Psycho Re-Make, First Temp Mix, and a Busted Up Computer
It's the night before our first temp mix on Psycho, we're on deadline, and our computer won’t boot up. All of our audio, the dialogue and FX are on this machine. All of it.
More Adventures in Movie Land
When I worked on the re-make of Psycho I got a lot of shit from people. Sure, it was a bad idea to re-make Psycho, but I was in the middle of finishing my own feature, Birddog. I was broke. I used the money I made on Psycho to finish Birddog. I have no regrets about doing that film.
Early in my career I worked on another bad movie called, Mercenary Fighters. You won’t see my name in the credits, but I did work on it. I shared an editing room with a wonderful man by the name of Dick Oswald. He had done sound on a lot of classic films including Hitchcock’s Psycho, and The Birds.
As a film school geek, I peppered him with questions, what was it like to work with Hitchcock? How did they come up with various sound effects for the films? Real film nerd stuff. He patiently answered all of my questions. Actually, I think he dug it because most people weren’t all that interested in these things back then.
So when I was offered the remake of Psycho, I thought why not? If it was going to be a shot for shot remake maybe I could learn something by really studying how it was put together originally.
Backing Up
I was working on To Die For, when I invested in my first audio work station. Up until that point we had been working on upright Moviolas and flatbeds. Good Will Hunting was the first film that we did totally on computers. I was using a program made by a company called Spectral. I spent a ton of money on this system and had a custom made PC built just for this. Long before laptops, I wanted to make it “portable”, so I invested in custom shipping containers so we could ship the system back and forth between Portland and LA or SF or wherever we were mixing. And they were expensive!
Most of the time it worked out well. The system was air freighted out the day before we would fly to the mix so it was always at the studio when we got there. We’d usually arrive the evening before, go to the studio, and get the system up and working before the mix started the next day.
On Psycho we were doing the first temp mix in Berkeley (at the Saul Zaentz Film Center) so I had the system flown down the day before the mix. Richard and I flew in the evening before and went to the studio to set things up.
My big fear was always that the monitor would be damaged in transit but I figured we could deal with that somehow.
My Worst Fear Realized.
I wasn’t expecting the CPU unit to be damaged, but one look at the shipping case and...
What The Hell?
When we open it up we see the computer case is literally broken in a couple of places. How could this be? It was in its padded case. Everything else we shipped was fine. We pull the computer out and looked at the damage. Yikes!
We set it up, plug everything in, and hit the power button.
Nothing.
The power won’t come on. It's the night before our first temp mix on Psycho, we're on deadline, and our computer won’t boot up. All of our audio, the dialogue and FX are on this machine. All of it. The entire movie. And this cut is scheduled to be screened to the Universal executives after the temp mix.
FUCK!
Let me digress for a moment.
In the years that I was doing sound design and sound editing on Gus’ films, and Todd Haynes, Far From Heaven, we usually did our mixing in LA. For me, the first day of any mix was a stress filled nightmare. I was sure I would get fired because they didn’t like what I was doing with the sound. And since I wasn’t from LA, that was another strike against me.
The LA crews always looked down on us that first day. They had this attitude, How could we be any good, we weren’t from LA, we were from Portland, Oregon for God sakes!
The group of editors I put together were really talented and most of them had worked in LA before they moved up north. By lunch time the LA folks were asking me if they could move to Portland and make a living doing film work because they all wanted to get out of LA.
Anyway…
Richard and I are not computer techs, but somehow after a couple hours of sweat and swearing we get the computer to boot up. The files open and the program runs. Everything is working. We hook our system into the mix console and they speak to each other. The engineering staff at the studio is fantastic.
We gaffer tape the power switch so no one can accidentally turn the machine off. We wrap more gaffers tape around the case to physically hold it together, and rope off the area where the system is set up so no one can get near it. For the next three days. I'm sweating bullets as we do the temp mix.
That beat to hell computer handled all of it.
It Wasn’t Us!
Of course when I call the freight company and the airline they both denied damaging our stuff.
After the temp mix we ship everything back to Portland and an audio engineer/computer geek friend of ours (Jim Rodgers) builds a new faster computer from scratch in 24 hours. We reload all of the software and our files and are back to work in no time. Post-production schedules wait for no one.
The down side was, from then on I had to hand carry this really heavy desktop CPU unit onto all of our flights. We put it into a canvas bag and I literally walked through airports and security with this huge thing. Since it was a studio film, they were flying me first-class. The flight attendants would fit this bag into the closet in first class. They were always very nice about it but I know if I was flying in the main cabin there was no way we could get that thing under the seat or in the overhead bin.
I always hated flying with that thing. It was bulky, heavy, and I was still afraid that if it got knocked around too much it might not boot up.
In a few short years we had laptops and portable hard drives. I can either upload/download everything to the cloud, or put it all onto a drive that fits in my pocket. But that first day of any mix is still stressful. For different reasons.
And for the record, it was stupid to re-make “Psycho”.
Thanks for reading. Have a great week.
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This is a fascinating story. Have you ever thought of combining all of your posts about your family and experiences working on films for the foundation of a memoir? I would love to read it and I'm sure others would too.