My Own Private Idaho, Mixing in Canada, Border Crossings, and Too Much Alcohol

My Own Private Idaho

I have to say that this film has always been one of my favorites because we were young, just learning our craft, and working a million miles away from a studio system so we did what we wanted and how we wanted it. I got to experiment with a lot of sound styles, Gus pretty much let me do what I heard in my head. Sometimes he would pull me back but he always gave me freedom to create for his films. We had a good relationship in those old days.

When we were doing My Own Private Idaho, we went to Vancouver, BC to do our mix. We were working with Paul Sharpe and Bill Sheppard, an amazing re-recording mixer combination. The first step was to get there.

We were doing our sound editing at Teknifilm (long gone), and working with 35mm mag stock on upright moviolas. Our budget was so low that I got a buddy and my now ex-wife to walk foley. They had never done it before but it ended up through trial and error working out okay.

When it came time for the dialogue pre-mix I loaded up a van with all of our reels. I don’t remember how many boxes of elements we had but the van was 2/3’s full and the load was pretty damn heavy.

I have always had bad luck crossing borders. Not so much when I leave the US, when I return. Some of those things are chronicled in Road Dog, others not.

Border Crossing

We had been working long hours and I hadn’t had much sleep when I piloted the van five plus hours to the border and met up with the customs broker who had been hired to get all of our stuff across the border and back as far as doing all of the paperwork. I sat at his office for another 5 hours while he filled out all of the forms.

I knew the production was paying a fee for all of this that would be refunded when the mix was complete and we returned everything back to the US. I don’t know how big a fee it was but I understand it was significant.

I napped a bit but the customs broker guy kept asking questions so I didn’t sleep much. I called Gus multiple times as he was already in Vancouver and we were supposed to be having dinner that night. The mix was scheduled to start early the next morning.

After what seemed like forever all of the paperwork was done. I had a temporary work permit and was able to haul this van full of mix elements across the border and up to Vancouver.The Canadian Border people were wonderful. Not like the asshole on Victoria Island but that’s another story…

I rolled into my hotel after midnight. I got a few hours sleep and met Gus early for breakfast, where this photo was taken.

I was absolutely fried but more long days were still a head.

Working with Paul and Bill was a blast. During the day we worked hard and the film was sounding great.My whole sound crew had done a great job prepping everything and on those few times when Gus would want to add something to the mix we would hook up a live microphone and just add it straight in to the mix as I didn’t have an editing room or any equipment besides a synchronizer to work with.

Barn Crash

I do remember running a microphone cable down the hall and out to the loading dock and throwing scrap wood against the walls to add to the barn crash in the opening.

We were mixing at the old Alpha Cine facility and it was in transition as Paul and Bill were getting ready to move to their own place. Machines and other gear were all brought in and hooked up just to get thru this mix.

This was my second feature mix (Mark Twain was first) so I was pretty nervous and wanted everything to go perfectly. Well that never happens but Paul and Bill were so calm that when there were problems we just fixed them.

The Inmates Were Running The Asylum

And the great part was there were no suits, representatives from the studio, hell even the producer hadn’t shown up yet. We were truly on our own and making the decisions we wanted to make. Man that was a long time ago. Mixes don’t happen like this anymore.

Working in Canada (and the UK I found out later) means that everyone has beer or wine with lunch. Not a lot but a couple. It never seemed to affect anyone, except me as I would start to fall a sleep around 4 o’clock because I was so tired. I soon stopped having a beer with lunch.

Gus and I went out to dinner every night and usually drank too much alcohol, (come on, we were young and could both put away a lot of booze). We’d get back to the hotel really late. I would be back in the studio around 8 am feeling like crap. Gus usually showed up just before noon looking much better than I did.

This went on for the first week. I was exhausted.

Eventually I called the producer and asked her to send help up to the mix. I was handling everything fine, I was hoping for someone who could hang out with Gus in the evenings so I could get some sleep. She told me she’d be up in a couple days.

I know you figured you would read about actually mixing the film and not all of this other crap but it’s my blog. Maybe I’ll add more stuff like that in future posts. We shall see. Thanks for reading.

Coming up in Part Two – That night I found out I was going to be a Dad.

Posted on September 28, 2021