Jonathan W. Stokes

Getting permission to use a single song in the movie may require negotiating and signing six different contracts.  The Masters contract, the Synchronization rights, the composer’s contract, the label’s contract, the publisher’s contract, and the performer’s contract.

I generated 120 musician contracts in December, and I have signatures for 70% so far. People have asked me if it’s hard to direct a movie.  I tell them directing is nothing compared to producing.  Writing and directing comprise about 2% of the time I have spent on The Last Hurrah.  Everything else I do is producing.

As far as wrangling musicians to sign their agreements, I’m very glad to have Adam Boardman to help me chase down a few folks.

I’m thrilled to be using Sugarman 3 in the soundtrack. I’ve been such a big fan of them for so many years, and it is wild to talk to Neal Sugarman on the phone and get his thumbs up for the movie!

I got many, many things off the to-do list this week. Measurable progress. Minor physical and emotional exhaustion. Chuck says I’m pushing too hard and need to give myself some distance. So I forced myself to take the morning off.

I drove to Malibu, which is a different world from Silverlake. I sat in the sand and watched pelicans and dolphins. I read Notes from Underground and just stared at the Pacific. Finishing this movie, there are so many emotional highs and lows that each week feels like a month. I can dig it, but it is nice to take a day off.

Had a really fun ADR session today with Randy Wayne. Randy is this guy:

Randy plays “Dogbowl,” a hyper character with ADD who is in constant motion. To add depth to the sound design, Jeff and I recorded a lot of extra dialog for Randy that we can pepper throughout the movie. So any time there is a break in conversation, Dogbowl can be heard screaming something in the background.

Practical ADR

Remember that we filmed The Last Hurrah all the way through from start to finish, each day of our shoot. This means that if an actor flubbed a line 34 minutes in, we didn’t yell cut and start over at the beginning. We just kept rolling. This makes ADR especially important for this movie!

Randy’s was a fun ADR session because it involved a lot of improv. But several of the actors needed more meticulous ADR because their lav mics on set had too many pops and cracks. In these situations, the actor stands in a sound booth watching film footage on a monitor, and gets recorded saying the same lines over and over until the ADR recordist gets a usable take. Actors must match the pitch, rhythm, and characterization of lines they spoke six months ago. It’s hard work!

Put on some head phones, lock yourself in a closet, and read each sentence of this blog post, out loud, fifteen times in a row. Now do that for four hours. And you will begin to get a sense of how an ADR session works.

ADR for the Director

My background is in sketch comedy. Sketch comedians are a neurotic breed who will eagerly invest hours perfecting the rhythm, nuance, and timing of three minute comedy sketches that will probably only be performed on stage once.

With our extremely limited rehearsal time for The Last Hurrah, there was barely enough time to memorize lines, let alone perfect comedic timing. Going into post production, there were about forty lines in the movie whose pace and comedic delivery I was not satisfied with. ADR is giving Jeff and me a second chance to let the actors perfect their comedic performances.

The Weird Part About ADR

Maybe it’s because our actors are hilarious, or because there’s a lack of oxygen in the recording studio, or because you get punchy after hours in a windowless room…but ADR is hysterical after a while. Every one of our actors had me cracking up – recording themselves doing funny voices and saying ridiculous things.

ADR is fun for me as a director. Mostly, all I have to do is sit in a chair and be entertained.

We spent about six hours recording foley today. I love working with the sound team. There is nothing like five guys on four computers in one room working toward one goal. Foley is ridiculously fun.

To give a taste, we need to Foley the sound of a very inebriated character peeing in the shower.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but people are used to the sound of urination in a toilet…which loudly resonates in a bowl full of water. By contrast, micturition on flat shower tile sounds high-pitched and wimpy – it doesn’t sound believable. Engineering this sound may require a creative mix of noises that have nothing to do with either showers or urination.

I have to stress that the shower-pee sound is really important to the character. The audience must understand that this gentleman is so shnookered, so unbelievably plastered, that he walked past a perfectly good toilet to pee in the shower instead. Before today, I never fully appreciated how many potential laughs in a movie are the work of the sound designer.

Every sound in a movie is built by a sound designer. Often, the only sound being recorded on set is the actor’s voices. And even then, the actors are often re-recorded in a carefully controlled studio during post-production.

The Last Hurrah was filmed at a house party with as many as 50 dancing, partying extras. But the party was completely silent except for the two or three actors on camera. The extras who appear to be conversing in the background are lip-synching. And the dancers moving to the music are miming.

Movie Magic

Watch closely the next time you see a dance club in a movie or TV show. The dancers in the background probably aren’t dancing to the beat. In fact, the dancers may all be moving to completely separate beats.

Notice how lead actors are able to speak in conversational voices during a crowded night club scene. Why aren’t they screaming into each other’s ears?

Crowd noise and music are created in post production. The editor has no way to cut together a sequence if there is real music recorded in the background. Every dog bark, every cricket chirp – it’s all carefully recorded and controlled by the sound designer.

Sound Designer’s Job

Our Sound Designer Jeff loves to think big picture. In one sense, Jeff’s job is very similar to Chuck’s (Cinematographer) and Shane’s (Production Designer). To make a one take movie feel as if it’s divided into separate scenes. To give each area of the party its own distinct mood by assigning noises and environments to different areas of our blocking charts.

Another part of Jeff’s job is to make the audience listen very carefully to our dialog. Our movie does not have big sex scenes, car chases, or explosions. We need a quiet and delicate sound design that will pull the audience into the party and make them listen to all the voices around them.

This is a finesse job. The crinkle of red beer cups. The clink of beer bottles. The sound of ice dropping into a glass. These delicate noises tune the audience’s ears to listen, as opposed to deafening everyone with a loud score and violent explosions.

The Era of Sound Design

Thanks to incredible movies like “No Country For Old Men,” Sound Designers are finally getting the attention they deserve. Someone told me (I tried googling and can’t verify this statistic) that two-thirds of the Academy Award winners for Best Picture also win for best Sound Editing or Sound Mixing. I can certainly believe it.

A statistic I can verify is that since 1950, two-thirds of the Best Picture winners also win one of the two Best Screenplay awards. This makes sense to me, too…

The wonderfully talented Dominic Mazzoni has signed on to be our composer for The Last Hurrah. And I am absolutely thrilled.

Jay (editor) and I went to college with Dominic and have always known him as a great jazz composer. After school Dominic got a second degree, worked at JPL as a geologist, created the Audacity sound editing software, and now works for Google. Most impressively, Dominic is one of the only people I know who is notable enough to have his own Wikipedia page.

Scoring The Last Hurrah

I always envisioned The Last Hurrah to be a sort of Woody Allen movie for Generation Y. Like if Woody Allen were 25 and could somehow stand to live in Los Angeles. This is what I was aiming for anyway.

I love jazz. When I lived in Manhattan, I kept my food budget down to an insane twenty dollars a week (you don’t believe me but this is true) so I could spend every free dollar I had going to The Vanguard, Birdland, The Blue Note, Iridium, Fez, St. Nicks, and of course, Smalls.

Jay and I scored a lot of Grant Green into The Last Hurrah’s temp mix to simulate the lighthearted feel of a Woody Allen movie. I had a lot of discussion with the producers about whether jazz would be thematically appropriate for a movie about 20-something hipsters. In the end, I found that when we scored the movie with rock-and-roll it felt more like American Pie than Annie Hall. Jazz and comedy just go together like tomatoes and basil.

Dominic’s Role

I didn’t even attempt to negotiate with Blue Note for use of their musicians. Especially when we have a wunderkind like Dominic Mazzoni in our corner. He is amazing to work with.

To give a taste, Dominic composed the opening credit music as a jazz trio. And then brought back the same theme as a piano solo for the final scene in the movie. I love the bookends!

A Director in post-production is a surrogate Jewish mother, constantly calling his brood saying, “What are you working on? How come you don’t call?”

For whatever it’s worth, here is my to-do list for this weekend…

Jon’s Action List Saturday, January 5 – Sunday January 6

• *Randy thumbs up for ADR
• *Ravi thumbs up for ADR
• *Jeff’s thumbs up on Susan/Lex for ADR
• *Jeff’s thumbs up for additional Indira sound files
• *Jay to deliver Jeff sound files for Dogbowl end credits
• *Jay to deliver Jeff sound files for pre-credits and credits
• *Jay to deliver Reel 1 footage to Chuck for Color Correction
• *Jay to temp new Afghanistan music
• *Jay complete Lex and Ritalin After Effects
• *Adam Music update
• *Chuck/Jon/Jeff discuss Color Correction
• *Chuck/Jon exchange bank cards
• *Chuck research/complete Brand Image
• *Chuck sign Peter’s release
• *Chuck $62 check to TLH, LLC
• *Peter $207 check to TLH, LLC
• *Jon $888 check to TLH, LLC
• *Jon write Composer contract when Dom gives song titles
• *Jon complete Richie’s extra list
• *Jon raise more money
• *Foley Prop Gathering for Tuesday
• *Lunch and Sound meeting tomorrow 12pm
• *Richie Rotoscoping Update
• *Richie/Lisa to sign New Epic Transfer
• *Richie Festival Calendar
• *Richie writes Deal Memos for Lisa (get signed) and Jay and Jeff
• *Richie Tribeca Cost?
• *Dominic to deliver music files, new drum beat, song titles
• *Investors to sign and fax LLC Operating Agreement, Subscription, and Promissory Note