Cinema Canada (Jul-Aug 1975)

Patrick has had extensive experience with dramatic voice recording, notably on a handful of Canadian feature films. ‘The Rainbow Boys was the most fun. My very first feature at Crawley’s was Genevieve Bujold’s first film called Amanita Pestilens. | recorded the guide track for René Bonniére, who thought I was an awful twit, and indeed I was. Didn’t do another feature until I worked for Ivan Reitman on _ Foxy Lady, which was a bit ofa disaster. Then I worked with Don Haldane on The Reincarnate up in Kleinburg, and that was a very special experience. Donis a particularly wonderful man. Then Paul Almond’s Journey, an absolutely wild experience. I’m still convinced that Paul is a madman, and I think we were all pretty mad by the time we left that location. But a marvelous opportunity and nice people to work with.” One of the frustrations of being a soundman on a feature film is sometimes seeing most of your work scrapped and post-produced sound substituted. ‘‘On Journey most of it was used, on The Reincarnate all of it was, there was no post-synching on that. On Foxy Lady there was quite a lot of it, since Ivan changed much of the dialogue after he shot the film, re-wrote entire scenes, and used cut-aways to get away from lip-synch. Then on The Rainbow Boys we got away with using 100% of the location sound, and I was as proud of that as anything I’ve done. That was a very special film and Donald Pleasence, who’s still very much a star in my eyes, was very flattering to me. (He called Patrick the best soundman he ever worked with.) There was only one line from a Chinese shop keeper that we had to post synch in the studio, because it was just a shocking performance.”’ It’s aremarkable thing when 100% of the location sound is used on a feature, especially when it’s shot outdoors, under difficult conditions. ‘‘Mind you, I had Billy Nobles as a boom man, and that was very special. We worked very hard and covered ourselves from every angle, room tone, everything. We were shooting on a mountain one day, so we recorded mountain tone: we recorded it with the mike pointing toward the valley and the river, then toward the mountain, then toward the ground, to cover all possible camera angles. In fact, it proved very valuable in the mix. Then the last feature I did was Peter Pearson’s Only God Knows, and that was acomplete disaster for me in sound, they used only five minutes of my actual location recording.”’ The day I visited the set of that film, director Pearson was shouting all throughout the shoot, so I wasn’t surprised. ‘*Peter came in on the film extremely late and we had no time to look at locations. He was about three hours ahead of himself at any given time re-writing the script, and to have created any delays at all in recording sound would have been terrible. Difficult locations, as well, shooting at the end ofa runway at Malton with planes coming in just overhead and that abandoned prison farm, it would have cost a fortune to deaden the echo in that place. The tradition is that the soundman is one of the few people on set with the right to say ‘Cut,’ at any given time. Peter came to me right off the top, saying, ‘I don’t like location sound, I don’t want location sound, and you'll never shout ‘‘Cut’’ on my set.’ So I said, ‘Peter, I don’t think I’m your man, I wouldn’t enjoy recording sound under these conditions.’ He said he would like me to do it very much, so I did it for the money. In retrospect, I think Peter was absolutely right, for that particular film, and I learned quite a lesson from him. But when a filmmaker doesn’t even like location sound, it makes you feel pretty useless, indeed.”’ ‘*] think to make a film, you have to have a lot of fun. It shows if the actors are having fun, ifthe crew’s having fun, if you really enjoy making it. Working under an uptight situation is no way. That’s why The Rainbow Boys to me was magic. It’s coming up again, by the way, in England. It’s sold 35 prints and is going to be touring with Monty Python. Again, it’s a weak plot, but a charming film.”’ Patrick himself is an easygoing chap with a British accent and a keen mind. He got involved with film fifteen years ago at Crawley Films in Ottawa, where he combined an interest in theatre and electronics to launch his career. He still considers Crawley’s one of the best places in the industry to learn, even though he himself left after only two years, since, as he so candidly puts it: ‘‘I was 30, just got married and was earning only 80 bucks a week so it was time to move on.’’ He came to Toronto, free-lancing, and teamed up with Bob Dutru to make documentaries for CBC Newsmagazine. That took him to Vietnam and to Oslo with Martin Luther King accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, thus he found it an interesting job. It also gave him enough good credits to get his name well established as an expert soundman. He’s been free-lancing ever since. ‘‘Seven years ago I realized that I was burning up a bit on the documentary route and I wasn’t heavily into feature work, so it seemed like a good time to open a studio.’ This idea was born out of his frustrations as a soundman, not having access to a transfer machine, which would enable him to carry the recording process one step further. *‘ All tapes that you record in the field are inadequate, and nobody is capable of fixing those inadequacies, unless they know the actual situation. Somebody crunching on gravel might be established in the shot or it might not be. In order to eliminate some of that gravel in transfer, you have to have the man who knows that you don’t actually see somebody crunching on gravel. So I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to follow through with that one extra stage.” ‘‘T was working for Jim Mercer on contract, so I rushed out and bought all sorts of second hand equipment and built a pretty junky studio on Jarvis Street in his building. It was a start, and it proved remarkably satisfactory.’’ He had to borrow $15,000 from the bank for this first venture, and only when that was paid back did he borrow the next $35,000 to finance the present studio. It’s located in the basement purely for sound reasons and ‘‘practically every soundman drops in from time to time, it’s become somewhat of a soundmen’s club. Where people discuss problems or play tapes, saying, my God, what can I do about this or that? Some people come to do their own transfers, I’d like to carry on with that tradition. And of course it gets increasingly difficult to get out of the studio, people look on you as more or less a permanent fixture, and you’re unreliable if you’re not here all the time.”’ In order to enable him to spend more time in his studio, Patrick Spence-Thomas has made it a practice to train a whole line of fine young people in location sound recording. Billy Nobles, Aerlyn Weissman, Douglas Ganton, Larry Johnson and many others have at one time worked for him, though he modestly disclaims most master/apprentice relationships. He also recognizes the inevitability of most of his students moving on to better paying jobs as soon as they’ ve acquired enough practical knowledge. “‘ Theoretical training be damned, you pick that up as you go along. I don’t think there’s any way that I would trust anybody out of a film school right off the top, unless they came into the studio ina junior capacity and worked for a couple of months to a year. Then I would feel happy that they’ve hit all the problems that they were going to hit, and learned how to deal with them.”’ ‘*As a soundman, the most difficult thing to learn is your compromises. If Trudeau is in a light aircraft circling Toronto and the plane’s about to crash, the soundman doesn’t say, hold on mate, I want to use a different microphone or I haven’t got the best mike position, or hell, the synch chord’s broken, you just record the damned thing. And it boils down to compromise the whole time on a feature film. Let’s say it’s getting late in the afternoon and the sun’s going down, there’s only enough light to do one more take, the actors are getting uptight because they’ ve been working too hard, and Cinema Canada 53