BEHP 0:00
We're in the theatre five at Pinewood at the date is the 25th, Tuesday the 25th of October 1988. And we're going to go through the basic questionairre first, and then hopefully, if we don't get out all the bits and pieces we want from the, we'll go over to the more specialised questions that I supplied Geoff with previously. So I'll just okay, Geoff, it's quite an honour to come here and do this with you. Because I've known you for a number of years and admired your work. And, and I'm sad, really, that you're a little sad that you're now retiring. But I'm hoping we'll take this opportunity to wish you a very successful and happy retirement,
Geoff Labram 0:13
Thankyou Bob
Interviewer 0:13
And so if we can get on with a few of the questions now, we start off with and where and when were you born?
Geoff Labram 0:17
Well, I was born in Isleworth in Middlesex, in November 1923. That's the short answer for that. Alright.
Interviewer 1:17
And you went to school in that area.
Geoff Labram 1:20
I lived until I got married, which was in 1953. So I was 30 when I got married, and throughout the whole of that time, apart from being evacuated during the war, I lived with my parents in Osterley facing Osterley Park, which is now a National Trust property. And I went to school, little locals, private schools, and then subsequently followed that going to Collet Court and St Pauls in Hammersmith. So although I know, looking back on it, that it was a struggle for my parents, they gave me what I think by anybody's standards was a good education. And it served me well ever since. And rather belatedly, I'm very grateful to them.
Interviewer 2:07
Good. Yes. you we were evacuated during the war, then where we? Where did you go
Geoff Labram 2:13
Crowthorne Berkshire For three or four years? Yes. So
Interviewer 2:18
very far out. And you were in you attended the the primary school there at that time?
Geoff Labram 2:23
Well, no, because at that point, I was. I was about 16, or nearly 16, when the war broke out. So last few years of my schooling before I then went on to what was then the North Hampton engineering college, which was in London, and is now part of the City University.
Interviewer 2:42
What course Did you take there, then,
Geoff Labram 2:44
electrical communications. So that was a course designed to lead I'd taken inter BSc It was called at school. It was rather like a levels I suppose. And when I went with those two years to college in London, this was a BSc course. And I have to say, I don't say with any pride, obviously, that I got so interested in involved in all the various activities of the Students Union and so forth, their social events and whatnot. The right cloud? my degree, I didn't get it. I got my part one, no problem at all, but Part Two no. And so I finished after two years when the war was now midway. And I had Well, it was no Come to think of it, it was more than midway, it was getting towards what was to be its close. And I hadn't really contributed very much to anything at that point. And was obviously an imminent candidate for being called up. But in fact, what I was, what happened to me was that I was directed to the mullard radio valve factory in Mitcham. In Surrey, and I spent some months there and then finally was called up and went into REME Royal electrical and mechanical engineers. Spent, I've never been able to remember exactly how long I've put off my I think it was about two and a half years. In REME, but after the first six months of my time in REME the war in Europe ended. So I never saw active service. And a few months after that the war with Japan finished also. And from there on, it was really a matter of serving one's time out. And I had become an instructor and the one of the REME instructional establishments and was eventually given what was called a Class B release which got me out earlier in order to go back to college, where I succeeded in Not getting my degree again, which is, you know, I don't have any kind of a record. But what I did get, however, was a diploma in electrical communications from the, from the Northampton engineering college. And the irony of it is that I found that exam harder than the degree one. And I got that one, which subsequently enabled me to become a student of the REE. And some years after that I had a little dispute with the REE because they didn't consider my qualifications good enough to be a proper member. So I told them where they could put their institution. Without any regrets at all, I found them a very stuffy and rigid minded lot, frankly,
Interviewer 5:45
would they today with those qualifications be more recognisable?
Geoff Labram 5:50
I think so. Because, again, ironically, some, I suppose three years after I'd had my up and down with them, they changed their rules. And they introduced a different category of membership, which was rather, again stuffily, or snobilly regarded as being a kind of lower class of membership for those people who who couldn't rise to the heights. The problem with I had had was that, whereas my diploma, qualified me academically, It wasn't a problem with that. Coming to Pinewood as I did, and my anticipating cover, as a maintenance engineer member for a number of years, I was employed here, and also our maintenance engineers and film studios, and in the film business generally, are, as it were working as individuals. And it was not for many, many, many years later that I was in any sense of responsibility over a group of similar people working. So that within the timescale that the IEE imposed for them becoming an AMIEE, of very desirable qualification, within the time limit that they put on that or the age limit, I think it may have been, there was no way that I could establish that I have been in charge of a number of people and that had done this, that and the other works, been responsible for sounds transfer. I may have worked hard, which I did. But it didn't fit their pre ordained framework of what qualified engineer was supposed to have done. As I say, since then, I think they have created a different order of membership, which admits of people who do funny things like that.
Interviewer 7:47
So, apart from this, the disappointment, shall we say, of the of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, who feel it through, you're looking back on your career now that not having gained the qualification of bachelor of science that did that hamper you in any way at all? Or do you think that ever restricted you in your future career
Geoff Labram 8:10
as things worked out? The way that my career has gone on? I'm sure it made absolutely no difference whatsoever, this industry seems to value people for what they can do what they have done rather than what they some piece of paper thinks they ought to have done.
Interviewer 8:28
Good. Now, then, just before we go off this these early years 1923 years has been your year of birth and mine a couple of years later, actually, we both sort of entered the world. At the time when when the talking picture. A commercial commercially anyhow was starting to evolve and become a more practical consideration for a form of entertainment. What do you have any recollections of or what are your recollections of the first sort of first talking pictures that you saw yourself?
Geoff Labram 9:05
The first talking picture that I can remember saying was thing called dirigible which is a I think, a fictional film about an airship. I've never sought out it's it's credits ever since. But it was not the first picture I ever saw that one was Sherry Kirton?`nature film taken in Africa.
Interviewer 9:33
Sherry Kirton? of course was very famous for his South Pole. Movies, wasn't it with Scott and people and
Geoff Labram 9:43
well, the I'm not sure there was wasn't that Sherry Apsley Garrard? or something. Sherry Kirton?
Interviewer 9:50
was connected. Kirton? was also if I remember rightly, had a Newman Sinclair made that was wooden to cut down on the noise for nature photography possibly that picture.
Geoff Labram 10:01
He certainly filmed wild animals in, which was anticipating the kind of thing that goes on all the time now by Graham Sidelair?. And that was a silent film. And I seem to think what I saw it at the London Polytechnic or something I was taken by someone.
Interviewer 10:19
That's the Polytechnic cinema that in upper Regent Street. what and where you generally interested in, in cinema, particularly,
Geoff Labram 10:28
as the years went by? And yes, it did, I think when, in my later school days, it certainly did. And I remember opening a file, which I began to fill with, with paper, which, by another strange piece of irony, irony seems to crop up a lot. And this was all about the Rank Organisation. And I learned fascinating expressions like vertically integrated combine, which is what the Rank Organisation or the J. Arthur Rank Organisation, in those days was considered to be a good example. And I can remember culling any information I could about this and stuffing it into this file. And that was when I was probably 16 or 17.
Interviewer 11:14
That just after that one, there was the outbreak of war. Yes. So what that was was rank was, of course, the first in religious movies, wasn't he? And
Geoff Labram 11:24
that was his initial motivation here getting into them, I think he is
Interviewer 11:28
here? Well, I think that at that age, you gain on the business side of it, which you eventually became very much involved with in in your later years was the organisation over ,
Geoff Labram 11:39
certainly I think it would have been fair to describe me as quite a film fan in those days. And my parents, would have been amazed, I think, to be described as film fans. But when you look back on the fact that as a family, we probably went to the pictures, probably approaching once a week, I thought nothing of it, it was
Interviewer 12:03
went as a family.
Geoff Labram 12:04
Yes. And then, of course, a little later on, when I was 17 18 19. I was going a lot on my own obviously and seeing things of my own choice.
Interviewer 12:17
That cinema going at that particular age, there was not really what brought you around to entering the film industry as a as a professionalism, livelihood and life's work.
Geoff Labram 12:30
I, I don't think that's necessarily true, I think I must have had a pretty compelling interest. I can recall, discussing the matter with my father. And saying, This is the sort of thing I would like to do. In those days, of course, my interest in it was a creative one. I wanted to go and make films. And he he liked all caring parents have that era and probably still took the view that what you've got to go and qualify yourself in something proper and worthwhile. And not having you go off into some industry like that, with anything to fall back on,
Interviewer 13:14
and never have another very good friend whose parents attitude was matched to say, same sort of thing when he was, why don't you get yourself a proper job with the attitude of when he wasn't again, when he got into films and so on, and sound recording for movies. So anyhow, there was an underlying interest in the cinema as a wise boy. And
Geoff Labram 13:37
yes, I have the opportunity to come to the north and North Hampton engineering college really arose out of the, the, the difficulty that there was that period of the war in getting a place anywhere, quite a number of places. And where in effect being drowned by the wealth of of tuition that has been given to people in the services that they were being drilled into various kinds of technology in order for them to do their technical job in the services. So the number of places for ordinary students was somewhat reduced. I imagined to a lot of the university staff were serving in the forces. So I wasn't really given a terribly wide choice of things to go and study. And I know that another interest I had was was in civil engineering, wouldn't have minded building a few dams and harbours while I was at it. And so I had this this, in fact, my desires were really transmuted into civil engineering at that point, because it seemed to be the best thing to do in the light of the situation in the war. And it was, I suppose, halfway through my two years college That the opportunity to switch to an electrical side of things they came apparent between the first year and the second year. And of course, I did that with great Glee, having always been rather more interested in electricity, and then I was in concrete. So that's how that happened. And the The other thing, which I think is a great significance, probably one of the most significant things that this interview could reveal was that when I was at college, it was considered that it was almost obligatory, to spend the summer vacation doing some kind of useful work that would help in your overall studies. And before I started at college, the principal so what do you want to do and I said civil engineering, I was sent on something like nine week spell. They are kind of very junior surveyor on an opencast coal mining site in Yorkshire, which firstly gave me a love for the north of England, which I'd never seen before. The following year, which was the between the first and second I was again, asked what I wanted to do. And I said, Well, really, and truly, what I want to do is be in the film industry, thinking though, that was a pretty wild thing to ask for. And the principal said, Well, now that is interesting, because we just do happen to have someone who can help you, who is an ex student. He was referring, of course, to Watty A W Watkins at Denham. So I was sent down there. And I spent nine weeks in Denham in the sound department. But he was there when they got there. Which year was about 1943. Again, it was the This Happy Breed was just wrapping up. Henry the fifth that just returned from Ireland, the Way Ahead was just starting. And I was after a day or two put onto the crew for The Way Ahead, I spent two weeks there. But as I mean, every moment of those nine weeks is stamped in my memory. Rarely because this was I was at an age where that would make this impression that it was a complete change from there on, and I was hooked. There was no question what I was gonna do from there on arter those first two weeks, I was reassigned to Henry the fifth. And I spent the remaining seven weeks working on Henry the fifth.
Interviewer 17:39
That was they were still in production and there wasn't post production.
Geoff Labram 17:42
None of this was post production, that the term post production, if you recall, wasn't even coined for about another 20 years. So those those things are very, very strong influences on what happened later. And I might add as a little footnote that I was delighted to be able to buy a cassette of Henry the fifth from Woolworths for less than 10 pounds.
Interviewer 18:08
And they're doing a remake of it shortly to I don't know why No, I said I just said I'm puzzled by that one wonders why they have to have to reset your masterpieces that was so that was that was for the period of the vacation during during your your course.
Geoff Labram 18:23
I remember attending an ACTT meeting.
Interviewer 18:29
And you went back then. And then of course what you said previously,
Geoff Labram 18:33
went back to college to the plan. Went to the valve factory, then was called up and did my two and a half years in REME came out there do another year at college and then wrote to Cyril wrote to john Dennis, who was my previous contact and was working at john
Interviewer 18:53
john Dennis had been the mixer on one of those he was
Geoff Labram 18:56
actually he was the one on both of them. We all moved as a team and I think we were second unit on The Way Ahead. That's why. And he kindly wrote back to me from Pinewood. I've written to Denham and he wrote back to me from Pinewood. And he said that, while he was all very interested in he'd like to see me so I came down and saw john Dennis and, of course, the department was then in the hands of Cyril Crowhurst and he offered their job as an assistant. As a film loader I have to be correct about this as a film loader, which I did. And I joined the studio in I think it was August in 1948. And within a week, I discovered that we were imminently about to enter the two week annual shutdown which the studio had at that time. What everybody had their holiday at the same moment. And I remember going in some bother to john Dennis and saying john, I've been i've only been as learning been here two weeks and i've got to go off for two weeks holiday what do i do and i also remember his reply take the money and shut up so i had two weeks paid holiday after two weeks service with the company I hope they don't send me a bill when I retire.
Interviewer 20:21
well i think i think after my shorts they hear that they had never ever got my holiday credit so they'll make up for what they've made you that that that says splendid and that was the that was the start at pinewood when when when john working with john dennis as as a loader
Geoff Labram 20:44
well of course i wasn't working with john dennis i mean he knows you back into the company i see i joined a staff of i suppose about three film loaders because remember we were an optical stock and so we were all loading like crazy and i seem to think i i spent no more than two or three weeks as a film loader and then i was given a job as an assistant maintenance engineer and that brought me the salary is seven pounds 10 shillings a week
Interviewer 21:16
that was alan watkins was the was the what the rather was it was in charge of of the maintenance side was
Geoff Labram 21:24
he had the title of chief transmission engineer
Interviewer 21:27
he's transmission engineers that's a good idea isn't right so we can always say that you were one of the first job fit type people having your period of
Geoff Labram 21:42
except was that the the attachment as you rightly call it was not organised by the film industry organised by the university or by the Collinses
Interviewer 21:53
is it should have been that sort of thing should have been being organised through the
Geoff Labram 21:57
way around
Interviewer 21:59
absolutely right let's pause to think for a moment the question here is where were you living and how did you get to and from work
Geoff Labram 22:13
well i was still at that time living with my parents in Isleworth Middlesex and i got to work in the earliest days by fortunately securing a lift with Jack Lock who was a mixer and that must have gone on for a few months and then i realised that as it was a difficult journey by public transport i better get some of my own and so i bought a 1931 Austin seven for the sum of 30 pounds and used that for quite a number of years that travelled to and fro in that and that situation really remained until i got married which was in 1953 and i still was still had the little old Austin and even then but i settled then in Rickmansworth and although i've changed addresses that during the next four years i changed addresses twice i've lived in the house i'm in now for the last 3031 years
Interviewer 23:20
so you can say that you provided yourself pretty well with transport all the time that you've been working you haven't read the rules and have to rely on public transport to them from very literally beginning okay now what was the working day in the working week
Geoff Labram 23:40
well the working the working day began at 830 and it finished as i recall at six i know i'm not sure whether it was 630 or 615 but i want to do remember is that on two nights the week i believe it was it finished a quarter of an hour earlier i know that that was to make up an exact number of hours or whatever
Interviewer 24:05
i bought it was when i first came to britain in business then because it was still a 44 hour week what i remember was three days of the week it was 638 3630 and other two days wednesdays and fridays was six o'clock well that may
Geoff Labram 24:26
fall in line with you bob that was what
Interviewer 24:29
you were before that was some time after your
Geoff Labram 24:33
material
Interviewer 24:34
no the sound there was no saturday no saturday work
Geoff Labram 24:37
no but i remembered that when i was doing that spell during the war there was yeah who worked until one o'clock i think on Saturday morning
Interviewer 24:45
people that other people have told me that it used to be sort of saturday mornings were never that was a 44 hour week
Geoff Labram 24:53
and those days because i did use public transport to Uxbridge bus from there
Interviewer 25:03
but the next section there is there's this paragraph paragraph number three of the on this question basic question give us a rundown over your career your progress and in films positions held and type of films worked on.just saying yes so give us a rundown of your career and progress up to from from being assistant maintenance to
Geoff Labram 25:32
maintenance for quite a long time i was certainly that when i got married i got married on 10 pounds a week i seem to think that was pretty good money then and subsequently i couldn't put a date on it i was made a full maintenance engineer and of course in those days the department was much bigger because we were covering production as well as post production so there were more of everybody and i continued in that grading for many many years but as the time went by and i suppose we're now probably getting into the late 60s and into the beginning of the 70s the the line of promotion began to get a little bit blurred if ever there was a classic example of the the way that the peter principle and so forth works it must have been our department i can remember being extremely frustrated and saying to my guvnor Ctril Crowhurst that i didn't think i was ever going to get anywhere and his attitude always possible patience dear boy you know the opportunity will occur and that was really the nub of it because as it is still to some extent in our department the opportunities for promotion were practically what are known as dead men shoes as long as everybody was neatly slotted into a structure there was really no room for promotion and you had to wait somebody's departure from a slot before you could even be considered for moving into it and at a certain point i think Cyril Crowhurst must have thought that he probably i think had his eye on me as a possible successor i think this must have been the case and of course i didn't know that and he obviously didn't want to lose me he didn't want to discourage me and yet there was Alan Whatley as it were in the way so what he arranged to have done was he had me made development engineer nobody knew what that meant least of all me but i became it and around that time the company used to dish out the early contracts and i remember that for several years i enjoyed the benefits of having a yearly contract with a company that didn't go on for all that long it just stopped it doesn't exist today so i became development engineer for a number of years and that in a sense i suppose must have given me a slightly freer hand i wasn't quite as locked into the idea of maintaining a theatre or a crew i was sort of a more of a free agent which enabled anybody including Cyril to give me a job that didn't tie me to production requirements i think i ought to be very grateful for that because it enabled one's mind i think to be freed of certain amount of rather routine attachments and things to think about and because in due course i suppose it made it easier for me to eventually sit in what had been Cyril's chair but the way in which that happened was all a bit a bit strange we again my memory is a little clouded is the order in which things happened certainly Alan Whatley retired and very sad to relate that he died shortly afterwards as a terrible shock to all of us because he was the sort of man who was regarded as being a solid as a brick wall so there i was on the scene with Cyril Crowhurst and and myself sort of in the upper layers of the department and i know that our managing director at that time was Kip Heron and he had i think found himself a little frustrated Because he felt that Cyril plain maybe was
one of the old school and in his view in Kip's, he didn't see far enough into the future, he was tending to do everything the way he always had done it which is come to realise a very easy thing to do. And so, in this way, Kip started manoeuvring and trying to line up something a little different, which resulted, as Cyril himself told me a few months ago, in his not being allowed to continue after his normal retirement date has even been allowed, been encouraged to think he would be. And he was retired pronto on his 65th birthday. And I think he left with a slightly smarting feeling that something had been done to him they didn't like. And what was set up in its place was a regime in which Ian Lewis had been imported into the company, he had been a production manager and producer in a small way, was brought into the company as a kind of universal troubleshooter, someone with with pretty wide ranging authority to get things done if a customer wasn't happy, and kind of side responsibility for the sound in which I was going to be the day to day runner of about the particular responsibility lay with Ian, and I will always be grateful for that too, because to be suddenly stuck in the hot seat, totally on my own, with no previous managerial experience at all, is something that I would have found very, very hard indeed. Whereas Ian, who did have managerial experience was able to cushion that shock and see me in and what happened to Ian is a totally another story. But he was there for a number of months. during which time, I began to get the idea of how things worked on how to do it, and eventually was established in the position, I seem to think the title was chief sound engineer. It was of interest, historically, to remember that Kip's original plan was that the department would be run by two people. One of them would be responsible for all production, crews and work and for generally making approaches to producers and liaising with them. And that person was to have been Dudley Messenger. The other person was supposed to run what we would now know as the post production side of the department, and look after the engineering aspects of that. That was to have been me. And this little plan was being worked on and polished up and was unfortunately frustrated by Dudley's untimely death, which was a terrible shock to everybody. But probably most of all to Kip and I don't think many people realise why it was such a shock to Kip. His beautifully constructed plan was destroyed overnight. And it meant that until he had finally located the Ian ???? and imported him into the company, they everything went back on ice. And so that's how I came to be sitting ultimately in Cyril Crowhurst's chair. And I've tried to put a date on that I can't be too sure on my facts, but I would guess it must have been about 1971 or two. And all that happened. So I've continued in that position until the present day, although the title has changed a couple of times. And after a few years, the camera department of the studio which had been headed by Bert, Easy that Bert Easy. I think he retired and then like Alan Wadley abruptly died
and that left a gap and I recall being called by Dennis Holland who was just after Kip's death was effectively running the company is saying to me, Well, I want you to to look after the camera department and I said well I I'm not a camera person. I mean I I can use a camera to take snapshots. I'm interested in photography, but that doesn't qualify me to be head of the camera department of a major studio. He said, don't worry about that. It's just a titular responsibility. And indeed, it was because the department has been run by other people, most reasonably john, Jim Body. And my responsibility was more or less rubber stamping decisions and otherwise, not having much involvement to the point, in fact, where I realised that Jim Body was being left out of certain rather important meetings and circulation of information as therefore. And when I inquired `why this was, I was told it's because he's not head of a department. I pointed out that that was a nonsense, and they jolly well ought to be a head of a department because that's what he wasn't, in fact doing. And so the question then arises, well, if he's going to be head of a department, what are you I said? Well, if you still want him to report to me, I'll be something else, per se, head of technical services. And that's the way it's been ever since. And it's, it's not been particularly to my advantage, because I've occasionally been rung up by outside people inquiring about things, which I had no knowledge at all the things like front projection, which were not part of my remit, and the title misled people. So my successor, Graham Hartstone, will be called Head of post production, which is much more to the point. I think.
Interviewer 36:27
Right back on again, this is the question that I would like to ask you is that when you mentioned about the the sound department being run by two people, namely one for production, and one for post production, and the debate the sudden sad, demise off of Dudley? This This didn't go ahead. Can you explain a little bit about that reasons why perhaps it didn't go ahead.
Geoff Labram 36:56
Yeah, certainly. Of course, the main reason why I didn't go ahead was because Dudley died. But the the way that the the, the two man crew was supposed to operate, the department, I think, was a little unsure of itself. I rather think that Dudley's function was not strictly and totally to be in charge of production work and mine post production work. As I think I've mentioned before, I don't think those terms, and the the reality is that they describe how they actually come about, as clearly at that time, two aspects of the departments weren't, weren't quite as clearly separated. But Dudley was going to relate to our clients, our customers, and I was going to concentrate rather more on the engineering, I think that would have been the way it worked. Nonetheless, you rightly say that the floor crews would have been very much his baby. And it was therefore, at that time that the studio's involvement with sound work on production was beginning to diminish. from having something like five active floor crews, we were seeing less and less and less more people were either being fired or taking themselves off and becoming freelancers. And so that, I think that even if the if Kip's grand plan had in fact, come off, without Dudley would have found himself more and more being, shall we say the office wallah and the guy who was selling the department. Whereas I would have ended up as being its its chief engineer in the strict sense of that word. That's why I think it would have worked. And I think that it was actually in the process of change when that plan was evolved.
Interviewer 38:47
And that would be more The reason that the plan didn't come off rather than the path rather than there was nobody else to, to take over or take to fill the shoes that Dudley
Geoff Labram 38:57
Right I think that the few months that ensued between Duddley's death and the establishment of the excuse me, the new team, with Ian Lewis, acting as sort of surgeon bringing it into the, into the world that those insanely few months really saw the rise of post production and the falling away of production work. And so the time Ian and I was set in our respective positions, the scene actually probably did look already quite different. As well, I was looking back on it, I think that is probably about right.
Interviewer 39:46
We skip a bit now because we've got a long way to go back on and before we change the roll and I'll go over to what is actually in paragraph seven of the basic question here. And that is to ask you, whom when when you joined ACTT or as it was actually ACT and those only in those days. Can you tell us those any details about
Geoff Labram 40:07
details I joined ACT, I would say in 1948. It was borne in on me very quickly that I had arrived in the studio, but that I would be expected to join the union. And I think my initial attitude was I never had anything to do with unions before and my father was a manager, he wasn't in a union and I was a little sort of suspicious about the whole thing. But I was prevailed upon that this was not it was expected of me that one didn't exist in the sound department if you weren't a member of ACT So I said I alright and I joined my feelings about being involved with ACT since I have been mixed. Certainly many times when I've been glad that there was some organisation that one could go back to if if things got sticky. There have been other times when one has felt that, as in so many trades unions, the union was trying to drive the membership rather than the other way around. So my feelings have always been mixed. And when I did finally come into what has to be seen as a managerial role, why I felt that it was time to lodge my ticket, which I did. I found after a few months of trying to be a manager and trying to be an ACTT member that the two things really didn't seem to fit too well together, I felt that people would, would regard me with a certain amount of suspicion, especially on both sides of the fence if I appeared to be on both sides of the fence at the same time. So I lodged my ticket with no one seemed to mind or resent that in any way I felt then a little bit freer to deal with are judged to be right in the best sense of the word. And I've always, of course respected the feelings of people who are in either ACTT or what used to be NATKE because during the years I was an ACTT member, I came to realise that it was most certainly not all bad. There were many things about it, which were commendable and had to be respected. So I've always tried as a manager to respect the union, what it stood for, or at least the best thing that it stood for. And to to deal with it in a proper and businesslike fashion once or twice I've slipped with that was inadvertent. And I couldn't tell you who recruited me I rather suspect that it was John Dennis. I'm pretty sure it must have been because I mentioned that I once attended an ACT meeting during the war. And I believe he was the spokesman at that meeting. He was always very strong with ACT least he was in the days that I'm thinking of I don't know, in his latter most days, not so much. But yes, he was, I think a loyal member of ACT and I, I always respected him very, very much. He had been my first guardian and mentor back in 1941. And so if he said join the ACTT I didn't argue I joined
Of course, I think my memory that Pinewood had a very good history is fine record as far as ACTT relationships go. I don't remember them ever being any big disputes or worries here in the studio
When the first few years I was at the studio. After the war. There used to be studio meetings of employees almost weekly. But they were not normally stirred up in any sense by ACT, they were usually usually disputes involving members of NATKE
so this would be the Works Committee rather than just
what you meant exactly, which tended to be rather a little consortium of NATKE shop stewards and the odd electrical union stewards, and was in the occasional member the AES I seem to recall, it was it they might have made it and that AEU I beg your pardon. They they used to get involved in a very small way. ACTT was officially involved but always seemed a little bit, slightly aloof. And I came into this because it fell into part of my duties in those days to be the department Therefore, the studio's public address engineer may dignify rather grnd title, which means I had to drag out the great thing valve amplifiers and speakers and so forth. And then use them to do this at one time almost every week. A rostrum will be erected on a vacant stage and the Works Committee would stand up and speak through my microphone and address the workers and it was a very, very frequent occurrence.
Interviewer 45:26
And as Tim said, there must have been quite a collection of people in to have required a PA to to address them.
Geoff Labram 45:32
Yes, there was quite a collection, they would come to two or 300, probably which was a fair proportion of the studio payroll. But I think also that the people who were on the platform like to feel that their voices were amplified. It's not....................................
Interviewer 0:08
This is side two of the interview with Geoff Labram.
Geoff Labram 0:17
Okay,
Interviewer 0:20
there's continuing on, can you then do give us a rundown, as best as you can of the period of time when you were a sound maintenance engineer from your assistant days upwards, as to the duties and the type of work and the calls that you had, and probably the problems were the how reliable the equipment was and what sort of equipment was being used. And, yeah, information of that nature.
Geoff Labram 0:49
Certainly I suppose for about the first third of my time here, there were production crews and equipment in use. So part of the department's effort obviously was deployed on that side of things. Indeed, I would even say that when I first joined in 1948, post production as we now call it was quite a minor part of the of the department activity. We were barely into things like post synching and effects recording, I mean, it had to be done, but it was pretty new, I think dubbing was was just beginning to climb out of very primitive conditions. I'll mention that again in a minute. But floor recording, of course was on a grand scale, both in the size bulk of it equipment and on the number of crews. I've known times when the studio had nine shooting units going at the same time. Normally we had something like I think five of our own crews working in fact, I say our own crews, what one has to realise that in 1948 our own crews but the only crews that were here, freelance people were almost unheard of. So that the the studio's limited and when I say we had nine you said this for probably crews that had come in from another studio for some reason to take up stage space or whatever. We are talking of the Rank Organisation which then had a great many studios, something like 13 at its peak, I recall, so that people were always coming down from Gainsborough from the bush, or Ealing. And in turn, occasionally, we made expeditions there, I certainly went to Ealing. So the number of shooting units went up and down as rank productions were moving around between the various studios, based principally in one but occasionally taking space and others my own duties Therefore, as an assistant maintenance engineer, we're almost at once defined as being playback on public address assistant, which meant that whenever playback was required on the studio floor, I was the one who fell for it. And that actually became my number one concern for quite a number of years. Playback was conducted from acetate disc recordings, which were made with an in to out cut. We're all original cuts. And we're playing at 78.26 revolutions per minute. That being a convenient gear ratio from the motor speed of the interlock system, which was the one in use in the studio. The equipment to play this was very large, very heavy. We had MSS turntables made by that little firm Colnrook or around there. And they were massive castings. They had a I think it was a quarter horsepower interlock motor underneath, they didn't need it, but that was the only size motor that one can obtain. And they had a linear tracking system for the the pickup arm which had two ball bearing wheels running in a V track and which could be lifted off the record by a lever and will then engage with a screw which had 10 threads to the inch. And it had kind of drum at the end of that screw which enabled you to by choosing the particular thread that you engage the arm with. And by turning the drum round you could get an accuracy of probably something like a 100th of an inch on The position at which the needle would drop into the grove. Of course, there weren't 100 grooves to the inch there so that the needle never dropped straight into the groove. It matters very much whereabouts in its rotation it was, you could never in other words hitter, a cue.
Better than one third of the desk, we weren't sure which side of the land it would fall down on anyway. So one got used to this kind of technique. And it was all the more frightening because the equipment not only as I've said, was heavy, but it had to be taken onto the stage itself. So that the the operator, which was usually me, was faced with trying to keep the equipment clean. On a shooting stage, as anyone who's ever worked on it knows, things are always falling dust and dirt and bits of this is that. And this was not only a hazard in the sense that bits would fall into the record or into the grooves of the record. But worse, they'd fall into this V track and the tiniest fragment of anything that fell into that would stop them pick up moving, and we will be embarrassed by the horrible Repeat on the groove which would go on indefinitely and send the director straight up the wall with frustration. So that and the ever present risk of a bad lock, were two of the excitements that kept the challenge alive. Bad lock, when interlock was was switched on on the interlock system, the Western Electric interlock system, if one had been unfortunate enough to get one. Luckily, it didn't happen too often would cause that massive turntable to leap out of the box by probably half an inch that would dance up and down. While the bad lock was on making the most ferocious noise that would frighten the artists alive. And so it was full of excitement. Being the kind of person I was because I was never really satisfied with carting a load of boxes onto the stage. And after somewhile I once I began to feel my feet and use a bit of initiative, I would start to incorporate them into something that was wheelable onto the stage. And at one point I managed to acquire, I never found out what it was made for a an aluminium cabinet rather than the shape of an upright piano and not a lot smaller. And I managed to put one of the turntables inside this thing. The power amplifier, which was a Western Electric, Ra 1086 amplifier, weighed something like two thirds of 100 weight and was capable of producing the massive output of 10 watts. And that lived in the bottom it did give the thing a certain amount of stability, I'd say everything was connected together with EP six canons, cables, the half an inch thick, that would be a motor cable, and a start position cable, both of them thick, 100 foot cables, there will be a speaker cable, which will be of the same sort but for convenience. And all of this lot coiled up would be wheeled onto the stage with his massive, great cabinet. And I can well recall that the first time I took it on to a stage. My approach have been heralded by the fact that it rattle like the dickens it was wheel with its hard wheels along the concrete covered way in the middle of Pinewood. When I arrived on the stage, and proudly wheeled my wonderful thing into the middle of the set. I immediately had a chef's hat plunked on my top and an apron wrapped around me and the notice was dumped on the top frying tonight. I hit my face with a bit of red. That was playback and he went on that way for quite a long while until we involved ourselves with a picture called hotel Sahara, which starred Yvonne de Carlo and add Peter Ustinov in a minor part P I think had written the play.
I was told by john Mitchell who was to mix it that this was going to involve a lot of playback, probably something like 11 musical numbers, and he wanted it all to go very smoothly. So this is when I allowed my initiative to run really riot, I discovered that the whole thing was going to be based on on D stage and C stage next door, which meant that it was they'd open the possibility of installing the equipment for playback in the sound department rooms which had glass windows and which looked down on the two stages. It would therefore be possible to put did in there permanently during the duration of the production so we'd have a clean steady environment and so i got on did that and then i decided that if this was going to be reliable i better have all the disks cued up we'll have two have everything and they'd all be cued up every 10 seconds throughout their length so that was done and took some time so when knew exactly how to set the pick up for any given moment then i decided that something a bit better than the way we worked previously which is or someone would shout and he put playback on would would be a good idea so i got hold of some an empty rack and started to build things into this rack including relays and signal lights and a patch bay for this thing to patch at the various points of stages and so on and after something like two months work because i had that long leeway to do it the whole system was complete and boy was i proud of it and at that point Alan Whatley decided to take some notice of it i can only feel he cannot have been unaware that it was going on because otherwise he would have asked me what i was doing that he decided that his body will have a look and he came and had a look and said well alright if you insist on doing it this way but you must have a way out it must be able to override all of this equipment if if trouble develops he was convinced that there was i was just making it over complicated and that it would cause trouble i'm glad to say that it worked like a dream and that john mitchell was able to control the playback silently by giving me light instructions and operating relays from my unit on the studio floor and i was able to work in and calm conditions and clean conditions and nothing worked as i say beautifully and that was then adopted as departmental policy we have this common play back and it was spirited away to the to the fastest? of the sound department building and i was then commanded to rebuild it in there and make two lots of it and so i found a little glassed in enclosure and built the thing in there two turntables to two amplifiers two sets of relays and we used the manifold lines that existed and in throughout the studio for running motors and so forth and playback lines are duly installed massives cable runs at all stages and it became the way of thing the way the way things were done we now have central playback and we did actually have one or two amusing things like for example when two productions were working on the same time at the same time on the same day we were using the dual system and unfortunately we had i think a monastery scene on one with monks chanting and the french cafe or something on the other and the records got put on the wrong turntables that is a that is true story and whether it was done deliberately of course is something which i can't speak about all these i won't but that was the sort of thing i was in love with at that time
Interviewer 13:39
did you did you cut the acetates as well
Geoff Labram 13:42
usually that was done by john hood who still looked me up incidentally
Interviewer 13:48
i remember he used to refer to it as cutting washers and when well
Geoff Labram 13:51
cutting washers was something which i subsequently did as we'll come to shortly but technically speaking cutting waters meant cutting right through the acetate until the aluminium showed but yes dear old john used to cut all these acetate discs sometimes almost by the dozen even know when especially when a big picture was coming out with lots of musical numbers in it
Interviewer 14:15
the originals having been recorded in those days on optical of course
Geoff Labram 14:18
yes yes because you're now touching onto another thing which is recording on magnetic and that all of this was going on around about the same time so perhaps we could just mention that Bob the data
Interviewer 14:32
just before i guess just as a point of interest he referred to the mixer to our hotel sahara as john mitchell is that the the pine wood john john w mitchell yes because this is always a confusing thing because there was a metro i don't know if mitchell was a he really was strange on the River Kwai mitchell is the way that i saw
Geoff Labram 14:51
now john w was yes accidental yes
Interviewer 14:57
yeah okay and just just pause okay And we're running again.
Geoff Labram 15:01
Well, I just mentioned the advent of magnetic recording. And of course, that was one of the most important new developments that took place during the early part of my time here at Pinewood. Before magnetic recording on film became known about all recording and been done on photographic soundtracks, which had a number of disadvantages one of the most important of which was that a track having been recorded was not available until the print of it came from the laboratories the following day. So, there was no instant playback. And the quality of the track indeed could not be assessed until until those that print has occurred. We always were recording in those days on variable density system, which was a very difficult system to maintain accurately in the exposure and treatment by the laboratory. There were elaborate things like Delta DB tests and so forth, which long since passed into, into the history The Forgotten history of sound technology. And furthermore, the what was used if all these original recordings made on production, where was a push pull track, it was to 100 mil, push pull density tracks, capable In fact, under good conditions of extremely good quality, as some of the old films now shown on television reveal, they could of course be plagued by noise or which meant that sometimes spotting of the print was necessary when these tracks were brought into the dubbing theatre joins all had to be blooped with ink. Otherwise, they made a colossal plunk. And of course, when on location, the daily setting up tests all had to be developed on location which we did actually have one truck with a built in darkroom, which was a great luxury But otherwise, it was changing bags and bottles and goodness knows what the light bulbs were always vulnerable. It was not impossible to break one with overload, or sometimes even without overloads. And changing a light bulb in the field was obviously a big holdup. So the advent of magnetic recording was a revolution, instant playback was possible reuse of the stock was possible. So it was an obvious choice for the future. But it didn't go down too well with everybody. The people who were laying soundtracks were decidedly opposed to it in the beginning. They couldn't, as they said, See the mods. Skilled sound editors in those days were quite capable of looking at a soundtrack and forming a pretty good idea of what was on it just by looking at it. And certainly they could see where it started or where the the sync point as for example, the clapper was simply by looking at it. They they've couldn't do that with magnetic and felt that they were they were encountering a major difficulty. And one attempt was made to overcome this problem by endeavouring to get the film manufacturer to put a white stripe on the film. And people were then trying to rig up rather crude devices using some sort of pen. I think the attempt was actually made with the very new biro pen that had been brought in to regulate to and fro with the general amplitude envelope of the sound, so that the more obvious points in the soundtrack were identified by a big wiggle on the white stripe. Needless to say, the film manufacturers weren't very pleased with that. And the devices the wiggling the pen weren't really reliable either. So the thing very quickly died. The sound editors found that the problem was not as great as they'd thought. And their efforts were aided by the invention of the track reader, which was a little box containing an amplifier and loudspeaker and a kind of shoe on the front of the sound head and magnetic head. And you were able to pass the film manually over this shoe and hear was on the track. That of course, later was subsequently was supplanted by the the synchronizer or in the earlier days the the rather more sophisticated track reader which was synchronised with only one wheel if you remember it, which enabled you to pass the film over the head by winding a handle rather than just pulling it
nevertheless, As these crude devices cracked the the objections that sound editors had and maybe they soon realised that the advantage of the medium were in their favour and adopted magnetic and that's it's been there ever since. As the the the equipment that was used for recording magnetic well in the first instance, it was entirely photographic record is converted least it was in Pinewood. The location recording up until that time had always been conducted on what we call 500 channels, Western electric 500 channels of which we had three. And these were a scaled down version of the more solid studio recorder the 600 channel. But they were nevertheless massive, they require the truck working. And they were the only equipment that was available then when magnetic suddenly hit us. And West RX or Western Electric as they were quickly came out with a conversion which involved in sir inserting a magnetic head on a slightly flexible arm and pressing it against the film as it wrapped around what had been the optical scanning drum. And recording it on that principle were made for quite a number of years with reasonable satisfaction. Because that quality of recording would never have survived today, because there were too many things against it. One thing was, of course, that as the head wore, it was likely that the contact between the head and the film would would suffer. So that it was necessary to to check that very frequently. And also, there was no provision at all, in the beginning at any rate for a monitoring head, one simply monitored the signal as it entered the recorder and hope for the best. At least you could run it back afterwards if you wanted to, by switching the record head over to replay. But everything looked at from the point of view of 1988 was incredibly crude, incredibly simple. And it was a marvel that it worked well enough to satisfy the motion picture industry. But it did. Probably it did because the machinery that was converted was so good in the first place. Inside the what would now be called the post production end of the studio. The reproducers that were used in the dubbing theatre were again converted photographic reproducers. They were the ra 1251 which was, in my estimation, the Rolls Royce of all machines, there was a beautiful machine made to scan photographic soundtracks first of all in three different standards. And built absolutely like a Rolls Royce. And the conversion was made on the same principle by taking away all the beautiful optics that have been on there and stuffing a head against the film as wore around the drum. There was no flexible mounting in this case. So that one was in fact relying on deforming the film as it went over the head in order to achieve any pressure at all, which plainly was not a good way of working. Yet we did that for a long time and we used converted machines of that type for recording. Eventually from the studio floor, the playback which I mentioned had been centralised, then recording from the floor was centralised to be set up three recording rooms in the in the sound block itself and all sound was conveyed to and from them by cabling, perfect cabling ending in the studio floor on cables from the wall. And the operator sat up in the sound department totally divorced from his crew. He had communication by telephone, and that was all and it was not uncommon for the crew to start work on the floor not knowing that the man upstairs hadn't even come in for the day. So magnetic was used that way and the transfer department had to be set up, which again use some of the same machinery to transfer the chosen takes from the master film onto a film which the cutting rooms would use. The master film was hired to the production and it was reckoned it would last for four productions. It was stored for a certain length of time and then it was wiped. By the time we got to the fourth production is beginning to get decidedly brittle.
Again, we could never live in that fashion today. acetate film getting brittle. So those were the ways that magnetic came in first. The next development was the Leevers Rich synchro pass. This invented I imagined by Norman Leevers himself, but made by his company was the first truly portable sound recording equipment to be used in this country. And, okay, most two transportable units which can be plugged together, connected to a 12 volt battery, which was a third object to be carried, and used quarter inch tape. Now, the synchronism, as widely known was achieved by a pulse recorded on one of the two tracks, the other carrying the audio, a nice wide gap in between to prevent crosstalk being a problem. And the pulse itself was 1000 hertz, 1000 cycles modulated by 50 hertz, which, in turn, the 50 was derived from the camera or the source of supply that drove the camera. And it worked very well. The problem was that it was extremely difficult to convince the American producers that it worked very well. They could not believe that anything that didn't actually have holes in it can possibly remain in synchronism. And they were sceptical of the whole thing, thought that the ignorant Europeans was pulling the wool over their eyes and tried to insist on having proper film. But they eventually cottoned on I suppose, when things like Ranger town and so forth got invented in the States, they then began to believe in it. The difficulty of course, with with the Leevers Rich material was that it had to be transferred. And that was a bit of an adventure. In the beginning, it was done more or less, by hit or miss methods are one used a quarter inch transfer deck, playing into a film recording channel. And synchronism was achieved by playing the pulse, displaying it on a cathode ray tube, and maintaining the pattern of it constant when the time base of the cathode ray tube was triggered from something derived from the mains or whatever was driving the recorder. Since the machinery was quite unsophisticated, it required no little skill on the part of the operator to keep that pulse stationary. And it could indeed be quite a wearing experience to do a long spell of rushes transfer. I can recall a film of ours that went to Norway, where the pulse was in some way, spoiled or lost, and which quite a lot of the rushes had to be transferred quite manually by watching what was happening on the screen, where the transfer deck was taken into the theatre. And I believe it was Alan Whatley, who took upon himself responsibility of trying to maintain the tape at the right speed so that the voices actually fitted the lip movements of the artists were very dodgy that was, it may indeed have been due to the excessively cold temperatures. I'm not quite sure what the cause of the problem was. But it was sometimes he had to have many gooes before he got it right. Later, of course, Leevers Rich equipment came out with self synchronising reproducers. The the S T two was a very, a very well engineered machine. We had one an ST two r which is actually capable of recording with pulse as well. But these were over quite wide range of pulse error. They would in fact synchronise themselves though this machine would synchronise itself against a mains reference. And we then had to arrange that our film recorder was driven by a synchronous motor from the mains as well. And that principle was used for quite a number of years with with those tapes, and was subsequently modified for use when the Nagra came in, when we changed the head and the synchronising system and used it to transfer nagra.
first time we ever saw Nagra was when the gentleman who was a professor from Canada, arrived in this country carrying one on a trip around Europe to record and study ecclesiastical bells, church bells, Cathedral bells, any Bell we actually call them Professor bells, but didn't know that and it was the first nagra we had ever seen it it didn't have pulse it was early one and was not intended for that sort of work anyway but i remember that the general reaction amongst the hierarchy of the department as it then was was that anything like that was just a toy and was incapable of doing anything proper anyway when they actually tried it out because professor bells was quite accommodating it they were sort of reluctantly surprised to find that the quality was really quite reasonable but i mean it was only thin tape anyway i mean pretty small pretty ridiculous thing it must have been a couple of years or so afterwards that we were ordering them by by the not by the gross but by considerable quantitative to feed the requirements of the industry and the nagra became the universal workhorse that it still is has quit which is a tribute to the ingenuity of its design on the quality of its manufacturer so that is the early history of magnetic since then of course magnetic on film has gone on from one thing to another it led quite early on actually to the possibilities of the sound for cinema scope all of a sudden we will into stereo and that was a major upset because that meant that our theatres had to have a major re-equipment when all of a sudden had to be able to cope with stereo sound in dubbing and of course it was stereo sound or magnetic release so the one had to produce a a multitrack film master which can be used by people like technicolour to sound a striped print but the that time i think that those who were guiding the engineering decisions of the department that didn't include me were taking their lead from america because plainly the the techniques were being evolved very rapidly over there and one of the techniques that very quickly established itself was that you didn't ever attempt to try and do proper stereo true stereo that simply did not work in the cinema environment and everything therefore was recorded strictly monaural and the pan pot became the the badge of the stereo mixer and one had to have pan pots and they had very tight images deliberately they did not spread themselves across the screen because what was the point of having stereo if you didn't know where it was coming from so a very small spread from channel to channel was the order of the day and one heard stories that Todd AO we're building desks that were an enormous length and had four men who were running up and down on rubber tire chairs coping with it all
Interviewer 33:15
go in you go in your own time
Geoff Labram 33:17
right well at pinewood we had to adopt stereo and that involved in creating a panning desk which was added to the equipment in our theatre and enabled the moving of the sound to conform to the picture to be carried out we were involved with some quite early stereo work using that equipment i think for example of the the vikings was one of famous film which has been revived on television once or twice and El Cid was another early one and these were the this was introducing us to a world of dubbing where the dubbing was not finished in three weeks as i had been the case but sometimes three months so a new vista was opening up of major work and international work as well the next big event i suppose in the stereo post production world was was dolby but it's necessary i think to put that in a timeframe of its own as stereo dubbing had progressed the number of tracks on which we were endeavouring to record had increased and as they increase they got narrower and the combination of more tracks and narrower tracks meant that noise track noise was beginning to begin become quite a worry and so six track which we were by Then beginning to embrace was a very definite worry. And Dolby approached us as they must have done many other recordings studios of various sorts with the the ability to reduce the amount of noise that was added during the process of recording and reproducing magnetic sound. And Ewen Allen?, who was fronting the the sales effort for the company came to me and said, was I interested? So naturally I said, I am interested. So I said, Yes, they, the aggregation of noise in stereo was getting to be a bother and certainly their system. If it did all that it was claimed it would be a big help in that regard. And then almost as an afterthought, I said that surely the thing you really ought to be looking at is the the noise that comes from an optical track when it is reproduced. And at that point, I don't think he really knew what an optical track was. And we talked some more about it. And it was decided that, that Dolby would make a trial to see how well their process would apply. And so they lent us a Dolby encoder. And we were able to make one extra transfer of a reel of a film that was then going on, they mixed by Ken Barker with Dolby encoding. And when the print of this was returned from a laboratory, Dolby came down with a professional quarter inch tape recorder, and we listened to the material in the theatre and to their chagrin, we couldn't perceive any difference at all, between the encoded and decoded track. And the one which had no Dolby effect on it at all. they were so intrigued by this, that they took recordings of both away with them. And we really didn't hear very much from them for a long period afterwards. They were working on this design, find out why it was that the Dolby benefit, which was a proven thing was not noticeable on an optical track. And the work they did on that led to the statements which they made thereafter. And they've repeated many times since, which was that the the academy curve, which we had bowed down to for so long, which is defined in terms of the electrical overall frequency response that took effect over the whole process of recording and especially reproducing in the cinema, and which caused a massive fall off of the higher frequencies was entirely responsible for masking whatever benefit Dolby noise reduction might have been responsible for. And that of course was, I suppose somewhat embarrassing to them.
But then they very sensibly put their thinking caps on and realised that the answer to that was to say, Well, look, it's pretty shocking sound quality really judged by any ordinary civilised standards. And wouldn't it would be far better if the cinema industry addressed itself to recording and far better quality and using Dolby noise reduction to get rid of the the great increase of noise that would result from that so that became their new sales tactic. And they formed an association with the studios and Elstree were noted, notably with Tony Lumkin, and they got working with him and he in turn had a friendship with Eric Rasmussen in Denmark, who had been investigating the practical working possibilities of electro acoustic measurements and some form of standardisation for what might be achieved using Dolby noise reduction. were set up at the first thing that they suggested was that everything should be recorded flat from the microphone to the ear of the beholder in the cinema. And this I remember was communicated through to me by rank film equipment, who had somehow worked themselves into the position of being middlemen in all of this. They had became selling agents for Dolby equipment. And I remember having a fairly heated telephone call late one evening with the with rank film equipment saying that if you go for something as ridiculous as that you're probably going to be sued for making holes in People's screens as voice curls come flying through. And, of course, what actually happened later on was that Dolby realised that to produce a sound, which was a flat reproduction of the original recording, as heard in the cinema seat was impracticable, and in fact was even unpleasant. And so they compromised in association with Elstree and the so called Dolby curve, which is now recognised as ISO curve x, was evolved, and has remained So ever since. Dolby, of course, succeeded in planting people on ISO committees and thereby getting it ratified internationally. So that was the beginnings of Dolby, which was monaural of course, originally, and in order to make the whole idea of selling this rather expensive equipment as cinema owners more attractive, they provided it with a facility to be used on non Dolby encoded tracks, thereby as they use the expression cleaning them up. And it became for a little while quite popular, because the trailers, the regular trailers and and in particular, the commercials that were run in cinemas became so worn, and therefore so noisy, that they were almost a joke. And the dolby clean up mode did in fact reduce the disturbing effect of these noises quite markedly. And rank film equipment were in a position to sell quite a lot of them, which they did. Unfortunately, cinema projectionists were in the habit of improving the sound of the prints they were running by way of entertainment or by leaving me. They clean up in film as well. And I believe I'm right in saying that the early copies of Sleuth which were run up in West End were run with the cleanup in and they didn't sound exactly as they were intended to in the dubbing theatre as a result. And the idea of Dolby clean up became somewhat discredited after not too long a time. In the meantime, Dolby have been working with Elstree and decided that the way to record dialogue now is to record it without any equalisation at all. And to pass it on through the dubbing process without any equalisation at all. This, of course, again, became discredited after a little bit when people realised that it was all very well being purist about it, but you got to hear what the man said. And sometimes you needed to pull that out of a lot of other things fine, if there was nothing else going on at the time. But when does that happen? And they had also interested themselves had darwinopterus?? in the fact that Kodak had manufactured or cause to be manufactured a modified RCA recorder, which was capable of recording two optical tracks in the space of one
half size side by side. Kodak had tried making stereo recordings using this process, and it had been decided, after a bit that this was not on. The famous hole in the middle effect had been observed in a cinema, you could tell it was either coming from the left or the right, or whichever was nearest to you, but it never seemed to come from the middle. And the thing had been abandoned but the camera for recording the sound it still existed. So Dolby laboratories along with RCA got hold of this camera and then realised that if they could crack the problem of the hole in the middle, stereo on optical was now a possibility because it would be adequately quiet. And they got their clever heads together and came up with a matrix system which enabled a centre channel to be reconstituted out of two. And the Dolby stereo system was born. And it spread pretty rapidly. Everybody wanted to get on on this wonderful new bandwagon stereo tracks for the price of Mono. There was a great new watch words that everybody wanted. There was only one camera in the world at that time. And that was the one that Elstree Elstree had been chosen because they had a history of RCA and we used to operate in those cameras. And this camera was a bit of a devil to set up because it was really to two separate optical systems cast into one. And that camera has continued almost up to the present days dishing out optical sound negatives of very, very acceptable quality. Only in more recent times in the last four or five years have competitive cameras been developed and they have now proliferated worldwide and they are now by no means uncommon. We've had one at Pinewood now for a couple of years or more, producing high quality negatives...................................................
Interviewer 0:08
this is side three on cars cassette number two the a side of cassette number two the interview with Geoff Labram okay in your time
Geoff Labram 0:19
right i was saying that better cameras or more modern cameras had come out and were proliferating all over the world we had one at pinewood for a couple of years and typical of its breed it's producing first class results the matrix used by dolby laboratories to produce the centre channel out of two also was developed at a slightly later date to produce a surround track therefore achieving in effect four channels of sound out of two on the film and the technology for achieving this which was originally developed from these sound theory qos or is it was the sql quadrophonic system and the licence has been improved over the years and now he's capable using what they either optimistically referred to as the infinity chip of producing a very high level of separation between a surround channel and the onscreen channels that separation of course is rather important because its effect is very very very noticeable to anyone if it's not as good as it should be the system is very phase conscious and that has meant of the studio in common with all other studios has had to address the engineering problems of recording not only better quality with quieter systems but also to be very very careful about the phase relationships between tracks the slightest error in this direction can produce major shifts of the of the image in stereo so that in itself has been the occasion for a considerable improvement in the standards to which the department has had to work over the years i can remember when achieving a response that was audible to eight kilohertz was considered quite a good day's work nowadays of course that is not only vastly surpassed but also one is having to do it in many many tracks which have got to be carefully matched one with the other and the probably the biggest tool to aid that process to speed it up and make it practical has been the adoption of the real time analyzer which was originally developed as a method of assessing the electro acoustic performance of a stereo system or any system that mat for that matter carried into the auditorium and used with a microphone it was soon recognised that the same instrument when connected directly to an audio channel would give an immediate appraisal of its frequency response performance and in the main dubbing theatre we had a count one day and realise that we had 72 tracks in there and many studios have more than that and to maintain all of those to a good standard and an equal standard would have been unthinkable by the old traditional means of recording tones and repaying them one at a time and measuring them with an instrument and writing them down a zero england? to 1000 1000 hertz that would have taken 20 times longer and to reply to a carefully recorded pink noise sound into an analyzer will give the answer instantly the great advantage to is that adjustment can be carried out watching the effect so that not only can you find out what the state of things are but you can put it right immediately and i remember writing a report to the effect as in my judgement the speed up of that kind of work could have been by a factor of up to 100 times so dolby dolby laboratories in a sense where the trigger that made all that happen and their technology and continues to march on our floor when you've sold everybody one technology there's no only one way to do that invent new one and we are into ASR which offers the possibility of giving the kind of audio performance that does approach that have the
More sophisticated forms of audio recording, compact disc, and whatever it gives, as I say, an approach to that level of quality and can indeed afford the producer a fairly good substitute for a 70 millimetre very expensive print release in 35 millimetre photographic soundtrack.
Interviewer 5:30
Okay. Did you have any we go back a little bit now on studio history? Did you have any sound connections or connections with the independent frame, when that was introduced into this?
Geoff Labram 5:42
Yes in fact, it was one of the first things I got involved with when I joined the company in 1948. Pinewood had spent a very large sum of money on their investment in this technology. It ran I believe in those days, something like 2 million pounds on if you turn that into today's money that was a vast sum. I didn't have any sound connections within the better frame because in essence independent frame was not about sound, it was about a way of making motion pictures without building large an elaborate and costly sets. And the the sets in fact, were usually the foreground pieces or small parts of that which were built on rolling platforms and could be brought onto the stage quickly and pushed together the greater part of the background and in many cases of the structure being filled in by projective pictures projected from large size transparencies. And of course we are thinking of black and white films. So the the studio's enormous involvement there comprised a kit of equipment including huge slide projectors, in effect, using 300 am arcs which were called steropticins for some reason I never discovered and the the means to position these gigantic projectors, so that the line of their axis of projection lined up with the axis of the camera lens. Since this was regarded at that time as being informed were elaborated in the extreme. The so called North tunnel of the Pinewood Studios was built for this express purpose. Long narrow and high. It contained a pair of of railway lines built into the floor, along which a tower was able to roll, which was capable of lifting as many as three of these projectors up to the ceiling. They were mounted on a platform which could be wound up or down this tower. And every day, the art director for a film to be made an independent frame had to prepare drawings of following days setups. The studio floor was marked out in I think they were three foot squares, metres weren't really popular then. And the drawings were pre marked in squares as well. So that his layout drawings of how the set was to be assembled, where they're positioned where they are identified by reference to these squares. And the thing I think that really got up the noses of directors and cameramen were the tight requirements for positioning of camera, whose height was quoted to the nearest quarter inch are marked on the drawing, and whose position was also identified very closely on the drawing. It had to be so that it could face the projector wherever that happens to be. And so the North tunnel was built so that the throw could be great enough to fill a screen, which I believe was about 30 feet by 20, which covered the the stage end of this long tunnel. And there was also a second tunnel built at about 80 degrees off the side of this stage, which was slightly smaller, and endeavour to fill a smaller screen so that a house for example could be built, and the camera could pan around and look out of windows on two sides of the set and see the open countryside. The projectors that were made available were not only still projectors with large transparencies that we also had moving projectors, back back projection projectors, in fact, and the problem there was to get enough light The reason in fact, why this Tower was capable of accommodating three projectors, because the idea was that you had three projectors all with the same picture. And they piled their images, one on top of the other. And the fact that they were all coming in from slightly different angles was one of those little things that you had to overlook.
But you've got three times the light, you can imagine that the ancillary services that had to go with all this lot were, considerable the power to the arc, there are 300, amp arcs and three of them. And there were talkback systems, from one from the projector, to the, to the screen, and then to the camera and to the sound. And it was with that aspect of it as I was involved with others, because there was a massive installation. And all these huge towers that were the one I described was not the only one all had to have many, many cables attached them in such a manner that as they rose and fell or whatever they cables looped with them. We were manufacturing steel cleats and screen these cables to to to the equipment even whilst it was being in it being used to make films only four films were made by this process and it was abandoned. And that 2 million pound investment was practically down the drain the studio had in order to get the system underway, set up what was then known as the technical directors department, which has a very high flying people in it. And indeed some of its work was all of those were possibly I was it happened just before I came back and 48 it had been constituted under the general ages of Robert Watson Watt of radar fame. So a lot of his pet sciencetists were involved I've no idea what it cost the rank, J Arthur Rank Organisation to pay them. But they were given a free hand and they invented things like the gyro crane, and j Arthur Rank Organisation underslung camera crane, which was another disaster and never really used in anger very much. And eventually, these gentlemen were one at a time paid off. And only one or two who really had got their feet on the ground, survived for a bit longer, and before the thing faded completely from view. So that was that was independent frame, it was a brave attempt at cost saving, which must in fact, have actually cost the organisation a vast sum of money. Vista Vision was another thing I think he wanted to ask me about
Interviewer 12:36
when you touched on that slightly with
Geoff Labram 12:38
Vista Vision, of course, was a paramount idea, intended to achieve better picture quality by not only photographing on an image of twice the size, but also projecting in the cinema from an image twice the size of that the image was like a frame, and therefore lay long ways along the film, and projector had to project the film. With the film passing horizontally instead of vertically through it. The camera likewise had to do the same thing. And Pinewood again, jumped in with both feet and bought nine. Again, I don't think we haven't used them to any great extent in anger. And they gathered spiders for a long time that eventually have all been sold off one at a time or in small lots, and have now acquired a very, relatively high value, since it has been discovered in recent times that they make an ideal way of recording a process image which can be used for front projection with high quality. And so not only vistavision cameras, but vistavision projectors now highly sought after items, and just shows how technology can go right round in a circle and find a new application.
Interviewer 14:02
That's very interesting. I think we cover the upheavals as well, that question as a sound engineer specialising in motion pictures, what have been the most important technical changes in Motion Picture sound during your career
Geoff Labram 14:19
Wel I preared an answer for that one, Bob good. It will take about 10 seconds to deliver magnetic sound, stereo sound, and then rock and roll. Rock and roll in the in the dubbing theatre, obviously was a revolution. And looping was a revolution. The idea of being able to make up the material in an endlessly repeating loop was an innovation which just struck a world like a thunderbolt. And I believe I'm right in saying that Pinewood was the first studio in this country if could even have been in the world for all I know, too. adopted. It was made for us by Gaumont Kaylee and I can remember that when the equipment was delivered we didn't think that there's been designed right and altered it. Gaumont Kalee came along chided us gently and pointed out there are ways because we were wrong. And they put it back to how he said they work.
Interviewer 15:21
This was with optical sound. This was with magnetic and this was for the putting switching bias on and off. And yes,
Geoff Labram 15:29
absolutely if it worked, it worked splendidly. In fact, if I may digress for a few seconds Gaumont Kalee which was a rank company part of rank film equipment was a company which had existed as British Acoustics for a great many years. And in my view was a very much underrated company. I believe they made first rate equipment. And if they had been given a free handler and allowed to carry on, I think they could have today been a dominant force. Unfortunately, John Davis, Sir John Davis as he now is, didn't see enough profit in it and closed them down abruptly overnight. In my view, a tragedy. The people who were working for them were, I think it was fair to say, pretty nearly brilliant. The quality of workmanship was admirable. And the equipment what is more complicated as it seemed at first carried on working with utter reliability for years and years and years. And I think it was first class a terrible shame. The Rank Organisation had a wide open opportunity there and blow it.
Interviewer 16:42
I the saving of British acoustic probably would have been if the American anti trust laws had come earlier and the the the hold and RCA and Western Electric later Westrex had on the motion picture sound industry.
Geoff Labram 16:59
I think you're right. I think youv'e blown blown the breath of fairness into my diatribe there. Yes, I think you're right. As long as those licencing arrangements, punitive licencing arrangements which both Western Electric and its successors and RCA had over the western film industry, I think were it was unfortunate and made life for British acoustic pretty difficult. Nonetheless, we were buying the equipment. At that time, we were we were commanded to buy it out of loyalty to our own organisation, and it stood alongside Western Electric equipment. And in certain respects it it made it look not exactly silly, but it certainly was more state of the art at that time. And at the time that it was shut down. I had even better things in the pipeline, which we were consulting along with them. So my disappointment was great, I think was the next, getting back to my list. The next thing that came along was high speed, high speed rock and roll, which was slow to adopt, very slow. But it is all of these things constitute very high capital investment. It's, I think, not very widely realised in areas outside film work just how big a capital investment has production equipment is. I worked it out once in writing could have been an article for the big SDS journal for all I know that the cost of installing the reproducers in a dubbing theatre would build a music recording establishment from the ground up and equip it to a very lavish scale. And that's when you think about that, and the fact that in a dubbing theatre, you've got to have the theatre, got to have projection equipment, you've got to have the mixing console, the recorders all of that would have to be added to the bill. So the cost of the dubbing theatre is monumental. And keeping it up to date by replacing its equipment totally with state of the art gear is a monumental cost to one which Pinewood has always found difficult. And we have done a lot of updating of equipment always have done had as we most other people who haven't got one theatre to update we've got 4 automation on the mixing console is another innovation which those who have got it in theatre too find like the domestic telephone and the fridge, something they couldn't live without now. It's broaden the horizons, their capabilities and everything else. And the the new mixing console, which we're talking about now for theatre, one will obviously have all of that a bit more. And I've already mentioned the other big thing, which was the use of electro acoustic measurement as a way of getting some degree of standardisation of the sound quality that is to be found right through the chain and into the cinema. The old Academy curve that I mentioned before was simply an electrical curve. And because it was recognised that not all loudspeakers sounded the same, there was one curve for each kind of loudspeaker as something that people don't always realise. There was a little book with about half a dozen or more different slightly different characteristics, one for each type of loudspeaker system.
Interviewer 21:00
Right, the other your fellow of the BK STS, when were you given that honour and proper citation,
Geoff Labram 21:07
I can't remember the words of the citation I was given it was it two years ago. And I was enormously gratified by receiving that I feel that in our field of work, there really isn't any other honour that we can really aspire to. I mean, Oscars are not for the like of people like me. Not unless we have invented something really remarkable that the whole world falls down in admiration of, I think to be to be given that honour by your peers is something that you can justifiably be pleased with them proud of. And I think the citation was a pretty general one sort of having been a good boy and done a good job at for rather a long time, in the sound side of the motion picture business, because I had been additionally honoured by the President's Award the year before, which I really thought was, was enough. I was so pleased with that, but they have a fellowship. To follow that was really well, you know, that is made me feel so good about retiring. I feel that, you know, what, effort I have put in is as obviously seen some recognition and I think no man can ask` more.
Interviewer 22:31
Other any other? You mentioned the President's Award, but outside of BK STS, have there been any other awards that you've been
Geoff Labram 22:40
No, none? None, to me personally, that's why I value them so highly. Not that I would have expected any others. There aren't any others I think are particularly appropriate. And I say they are a technical Oscars. So I'm glad to say that Charlie Stuffle? at the studio was awarded one for front projection. And I think that's greatly to the, to the credit of the studio that he was enabled to do that work, I think that Oscar's all too often looked upon as being the fair game for American technicians. And the conclusion is drawn from that, that American technicians are better than anybody else. And I think it's nowadays recognised that that isn't true. And so when a few come our way, I think that's all fair.
Interviewer 23:29
Well, there have been a number of sound awards through the theatre anyhow. And I think Chris, Fiddler on the Roof was yes
Geoff Labram 23:40
Gordon McCallum and got his share, mind you, if we can mention awards and Oscars and things just for a minute, I think most people in the industry would tend to share the view that the awards are slightly two edged things, they're never clear cut. in fact, even the Academy, bless its heart has a job really to deciding what should qualify a person to be nominated for, for a particular category of award? One time, the the number of people who are involved with a sound award, for example was was they were a different selection of people to what they have now been for a number of years. And that surely indicates that they weren't really quite sure how the credits ought to be spread around. And it does cast a little doubt I think on the the whole system of award presentation for that kind of thing. It could well be argued, I think, but there are perhaps to be more awards, but each one is more narrowly assigned. So everybody knows exactly what the guy who got it did, I think sort of up to five people getting an award. can be a bit nonsensical.
Interviewer 25:03
Is that possibly shouldn't be left is not the best the best sound award shouldn't be the best sound award. And that's it. who who did it so on the floor
Geoff Labram 25:12
I suppose someone who has been named as the recipient that's the big problem, and they've tended to, to duck that one by by having in the case of the sound award under present rules fou r people.
Interviewer 25:28
Which is and again, there's often there's more than that, anyhow, involved?
Geoff Labram 25:32
Yes there are, I mean, the point Well, in the old days, I learned Douglas Fure? used to get nearly every year that was fit, perhaps
Interviewer 25:40
it was fair, then to departmebt
Geoff Labram 25:43
mean, I think it should have been like that. And I'd have had a row of Osacars a yard long ask
Interviewer 25:48
everybody, but I was fearless as being the being the floor mixer and production mixer I'm no good. unless I've got a good boom operator and any other good assistance, they're all part of a team that you're all doing it together, you're sharing and so nobody can say I mean, I might, my name might go as the credit on the picture. But that's only because I happen to perhaps take most of them take the responsibility for the overall thing. But the effort that's gone in is just as great for all the people to all this`
Geoff Labram 26:16
as well. And that is that here we are sitting in theatre five, which is our principal room for post sync and effects recording. And fantastic job in here. Never gets, never gets a mention ever, ever. There's no category fits into. And yet,
Interviewer 26:35
possibly the production mixers amount of work that the production team, that some of the actual finish picture may only be a matter of a few minutes, that's the hour that he's Fiisgers? work with
Geoff Labram 26:49
a picture was was shot here over a period of months, in which Not a single foot of original sound was used, mainly because there were wind machines going the entire time. So if the mixer of the production mixer got a credit for that, while he was lucky, because he really contributed nothing to the final result.
Interviewer 27:11
Yes, that's a little digression. Have you any equipment designs or inventions relating to Motion Picture sound or projection or production? To your credit? This is a question sort of thing that is SMPTE sort of thrown a lot of
Geoff Labram 27:27
fun, which I really should have racked my brains over and seen if I could come up with a suitable answer. I mean, the short answer is that all through my time here at Pinewood things have been required and and one has had to sit down and think about how they could be achieved. I've already talked about my early playing with playback, for example, nothing that I've ever done, so far, as I'm aware has ever been of international importance. So in the sense that you probably mean that question, the answer is no. But there have been countless small things down the down the years which have been put together and that in that are not unique. I mean, the whole engineering team here as had to do this extemporise or, in some cases, innovate. But we all regard that as being rather than the line of duty. And so none of us I think has been responsible for anything that would show we say qualify for a mini Oscar,
Interviewer 28:38
OK well you give us a little bit of information about your work and the British Standards. And the Standards Institute of International as well as Britain at
Geoff Labram 28:49
Committee work is something that the likes of me inevitably gets involved with. I've always taken the view that if you accept a position on the committee, you should only do so if you are prepared to attend the greatest possible number of meetings I know of others who are seemingly not taking that view. They've been happy to be nominated, or named rather as members of the committee, but only turned up when it suited them, I that's not my viewpoint. So I've been a member of the appropriate sound committee of the British Standards Institution ever since Cyril Crowhurst realised that he was approaching his own retirement. He of course was very enthusiastic worker for British Standards. And at the time of his retirement was the chairman of that perfect committee. And so seeing that that situation was going to be that I was going to be here but he wasn't. He managed to get me a seat on that committee and subsequently he retired. from it himself and for a time, Tony Lamkin took it over. Whereas I had become a committee member was sort of looked upon as being part of the furniture. And that has gone on now for all those years I've been, the committee has got re numbered once or twice or down the years, but it's really been the same one. It's had one or two different secretaries. But it's still the same committee. I must say, since we're being totally frank, that I am a little bit dubious about the value of British Standards. International Standards must have some value. And nowadays British Standards, committees in our field, are very little better than rubber stamping grounds for international standards. That's a little bit unfair in the sense that if a proposal is to become an international standard, it has to be submitted to all the member countries. And that in turn means that the BSI sends to all of us committee members, details of what is proposed. And we are invited to make comments or suggestions amendments or what have you, which we do. And sometimes these are accepted, sometimes they're not. So we do make a small contribution. But what is sad is that whether the result of our work is issued as a British Standard or an international standard, or commonly both, because now British Standards actually is your international standards, in photocopy form with a different heading. They don't even print their own. So whatever form they're issued in, as far as I know, nobody takes much notice of them. And that's a bold statement all I believe, to be not too far from the truth. And so there are two things about that. One is that they're not really accomplishing what they're supposed to do. And secondly, it means too that the British Standards Institution does take a rather jaundiced view of its own expenditure on supporting this effort for the British Film industry wnen the British government is eh the British film industry, frankly, is pretty unimpressed by all. cinemas never see a British Standard. Those of us who work in studios obviously keep copies of all these standards and endeavoured to live up to them and refer to them when we were in doubt. I doubt if cinemas ever do. I think that's a terrible thing. Well, that's what it's really all about. Getting cooperation from the owners and operators of cinemas has over the years been very, very difficult. If it if it involves spending another couple of quid they don't want to know basically, that's the rather exaggerated viewpoint that is, in principle true. I've also been a member of BKSTS committees over the years, I used to very much enjoyed attending the meetings at the Technical Advisory Committee. And before that, I was on what was known as the sound panel, which was again, of a lively little group. And they while the Technical Advisory Committee still exists, but it's changed nature, and I haven't been on it for years. Well I have been on however, of course is the is the sound committee, as you are yourself, Bob. And
I think sometimes to there that that committee really hasn't done enough to talk about, and it has tended in recent times, and I've made this point a number of times, it has tended to become a kind of organising forum for what are supposed to be training activities. And it always seems to me rather sad that the British film industry who keeps trying to shout keep its end up doesn't actually do training of its own in any way and have to leave it to people like British, Kinematic Sound tand Television society, to organise training sessions designed to make a profit. Something was wrong there, isn't it? We have spent, I would guess, 80% of our committee time in the last three years discussing these benches. We used to do fascinating things like trying to get some measure of agreement on connectors. And, again, the industry didn't want to know In fact, it turned out that the BBC was divided internally almost equally into two halves. One did it one way and one did it the other face of that what's good I would say that the committee work I've done which in many cases been enjoyable in a social sense, has been pretty depressing as a useful exercise. So I shall be leaving the sound committee and I shall be also suggesting that my membership of the British Standards Committee should cease also, I think it's not right. For anyone who's not actively involved in an industry should participate in these things, I think you've got to be in it. That, you know, we are hands in it to be really useful.
Interviewer 35:37
still have a lot of experience to contribute. Knowledge shouldn't be lost to those, those people.
Geoff Labram 35:44
Yeah, but it's the people. I mean, there are other people with with with knowledge. And as long as those people are people who are who are still doing it, and still encountering in their work, the changes in technology that are all the time taking place, they should be the ones who are doing it. I don't want to use the word like old codger or anything like that. But there is just a smattering of truth in that, that if you're out of the swim, then I don't think that you should be regarded as being a prime choice. Or should I say that?
Interviewer 36:17
That's true enough we agree Just as just saying, Geoff, if there's anything further, you would like to say we will give you a ring next week and see if you've thought of anything else. But everything we've got down here is so nice and concise. And well said I think there's a wealth of material there. And so just take this opportunity to saying thank you very much for giving us so much time. And, again, wish you all the best in your retirement. And may I say that I'm quite envious of your your trip to out to New Zealand. And perhaps anyhow, I'll be getting in touch with you again, when you come back to gauge and find out what your impressions were of
Geoff Labram 37:02
the interesting exchange this would be would be very good. Yes, I'm looking forward to it. I thank you for your kind remarks. Obviously, I've enjoyed doing this. I've been looking forward to this afternoon. In fact, and as I've just said to you, I feel somewhat drained now as though you've sucked all over all that you can out of me, I'm sure there's a lot more stuck in there. But some of it is, is probably apocryphal and therefore not very reliable. for the archive and some of it is just plain inconsequential and funny. But I find that what I've said there hasn't been leavened by very much in the way of humour. But perhaps that's not the purpose of the exercise anyway. But there have been many funny things over the years, inevitably, in a place of this kind. And I've said this many times, I believe it to be true that when I joined the studio, in the 40s, and on into the 50s, life was had a great deal of the fun element was still hugely enjoyable. And people, I think, for the most part had a fairly relaxed attitude to what they were doing. This may have been the result of it still being a pretty parental kind of atmosphere, the company was making its films and you were its employee. And I think that does give everybody a feeling of kind of comfortable security and in that atmosphere of funny things are allowed to happen. They do when, however today, our production is made. The producer is watching every corner of everything he or at least he should be doing his job. And the as a result, there isn't much time for fun. I mean, there may well be fun, and they will get drunk at the bar at the end of a hard day's work, I wouldn't know. But generally, I think there's a tighter atmosphere about everything which doesn't leave as much room for for a good laugh. And I think that's a terrible shame. I think that humanity and people's relations working relations one way or the other actually comes out in the final product. And that's why some of the films of those days have a kind of softer note than some of today's product which tries terribly hard and sometimes succeeds and sometimes doesn't. So philosophical thought, and
Interviewer 39:30
then I just want to
Geoff Labram 39:31
thank you very much, Jeff. great pleasure.................................................
