A Life In Sound: Industry veteran Jerry Ross talks about clientele and building client relationships

DS: I see that you started out in Northern California on Apocalypse Now. Is that correct?

JR: I did, back in 1976. I was working towards being a chef. I was going to be a chef and a cook and do that as a career. In the meantime, I was working as a salesman, selling Hi-Fi stereos. I got an opportunity to go work on Apocalypse Now. I wasn’t sure if I was going to do it. My boss at the Hi-Fi store said, “Are you kidding me? You’re fired! Go do it!” It became a life changing experience.

The store was called Sound Systems. It was downtown and it was great. I’ve always loved sound and film. Growing up in San Francisco, I was never sure how to get into the film business. I had an inroad through family friends. My girlfriend’s sister worked for Francis Coppola, as a babysitter. So, we were around there a lot and Francis said, “You guys have to come work on this new war movie that I’m making. It’s going to be really great!”
 

DS: Today I want to talk about the topic of clientele and building client relationships in the television and film industry. How did you find your first clients?

JR: The first thing that I supervised was after Apocalypse Now. It was through a friend, Michael Kirchberger, who was a picture editor, assistant editor, and then became a sound editor for many years. He brought me out to New York. I moved there. He set me up with the editor and director of a movie called Time Square, made by Robert Stigwood Productions. It was directed by Allan Moyle and the picture editor was an English editor named Tom Priestley. I was introduced to them. I had just come off of Apocalypse Now, which was quite a story. I was 27 at the time and they were crazy enough to hire me as the supervising sound editor.
 

DS: So, you went straight from San Francisco to New York and eventually ended up in Los Angeles?

JR: On Apocalypse, I was hired to be a GI extra originally. Then I got an opportunity to be an apprentice picture editor. Then I was an assistant picture editor after that, for a year or so. Then I got an opportunity to play one of the surfers because the original surfer was a stunt man, who couldn’t come back after the typhoon and schedule changes and such. So, I got an opportunity to play Johnny from Malibu. One of the surfers that flew around with Colonel Kilgore. Then I was an assistant editor for another year after that and then I was a foley editor. I did a little bit of everything on Apocalypse, so it was my film school where I learned everything. Plus, I met a lot of people in the film business and became friends with them, particularly in post-production. The relationships that were built there, were the groundwork for all the work I commenced doing once I finished Apocalypse.
 

Apocalypse Now Trailer

DS: Can you talk about building relationships with clients?

JR: It’s a matter of getting an opportunity to work with somebody and if the experience is positive, the clients, whoever they are, ask you back. This could be the director, a lot of times for sound people, we’re hired through relationships with the picture editor, then you have to build a rapport with the director, producers, post production producers, post production supervisors, and if those relationships go well, you get asked back by any one of the above. Either the director grows fond of your collaboration, or the post production supervisor, or the film editor does. It’s really about building relationships with all the people, truly starting with the ones that hire you, and you have a good rapport and a good relationship and they’re happy with the experience of collaborating. You give them what they want and then the whole thing gets repeated. Then it snowballs and grows from there, where you build a wider net of connections. People who actually like working with you. Then they call you back or you call them up and hopefully they want to continue to work with you.

It’s not always the case. Sometimes things don’t quite go as well as you would like or there was some problem. It’s funny, sometimes it depends on how successful the movie ends up becoming. If a movie doesn’t do well, everybody involved gets the wash or the taint of it. It’s very funny. If a movie does well, that tends to change things.
 

DS: How do you maintain those relationships once you have clients?

JR: When I started out, maintaining relationships came in a natural way, where you would continue to work with people, overlapping projects, or projects would come one after the other. You’d have repeat projects, so your relationships would build naturally around that. You somehow had to do some hustling, and calling, and following up with people about when a new project was coming up and reach out to them and hope that you caught it at the right time, with the right circumstances. Relationships were maintained by working together. Relationships grew in patterns that would cross pollinate. People that worked together would be like, “I worked with this guy, they did a good job, you might want to use them on your project.” So producers would talk to other producers, editors would talk to other editors, directors would speak highly of your work or not, so the relationships were maintained by constant care. So, you know the quality of your work and the passion of your work.
 

DS: Who was your first really big client? How did you meet that client?

JR: Clearly getting to work on Apocalypse Now was my first really big show. I wouldn’t call it a client because I wasn’t supervising. I have a great relationship with a guy name Michael Lehmann who I just finished working on a Netflix Project, The Woman in the House. I’ve done all of his films. Talk about maintaining relationships. I think I helped him get his first job out of film school, at American Zoetrope as a receptionist. He then went on to direct many films including Heathers, Airheads, The Truth about Cats and Dogs, Hudson Hawk, which was an incredibly big and complicated and controversially successful film. I think it was a big flop at the time, but it had a big budget.

Then I had an opportunity to work for Penny Marshall on Big. She obviously is a pretty groundbreaking director as a woman. One of the few at the time that was directing big features. Very successful features. Big went on to be very successful. I did a film called Awakenings, with her as well. I met Penny through the picture editor, who had already been hired on, Barry Malkin, who is also an Apocalypse Now alum. He had cut and worked on most of Francis Coppola’s films. His relationship with Francis went back to elementary or junior high school. They grew up together in Queens.

I think we’re seeing a pattern here that relationships are built by cross pollinating many different personal and professional relationships that sometimes meet and commingle. I got to work with Walter Hill. He is quite a stalwart Hollywood writer, director, producer. He was super big in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, and did a lot of stuff. I’ve even forgotten how that relationship started, but there are many others. Some just come randomly. That crazy film that I did, Last Action Hero. That was another big, wonderful box office disappointment. It was a big-budgeted thing with Arnold Schwarzenegger. John McTiernan directed it.

I’m kind of infamous for working on a lot of big budget flops or box office disappointments, things that were expected to do well. Hudson Hawk being one of them. There was also Last Action Hero. I worked on a great movie for Dino De Laurentiis called The Million Dollar Mystery. It was kind of a remake in a way, in the spirit of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World. It’s a great Cinerama movie. It’s kind of a classic. It has this cast that you wouldn’t believe. It’s unique. It’s not like anything you would see today.

DS: You also did some stuff that was more successful like Tombstone, Billy Madison, and more recently The Walking Dead. Even though you had the infamy of those big budget flops, you had some very successful films mixed in there as well.

If you’re in the right place at the right time with the right people, it changes everything.

JR: It’s interesting that you say that. It’s the luck of the draw. You never know. The filmmakers, from writing to directing, producing, editing, to the completion of a film, nobody’s ever sure exactly why they end up gelling in a perfect way or an imperfect way or not working quite as well as they anticipated. Then you have this random thing where, some films are really good and don’t appeal to the right audience at the time. There are many that are classics today that came out and were received as flops or failures at the box office. I guess what I’m getting at is, it’s pretty random how it happens. Even though I was infamous, we had a lot of fun and did some really neat sound work on some films that maybe didn’t do as well. You never know. If you’re in the right place at the right time with the right people, it changes everything.
 

DS: Does the client already have a budget in mind? Or does the house have a minimum rate card?

JR: I think that’s changed over the years quite a bit. It was quite different when films were made on film. We had big, big film crews. We had giant sound crews. I started off on Apocalypse Now. That was my training ground. So, I learned how a film was made, at probably one of the most complex, detail-oriented places. Time was given to do great work. Walter Murch was the first real sound designer, who took that credit and made it a household name. He truly designed the soundtrack from the ground up. There was a whole bunch of people in different departments within the sound department who worked for him doing a particular thing. The budget was…I have no idea. The stories on that are probably well documented in Eleanor Coppola’s book and many other people’s discussions about the incredible drama that Francis went through, negotiating with the studios to get the film finished. That was my starting ground, so I thought that was how you made films.

I went to New York and supervised that film, Time Square. I was going with the way that I thought films were supposed to be made, like Apocalypse Now. I thought everybody should do it like that. I was so substantially over budget, that I was kind of black balled in New York for quite awhile, because people thought that I had blown the budget up single handedly out of control.

You typically have a line producer who has put together a budget for the whole film. They allocate certain amounts of money in each department. Usually, what happens is post-production gets left for last. They put as much money as they think is needed in there for editing, and now visual effects today. Basically sound becomes the last part of the process, because it is literally and physically the last part of the process. More times than not they’ll underestimate what is needed for a good sound job. Looking over the years, back in the 70’s when I started, we had bigger budgets and more time with lots of people involved. In the 80’s it continued. It even continued into the 90’s, and then the transition into digital changed that quite a bit. Things started looking different. The crews became smaller. There were more people working on workstations, where they could do more and different digital editing processes. You didn’t need lots of assistants to rewind reels of thousands of feet of film. It became a much less intensive type of process and budgets have changed accordingly.

Then you have the final mix on a film. The budgets on that can vary so widely depending on the type of stage, the mixers involved, the amount of time that’s spent on the mix. Budgets run the gamut from completely huge to what’s happened over the last 20 years, it’s certainly gotten worse. Every few years since then budgets have shrunk, and shrunk, and shrunk, and time has been cut back as far as what’s being allotted for creativity. A lot of it’s because they think everybody can do things digitally and you can do it instantly, you make a fix, you make a change, and it’s no problem. It’s easy to do. I think what’s happened is a lot of the creative side of this, and the fun, and the joy of a lot of the work has been squished down and condensed in a way where it’s much more pressure filled. So, does the house have a minimum rate card? Everything is different. I’ve been working mostly at studios. They have a whole set of rules about the way they do things. There are limitations on the way big studios do things because there’s big overhead involved. There are small houses that have less people involved and they can do things on a much more spartan and spare basis. Then there are places in between. It really is a moving target.

DS: Right, with digital, things have become easier in some ways, but sound editors are expected to make a lot more edits. Expectations of what noises they can clean up or remove are much higher.

JR: Budgets are completely underestimated. Because the sound editor is at the very end of the food chain, they tend to get the least amount of consideration. They don’t have agents. They don’t have people fighting for their budgets, they have to do it themselves. It’s one of the sad things. I think there’s a lot of below the line people that should have a lot more representation and support for keeping the wages and salaries up to a commiserate level of what films and TV actually bear in terms of financial gain for the producers. I would say that sound editors are at the low end of the food chain. They don’t get compensated as they deserve, more often than not.
 

DS: You’re talking about budgets getting smaller and crews getting smaller as time goes on and things switching to digital. What are some of the consequences of that? For me, if I’m working on something that’s a really small budget, I’m not going to have the time to look through my library as long to pull the perfect sounds. I’m going to go straight for whatever sound I know works. “Door slam 57” or whatever the sound might be. Then throw that one in there, because I know that sound usually works. Can you talk a little bit about some of the consequences of budgets getting smaller?

JR: Yeah, absolutely. If you look at a template…like going to an extreme like Apocalypse Now, we learned that the best way to get sound effects is to go out and record exactly what you need. So, we were able to go out and record a series of helicopters of different types, munitions, explosions, guns, vehicles. We actually recorded Foley on location because Walter liked the sound of Foley that was recorded outdoors in natural environments more than Foley done on a Foley stage. That’s one extreme, right? We did all of that. All of the above. We recorded for a good part of a year, different sound effects. I learned that the best way to get sound effects for any particular project is to go out and record them when you can. Those are kind of extremes that probably took us to the late 80’s and early 90’s.

There’s some camaraderie in the sound community. If I’m in a pinch, I can call up another sound supervisor or editor.

We’ve done less and less of that over the years and like you just described, I have to go to the library sometimes and just use whatever is going to work. Sometimes we’re lucky enough that many of these things we’ve recorded over the years, including recordings that a lot of competitors have done, because there’s some camaraderie in the sound community. If I’m in a pinch, I can call up another sound supervisor or editor. There are a lot of really well-known people who I can call up or vice versa. They can call and say “I remember you recorded something 5 or 10 years ago. Do you have any of those sound effects?” We share sound effects and help each other out. It’s a process. It brings up lots of memories of all the wonderful experiences of one person helping another in the spirit of my favorite term now, which is “ubuntu” which means “I am, because we are”. We all do this together. That’s what I found filmmaking is all about. It’s a totally collaborative process, where everybody pitches in and even the director is not responsible for making it all come together. It happens with a lot of people’s efforts.

DS: One thing that I’ve noticed over the years is it feels like films are becoming less stylized. If you look at Apocalypse Now it had a feel to it. Or you look at Star Wars and the sounds that Ben Burtt created there, it’s very stylized. If you watch another sci fi and you put the Star Wars lasers in it, you would say “why do the lasers sound like Star Wars?” You know right away where they came from. Now I feel like we’re getting away from having these stylized films, where each film has its own particular sound and feel, and it’s becoming more of an assembly line process.

JR: That’s absolutely true. Think about it, Ben had the opportunity to work for something like a year or two collecting sounds, creating sounds, and making up things. Finding those wires in the desert that he would hit and get them to ring out to make the sounds of the light sabers. He creatively came up with ideas that had never been done before at the time, but he had the time and space and support from George Lucas, and the producers, and the creative people involved to do all that. Those things have been shortchanged now because everybody’s rushing. They want to get these things out and they just hire some guy who did the last big thing, that sounds like some other big thing, and they end up just throwing a bunch of sound at it. They don’t have the kind of time that Ben did, or that Walter created for all of us, or that many, many films in between, and of many different styles, where people had time to actually create unique sounds. It’s kind of like I described. We’re not pulling things from a library; we’re creating unique sounds. When you do that, it makes a big difference. It feels real. It feels unique. You create new sounds that have never been heard before.

You also need to have filmmakers that are bold, and brave, and courageous enough to try new things. To be able to take risks and do something that hasn’t been done before. Think outside normal parameters of how something should sound or how something should work and try a completely different thing. That’s the wonderful thing about sound. Some of the great sound jobs, and some of the most creative sound designers and sound editors who conceive this, think very abstractly, and try things that you never tried. You know, the famous stories about Gary Rydstrom’s fly fishing recordings in the lake at Skywalker. He had fly fishing poles and lines in the water, and that’s what he used for the bullets in Saving Private Ryan. He just thought it up and did it. There’s a million stories like that of great creative people and some people are still doing it. Some people still have that freedom and support. Talk about relationships.

Randy Thom talks about this a lot. The relationship to a director and then the relationship to the producers, to allow you the support to really conceive of a soundtrack early on, and then build it while the editorial is being done. Build it before that, back at a script level. Randy’s been a big proponent of that and what an ideal that would be, if at a script level you were able to talk to the director, the writer, the producers, about how you would like things to go, and they would give you some support to get there. Alas, it’s a business. People shortchange themselves. They just want to get it done. They don’t think it’s as important as it is. George Lucas is obviously very famous for stating that sound is 50% of his movies’ experience. I don’t think that most filmmakers and producers and others, give it that kind of respect.
 

DS: How do you approach this topic with a client? If they come to you and say they want you to do sound for a film, do you talk to them about the amount of time it would take to do a very unique sound job versus the amount of time to just bang it out and get it done assembly line style.

JR: Exactly! That’s exactly what you discuss. Depending on where you are in your career, a client will come to you, if they know you do incredible unique work, and they say, “I want to do incredible and unique work, how do we do this?” Then you collaborate and work together to get there. If a client comes in and says, “We’ve got $12 to do this in 3 days, do you want to do it?” You’ve got to make a decision whether or not you want to participate in that wholesale slap it together approach. Most people who care would prefer not to do that. I would even say that I know a lot of people in this business who are sound people, who put in a lot more effort and time than they are paid for. That’s very unfortunate. It’s very sad. Being part of the union, it’s illegal.

My experience is that when I do something from the heart, when I do something from passion and I care about it, that’s the satisfaction, and you do get paid for it.

Many people care more about the work that they do, than they care about the money. That is a good quality to have by my account. My experience is that when I do something from the heart, when I do something from passion and I care about it, that’s the satisfaction, and you do get paid for it. Hopefully people are appreciative enough to make sure you get compensated somewhat fairly for the process. It’s easy to get abused when you don’t have a loud voice for yourself. Many people don’t. Some people do. It’s a conundrum, isn’t it? It’s a problem that probably exists in many things other than the film business. It’s always the little guy that tends to not get compensated what they’re worth. A lot of crafts people who do great work may not get appropriate compensation.

You know, it’s a cultural thing, I hate to go too far, but we were kind of addressing it in the pandemic. People were realizing that we don’t really honor a lot of the essential workers. It’s like yeah, that guy at the grocery market who was putting his butt on the line every day to be at risk being around people. The guys that were driving around and delivering all this stuff to us. The nurses, workers, teachers, there are a lot of people that are unsung heroes, that happen to be paid some of the minimum wages in our culture. You extrapolate that and sound editors are at the back end of the economic order. It’s kind of like that. You know, it’s not like that for everybody, but even the one’s that are very successful are feeling the pinch of some of the budgetary concerns much of the time. They’re able to fight for it more. They may stand up for their creative rights. It depends on your position, some people can demand more.

DS: I think the pandemic is a good example. One thing that I’ve said is, “All these people that don’t want to pay for music or don’t want to pay for movies, they were stuck at home during the pandemic. What would their life have been like if they didn’t have any of that media to entertain them while they were stuck at home?” I think it’s very revealing as to how important the media and entertainment that we provide really are to everyone’s life. It really makes peoples lives better.

JR: The pandemic caused a lot of businesses to figure out how they could actually save money from people working from home, they would pay people less for their facilities, for their equipment, for their time. They figured out ways to still make money from this work. It’s an ongoing dilemma. We need to make sure that the creative process is not dumbed down, and marginalized, and paint by the numbers, or slapping it together out of your library. The idea is that we need to keep fighting to keep a real positive creative availability in our world so that it doesn’t just become thought of as you hack it together, you do the best you can, and hopefully you deliver something. It’s an art form. It’s really creative. Sound in particular.

The reason I got into sound was that I didn’t want to sit in a room being a picture editor, working with the director looking over my shoulder, hours on end.

The reason I got into sound was that I didn’t want to sit in a room being a picture editor, working with the director looking over my shoulder, hours on end. As much as editorial and picture editors bring a film together, you’re working with a finite number of frames, and things you can manipulate, and shots against other shots, where sound was kind of a throw paint at the wall and see how it plays, and see what it feels like, and see what it sounds like. It was pretty exciting. Because it’s somewhat abstract and subjective, we get left to our own devices, and you bring something to the director or the creatives that are wanting something for their film or their show, and you hope it works. Sometimes you miss, sometimes you get it, and sometimes it’s an unexpected surprise. If the creative person in charge is willing to be open, they may just find that they’ve gotten something even better and different than they had in mind. That is one of the wonderful, random, and beautiful, things that happens in art and imperfection in life. I have a deep sense that mistakes can be some of the most creative tools that we have. It’s hard to get to that point, and you have to have time to make mistakes and then try it again, and play with it, and just let it unfold. That’s kind of a luxury today and that’s unfortunate.
 

DS: Since we’re on the topic, how is that affected by the number of people trying to work in this industry? I think part of the problem comes down to a lack of mentorship for the new people trying to get in. There are so many people that are willing to undercut just about anyone, just to get their chance to work on a film. They don’t know how to negotiate or run a business. There’s a lack of a ladder to climb into the industry, as we got away from film. Due to the physical nature of a film, there needed to be more people in the cutting room, even if it’s just to carry the reels of mag to the stage. Do you have any solutions for dealing with the young people trying to get in, so that they aren’t undercutting everyone’s budgets?

JR: First of all, with mentorship and training and bringing new people on and all that, that’s a whole thing unto itself. It’s something I’ve been fighting for and talking about. I’m working with our union. I’m on the board of the union, and we have a sub committee that is about apprenticeship, and how we get people their start so they can get into a business that’s really, really difficult to find an inroad to get to. This has been a giant passion of mine, and a giant frustration of mine. Back in the day, I fell into it and was able to be mentored along on a project for many years. It was a totally unique experience. Years later, after struggling, and hiring, and bringing up a lot of new people, I ended up with my own business. We were a union signatory business. We were able to bring up people as runners and meet young people who were really interested in getting into the business and give them an opportunity to get a start. Eventually when they were really ready, and looked like they wanted to seriously do this, and showed a passion for it, we were able to appeal to get them in the union.

We had to get them on the roster. It’s a Hollywood thing. It’s a catch 22 deal that still exists and is kind of complicated. Today the process is still difficult, and cumbersome, and filled with contradictions and irony. It’s still a problem that I’d love to see dealt with, because I think we need that help. I think we need it today particularly for diverse members of our culture and our world that don’t have access the way some people do. I just fell into it. I don’t want to go too far down the path, but there’s no doubt in my mind that I’ve benefitted from white privilege in all of my opportunities that I’ve been given. It’s time to do something different there. It’s time to reevaluate how we can bring in diversity and underserved members of our community, give them access to this creative and wonderful world of post production that we’re in. Because right now the numbers are highly skewed and there’s very few people of color working in the post production business. Particularly in our union. I’ve seen some of the numbers and they’re miniscule. They’re predominantly white male. Women have made some inroads, but there’s a lot of work to be done.

I’m not the one to solve all of it, but it does need attention by many. I think everyone needs to start thinking outside their old box and be open to new forms of opening up this business to young people. There’s a lot of people like myself that are nearing the end of their careers and should be available as good mentors. They should be training more people who are young and teaching them all that we know. For better or worse, I’ve done this for a long time, and I’ve gotten a little bit out of my experience. I know some stuff. I know how a lot of things work with the business side of it. I know how a lot of things work with the creative side. It would be nice to impart that to more people. I try to do it as much as I can, but there aren’t enough avenues to do that.

Then as far as young people being willing to undercut people just to get a shot, that’s been a constant problem. It’s been a problem for years. It was even a problem a little bit in film times. People would open up a shop in their garage, a small-scale thing, and they were scrambling to get clientele and establish themselves. They would undercut and do things on a shoestring budget and work their tails off. They would give sweat and blood and sometimes just cut corners.

One was always faced with this, in my own business or just as an independent sound editor doing bids against other sound editors, it was always a constant thing that you were bidding against another company or individual that was trying to get the same job that you were getting. What happens is you end up getting people bidding against each other and trying to underbid the person before them or the facility before them. In doing so, they would actually sabotage themselves, with paying themselves inappropriately less than the work that was needed. Sometimes they would create really bad precedents too. So, a producer would say “I did this last film and so and so could do it for x amount. Why should I pay you triple that? He finished my film.” It’s a really fine line, of trying to share with your peers to keep our standards up to a point where we don’t undercut each other. I tried many times over the years when I had my own business, to get the different independent film sound companies together and create a little bit of an understanding that we’re not going to sabotage each other by trying to underbid each other to death, because nobody wins. That’s what’s happening now.

It’s like the music industry. The music industry’s truly changed, and many of my older friends who have seen it at different times say it’s been completely gutted, because now anybody can just get a Pro Tools system, go into their closet, and record an album. It’s happening not just on a Billie Eilish level, because I love Billie Eilish, but across the board. Classical musicians are doing it. They’re literally going into their homes, and their closets, and recording albums. It’s not the same as going into a beautiful studio with producers and talented people and sculpting an album over time. Similar patterns are happening. Young film people are coming up and saying “I want to do that. I can do the whole thing in my bedroom and cut the whole thing on Pro Tools” and do it for what seems to them like a lot of money. If it was done right in a classic way, where people really get to spend more time doing it, it’s a very different experience and a very different product in the end.

DS: What you are saying about music, I think what we’ve lost is, when people would put out an album in the past, different albums would have a very specific feel to it. Even with the same bands, different albums would have a different feel. I think part of that was that they were recorded at different studios that were blocked out for 6 months or 9 months. So, if you do a whole album at one studio with the same acoustics, equipment, microphones, and engineer, and then you go to a different studio with different acoustics, equipment, microphones, and engineer, it’s going to give the album a different feel just based on that.

JR: Sure, and also the producer. If you go to the history of rock and roll in particular, you can look at different producers and the creatives who worked with producers as collaborators. They created a sound for that album that was unique to the artist and was unique to that period in their music. A great record is created with the artist, the producer, and the engineers. The time and level of care that was put into the recordings changed it. There’s many a great documentary and story about that and how sound for different records has changed over time. It’s very similar. The music business is unique in its own way, but the film business truly is a collaborative art of lots of different people having to come together to get something to gel. Where the music business is certainly about the musician first and what they’re trying to get and then the producer, and engineer, and recording, and acoustics, working towards getting the sound that they end up with.

I’ve been around a few of the engineers over time that recorded Steely Dan’s stuff and they spent years in the studio. It was the same kind of thing. It was an Apocalypse Now kind of experience. They’d try 20 different marimbas until they found the one that they liked the sound. They’d spend a month doing that. Then they’d record the marimba. Same thing with different guitar sounds, and production techniques and such. It’s that same kind of thing of allowing the creative process to be as free and truly creative as possible. It all involves time, and unfortunately time equates to money in a lot of these businesses, and that seems to be changing.

DS: One thing came up for me when you were talking about young people undercutting people in the business. I think for one, it’s a lack of training for how to negotiate a contract for a film, or how to negotiate a budget for a film, or how to run a business. The other thing is that it really has to do with establishing value. I think this is an industry wide problem. If you don’t know how to establish value, the only thing that you can offer is doing it faster or doing it cheaper. But if you can establish value you can say, “This is why we need the budget. This is how much better it will make it sound. This is how we can give it a unique feel.” So unfortunately, I think that’s become a big problem in our industry as a whole, is that people don’t know how to talk about sound in a way that translates to people that don’t know sound, and really establish that value with them.

JR: You’re right on. It’s the age-old cliché, good, fast, and cheap. You can’t have all three, even if you have the money and resources something’s going to be lost. If you try to do it too cheap, you’re just going to plain sell your self short. It will be done on a shoestring budget. Every once in awhile you’ll get away with something that still can be unique. To do things well, you have to give it time and you have to give it the space for people to do creative work, which is money. People’s time equates to money. That’s how you get quality and interesting and creatively unique work as you’ve described. You see that missing a lot of times. A lot of quality is compromised. A lot of quality of how people mix dialogue, quality how music sounds, quality how sound effects bring something unique and interesting to a film. It all gets watered down. It’s just an added thing, rather than that 50% of the experience that we all strive for.
 

DS: Do the budgets stay the same when there’s a part 2 or 3 or a season 2 or 3?

JR: I would say that it’s probably a mixed bag. A lot of times they’ll end up trying to save money as things go on over an extended period of time. We end up having to fight for our ability to keep the standards and quality up. I know on Walking Dead, I was constantly fighting to keep things unique, and keep our budgets strong, and occasionally would get them to increase. After 7 years of doing it, they never really pushed me to try and lower things too much, but it was a constant battle. I would think that it’s probably true on sequels too. You would have to ask someone with direct experience.

Depending on the success of a show, you have that riding for you. It goes back to your last question in the sense of, how do you train people to fight for their rights? To really understand what it costs to do something well and have the tenacity and courage to stand up for those rights and budgets, so that you don’t end up compromising your work. I think people have experienced that a new producer comes along and wants to save some money and says, “Let’s save some in the sound department.” Then you have to fight for it. Hopefully you have a director or someone else who’s higher up the food chain, who’s willing to fight for that budget. Many times, directors can’t fight for you the way that they would like to because they’ve had to make compromises to get budgets for their visual effects, or they’ve had to make compromises to shortchange something else, so that they could have more time editing the picture. It’s complex. Everybody has to deal with it, because budgets are not unlimited. Some bean counter always gets in the middle of it and wants to question why you need so much money to do things the right way. I would say that over the course of my career, I have spent a lot of unnecessary suffering and energy on explaining to producers, or fighting for overages that were needed, when I could have used that time and energy, on just doing the work that was needed, if I had their cooperation. I’ve had to put a lot of energy, and I think a lot of people do, into fighting for budgetary needs. You have to explain it and stop what you’re doing and create a whole scenario and spreadsheets and justify everything because you’re constantly under the scrutiny of the bean counter. It’s one of the sad things that you have to waste a lot of time defending yourself as to why you need something.

Walking Dead Trailer

DS: It would be nice if the studio lots fought for you.

JR: It sure would. It would also be nice if we had agents. We’re the people in the below the line part of the food chain that don’t have agents. Agents do that kind of work for clients up above us. They make deals for writers, they make deals for directors, they certainly create these incredible deals for the actors. We don’t have that. The union doesn’t do that. That’s not part of their purview or lookout. The studios certainly don’t do it. When you work at a studio facility, I would never bite the hand that feeds me, but you’re fighting with them, because they’re trying to save money too. As a creative, you’re constantly trying to fight for your ground to get as much time and latitude so that you can do the best job that you can possibly do. It’s a constant battle. That’s what needs training, like you said. The young people and people who don’t know, need to learn how that works, so they can make that fight and continue the fight, and not make the mistake of compromising. Once you compromise and set a bad precedent, someone along the line expects you to honor that down the road. They might say “this one time, can you just do this special favor for me and give me twice the work for half the price and next time we’ll take care of it?” That comes back to bite people more times than not. It’s a constant battle. It’s a challenge.
 

DS: Is the project easier when you already know the client or if you’ve already worked with them before?

You work with somebody; you develop the relationship. You have their trust. You have a simpatico, and a likeness of creative expression and creative discussion, where you’re on the same page and you can work.

JR: Most definitely. That’s how this works in its best form. You work with somebody; you develop the relationship. You have their trust. You have a simpatico, and a likeness of creative expression and creative discussion, where you’re on the same page and you can work. They can describe something, and you can try to bring it to realization. You can try something new, and they can be open to it. By far, relationships that you have with that person and other creatives involved, help you to be the most free flowing that you can get. So that you can get out of the way of being worried that you’re going to make a mistake. That is probably the biggest stumbling block and creative block is not feeling free enough to try something totally different or new or just throwing some paint up on the wall, and seeing how it looks, and seeing how it looks with another piece of paint or another tone. Thinking totally creatively, getting out of the way of the ego or the fear of not doing it correctly, and being in the flow of creativity. Creativity is something where you’re at one with the universe. Michelangelo, when he was sculpting these giant pieces of rock, he said he just cleared his mind, he probably prayed and did some stuff, all of a sudden, some vision came through as to where he should start chiseling the thing. It just came out of his soul. That’s the ultimate goal is to get to the place where you can just have some fun and let it flow.
 

DS: Do you have a marketing team to help you find new clients?

JR: Individuals who are working these days clearly don’t have that. They have to hustle and look at the trades, and figure out who’s doing what, and they’re flying blind. Some of the small sound facilities that I’ve worked at, including my own, we did do that as much as we could. We would bring in people to help look for where the projects were. The studios do that. There are teams of people that help with sales and look for where new projects are. Mostly it comes down to relationships and previous experience with somebody.

It also comes down to random happenstance. When I used to get lists from salespeople about these projects that were out there, when I’d make cold calls, 98% of them didn’t pan out or prove to do anything. What would happen was, that call would potentially sometimes open up a door, somewhere where I least expected it, or randomly connect me with somebody who would have something on the next one. It’s hit and miss. You have to have a lot of tenacity to make calls, and market yourself, and hustle out there.

Certainly, sound people don’t have much in the way of marketing, but they hope to get some press when they’ve done an interesting film, or get something printed in the trades, or get a film that has Oscar worthiness, and they get some press out of that. You know, ultimately it takes that. You win an academy award, and it changes your career. I was never lucky enough to do that. I almost got nominated in the Academy sound Bake-offs for one show. The Walking Dead got a few Emmy Award Nominations. I got an Emmy Award Nomination on Catch 22. We got some MPSE awards, which is a nice thing, because you’re honored by your peers of sound editors. Marketing and promotion is one of the aspects of this thing, how do you get young people to come up and realize that they need help with that? They could use perspective on how to market themselves.

A lot of it’s word of mouth. A lot of one person describing the experience of working with you to another creative. If a director talks to another director. That’s typically what will happen. If they’re considering you, they’ll call the director that you last worked with, or the producers, or the editor and ask, “What was your experience with that person?” That word-of-mouth promotion and marketing will be the most important thing. It’s a truly people to people kind of business and the good connections are made by one person trusting the experience that another person has had with each other.
 

DS: In your early days, did you find that clients stayed with you as their films got bigger or did they move on to bigger studios as their budgets increased?

JR: I think I was lucky in that I had a lot of good clients that were repeat clients, and they would stay with me. Sometimes it wouldn’t work out. A different person would come in or a new editor who had a crew that they wanted to work with. The producers sometimes would dictate who they wanted to work with. My personal experience, over years of working, I had found excess alcohol and eventually drugs played a big part. I grew up in this business in the 70’s and 80’s and that’s what everyone did. I continued on into the 90’s doing that, and eventually it got in the way of my success and my ability. It actually hurt some relationships that I had in the film business. I was fortunate enough to find my way into long term recovery. I’ve been sober 24 years and in recovery for 24 years. My life and in particular, my career, and a lot of the relationships that I’ve had in my career, have been healed and gotten better, and some of them are new.

I’ve had a fair amount of repeat business. A lot of loyalty. There are some people who are loyal to the people who they’ve worked with. Clint Eastwood basically worked with Alan Murray, that’s his sound guy, on almost every film he’s ever done. Alan was always doing Clint’s next project. It was just a given. I’m sad to say that our dear friend and a wonderful sound editor passed away. He was an amazing guy and it’s very sad to see him move on to a different plane, because he was terrific. He was always up for Academy Awards. He was always doing incredible work and bringing incredible quality, and detail, and care. He had such a strong work ethic that was very admirable. It’s really sad to see him pass.

It does come down to clients and relationships. If you’re honest, you’re open, you give them your best, if you work hard, if you care, and you’re lucky enough to jive with them creatively and personally, and have a symbiotic kind of creative relationship, that’s what makes clients repeat business with you. They realize that you’re doing the best to take the best care of their project and bring the best soundtrack and best creative approach that you possibly can. It’s all about where your heart is. Your heart needs to be in it. It’s not all about the budget, it’s about what you really care about and bringing passion to it. If you do a good job, all that other stuff tends to fall into place.
 

DS: How does union vs. non-union affect which projects you can take on?

JR: I haven’t done a non-union film other than freebies and small independent films that are done from the heart, or for charities, or good causes. I worked on a number of recovery films. Films about positively changing the devastating effects of substance abuse disorder in our world. I’ve done projects for organizations that were charitable. Those were non-union because they are purely about love and doing things for good causes.

I think the majority of what is considered non-union is mostly done just for cost saving measures. Certainly, being a member of the board of our union, the Motion Picture Editor’s Guild Local 700, I don’t support that, and I don’t think it’s a good thing. I think people get abused and people really undercut the creative process. It makes a big difference. I support doing things and protecting people’s rights through unions and other measures. There’s a big difference. Non-union stuff tends to be where a lot of abuse happens in terms of taking advantage of people who are inexperienced or willing to do something because they just need a job and are trying to get ahead.

Part of the big fight that I’ve been involved in for a long time is working in the union confines and figure out ways to allow people to work in some apprentice kind of mode where they can actually learn how to do things well. How to do the craft in a way that’s professional up to the highest standards that we could possibly do, and then become full-fledged bonafide members of the union. Now there are avenues of getting in there by working non-union places a certain amount of time, and you can apply to be in the union. I would like to see new ways of doing that. It’s an ongoing process and it’s very complicated and we’re trying to make some inroads in that right now. I kind of alluded to it earlier. It’s something I’d like to see because there’s a lot of underserved people who need access to being able to experience what it’s like to work in this wonderful field. I’d like to see more people who’d like to do it, who don’t know that it’s even a possibility for them, to have access to getting the chance to participate. It’s time!