mix.

(52:55):
So they have to do that under relatively, tightlycontrolled conditions, don't they?
Yeah, yeah, it's quite complex.
It's. I'm saying that they can't just go into, abuilding and recreate sound going down a hallway.
If the building's full of other people.
Walking around and there's traffic outside, youcan't have any of that either.
Right. So it has to be really controlled. Allright, so I read a wonderful article that you

(53:16):
wrote. I read many articles that you wrote. Mark'shad a long time to explain this in much more
detail than we have today. But I'm just wondering,explain, for the listeners what the deal is
between movie sound that then gets changed,altered to go into home release or into streaming.

(53:39):
Explain what that's all about and what the problemis.
Okay. M. The problem is that the home environment,acoustically speaking, is not as friendly to high
fidelity sound as a cinema is. For one, a cinemais calibrated to be avoiding our eventual
discussion about how loud movies are. Let's nottalk about that for a second. But a cinema is a

(54:01):
controlled environment where we know the soundlevel a film should be played at. That's codified
the frequency response of the speakers, the trebleand the mid range, and the bass is controlled to
be reproduced in a very specific fashion. So thatwhen we mix a movie in Hollywood, we know if we
show it in Bayonne, it's going to sound prettymuch like we approved it because that's what the

(54:26):
director wanted. We don't have any of thoseguarantees in the home environment, first and
foremost, because the home environment is a muchnoisier environment. The noise floor, as we call
it, the base level of sound, of ambiences outsideand your kids playing in the street and the
dishwasher running or whatever's going on in yourhome, cuts into our ability to have you understand

(54:51):
the dialogue, which is the most critical thing wecan do, is make sure you understand. That's our
job number one.
Oh, well, we can talk about that too, for sure.
Yeah, I know. Understand the dialogue. So we haveto do a special mix for the home environment that
takes into consideration what's going to behappening in that environment where people are
chasing the remote with, oh, it's too loud. Oh,now I can't hear it. Now it's too loud. And the

(55:15):
other sounds that might be in that environmentthat get in the way of you hearing the subtleties
of a whispered line of dialogue or a delicateflute line or some light ambience that tells you
where you are geographically in the scene. If thenoise floor in a home is above a certain level,
all of that will be lost. So we must make aspecial mix for home theater for those.

(55:36):
And that then what? It compresses things. It dropsthings down effectively, yes.
we. The biggest trick is reducing dynamic range sothat the loud sounds and the middle sounds and the
soft sounds are compressed into a much narrowerpackage so that you can stay on a volume level.
And so here's what would happen. Dialogue alwaysneeds to be heard at a certain level, that human

(55:59):
beings know what people sound like when they talk.
And we always set our TVs for what's comfortablefor us. Now, if the music, that little delicate
flute solo, is way down here in a cinema, we haveto raise that up against dialogue without making
it unintelligible, but so that the audience enjoysthe value of what the composer was doing in that

(56:22):
moment. So we're constantly manipulating theelements so we make sure you hear all the
important sound.
So, It drives me completely crazy. I watch a lotof stuff at home. M alone, there's nobody else in
the house. There's nothing else running. And Ihave a 5.1 sound system in my living room. And
sometimes I absolutely cannot understand what theheck they're saying. It's all muddy. Is that

(56:46):
because of this compression?
No, that's a Function of several, aggravatingfactors. One of which is 100 years ago, sound
ruled supreme. Often the sound director on a settold the director when to cut because the sound
wasn't right. And we have gone downhill ever sinceover the last hundred years. So much so that sound

(57:12):
is a second rate citizen on most sets. Which meansthe boom guy, the boom operator, not guy, the boom
operator. The person who puts the mic into the setto capture the voices often isn't allowed to get
close enough to get a clean recording. What thatmeans is that now that mic is capturing all this
ambient sound, like surf, like we just talkedabout, that is sullying the recording. So we now

(57:35):
have to resort to complex digital processing toolsto remove the background sound that shouldn't be
there in the first place. And that has an effecton the overtones of speech and that affects the
intelligibility of dialogue. So that's number one.
Number two, there's a psychological effect goingon. A director has been working on the script for

(57:59):
a year or two and then they shot for six months.
And then they're the edit room for six months. Andthey know the dialogue by heart. And so this
creates an almost a mental laziness in terms ofdialogue, intelligibility, where they're accepting
intelligibility when it isn't actuallyintelligible because they're actually bored having

(58:22):
heard it a thousand times. And it's, it's, it's areally complex process for a directory especially
and a film editor to get out of that comfort zoneand jump back into audience mode and add a final
mix where we're making those important decisionsof when should we lower the music and the sound
effects, which we should be doing more often tomake sure we hear the dialogue, which is what a

(58:47):
movie is all about. And then finally, there's manyother factors, but these are sort of the big
three. A hundred years ago, cinema actors were,escapees from live theater. Live theater actors
are trained to reach for the back seats. starting20, 30 years ago. There's this term that developed
in my community, something we accuse the actingcommunity of what we call mumble corps. Actors

(59:12):
started mimicking some of the well known modernactors because their technique was to almost
whisper on set. And that makes the capture ofaudio not only much more difficult, but the
intelligibility itself is not there because it'snot full voice.
They become mushmouth. The actors become mushy.
Yeah, they're mum. They're literally mumbling. Andeven if you were on set listening next to them.

(59:35):
Forget what I do. You still might not understandthem. So we have all these factors, conspiring to
make dialogue. And then there is modern cinema.
There's the modern cinema aesthetic. Maybe that'sthe fourth tent pole, which is filmmakers believe
that the more you bludgeon audiences with sound,the more they're going to like sound. Because if

(59:58):
you have a, visceral reaction, they confuse thatfor an emotional reaction or an attachment to
characters. And movies are all about characters.
We need emotion. So m. Many filmmakers areconfused because they love movies like Dune and
Blade Runner, where we do have big sound, but theyforget the responsibility in the rest of the

(01:00:18):
movie. And so filmmakers. And it's part and parcelof this argument we can have about modern cinema.
Audiences are bored, and you got to constantly befeeding them something to keep the juice up. And
that's usually music and sound effects. Keep thejuice going, keep the audience engaged so they
don't lose interest. That might be true in thisYouTube generation, I don't know. But it could be

(01:00:42):
part of the problem.
All right, so take that to the next place that wewere going to talk about anyway, which is, why is
it so loud in a movie theater?
There are a few directors who I won't name whobelieve in this bludgeon policy. They want
everything to just be overwhelming, overwhelmingthe audience so that they feel as though they had

(01:01:04):
a transcendent experience. I mean, you know, partof cinema, part of storytelling, has always been
give the audience even back to cave people, givethem a transcendent experience. Give them a reason
to appreciate why they got out of their cave andcame to listen to you at the campfire. So you have
to do things to make people feel slightlyuncomfortable, to challenge them. Right. And. But

(01:01:28):
we. We've gone overboard. We're now doing that atsuch a rapid rate that we're detracting from what
we're trying to achieve in the first place, whichis engagement, not necessarily constant
transcendence. And so there are filmmakers whoconstantly abuse that privilege. Now, there's also
a sort of a technical side of that, which is, asmovies have gotten louder, because filmmakers who

(01:01:51):
don't know how to control their impulses havegradually abused technological advances like Dolby
Stereo and Atmos and, imax, which all over thedecades have allowed us to make movies louder and
louder. Not that we should, but we've been abusingthat technical privilege by making movies louder

(01:02:12):
and louder, for better or for worse. And so what'shappened is, as Movies got louder, cinemas began
turning them down. And because there's a knob or abutton or a switch in every movie theater that
tells how loud you're going to play the movie aswe got louder. So it's that baseball, you know,
it's like, oh, I got, oh no, I'm on top. No, I'mon top. As they turned the movies down, we started

(01:02:34):
turning the movies up. And it's a never endingbattle for supremacy there.
I think that, in some cases, there are movietheaters where the sound systems are not great and
you're getting impure sound. It's getting, it'sgot a fuzz in it or whatever. And it actually is
painful to listen to. The purest sound at level,at the very loud level that I've ever personally

(01:02:58):
heard was on the lot at Paramount Pictures. AndI've heard movies in there that were
extraordinarily loud, but they didn't hurt. Theyjust washed over you. They didn't hurt you.
That's an interesting thing for me to nerd on alittle bit. interestingly, that's a technique we
use in sound and now even some composers arediscovering this. That distorted. If you don't

(01:03:20):
have good equipment, even a film at a modest levelcan feel painfully loud. As you've just discussed,
we've known this in our community for years. Sowhen we want to make for example a gunshot or
something that needs to be louder than you reallyshould reproduce it at, we add distortion just to
that sound. Not, we don't add distortion. So thewhole two hours you're hearing distortion. But to

(01:03:44):
make a gunshot sound really loud, you adddistortion to it because the ear subconsciously
translates that as loud. Because when things arereally loud, our ears do actually distort so we're
just mimicking something biological.
So you're actually playing with the audience'sunderstanding, using the sound as a means to do
it.

(01:04:05):
But we'll do it so that we don't have to play itat those levels that those filmmakers play it at
to bludgeon you.
Well, I've been having absolutely the most funhaving this conversation for a little more than an
hour now with Mark Mangini. And we're going towind the show down just a little bit and believe
me, I've got many m more questions to ask Mark andperhaps we will be lucky enough to have him come

(01:04:27):
back someday and we can talk a lot more aboutsound. But I'm just wondering, in all of your
experience experiences can you share with us astory that's either weird, quirky, offbeat,
strange, or just plain funny.
Oh, man, I have so many. I'll tell you this, andthis is online. You can research this and you can
hear it for yourself. But I was doing the filmPoltergeist in 1982, and I needed to create the

(01:04:54):
sound of the closet beast. This, giant, weird,phantasm that jumps out of the closet to scared
Mary Jo and I. So as fodder for that closet beastbecause we. The visual effect came first. It
opened a big maw and looked like it did somethinglike roaring. So I thought, I need the sounds of a

(01:05:14):
big cat for that, and I'll manipulate them intosounding like a closet beast. So I went out into
the field and recorded lions and tigers and gotall these wonderful recordings things, and I place
them in, and that's what's the sound of the closetbeast in the 1982 poltergeist. Now we're getting
ready for an audience preview, and the studiosends us the MGM logo. What's the MGM logo famous

(01:05:38):
for? Leo the Lion. Well, something reallyinteresting happened when a lion roars. I tried
fitting my lion sounds into the lion mouthopening, and they didn't fit. Because when a lion
roars, a lion sounds like it's yawning. A lionsounds like. Not. But the tiger sounds were feral

(01:06:03):
and frightening. So starting in 1982, I made theMGM lion has been a tiger, not a lion. And I've
been. I've been doing the MGM logo for over 40years.
You're the guy that makes the sound that comes outof the lion's mouth on the MGM logo. That's
amazing. And then mtm. It's a cat. Meow. Right?

(01:06:26):
I haven't had the opportunity to touch that one.
Well, I mean, that's fascinating because we allthink that that's the lion, but it isn't. It's a
tiger. I love it. I love it. All right, so lastquestion for you today, Mark, you've given us just
a massive amount of wonderful advice throughoutthis whole show. But I'm wondering, do you have a
single solid piece of advice or a tip that yougive to those who are just starting out in the

(01:06:50):
business, or maybe they're in a little bit tryingto get to the next level.
I do have, I think, a good piece of advice, andthat is this. I'll, preface it by saying, if you
wouldn't do what you do for a living on your dayoff, you're doing the wrong thing to be good at
this. You have to love it. And you love it becauseyou love doing it. And you think about it even

(01:07:12):
when you're not working or you're not gettingpaid. And I tell film students regularly that just
because they're not on a job doesn't mean theyshouldn't be out in the field recording. Stealing
one of my movies off the Internet and strippingthe sound and cutting their own version of the
sound to see what they would do versus what MarkMangini did. You shouldn't be doing what you're

(01:07:34):
doing if you don't love doing it every day, nomatter what.
I think that that is, about as pure a true pieceof advice as you're ever going to get, because
it's true for all the arts. If you're doing itbecause it's a job and you're making money and you
don't like it or you don't love it, or you don'thave a passion in your belly for it, you might be
in trouble. I think that that's really true. Andit's really hard for people like writers who have

(01:07:59):
to write and write and write and write before theysell anything.
Writers should know that intuitively because theyknow they have to write. They have no idea if
they'll ever sell a script.
It's very difficult to practice movie directingwithout directing movies.

Mark Mangini (01:08:14):
Good point.
You know, I mean, you have to make. You have tomake them to know how to make them.
But you know what? There's a great meme goingaround. An interview with Jim Cameron, the Avatar.
Jim Cameron, the Titanic. Jim Cameron and hisadvice. His simple advice is, if you want to be a
director, go direct. You can do it with youriPhone. Just go out, write something, shoot it, do

(01:08:36):
it tomorrow, and start developing those skills.
You don't have to wait for anybody.
I think that that's today. That's really true.
When you and I were kids, you couldn't do thatunless you had a lot of money. You know, today you
can take your cell phone out and go make a movie,or you can make motion picture. I don't know how
good it's going to be, but you can. You canperfect angle and quality of sound. Not sound, but

(01:08:59):
you can storytelling, because it's all, at the endof the day, all about storytelling. And if you
aren't interested in telling stories, you mightjust be in the wrong business.
Oh, that's a good way. As, only a writer couldsay, if you're not interested in telling stories.
Well, everybody that's on the set is telling astory. Everybody's part of that storytelling
process, so you better be into it. Mark Mangini,this has been just so much fun for me, I can't

(01:09:22):
tell you. And I just want to thank you from thebottom of my heart for your time, your energy,
energy and your wisdom. It's just been fantastic.
Thank you. this has been a joy. You're a greatinterviewer.
And so we've come to the end of today's StoryBeat. If you like this episode, won't you please
take a moment to give us a comment, rating orreview on whatever app or platform you're
listening to? Your support helps us bring moregreat Story Beat episodes to you. Story Beat is

(01:09:47):
available on all major podcast apps and platforms,including Apple, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify,
iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and many others. Until nexttime, I'm Steve Cuden and may all your stories be
unforgettable.