Winston (Wyn) Ryder

Forename/s: 
Winston (Wyn)
Family name: 
Ryder
Work area/craft/role: 
Industry: 
Interview Number: 
11
Interview Date(s): 
23 Jul 1987
Interviewer/s: 
Production Media: 
Duration (mins): 
245

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Interview
Interview notes

This interview covers Wyn's career in editing/sound editing. It has quite a lot of technical information about editing processes and gives insights especially to working with David Lean and Stanley Kubrick. 

Transcript

behp0011-winston-rider-transcript

SIDE ONE.

Roy Fowler[RF]: This is a recording with Wyn Rider, interviewed by Lesley Hodgson in the Elvin Room at ACTT on the 23rd of July 1987. This is side one. Please note that all contents of this recording are the copyright of the ACTT History Project.

Lesley Hodgson [LH]: Where and when were you born?

Wyn Rider [WR]: I was born in 1915 in Willesden and very quickly moved out to the Gerrards Cross/High Wycombe area.

LH: One slight thing, which I’ve always been curious about which is not on the questionnaire, were you called Winston after Winston Churchill or was it..?

WR: No, I’ve cheated because according to my grandmother we were distant relatives, but in those days every grandmother had to be related to ‘somebody’ if you understand what I mean – but it was an easy because there was an ‘e’ on it, on my birth certificate, so I have just dropped it.

LH: What kind of schooling did you have?

WR: Prep school in High Wycombe and then the grammar school, and I wasn’t the best student, and my parents were friendly with Edgar Wallace’s Art Director, the only lady art director at the time. She was very talented, when she wasn’t working for Edgar Wallace, mainly in the theatre,

LH: Edgar Wallace, apart from being a writer, was presumably a film director-

WR: Well for some time – I was so young Les that I don’t really know – he almost took over Beaconsfield Studios, which we were living almost two or three miles away from, and she – when she wasn’t with him – I know one thing she did, she did two liners, two big liners, she did the nursery, painting nursery rhymes and so on, and she said to my parents one day “They want a boy in the Sound Department”. Sound had just come in and I thought, ‘marvellous’ you know. Films were so important in those days and sound just beginning so I took the job, left school quite hurriedly I think I was 16, and I was the cable boy, and general thing, with Marcus Cooper. I think I was working for A.R.P. Films or A.R.P. Studios. They were renting Beaconsfield while Ealing was being built, and I went – we had two trucks – two sound trucks, designed for the desert, designed for big locations in America. One was only a bank of batteries and a petrol generator (a standard) and two recorders side by side so that for newsreel you could start one up and overlap, but I never really understood what went on inside those little boxes; I felt quite frightened when I went on location [nervous laugh] in case something went wrong, for in those days you didn’t carry a maintenance man with you, you see.

LH: That was the only connection your parents had with the business, was it?

WR: Yes, my father was nothing connected.

LH: So, what did you actually have to do on your first job?

WR: Well, really for a long, long time we didn’t make any films, as I say we were sitting outside this place, they were installing equipment, I was the sort of bum boy, cables, on location I had to help with the cables; the cables were very thick they were about as thick as a garden hose, because they had about eight cores, I think; the microphone that was big because it had about five valves in it, the signal had to be big enough to get it back to the green[?].

LH: Was the sound used then, that you shot on location or was it…?

WR: I think so, but I was awfully young, I didn’t know what to do in the cutting rooms, you learn as you go, but in those days, from my recollection you did very little dialogue on location. There was far more interior work and they somehow seemed to get the dialogue on the interiors.

LH: There weren’t a lot of exteriors in fact, were there?

WR: No, very few. Faked up in the studios.

Railway stations. And at one time – I did one interesting thing: Courtauld, the Courtauld family put a lot of money into Ealing, and they had a colour system, an experimental colour system called Raycol, where you had a green and a red thing in front of the projector. And they were having great difficulty with sound, printing sound onto the colour print, I suppose, and we went to Newmarket for the horse racing, and I loved that, and presumably we used the sound of that because we went to the stables, and then we went to – gosh [forgets] a racecourse in the South of England

LH: Epsom?

WR: No, before that – Goodwood! And before that we went to the huge house that the man who owns Goodwood –

LH: [Behind Wyn] The Duke of Richmond or someone.

WR: - and I was amazed, because I’m a country bumpkin, as you know, the back of that house was like a village. There were rows and rows of horseboxes, with bedrooms above for the grooms and the boys– mind you there weren’t all that many horses -Rolls Royces, carriages, hundreds of yards long. The house must have finished like that [presumably gesturing] and it came into two, all paved – and one thing I always remember, the truck driver at Ealing had worked for Pathe, Pathe News and it had rained and you know if you go on grass after it rains a lot a nasty muddy film comes up above the grass and that had happened and I don’t know which enclosure we were in but all these people dressed up … and I was told to put the mic over there, and I was going along saying “excuse me, excuse me” and I wasn’t making any progress at all because I didn’t want to drag it past, and Nobby Clark grabbed it saying “Give the bloody thing to me” and walked ! and dragged it past and nobody hit him – there were a few grumbles, but he said “well, when you are on a newsreel, you’ve got to get there”, you can’t hang about, and then eventually Ealing was finished. We were sitting outside in King & Chapman’s [?] garage for a long, long time while Ealing was being built, at one stage.

LH: Really. Really.

[Pause]

WR: And then I had my brushes with Basil Dean –

LH: Ealing didn’t look like a purpose built studio, it looked like one of these ramshackle things that just grew up, and something was added, and something else was added –

RF: There was some sort of activity before.

WR: There was next door, in this Kingdom & Chapman’s garage there was a glass, a big glass building. I’ve forgotten -Alan you knew the name of it, but that was a film studio, where they lit it by having blinds all over the glass and that sort of business.

LH: Also there was a house, a country house? Or a big house?

WR: I don’t know. That can’t have been a park. The front office was an ordinary house.

RF: Villas. Still is.

WR: Yes. I wouldn’t – I can’t remember that. But Ernie Palmer had worked in this studio as a boy. This is nothing to do with editing, but he said that he held the film while they put a drawing pin in the end of it and turned a handle on a great big wooden slatted drum and unwound the film onto it. And then lowered it into the developer and turned the handle; and another interesting thing is somebody came along and bought the earth round the drain that they tipped all this down to get the silver out that had been filtered out of the hypo. [laughter] [Hypo is a ‘fixer’, ammonium thiosulphate. DS]

Anyway, Basil Dean became, he was Managing Director, Director and he was a monster, a most awful man, he really was. He got a down on me and at one time I dreaded going to the studio, and Jeff Seaholme, who was the clapper boy and myself, who was a boy in the Sound Department, were summoned most lunchtimes to go and play deck quoits with Basil Dean and the finance man, Reggie Baker, and I was always Dean’s partner. The thing would come over – and I wasn’t bad at sports, but I’d miss it or, you know – and “Ha, you’re no good at anything!” And when I was on the boom – the boom was quite something because the mic weighed 8 pounds –

[10mins] LH: How old were you at this time?

WR: Seventeen; and when you wound the boom out full length you nearly cut your arm off hanging on to this thing, and if you weren’t careful you nearly crowned a leading lady. And of course the lights, the shadows were much more of a problem because it was a big mic and –

LH: Was the boom moved about a lot in those days or not?

WR: Yes, it was on lengths.?

LH: Yes but once you got the thing you just slung it, there was no-

LH: You couldn’t angle it or crank it in and out.

WR: Yes you could crank it in and out; that was when it got heavy. It was counterbalanced when it was fairly well out but when it went right out, but when it was further back – I used to take it if it was long I would get a sand bucket, a fire bucket and tie that on in case.

LH: So you became a Boom Operator, virtually?

WR: Boom Operator, yes. What else? One – I think – then I became a sound camera operator.

LH: Still at Ealing.

WR: Still at Ealing. And it was about the third RCA – the third model that they had made – we seemed to have used car headlamps for the exciter lamp and burn them at a much higher ampage than one should do so they blew quite often. And it was so bloody primitive. You had to have a duster or a handkerchief because it got red hot and you had to fiddle it about until you got all the reds and the greens and things out of it, on a card. And [Basil] Dean, or Savile or somebody would be champing up and down because you’d held them up, and at 17 that was a bit horrendous. “When’s that bloody boy going to be ready?” sort of thing. And then I’d had one string go after another, I was blamed for this I’ll always remember; I can’t remember what happened, I think I was taken off the floor, and one thing I’d have probably been hounded out of the industry – we only had the one stage, there were always a number of sets, one being built, one being knocked down, one being shot on, and there was a hole in the road set, and there was a concrete mixer, and they were rehearsing or shooting or something over the other end and I wandered up to that and turned the handle, and to my horror, it started! Can you imagine? A concrete mixer in the studio. I didn’t know what to do; I grabbed, I pulled the lead off the only plug and ran for my life, and nobody ever knew [laughter]. I don’t think there’s much else to say about that – oh, one awful thing with this equipment, it was loud and it was a nightmare doing music, and they had a big flywheel, naturally- the film went round when it was actually recorded, and that had a magnetic control on it which never seemed to work. They drilled holes in the casing and I had to clean it with a brush and carbon tet[rachloride].

LH: How did you come to leave Ealing?

RF: [Interrupting] Sorry, just to backtrack, could you tell us how much you were paid in those days, and working conditions, how much you had to travel to get to the studios, the problems working in the film industry.

WR: Well one time I was paid 30 shillings a week, one pound fifty, there were no hours at all and one of the worst things I think [was] you didn’t get any notice. They’d come onto the floor and say “break for supper” and that’s all the notice you had. One always tried to make love to the Continuity Girl, because she was the one that knew what was to be shot [chuckling] and you always tried to get round her to find out, you know… and I –

LH: In addition to 30 shillings, were you provided with supper and things like this…?

WR: You got half a crown [12 ½ pence] for supper, so I always spent about a shilling [5 pence] or one and thruppence [c 6 ½ pence] and save the other one and thruppence.

LH: Which was quite a lot of money.

WR: Yes. But at that time – or was it a bit later – I seriously thought of becoming an electrician because with one stage only there was an awful lot of rigging of lamps and things after hours, after shooting hours, so they made a great deal of money. They were probably on about the same basic as I was but they got [paid] overtime, and we didn’t get any overtime at all. At that time we were making Gracie Fields films, and another, ooh horrendous film that I worked on was –

LH: Can we just [clarify] what year was this?

WR: Well, I was 17 so it would be about ’32 or ’33, and I think it was before my accident – it was such a bloody long time ago I find it difficult, but Gloria Swanson came and hired the studio [for Perfect Understanding] and I think she was part of United Artists or something, but she [annoyed?] everybody, the Director her millionaire husband was in it, and sometimes she would arrive into the studio at four o’clock in the afternoon; and the worst time she arrived about six in the afternoon and we had an eight-thirty [am] call.

LH: And how late did you go on shooting in that case?

WR: Well, until they felt like it, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock. When I was very young, I thought it was rather big, you know and I was rather important working all these hours, but it got a bit of a bore later on of course. I don’t think we went on [late] on Saturday – Saturday was a full day, but I don’t think they often went on after seven o’clock.

LH: Was there a theoretical say 8 until 6 or 8.30 till 6 start and finish time or anything like that?

WR: Well, I think there must have been for the electricians and what we called the early[?] staff because they got overtime when that finished. But it was much more relaxed. I mean when Val, Val Valentine was there, I can’t remember [when], we used to go off and play ping-pong, table tennis. There was a lot more fun and a lot more playing about because I suppose it was wages were so low, expenses were so low, there wasn’t the pressure to. Monte Banks was there at one time and he was always playing the most horrible jokes on rather weak people.

LH: Was Hitchcock there at that time?

WR: No, I never worked with Hitchcock. Graham Cutts, was he there once, Monty Banks.

LH: Formby, did they make the Formby pictures there.

WR: Yes – I’ve got a feeling that was after – you see then, very shortly I, my parents then were living in Ealing, they moved to Ealing for me, then they moved back to Chalfont St Peter, and I was travelling by Greenline [bus]. Well it was alright coming up in the morning, but in the evening, I was fairly down the line, the Greenline started in central London, Oxford Circus or something, and particularly on a Friday night or if I left early, and it [the frequency] was every half hour, the buses just used to go through full and I’d be waiting on Ealing Broadway for an early bus. And I bullied them into allowing me to get a motor-bike… and one foggy morning on my way to work I went and collided with a seven ton lorry and it took me two years and eight months to get over it.

LH: Were you off work for two years and eight months?

WR: Yes.

LH: Good Lord.

WR: I did have one job. Val was very nice to me – he was the Chief of Sound – and they recorded, they shot a thing called Lorna Doone, with Basil Dean directing, and the sound was so bad, so badly dubbed that they needed somebody inside the theatre on the gain, so they said why don’t we give this lazy young fellow [?] the job, so I stayed with friends in London and they had a midnight matinee or a midnight charity show –

LH: When you say badly dubbed, you mean badly mixed?

WR: The I think the levels were all up and down.

LH: Yes but we are talking about the mix, but it hadn’t been dubbed.

WR: Oh, no no. It was a charity thing and I’m in there trying to take notes. Well you imagine – I haven’t been near a studio for ages [20.00mins], in the dark trying to take note for  film I’d never seen before; anyway, at the end John Ridd, comes into some house, I presume Carver’s house in the Doone Valley, crawled in, sheepskin coat, looks as if he’s got the hearth rug over him, crawling in, and the entire cinema dissolve into roars of laughter, and I can see Dean, did you ever see Dean, he’d got a jaw, it was a square like a bulldog and when he was cross he ground his teeth, aarghg, you can hear him so at the end of the thing I was sitting in the car, and a big meeting, I think they got everybody out of bed, I had a meeting in the manager’s office, and I don’t know what happened, but eventually I went to the Adelphi, in the Strand, which was a cinema then and spent six weeks, and I could bring up pistol shots, and now I understand dubbing mixers doing that all the time. I had a marvellous time on that. And, diverting from that they had Mickey Mouse at the Opera, on and I always try to see that because every time I see that: have you ever seen it? You’ve got the hen as the soprano-

LH: Oh, that’s right.

WR: Well, every time I’ve seen that film, little mice crawling all around the proscenium arch and so on, I saw something different, it was a fabulous film. One thing and I’m not sure of, in the early days, whether they didn’t record the music and the dialogue and background music at the same time. I wonder if that’s possible or I’m imagining it?

LH: They used to – what I believe is that at Shepherds Bush in the ‘30s they had what they called a DB section and they would put the dialogue up and the music and mix the two at the same time together to avoid doubling up on the ground-

WR: And, of course, you only mixed the section that you had to because of ground noise. If it was straight dialogue, that was not mixed.

LH: [It was] Off the original negative.

WR: Yes off the original negative of course I presume if the levels were all over the place it had to be moved but…

I think that’s about all, about Ealing. And then I went to Beaconsfield under Harold King.

LH: But you started at Beaconsfield?

WR: But for this company that was only Harry that moved to, the company that went to Ealing and waited for the thing to be built. And on much older equipment. It had a cone. Because wire was a nightmare in those days, to keep it steady or flutter, and it had a cone, with a jockey wheel going up and down it, and that compensated – sort of the roll of the film went up and down. Marvellous. Never went wrong or anything.

LH: Was this RCA?

WR: RCA, much earlier than the later Ealing stuff. One difficult thing, as I’ve said these exciter lamps got awfully hot and the galvanometer was in oil film, it was oil-damped and the oil seeped out of it, out through the, well it wasn’t a lens, I think it was just a window and with all the dust flying around I had to keep cleaning that with alcohol, pure alcohol. But at Beaconsfield I had to order my own film, check densities – Beaconsfield I learned an awful lot, because we had our own little lab, which when the studio wasn’t working did release prints for British Lion, for oh what was his name, Smith.

LH: Herbert Smith?

WR: No Herbert was the younger brother, big brother[?] they had quite a good distribution company. So when we weren’t shooting the lab did release prints, and – another digression – a lot of waffle I know, we had three brothers working in the studio: Cyril King was a neg developer on a fairly low wage, Harold King was a sound supervisor on a fairly good wage, and George King who used to do ‘quota quickies’, shoot them in a week, was arriving in a Rolls Royce every day. [laughs], and they didn’t seem to like each other very much. Beaconsfield was a family, and you learned a lot more than you did in a big studio because you had supper and things with the camera department and the art department and you heard them talking.

LH: Was there at that time, as there is today, a tremendous sort of ambition amongst people to get into films?

WR: I don’t know.

LH: I remember when I started, it didn’t seem to me that everybody was fighting as they are; I think it’s probably the effect of television publicity and things that have happened since. But I don’t remember at that time – well the money was no better was it?

WR: The money wasn’t very good and of course at a place like, well all of them, you’d shut down and you went on the dole or something. There were two of us at Beaconsfield, and Harold King was quite kind, he fired us alternately [chuckles] so the next shut down I would go off, and the next I’d be kept on which was –

RF: The modern-day term would be laid off, so it was regarded as being fired in those days was it-

WR: Oh, I mean laid off, yes, so you went back. But I was terribly sorry for the hourly[?] men because there’s not a lot of work round there, building would be the only thing in the Gerard’s Cross, Amersham, Beaconsfield area.

RF: What sort of notice did you get when you were laid off?

WR: I’m not sure. I’m sorry I don’t know, I don’t know whether there was oh what I should have said, while I was at Ealing, I went up one day on crutches, my, I think, yes, my grandfather was the local carpenter and undertaker and he had a bad fire, nearly burnt the house down, but all of his outbuildings which were mostly made of wood and all of his carriages and things were burnt and he just gave up, and a nephew took the business over, and I used to go up to the hospital and to Ealing – because I couldn’t bend. I was from up just under my arms, down to my toes I was in one straight lump of plaster; I used to go up in the hearse – pushing me, I was almost in a coffin [laughs] – and anyway I went up and Alan Lawson approached me and said would I like to join the ACT, and I didn’t know anything about the ACT, and he said “well it won’t cost you anything, because, you’re out, you’re not working.” So I said “yes”. Obviously in those days they were after numbers, and I think I was-

LH: [Interrupting] What year was this?

WR: Well I suppose-

LH: [interrupts] 1937 was when ACT started.

WR: Oh no-

RF: 1935. When was the 50th anniversary? 1983 was it?

WR: Round about ’83. And I think I was number 85, I’m not sure. I’m now one thousand eight hundred and something. I lapsed because Harold King didn’t like ACT and I wasn’t very political in those days [Pause]

But I don’t know about Jobfit. I’ve heard funny things about Jobfit but I’ve always thought we ought to have had an apprenticeship scheme because it’s so departmental, and you don’t have to be an expert cameraman or soundman, but it does help to know what the other people do, and their problems and I learned quite a lot being in a small studio, which only had one stage, at Beaconsfield..

LH: When you went back to Beaconsfield were you still boom operating or camera operating or-

WR: Camera operating. And I had to order my own film, check the densities every day, coming off, out of our own lab; and run a small library.

LH: Did they mix the films in those days at Beaconsfield?

WR: Yes. York Scarlet was the – he did nothing most of the time. I mean there was nothing to do, I’m not –

RF: Well, the fact is that optical recording, and mixing is now a lost art and craft. It might be interesting to hear you explain the process in those days and how they differ from present day techniques.

WR: Yes. I will come to that when I started dubbing, I think.

[30.00mins] There was a tradition at Ealing that editors never seemed to be ready with the stuff to dub until after supper. With this going on, I never quite understood the system; and they had an American chief of sound, who used to bring his – dipsomaniac – he used to bring his girlfriends in when he was dubbing. Very strange goings on in those days. Then Beaconsfield shut down at the beginning of the [Second World] war, and we thought there would be no more films made, and I had this leg, couldn’t do very much in the way of fighting, and it may well have saved my life because no end of my friends died because it would be easier to train a grammar school boy to become a fighter than it was if he wasn’t a grown-up. So, Beaconsfield shut down and I went into an armament factory, which I hated. It was a bottle washing factory, making bottle washers, which are quite complicated machines. And they didn’t give me any training, they gave me a bit of metal, I had my own tools, “make that”, and I hated it. Then I came out and I’ve always been a frustrated farmer and my aunt had a farm and a plantation and I started keeping pigs; and the bloody things got swine fever. Anyway, I found that I couldn’t really do it, it was hard work. I was building concrete styes and digging the ground, gravel it was on gravel and at the end of the day my leg was killing me. And then I went to Denham Labs, and became a printer. And that opened my eyes. The standard of work in a laboratory – I’m sure it’s changed now but a dupe neg would come over from America, with most of the light changes corrected but not hugely anyway; you’d probably go through four light changes, at from say 8 to 12, whatever the numbers are, and you were encouraged – in fact told – to stick it on a central light and let it run on a machine. Output, output, output was the thing from Denham Labs then.

LH: They were probably the most modern labs of the time weren’t they.

WR: Yes. Well, they had all Debree equipment which was quite good. I worked on a pre-print, I think it was a nightmare. You obviously had your unexposed positive and you had a sound negative and a picture negative and because this was an automatic machine they intended to use and do documentaries and thins that needed a lot of light changes; and you have a control – you made your own control thing by cutting little square holes in 35mm film, and that was geared and went through in sync with the 35mm positive and neg. and that was controlled by the picture thing it was controlled by a 35mm strip which was cardboard –

LH: Like a strip which was pink –

WR: But this was grey, with sprockets, and that went – I never did that I think- but that went and was punched with different apertures in it, and that was dragged through in sync with the picture with another control thing, so you had two control things, this piece of picture, a negative-two negatives, that’s five and the positive: six bits of film and the bloody thing would stop! And then I called the boss man in, I never knew how to – and he’d somehow take it out and count the things and off they’d go, but that, you’d operate two or three of those you see, but that was a murderous machine. And in the neg room, the printing room, I mean the developing room they were supposed to be daylight printers, but I don’t think they ever used them, they had covers.

LH: Oh yes, I think they were, they were clamped down, a clamp on lid and once you’d got them clamped down you could open the windows when it was all running, light-proof boxes.

WR: But they didn’t do that did they?

LH: Yes’ they did.

WR: Oh, because you joined there you probably know this, joining your release prints you are supposed to join your short end of the last reel onto the front of the next reel, so you always get one pos join in a reel, which is cut out by the ‘pos girls’. And I was joining in the dark and there was something, maybe there wasn’t enough cement in it, I don’t know but anyway my joins came undone in the [background noise] negative, and this is not to be laughed at and George, you’ve heard about George Barker and his wild ravings, and he came in and he actually knocked his head on the wall, screaming. That was awful, because you only have a few minutes in that machine, and I presume it happens with every machine, if something breaks or goes wrong, the buzzers ring and there is a minute or something where the rollers take off, it goes on through the bath-

LH: Hm, the brake clamps or something drops away and keeps it going through-

WR: And you’re madly clipping it together.

And then they wanted somebody at Denham Studios, and I tried to get into Denham, but Denham was a closed shop, well very elite, that’s where all the big films were made, and so on. And the call up.

RF: What year would this be now? Mid ‘40s?

WR: Yes somewhere middle of the war.

RF: Tell me, how did one set about getting a job at that point? Were ATT offering any kind of service, or was it word of mouth-

WR: I think you wrote

LH: I don’t think through APT, I don’t think there was an employment office until there was a lot of unemployment in fact, which was around the 1949-50 time when everything started to collapse.

WR: I don’t know how I found out there was something at Denham, but they mistook me for another Ryder, Sid Ryder who is still around I think, something to do with Fox?

LH: Dunno.

WR: Yeah, on the projection side. And I worked there with CC Stevens. I couldn’t believe it, because at Beaconsfield we often did forty set-ups a day. I should go back to Beaconsfield for a bit. They did some very successful [films], almost variety on the screen. They had something like the black and white show [Black & White Minstrels Show? DS], they had a number of black artists, like Paul Robeson, The Nicholas Brothers, … and then they just did a number. Harold King was so commercial. They’d come down in the morning, if it was a band and he’d record that first thing on the stage. And he often did it with one microphone, a ribbon microphone, and a ribbon is – you’re supposed to have it one way, I don’t know to do with something with the sound, but he had the actor or the singer or the soloist say about three feet away from the mic one side, and the band out there. [presumably he gestures to indicate distance. DS] And record it. And he’d do three numbers in no time at all, and that was recorded on optical, and we shot it straight away, and also on an acetate disc. I don’t know whether you know about acetate discs: an aluminium disc with some acetate on it and you cut it. I had to operate that but I didn’t know how to set it up. The maintenance man did that. And then after you’ve done it you put some sort of liquid on it which is oil and some fixing liquid. And that disc can be played straight away, which was terribly necessary, because if you were going to shoot the playback – and we were so efficient at playback, we really were. When I see them doing it today I can’t believe. I had to operate the playback machine, it had an arm and they’d pick out which bar they wanted me to start on it, and Harold King had a big speaker, with a microphone just hanging over the end of it. Well now today mixers will try not to get too good a playback in case it’s used or something, but there was a perfect recording of this playback, and I would be operating my sound camera, turn over and say the bit [40.00mins] of dialogue, he’d give me the buzz or tell me - I always wore earphones with the little microphone like the telephone operators wear, and he’d say “Playback” and I’d drop it on and it worked so quickly and we’d shoot, probably record them and photograph two numbers in one take. Very primitive, no arty-crafty thing. Herbert Smith was often the Director of those.

Oh and another funny thing which would amuse sound people: Harold King was out in a sound-proof booth on the [studio] floor, which has to be pushed around and it has windows so that he could watch the dialogue, watch the action and I was back, off the floor in  my little room, and you know the RCA thing has the galvers? [galvanometer?] on a card as well, and I had to shout the percentages, all the time, and if I stopped, he’d say “Come on, Winston” and I’d be saying “30, 20, over, 80, 50, 20, 50” and why I don’t know, because it must have been ages after I’d seen it and he’d reacted to it.

LH: Hmm.

WR: All the time I had to do that. Because he had a meter with a needle, which wasn’t terribly sensitive I suppose.

LH: A v.i., yeah

LH: One interesting thing there, was the sound truck was a Tillings Stevens was it? Petrol-Electric. Ever met those?

LH: No.

WR: You had a petrol engine, and you generated, and you were driven…by electricity you see [Assent from LH] and the steering when went straight down through the floor and the truck driver used to be with Bertram Mills Circus, because Bertram Mills had a lot of these things because when they had pulled into the field when they got there, they sued these things to light the tents…and this – it was a great big bus -it was a Green Line bus. And it had a dark room, it had all these things in it, and Bert Medico [?] it was – his wife was a trapeze artist – he was always nervous of going downhill. He hugged the bank in case the truck ran away, but we didn’t go very far in that, just to Burnham Beeches or somewhere around, and when I joined there, I was put up at the garage to familiarise myself with this truck and the equipment and so on, and I’m in there – can I swear on this?

LH: Yes, of course.

WR:  And somebody comes in “rotten fucking bloody bastards, rotten fucking bloody bastards, the bastards…”and this went on and on, and I thought, well I was new and I was in this garage which had a couple of lorries and this big sound truck and it was ‘Bonko’, and Bonko was one of the most colourful men you could ever meet, and he was a lorry driver attached to them, and I don’t know what had happened but he’d been taken into the office and torn off a strip and he went on like that forever. Anything – I’ll always remember, we were on location one day and something happened and I looked down and there was Bonko crawling through the hedge with his jersey full of apples. He was the most incredible character. Beaconsfield was the most lovely place you had all sort of people, and there was another man, Evamy [?] and he used to be a rider in the New Forest and he’d got trees and ivy and those sort of things and one day they played the most awful joke on him – I think his son was the master electrician, not the chief engineer, at the same place, and they told this old chap and he had a great big moustache, real old countryman, and they sent him out to get cobwebs, of all the daftest things. I didn’t see him come back, but apparently, he had cobwebs all over him. That was – and then at Ealing, erm, Pinewood, Denham I just couldn’t understand what had happened: the first film I worked on was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and the first shot in Colonel Blimp was Roger Livesey dives in one end as a young man, and comes out the other end of a Turkish bath as Blimp. I can’t remember how they did it, and Perinal, this great French photographer who was our first Oscar winner I think – he was [Alexander] Korda’s cameraman, and it took two days. Well, I was used to 40 to 60 set-ups a day at Ealing. You daren’t leave your room and if you weren’t ready to turn over at a quarter to nine, god help you. I’d have to shoot a thing and they leave the camera in the same place to swing a lens, and start again. And I think they cut into it but I don’t know how they did it. I didn’t know – it was such a different world and I was amazed at how primitive Denham was. Your sound truck – all the recording was done in the sound truck with a mixer on the floor and earphones.

RF: We’ll have to stop.

 

SIDE TWO.

RF: Side two.

LH: I think that was fairly common, that the sound cameraman didn’t see what was shot on the hoy? He was either sat outside, or he was in a room at Shepherds Bush. He didn’t even know what was being shot, he could hear it but he never saw it.

WR: And you had to be careful, particularly at Beaconsfield that they didn’t start turning over 5 or 10 minutes after they’d finished the last shot, and you could be caught out and then you’d be in great trouble – I could tell one – no I don’t think that’s worth mentioning –

LH: [interrupts] Presumably you turned over at the same time as the camera because you’re both-

WR: You had to turn the camera over –

LH: Oh’ you turned the camera over-

LH: Because as opposed to quarter-inch tape you both worked on thousand-foot rolls of film.

WR: Yes.

LH: - so if the camera ran out, you ran out at the same time.

WR: No because they do tests and I might not put a full thousand-feet on. No you didn’t do that, you just reloaded, but to show a little of the pace Monty Banks, an interesting case, I worked on one film he directed, and Claude Hulbert was in it, it was an ice-skating, an ice-hockey film and Claude Hulbert got into the team because so many people were injured or something or sent off and – was Monty Banks acting in this or was he directing? Probably he was acting and the stretchers were taken past the sin bin where all the people were and every time this certain man was taken past on a stretcher, Monty Banks went for his privates; so the chap who was laid out leapt into life, so they cut: “Monty please”, “OK”, and behold, next time he’d do it again, and if you could imagine, he was directing George Formby once and it was George Formby’s birthday and he got the sound department to put two drawing pins in the production chair and I was off-stage with a wind-up generator which can give you quite a nasty shock and I was supposed to give George Formby a shock. Well, he’d never put both hands on the thing but that was the sort of atmosphere that went on at Ealing, not at Beaconsfield but at Ealing. And if you knew that they were playing about as I say you’d go off and play ping-pong or whatever. He was rather cruel.

LH: Was Marcel Varnel one of the directors on those Formby pictures or not?

WR: [exclaims] No, oh I’ve missed out Joe Rock. I went to Joe Rock’s after, I mean British National. 3.26

LH: At Elstree.

WR: Noel Silvano ? was there. Not a lot to talk about: Charlie Reynolds was there who had quite a lot to do with the ACT, and I think we had a little threat of a strike or something to get overtime; either there or at Denham we managed to get overtime after 54 hours – it was a 54-hour week. But British National was interesting in as much as it had three things in it. A film company: Lady Ewell who owned it or had a lot of money in it owned Bowerings ? a big insurance company, reinsurance, or big insurance or re-insurance and they were evacuated down there, the corridors were full of files and things and also there was an engineering company, but I can’t think, I don’t think there was much about…

LH: How long were you there? At British National?

WR: About a year, year and a half; then I went to Denham.

LH: This was during the War.

WR: Ah yes. I always remember I got blamed, we had a rather drunken [sound] mixer, and I was very cross because he, Harold King. Harold King kept employing mixers who didn’t know anything about it –

LH: Was Harold King at National?

WR: Yes. He went from National to-

LH: [interrupts] ABPC.

WR: ABPC. I felt that I knew more about it than they did. Not about the electronics, but then they didn’t know about that anyway, but about recording sound and all the rest of it and one day I was nasty I suppose, they had a two mic set-up and the boom swinger had swung the mic off and not disconnected it. So on the next shot this dreadful man recorded the take on the mic that was off-stage and pointed the wrong way, and I got the blame. Not the blame but “why didn’t you tell him? Why didn’t you tell him?” and all this you see, and I got so – probably this was one of the reasons I went to Denham, but Denham was so much more convenient and [had] more prestige. But – what else happened there? I used to do both, dubbing-

LH: [interrupts] Is that how you came to leave, that Harold King invited you to, or did you just leave Denham Labs?

WR: No I went from Denham Labs, I think, to Denham. Oh, no you’re probably right I went – isn’t it awful? I can’t [recall] – yes I think I went from Denham Labs to – ‘cos I’d worked for Harold at Beaconsfield you see –

RF: Maybe we can identify it by the films if you remember the titles.

WR: One was Love on the Dole which was British National.

RF: That was what, 1940.

WR: Was it?

RF: I think so.

WR: That was, that was good film. And then we did one with Maurice Elvey [pause] and a number of George Formby’s then Marcel Varnel, I think, but I certainly worked with Marcel Varnel. I mean I worked on films that he did. One of the things about the cutting, er the Sound Department, you were so much shut away you didn’t, in the sound camera operator [role] you didn’t meet people you didn’t contact them much.

LH: Marcel Varnel was actually – I worked with him on a couple, two films that he did and he would produce 28, 30 set-ups a day, no time at all, very, very fast.

[Pause}

WR: I did from some period I don’t know whether it was from here, I think it was afterwards; it would be interesting from and ACT point of view; I went to see the Chief of Sound at Welwyn. I’ve only been to Welwyn twice, once was to deliver a roll of film, and once was this interview, and he interviewed me and during this interview he said –

LH: [interrupts] What was his name, do you remember?

WR: I can’t remember, but I’m going to be a bit libellous, he said he didn’t like ACT and they didn’t have the unions, and if there wasn’t much doing and he asked me to clean his car, then I cleaned his car. So that didn’t go very much further that morning. Welwyn was a bloody long way away [and] it didn’t last all that long, did it, Welwyn, I don’t know.

LH: [It] became part of ABPC and then they sold it didn’t they?

WR: I’ve got a feeling this man was in charge of both in those days. So it must have been before –

LH: [Led by?] Harold King.

WR: Then Denham was so different because you had loading boys, film was loaded for you and the one thing that did amaze me about Denham was how primitive the plant was. At Ealing it was a copy of a Hollywood studio and ? dabbled? At it. You had a thing called an organ, which originally was supposed to turn the camera over [background audio feedback from here on DS] but it didn’t but the man on the organ rang a bell, he switched the lights on, he raised – he locked the doors – he raised the big doors and lowered the big doors. He switched off the telephone – this ‘organ’ – a bit like an organ with lights and switches, have you ever seen one?

RF: I vaguely remember seeing one.

[Feedback stops]

WR: Then when I went to Denham, the trucks moved around the various stages; there was a pipe of about 4 inches, a metal pipe in the wall, big thick walls for soundproofing, you shoved your cables through the pipe. They had little boys on the doors, which was quite a good thing because it was a way of getting somebody into the industry and they put a string over a nail – it was so – and the doors had to be pushed open I think: they slid sideways. The difference there, you know, they were making the best films in the country, the big films.

[10.00 mins]

LH: Whether – you make it sound primitive, it was actually rather a fine studio, wasn’t it.

WR: It was a good studio and I was surprised at the –

LH: [Interrupts] – and when you consider the mixing theatre [that] they had at Denham compared with what they had at Ealing was-

WR: The quality of the films, yeah. They never got good sound.

LH: That’s right.

WR: ‘Cos they had this, I think, wonderful mic this Oster [?]six thirty the scoffball mic that was so good and then there I became a shop steward, I’m not sure I certainly became a Sound Department representative, and ACT in those days, during the war and just after the war was so alive, you had meetings and there was one terrific schemozzle going on because they wanted to bring an American editor Louis Loeffler onto Caesar & Cleopatra and ACT objected, and we all objected; there was meetings day after day and Gabby spoke and Tom White spoke, and then I was made chairman of these meetings because Percy Dayton, from ACT and almost ran Denham, he was the shop steward and very friendly with the Chief of Sound and he was in the Sound Department as all shop stewards were in those days, and I don’t know what had happened to him, or perhaps he was there- but John Dennis, the Chairman – Rank sent he and Jack Harrison out to Hollywood to get ideas and see what was going on there and in the middle of all this schemozzle they went and I was Chairman, and I had to stop- it was such a circus, these meetings, histrionics going on and I had to go round and stop laboratory people coming in in the lunch hour for the fun, to watch all the arguments and things [chuckles] and eventually they got Louis Loeffler in and there was another tremendous schemozzle when I think I was an ordinary ACT member, when – I can’t remember the name of the film but it had a Russian element and the ETU shop steward was a communist, Bert Batchelor, who was very powerful-

LH: Was this the thing – you mean somebody, [Laurence] Olivier, playing a Russian?

WR: Yes.

LH: Something about a Russian propellor design I seem to remember-

RF: [Interjects] Demi Paradise.

LH: You remember that do you?

RF: Yes, about the Russians.

LH: You remember the schemozzle I mean?

RF: No, no.

LH: About Bert Bachelor?

WR: Well, what happened was, somehow the Russian embassy got hold of the script, the Russian embassy then approached the diplomatic, whoever they should approach on the British side and tried to stop the film being made or have it altered, and the ACT right wing or the ordinary ACT members there were up in arms, and our President was directing it; Anthony Asquith was directing it, and I think he resigned over that because I’ve got a feeling General Council came down on the side of the Russian embassy. Oh, it was a tremendous row and we said that they had no right to interfere. I have a feeling that Russia were our allies then.

RF: It’s strange because the film was designed to promote good will between the Soviet Union and this country.

LH: That’s right. Pretty harmless from what I remember.

RF: Well, it was on television quite recently and its thoroughly objectionable in terms of attitude because it embodies all those middle-class attitudes-

WR: Well, I have got the right film, haven’t I?

RF: I’m sure you have, yes.

WR: But in the carpenter’s shop there were meeting after meeting after meeting, and we wanted to know how they got hold of the script and everybody was up in arms.

I’ll go a little to the technique. There was a –

LH: [Interrupts] It must have been a pretty right-wing shop at ACT at that time because everybody was being brainwashed to like the Russians and the Russians were certainly the OK people at the time. And because they were our only big ally – I don’t think the Americans were in the war at that time-

WR: [interrupts] I think the argument was the interference, and after all Asquith presumably, who was a most kind, humane, gentle man; marvellous man I thought. He was the Director, and we were protecting our Director and our people and what right had they got to come and –

RF: It was a totally harmless film, when it came out and it denigrated no one whatsoever.

WR: You see in those days – [he is interrupted]

LH: [speaking of the film’s plot] He was suspicious of the English way of doing things or something, and they both explain to each other how they work.

RF: Mutual suspicion.

LH: That’s right yes.

WR: But there was quite a lot of nasty

[LH and RF continue]

WR: There was quite a lot of nastiness there because I was pitchforked into this being chairman and all the rest of it, and to go – I was a fairly keen ACT person in those days because to go to a General Council meeting, which were once a week or once a fortnight, I think –

LH: Just to put things where they were historically was there a closed shop, were you obliged to be a member of ACT or was it totally voluntary? Because I remember when I joined ACT they said “Do you want to join ACT” and I said “Yeah” and they said “Alright”. There was no compulsion to join ACT, it didn’t matter. But after the war, towards the end of the war it became a closed shop and you had to join.

WR: I don’t know, I don’t think it was a closed shop, but most people did join.

LH: Yes, because – well anyway.

WR: I used to cycle to work – with one and a half legs – and to go to a General Council meeting, I cycled down to Denham station, left my bike there, caught the train up to Marylebone, got to Soho Square and I always had to leave early because the last train left Marylebone at 10 past 10. And I was always terrified of over-shooting the station because it was the black-out, no lights and the porters [announcers?] always sounded the same [imitates station names that all sound alike] so I had to almost count the bloomin’ stations, so then I cycled home five miles from Denham Station. That was the way I went to General Council. While all this fuss, I think it was with Louis Loeffler, this editor coming in, I’d get up to ACT and see the agenda and there’s Denham Studio Committee on the thing. Well, I hadn’t done anything and I was so cross because – no names, no pack drill – a man in almost the next cutting room to me, as by then I think I was in the cutting room because I-

LH [interrupts] I don’t think you were, because I was there when they were making Demi-Paradise and I don’t remember you in the cutting room-

[inaudible as they talk over each other]

WR: Well, I was, because he was in the next cutting room. Anyway, something I’d done, not dishonest, nothing but I hadn’t re-elected chairman or I had replaced one of these blokes who had gone to America, and something else was a bit slipshod, you know, it was ignorance on my part and instead of coming to me and saying “Don’t you think we ought to do something?  So and so, and so. “he wasn’t even in the studio this man, he was in the labs, he put this down on the agenda and I thought “well I don’t know.” It was an unfriendly act, and I threatened – Bert Craig was the studio representative then, organiser, and I said “I’m going to call a meeting, and take you to it.” But Bert talked me out of it, but I was talked out of that.

There were a number of people killed in those days – it was quite dangerous. Just before I got there, they made In Which we Serve and they didn’t have firearm or explosive experts, they just sort of- the chief electrician or someone did it and they were using a powder for firing the guns on the destroyer or whatever it was, and they said “Come on quickly, one more before lunch.” And I think it was the gaffer electrician and he got the barrel of powder between his legs and was putting it on the thing and there was still a spark on the metal plate – this is the story, I wasn’t there then – and I think he died, I don’t know, the whole lot went up. And there was one man who was badly burned standing next to him.

[20mins] Then on another thing – I can’t remember the director – Geoffrey Bell – was he a writer? – once.

RF: Dell. Geoffrey Dell.

WR: Geoffrey Dell. Then we didn’t have directors then, enough directors I think, I must say this sound camera operators often say this but David Lean was such a success that they gave writers, they gave editors, all sorts of people [the job of directing] and they were hopeless. I mean, really. They hadn’t come up through the hard school like the “B” Hollywood directors.

Anyway, there was a fire on set, and I was in the truck, so you hear what’s going on, and I was in the truck outside the thing, and suddenly there was a shout and a terrible bang. Bang. Silence. This was a real little sound picture, then Hullabaloo. “Round the back, round the back!”, and there were big high stages there and a spark had fallen off the spot rail, and crashed down and he died. The awful thing was a short time before he fell there had been bales of straw under the set. And another person, who wasn’t a stunt girl, woman, was killed on a motor-bike, by the camera car or something. It was quite a – there wasn’t the trouble taken I think, and we made, stupidly, we had two pictures going at once. Were you there when we were doing Cleopatra and Henry V? Vast crowds. Rationing. You couldn’t – oh almost fights in the canteen because they couldn’t get food, and the technicians went in ahead of them.

RF: I don’t think it was Henry V, I think it was a Korda picture. Henry V was in Ireland [background noises partially obscure what is said]

LH: Henry V was shot a lot in Ireland, so I’m sure you’re right. Just so they could get the people because it was during the war wasn’t it?

RF: Mmm, during the war.

LH: I remember, just as an aside, when they were making …Colonel Blimp, the German prisoners all attend a concert where they play, I don’t know, Schubert or something, and all these people are in fact plaster cast, they all sat on the grass.

WR: Oh, I remember that.

LH: There were only three or four casts.

WR: It felt like that to me.

LH: And that’s all they were. But it worked didn’t it? Yes, and for years after that, when we were doing Robin Hood, all those people were still mouldering away across the other side of the river in the grass. Amazing. Were you going to say something?

RF: Well, when you mentioned Colonel Blimp, which is one of the landmark British films I think, in terms of ‘scopes sizes. Do you have any other reflections of it at the time, working in the studio at that time?

WR: Not much about Colonel Blimp. [Pause] I have far more recollections about The Way Ahead, the Carol Reed thing. Mickey Powell was a very strange man, a very interesting man. Like a mountain goat on location. He’d leap about. Oh the western system of keeping the camera and sound truck in sync was murder. They had a thing called a winking winnie. Each camera had a 12-volt battery in a very nice case. Aluminium case, and in my truck, which I didn’t understand – I say, I never knew what went on inside those bloody boxes, I had a thing that produced a control current, which was supposed to control my motor, my sound camera motor and the – well in those days they were tri-pan cameras, you know bloody great cameras, and sometimes you would get two cameras and it would be cold, and trying to keep this blasted thing in sync – and while I’m on it, this is how I changed to the cutting rooms – but we were on location on This Happy Breed, and Celia Johnson had run way over; marvellous woman, but she said “Look, I’m going. At the end of this week. My family are important and I’ve given you, you’ve gone over and whatnot and I’m going.”

Well, I had a camera I couldn’t hold. The bloody thing was always wandering I was complaining about it. Nobody took any notice. And then we had a camera-

LH: [interrupts] How could you tell at the time that it was wandering?

WR: It was sort of three or four of these – what are these little bulbs that light up?

LH: Neons?

WR: These neon things. I can’t remember exactly but it went round, or if it went round one way or the other, it was a bit like-

LH: [Interrupts] Oh it was a plus or minus thing was it?

WR: Yes. This thing was very difficult to hold. When we had playback. And I’m not sure if there was another camera, so I had to hold, try and hold four motors in sync. And I couldn’t. And David Lean ranted and raved, “Let’s get Watkins down here.” This was in Balham or somewhere, in the suburbs – “Let’s get Watkins down, let’s get Crowhurst down, let’s get the whole of Denham Studios down.” You Know. And I sort of said “Who is blamed?” The bloke who can’t hold it in sync! And I was saying I’d complained about this for a long time. And at that time I was still living in Chalfont St Peter, and Ronald Neame [BEHP Interview No XXX], Ronnie Neame, a very nice man, I think was also living there and he gave me a lift, and on the way back – instead of giving me a lift from Denham Studios he gave me a lift from Balham, and I was moaning, “The trouble with the Sound Department, you’re only notice if something goes wrong, and this that and the other and he said “What would you like to do?” and I said “I’d like to go in the cutting rooms.” He said “Do you know Jack Harris?” I said “Yes, I was in lodgings with him or digs or whatever you call it at Elstree.” So, he said “Well speak to him and if he agrees you can come into the cutting room on our next film”. And it was sheer chance, you know because this thing went wrong that they took me on, I think at the same salary, I’m not sure, and that was Cineguild-

LH: That was very generous.

WR: I know it was. And Havelock-Allen said “Don’t tell anybody. Don’t tell anybody what you are getting.” And I became the joining boy in the cutting rooms –

LH: [interrupts] Pinewood or Denham?

WR: Denham. On the same film that I’d been on the floor on, which was interesting.

RF: Previously then you had been employed by the studio, and now you are on the payroll direct, is that it, or are you still on Denham studio’s payroll?

WR: On Independent Producer’s payroll.

RF: Independent Producers, hm.

WR: But to go back [pause] on The Way Ahead, they had four or five actors that were always on call, always on stage – not always on stage: Stanley Holloway, David Niven was the officer, and off-stage there was always a huge poker game going, the whole time, and the interesting thing about that – I thought it was a very good film – the artists were the same on the poker table as they were on screen, they didn’t change a bit [chuckles] It was extraordinary, and Stanley Holloway, they were always trying to upstage one another: “Oh Carol, do you think if I put the hat down there- artists, they were always trying to get upstage, and Stanley Holloway, who I thought again was a wonderful character sort of said “well I have been on, I can upstage the lot…” and Carol Reed seemed to know – it’s funny, Reggie Beck[BEHP Interview No 10] said he didn’t know, ‘cos he worked with Carol Reed, he shot from every angle and hoped for the best. I always felt he let it all go on because he knew he wouldn’t be using that bit, he’d be using another bit and so on. ‘Cos that started as a small documentary as a recruiting film for the Army, and it was so successful that Carol persuaded the Army to let him go or whatever, and they made a feature on roughly the same lines as the documentary, ‘cos really – did you ever see it?

LH/RF: [inaudible]

WR: Wasn’t William Hartnell in it? Became famous overnight because of that.

[30.00mins] I got a bit fed up because we were, nothing to do with me, but we were the best sound crew in Denham, the most sought-after sound crew, because of the mixer, and I think the boom operator. The mixer was C. C. Stephens, who was considered their best mixer and the boom operator was Gordon McCallum [BEHP Interview No 58] who later became dubbing mixer at Pinewood, and he was terrific. He’d get the boom up on a rostrum, and he’d get in and tell the cameraman he couldn’t have a light there. Imagine that. And I remember ‘Mac’ was on the rostrum one day, and Mickey Powell was, Mac was up there laying the law down to Mickey Powell he was looking up at him and Mac was on this rostrum [chuckles] bellowing at him, and I got fed up because we didn’t do any locations. I don’t mean marvellous foreign locations, but we never went outside the studio, because in those days you didn’t get much good sound outside the studio. You don’t even – well they tried I think but the mics were primitive, nothing like the thing we’ve got here and so we stayed behind and we’d often as film would come back on the Friday or the Thursday and we’d have to start work on it, the same film; the mixer would go off and we’d start on it on the Monday, in the studio and then go onto another one in the studio and all the locations were done by not so popular mixers. 31.38 I mean I’m not saying this was the John Dennis’s but the minor string. I don’t think there’s much else – oh one interesting thing which I always thought, because I can’t drive an ordinary car, although I did try on these trucks, when you changed sets, stages, you moved the truck and you had to wait for a driver to come, and sometimes you waited a long, long time, and a lot of them, they weren’t supposed to do it, they moved the truck themselves and the way the studio was run, you paid, for that driver you paid his day’s wages, and he might have moved three sound trucks that day, so three production companies paid three day’s wages – the whole day. That was the way Denham was sort of run.

Then I became the ‘Joining Boy’ and the first film I really remember was Brief Encounter, and I think there were one or two [others?] but that was such a wonderful film, such a wonderful experience; and I was Shop Steward, or had a lot to do with the management in those days from a union point of view. I think I wasn’t a very good Shop Steward ‘cos I could always see the other side of it. But Denham didn’t make any films: they had Two Cities, and Independent Producers, and then renters like RKO or whoever came in and Tom White was in charge of Independent Producers and I went in there one day to see about something, I’m sure a union matter and he looked me straight up and said “What do you wanna do? What do you wanna do – you don’t want to be a joining boy?” So, I said “Well, oh I don’t know.” He said “Do you want to direct?” Incredible. So, and Jack had suggested to me, Jack Harris, who was the editor on all these Cine-Guild films said “You’ve been in the Sound Department, it would be a good idea if you got into sound editing.”

And then on Brief Encounter I assisted Harry Miller, who taught me an awful lot, but he was in such demand in those days that he finished the film, he wasn’t at all sloppy about the tracks but, oh, the things he did to me. If he had a roll of film and he’d used the first 30 feet, he’d hang it up and chuck the other two hundred in the bin, where all the trims are, and gradually it would become this corkscrew, because he was raring to get off to another film; he was going film to film. He was about, really, the only Sound Editor there was because in those days the editor dubbed his own, did his own laying of tracks.

LH: Or the assistant would do it. He’d make up a loop. Because soundtracks were pretty primitive weren’t they?

WR: Yes. But post-syncing in those days was very complicated on optical. You rehearsed the loop; then stopped. Wound round to the start marker on the sound and action on the loop you were copying, and the sound camera operator was supposed to put a start mark on the film in the soundtrack area, and then when that was printed that start mark would be registered. And if you went round 20 times then you had 20 takes, or you would cut if you hadn’t got a good one. And then – I think I’m right and I don’t know if Les remembers this -you had to wind round on your loop and put the start mark on each time, didn’t you?

[Inaudible as they talk over each other]

WR: You were around in the early days.

LH: Well once you got the first one on it would run in sync and it would keep running until it was cut wouldn’t it. If you wanted-

WR: [He interrupts] Oh I don’t mean that, I’m talking about when you get back to the cutting room. If you wanted to use wind 10, you had to wind the thing through 10 times because we hadn’t got round to having a blip on the film then, and I had a terrible experience because I was so keen, just after this at Pinewood on this apprenticeship scheme, because I went to the sound camera operator and I said “Look, you will put the start mark on, for heaven’s sake don’t forget to put the start mark on,” And I get the rushes back and no start mark, you see, so I go storming out, we were working in Denlabs then, I go storming out to the neg room and I say “Why didn’t you print the whole front of these things?” and they said “We did” and they got it out and showed me. There was the black, where he’d opened the door all back and he’d put the start mark in the middle of the film, not in the soundtrack area. Well that’s a minor and silly thing to do but if only you’d known what happened in the lab and what happened in the cutting room, you would have automatically have put it [in the right place] so I had to get all the negatives out and transfer the start mark, but I always feel that we would move round as much as possible at the beginning of things.

And of course one dubbed an entire reel from optical; you occasionally combined two takes or something but it had to go through in one run, rather than as it is now.

RF: Were there any special problems with post-syncing?

WR: Well, just this. It wasn’t as common anywhere as common as it is now

LH: You could, [but] you were pretty hard done by if you had twenty lines of post syncing on a film my god, all the post-sync on this film, because everything was shot on a stage and floor mixers were pretty good about getting stage sound.

RF: And wild tracks too.

WR: Also, they would shoot a wild track for instance the long speech in Henry V was shot wild, and I’ve been very successful – but of course in those days fitting process was easier because you could see the ‘mods’ [modulations] and the two and run them up and down and fit them. Editing them was difficult – Denham was about the only place that had a diagonal joiner, that you could put a join in the middle of a word, and if it was a good join you wouldn’t hear it but other studios, they didn’t run to such things.

LH: Well I think that if you were lucky you might get away with an unblipped [unlooped?] join if the ‘mods’ were heavy and you wouldn’t hear the word but Harry was much more limited as to how you could cut post-sync. Harry was the master of them all wasn’t he, was brilliant.

RF: Why was that. Why did one man have this special talent?

LH: He was very patient. Harry was an enormously patient man and he varies his technique of doing it and he worked it out and he knew, with experience, what you could do and people, not many people are as patient as Harry was, even now. I mean. With magnetic, it is easier to get a join without a click – you can still get clicks by joining in the wrong place

[40.00 mins] but I think it was patience on Harry’s part really.

WR: The same thing of course applies with footsteps and effects in the theatre, but I think dubbing was not half as meticulous as this, as it is now; I think we go overboard now in many cases, which we will come to later with stereo.

LH: There is a particular question here of what was the technique of working with optical soundtracks like really?

WR: Well it was much slower, for instance when you got your film finally cut, the work print, the optical work print was no good, it had to go away for neg cutting, and you either split it yourself because of overlaps  and dialogue running on and somebody crashing in on you split it yourself or you marked it up and that had to go to the negative girls and they got the negative out, the clicking numbers and cut the negative as they would the picture to fit the dialogue and then that was printed, and often there were pinholes, pops and plops on it, and that went to a department in Denham Labs where they had girls that had brushes and they did beautiful sort of long strokes, really through all the pinholes, and there was a department, a man called Luscombe who ran this department, the Optical Department and he would listen to it or look at it, I don’t know how he checked, and that came back, so I should think you had to allow at least a week before you were going to start dubbing, to get all this work done at the laboratory and your film back to start mixing; and another thing that was so much more difficult in those days – it took a long time to get a re-print of sound.

Say you were wanting to use a lot of one particular noise in a film, you’d try and work it out – and Harry was very good at this, he’d measure it and work it out and he’d order five prints. Well, if you were short today you or an assistant would nip down to the Transfer department and he’ll come back with it in a few minutes if you are lucky, but in an hour if you are unlucky. Now if you were unlucky and it’s really urgent, it could be days because they didn’t always put you at the head of the list, and sometimes they mislaid the negative, and it was the same in the Library. I used to join all the library tracks up and run them in the theatre, because sometimes you would order a library track, and on a Movieola you can’t really tell the quality of it and we didn’t wear earphones in those days, and when you came to hear it in a good theatre you got a nasty surprise, and one thing I started doing – there’s a lot to be said for freelance and there’s a lot to be said for permanence and we had a very good girl librarian – funnily enough, she was a librarian – a book librarian – she’d got a degree or something, and took it over and I always asked her into a running before I started it, if I could before I started in the library so when I spoke to her about church bells or rough seas, she was half way there, because she knew what I was talking about; and I feel that this wonderful girl at Cinesound – well they are both good now David that if they could see the film before you start asking them for tracks, they would come up with ideas, they’d come up with things ‘cos they know their tracks so well and we know some but not all; and I when I was working at-

LH [Interrupts] I assume now, you are talking about Pat Daines[?], obviously?

WR: No. Another girl. She left.

LH: Oh. No Pat Daines was in the cutting room as an assistant.

WR: She was David’s

LH: David Lean. Yes.

WR: No not Pat, another girl. I don’t know, I’ve forgotten her name. She couldn’t get on with the film industry and went back to books I think.

You see, I had my own little library when I was at Pinewood because libraries weren’t as advanced as they are now and weren’t so money-making. And tracks that were often used, I used to keep. I had a big cabinet, and kept them from the last film, and it was economic and it was useful; and I was very sad ‘cos I’ve always been interested in noises, sounds you know but not the technical side of sound, but the result of sound, and I got Ludwig Koch down – you know of him, do you?

RF: Yes.

WR: This wonderful, wonderful man and he came with his records and his beret and he sat in the front row of the seats in Theatre 2 at Pinewood, and he played a skylark. And he said [imitating] “He go up. He go up.” And whatever she did, “she stay still.” And afterwards “She come down.” And he was absolutely in love with this. I spoke to Ronnie about him and I said “Why doesn’t Rank come to an arrangement with the BBC, give him decent equipment, because he was using these awful old disc things that rumbled and thumped, and must have weighed a ton; give him a decent machine – this was the early days of tape machines – and come to an arrangement with the BBC, that you get a recording of everything he’s done because he was a pioneer in these things.

Nothing ever came of it. There was a terrible fight between the Sound Department and the library at Pinewood, and with no cost at all [as] they had dubbing theatres doing nothing. They had assistants, they could have employed them for virtually nothing; they had miles and miles of junk tape which was quite good enough for effects, and I implored them to file them properly, put dogs [?] on them like Cinesound, and put them on quarter-inch tape. Nobody bothered.

LH: I think it was slightly worse than that. They went on putting – on optical- they went on putting tracks from magnetic onto optical because the Head of Sound there, because the person who was running it called

[Abrupt end of tape at 47mins 02secs]

 

SIDE 3

RF: Wyn Rider, tape 2 side 1

LH: So, you were saying that there was no outcome-

WR: No; then on the popular tracks which were still on optical were just worn out. I went out - a very popular track was the church bells [corrects himself] the clock chimes, and I happened

to be sound camera operator – was I, oh I don’t know. I went up with John Dennis, to the bell foundry in Bow is it or Shoreditch or somewhere and-

LH: Bow, I imagine, yes.

WR: He was miraculous – he did long shot and close shot in that place and he did Westminster, big bell, small bell, ding dong, big bell, small bell, he got the lot and strike twelve. He got the lot but they wore them out. But it’s very difficult to choose a bell and get the chimes that go with it.

LH: Sure. Now would you say that using an optical track was restricting in any way, or it was obviously more restricting but it wasn’t a restriction at that time because nobody expected as much then as they do now?

WR: No, I don’t think - the restriction was time, I think. You had to be much more organised before you started. And of course, in the theatre you had to do it in one run.

LH: Well, everything had to be right and it had to be in sync for one thing. You had to be fully prepared going in knowing that you had two weeks and after that it was the end of your time, and it all had to be done.

WR: Yes, but as I say the dubbing mixers had to do it in one or at least two. You might change over on a big noise as you say –

LH: Or you could neg cut – neg cut an extract.

WR: But then you had to proof it. But you didn’t – you tried not to.

LH: Sure, sure.

WR: I had one very nasty experience on, I think it was Great Expectations, and I had just

done a change-over on a reel or done something, and the theatre was full of large men smoking large cigars for some important running, and Jack Harris insisted on having two start marks of fifteen foot for dubbing and twelve foot for projection, so we are all in the theatre, and suddenly David [Lean} stood up and said “It’s out of sync”. Well honestly, my heart –

LH: Your bowels turned to water!

WR: Yes. Wow! It was cut, I went belting upstairs – and Charlie Statt [?] was up there then

and I said “Did you thread up on the right start-marks?” And you can imagine his reply which was full of swear words “and of course we bloody well did!” so there was no alternative, but

to take the thing down, put it up on the synchroniser. This is a long job – with thirty or forty people sitting in there, waiting. And it was in sync. And they had lined it up on the wrong

tracks – but, who cares, you know? It was – oh dear I’ll never forget that. And on the same

film, and this is why I think it’s so good to work with David, of all people, because at the end there is a chase between a paddle-steamer, the police or whoever it is in a rowing boat, and the fugitive is in a rowing boat, and in the middle of mixing he said “Cut it. I’m an absolute idiot. I’m going to re-cut it.” And it was quite complicated because we’d post-sunk all this rowing, and it had to be in sync and we go back up to the cutting room, and he said “Well,

what are we going to do for poor old Wyn?” you see. Now not many directors would even dream of thinking about what’s going to happen to the tracks, so I came and my assistant

came in on a Saturday, and wound through and put a start mark on every 25 feet or every

50 feet or something, that’s the only thing we could think of, and then they came in on the Sunday and re-cut it and we did it that way.

LH: He was more, from what I know, what I’ve heard about David Lean at that time, he was more like an independent producer within Pinewood and at the time he was fairly cavalier and if he wanted to go away and make a change he always got time to do it, because he had great authority and power there and if he didn’t like a thing he would stop and change it and maybe [you’d be] shut down for a week while it was done.

WR: Not as long as that. Not for a week, but maybe-

LH: I’m only going by what Jack Slade said about it.

WR: Well Jack was only on one thing I think: Great Expectations. Wasn’t it? Yes it was. Yes, because he was involved with that.

Another good thing about permanence, ‘cos I’m moderately conscientious, I think and I always used to try and find out – because Jack was the person who allocated assistants and things in those days and I’d always try and find out from Jack my next film, so that while I was on the one, I could go into rushes, because it does help if you might even make a note [that] there’s a jolly good noise, which you’re never going to get in the film, and it helped to go to rushes of your future film while you were still working on the last one, ‘cos the schedules were far more leisurely then, there was a much longer break between finishing shooting- [and dubbing]

LH: [interrupting] There’s one thing, I suspect that your experiences and mine were slightly different around that time because I was working at Shepherds Bush, and at Shepherds Bush the sound was pretty well specified, and decided by the Head of Sound who was Brian Sewell, and he would say what was to be post-synced and where to shoot footsteps; the soundtracks were fairly simple the music would be decided by Muir Mathieson and the Director, but the Director by and large was doing something else and rarely came to a mix.

WR: Really.

LH: -and didn’t really have lot to contribute – I don’t know whether he was given the chance,

or it was just the studio system as I believed happened in America, where the directors didn’t follow a film right through to the end, they were off doing something else. Whereas David

Lean was obviously one of these men who - and Ronnie Neame – who followed it through and had specific ideas and had specific ideas about what he wanted.

WR: Well, I thought most did. I mean I worked with [Edward] Dmytryk on a very good little

film [Obsession DS] which was about a man who was going to kill somebody and dissolve him

in acid; he shut them up on a bomb-site in the basement and every day brought a couple of

hot water bottles full of acid, and he said “when I’ve killed you” – he’d chained him up – “I’m

gonna let you go down the plug-hole.” And while that was going on, we read the script every day. There was a murderer wasn’t there who worked in some sort of copper place where

they dissolved, and he’d [done the same thing in real life?]- yeah, and Rank held it back! Incredible! It was a Rank Film, I think. And at that time-

LH: [Interrupts] Brides in the Bath, wasn’t he murdering his wife?

WR: Something like that.

RF: He was Kenneth Haigh as I recall, murdering old ladies for their money, from little hotels in South Kensington.

WR: But the extraordinary thing was that our script was almost in the Daily Mirror or whatever it was every morning, and Dmytryk at that time-

LH: [interrupts] What was his name?

RF: Haigh.

LH: It wasn’t Heath was it. Neville Heath.

RF: I beg your pardon. I’m libelling Kenneth Haig the actor. I think you’re quite right.

LH: Neville George Clevely Heath I think his name was.

RF: Absolutely.

[Actually, they are conflating two different cases: that of John Haigh, and that of Neville Heath, both of whom preyed on women DS]

WR: Did you ever work with this Greek lady, she was the editor on that?

LH: Oh yes, Lito Carruthers, yeah.

WR: I know in the theatre she was on reel one she would say “louder, softer” and the rest of it all the way through the first rehearsal. Dmytryk really tore her off a strip.

LH: But did you never have the experience of doing the sound on a picture and never seeing the director or talking to the director?

WR: No, I don’t think so.

LH: No? It used to happen.

WR: Works for Hollywood then? No I don’t think so. I worked with Sam? I’m so bad at names. Brian somebody, [Desmond-Hurst. DS] when Dirk Bogarde did Simba. And quite a few with Ronnie Neame. And this wonderful chap who, from Ealing, heavy drinker –

RF: Robert Hamer.

WR: Robert Hamer, did one with him.

RF: Which was that?

[10.00 mins]

WR: I can’t remember. I think John Mills was in it – he’s up in some old barges on the [River] Medway. [The Long Memory. DS] I’m awful about names. I’ve got a blank about people’s names and things.

RF: Any recollections about Hamer? He was a great-

WR: No, except how sad it all was. Come - we’d be doing something in theatre – and come 12 o’clock he’d say he was going to do something, and not come back until quite a long time after lunch, and you knew what had happened. I didn’t know him, I only did this one picture and I think he was coming to the end of his career then. Er, what else did we do?

LH: Ronnie, presumably, once he became a director, modelled his method on David Lean’s?

WR: [unconvinced] Yes, I suppose so.

Well, he became a director during the time that America wouldn’t let us have films because the Government, the Labour Government restricted money going out of the country that the film’s earned, so Rank asked all sorts of people to make films, and there were some terrible films made. He tried to expand to fill his – do you remember that episode?

LH: Yeah- the Americans-

RF: This was the time of the added on [?] tax. 75% was put on the earnings of imported films and which is why the Americans would not pay it.

WR: Was it?  No, they wouldn’t pay it.

One thing I’ve forgotten-

LH: [Interrupts] Was that Harold Wilson?

RF: Yes, but under compulsion.

LH: When he was at the Board of Trade, I mean.

RF: Yes but it was because the country was absolutely broke.

WR: One terrible thing I have forgotten, and that was that sometime during the war, the very early part of the war – the Blitz was on – I worked for the Crown Film Unit, and that was an experience and a half in a disused chapel in Blackheath was their studio, and there was Pat Jackson and Humphrey Jennings. A bunch of amateurs, it was extraordinary, they did the most wonderful work but the way they behaved was quite extraordinary. On - what you were supposed to do on an RCA recorder was develop a test every morning. You’d put a frequency on it, at a certain percentage and then you measure the half-track, which was the galvanometer at rest, and then you measured the squeeze track because – they developed this squeeze track which cut the track down to 5 millimetres, very narrow, because that made it black on the positive, and you’re clearer on your long bits of clear film because that was where all the hiss and the thing came from. Anyway you’re supposed to measure it, that was your way of telling if everything was working and your location was right, because if you shift over on the side of the film you’ll cut, invariably you’ll cut your peaks off. You’ll get distortion. And sometimes you had a weave, your film would be weaving as it came through. So I had – with each recorder there was a little scale-ometer, and I always had a bit of glass that you held it on, put it up, and I developed my test, go into the darkroom, develop the test, come out and there was a permanent construction man there and a permanent projectionist. He used to come to work in his pyjamas and sign on and then go home and have breakfast. It was only down the road.

It was a very strange outfit [chuckle] and he’d say “What are you doing? What’s that? Never seen anyone do that before!” Well under Harold King if I hadn’t done a test that morning, and it wasn’t hanging up, I was for it but apparently- and that was quite interesting, and they made some very good films didn’t they?

RF: Ah yes.

WR: And I didn’t realise – my wife’s doing some research, archaeological research, and Humphrey Jennings has written books on all sorts of things, way outside the film industry. I didn’t realise that. He was quite a man.

RF: Hm [inaudible] man.

WR: Anyway, going back to dubbing and whatnot-

LH: [Presumably checking some reference sources] Do you want to look, shall we go through some of these?

WR: Oh yeah. I’m rambling – not talking much about technique.

LH: What improvements have been made with the introduction of magnetic tracks? Oh well we’ve talked about some of those.

WR: Oh, speed. I think a larger volume range isn’t there? I think.

LH: Yeah, the overall quality is much higher-

WR: Like up to optical [inaudible]

LH: Yeah, in the end it does. The final surface noise is much, much less isn’t it.

WR: And the great thing of all is the small recorder because on RCA you had a truck and that was it. And I don’t know whether they had other things but where the truck went you got sound and where it didn’t, you know you were limited to this very heavy machine, and 35 mill. [35 mm film]

LH: Smaller crew. You always needed [crash in background drowns out word]

WR: What, smaller crew now? Yes. But then RCA didn’t have a big crew they weren’t – one thing I quite liked about Western: each crew had a maintenance man, who if anything went wrong, a mixer walked away, a sound cameraman walked away, a maintenance man, who did know about electronics, did it. Now at RCA, I went out with as I say, Marcel Varnel, with a truck, and perhaps a mixer who didn’t really know what he was about, and oh, I used to be terrified, because if anything went wrong, because apart from changing a valve or kicking the thing, I really had no clue, and I think it was very wrong to send somebody out at about £2 or £2 10[shillings = £2.50] or whatever I was getting in those days.

LH: I mean clearly magnetic is of higher quality and easier to use, not sensitive to dirt – I mean you can roll it on the floor, and pick it up and it will still play whereas you had to be extremely careful with optical track if you, if it was one you were going to use in the mixing theatre print and to bloop it.

WR: And, of course, the tape joiner.

LH: The tape joiner, yeah.

WR: It’s marvellous. And all the things are simple…but I do think schedules have got a lot shorter, and they go on cutting it much more.

LH: Yes, it’s all becoming – the joiner that is you are absolutely right: once you’ve cut optical and you’ve lost two holes and you can never, ever replace them, whereas with magnetic you can put it straight back.

WR: I’m waiting for the time, Les, when they get a joiner that will go through the neg bath.

LH: What a take-up[?]

WR: Yeah, well even after you’ve linked up [?] Some sort of joiner that won’t show on the negative.

LH: Now [reads] what has been the effect on the cutting room and the dubbing theatre with the introduction of stereo sound?

WR: Well, I think in the cutting room it’s had an effect that the people haven’t really sorted out and have become, have done a lot of extra work that isn’t necessary: they’ve done this on the left, and this on the right, oh I think made it so complicated.

My great thing, I always managed to stick to it was – I always tried to put myself in the chair of the mixer who has got to handle it and I always think now how is he going to handle it, and I think the simpler, within reason, the better and if you go in with too many footstep tracks and things like that, they won’t use them, so knock half of them out or it comes through it so quickly it’s a mess. I don’t think if I was a producer, I’d always want stereo used. Because I think your brain, because on an ordinary picture, if somebody’s on left of screen or right of screen or they walk across the screen, your brain does it. I don’t think you have to have it done for you. I think it helps with music, and obviously in some films it is very effective.

LH: Well, I think the other thing is, whether its magnetic or Dolby stereo, the overall sound quality of the track-

WR: [interrupts] Is better-

LH: Is better yes.

WR: But I still think you can get the same effect using a Dolby non-stereo. I’m not in love with stereo really. I think for instance the thing you did out in San Francisco with the helicopter was very effective. Those sort of things; and I once saw a film I can’t remember what it was where they had motor racing and the cars were whizzing along in front of you

[20.00 mins] and the p.a was behind you which so often happens, that was very effective. Generally – and it’s time consuming, isn’t it, certainly time-consuming in the dubbing theatre, I think. Because they can’t do three tracks, they can’t do –

LH: Yes, it’s complicated it, it’s added an enormous amount of time to how long it takes to mix the picture.

WR: And also, to track-laying on a thing like Lawrence, or you have a line of men on a sand dune, firing rifles, and some close-ups, some long-shot you end up with six tracks of rifle shots which – and you miss one out or something and makes life very complicated, and that you have to do because nobody’s able to pan from place to place.

LH: One of the main drawbacks, also I think is that nobody the very small supply of stereophonic tracks, everything is cobbled together with mono tracks.

WR: One thing I’m always amazed and this isn’t to do with editing is that still they cast people whose voices they don’t like. This always absolutely staggered me. They give quite an important part to somebody, who then they proceed to revoice.

LH: Yeah.

[Pause]

WR: One thing that I’ve been lucky – I don’t know whether I’ve left Denham yet, I’ve always been very lucky on Sam Spiegel pictures, on David Lean pictures, and one or two others, to go on location. And I think it saves so much money, if it’s an action picture you’ve got camels, or trains, or tanks or whatever, and you can go out and get either a local crew or a British crew, but usually it’s a local crew if you’re abroad, and on Lawrence I used to go into the production department every night, to find out what they weren’t using the next day – this was in Almeria and I had a Spanish sound crew who were quite efficient. I could write a book about them, too, but anyway, [if] they weren’t using the camels or the Arabs or the train, I used it. And took the Arabs or the camels far enough away from the unit; I would never interfere with them, but they were noisy so I got them out of the way, and saved no end of money and time in my opinion. When you get out there and see the size of the crew, and the number of people standing around all day doing nothing, the price of one sound editor out there is nothing. They so rarely do it, and I-

LH: Do you think it should be a question of policy or principle that a sound editor should start- well, at what stage do you think a sound editor should start on a film?

WR: Well I would have said about half way through the location [work], depending-

LH: Depending whether its starts on location I suppose.

WR: Well, they usually do. I was thinking – yes the sound editor should start roughly half way through.

LH: Well, I’m more drastic than that, I must say. My feeling is that you often find that you arrive too late to salvage a situation because they’ve moved away from a location and they were there last week.

WR: Oh, well, I didn’t I was-

LH: The mixer didn’t have time to do it and so forth.

[Feedback on soundtrack]

WR: Well, the mixer really does have time to do it, because he daren’t leave. No, I feel very strongly about that and I’ve been lucky. For instance, on Zhivago and on Nicholas and Alexander, believe it or not I had my own train careering around Spain. [Chuckles] Quite a privilege, this same old engine that can’t get up much speed because steam comes out of every joint on it, and I did – because I had an interesting time. The man in charge of the train was the ‘jefe de tren’ and that was the guard, and you couldn’t really speak to the driver without going through the guard, and there was a lot of [gestures] between the two, and I did manage to get the driver to get up as fast [a speed] as he could go on a track near Madrid, and then I realised why there are speed limits on tracks, ‘cos it quite frightened me. This train was coming towards me waltzing, and it was presumably not allowed to go very fast not because of the train but because of the track [laughs]

LH: Really.

WR: And it was wobbling. Oh my goodness. If it comes off because you- but that was interesting and occasionally we’d be taken off the line, usually in a station. On Zhivago. And they were very old fashioned carriages, or cattle trucks, but usually the one  I used was carriages, and there was [a] hammer and sickle painted on it, you see, and Russian writing and [whispers] you could see the people on the station – this was the time of Franco, and they couldn’t work it out at all [chuckles], this hammer and sickle train, and at that time it was extraordinary how much co-operation you got, because I went out there a long time before these films [were filmed?] Alexander the Great, and Cleo-no, what was the one that Tyrone Power died on? Supposed to be one of the worst films ever made.

RF: Soloman –

WR: Soloman and Sheba, yes. And you know, you hired the army for nothing. [26.20]

The officers got money. That was interesting  because it was a film you used to get a lot of brass hats visiting. And it was a long time ago in Spain, they almost fought one other, they shook hands, they clapped each other on the back. Whereas an Englishman might shake hands and bow. The army was used a lot. I don't know if it was Robert Rossen on Alexander the Great, but he wrote the script every night, and people didn't know what location, unbelievable, he decided he wasn't going to go in a studio anymore.

RF: Were any of those [Samuel] Bronston pictures?

WR:   No these were a long, long time ago. I was fired from that. It was the only time I've ever been fired. I was left. The editor wanted to go home and there was an airline strike so the film was delayed in going back to Technicolor [labs] and coming back. So he said “I'll go back and see it in England”, he'd been there a long time, and they left me in charge of the film, and I didn't know where a lot of it was, and I was to get the film out and show it. Also the idea was I was to watch them shoot and stay back for about ten days, with the sound crew and cover it because they were getting wonderful horse-tracks, it was hard ground, solid and rocky. A lot of horses in it, and the horses would charge through, and every time spoilt by the Italian assistants yelling “rapido, rapido, venga” and I kept protesting and said “you know, you're going to regret this when you get back.”

LH: Spanish assistants. You said Italian.

WR:   Yes. I’m sorry. Another time they had a priest and I think he was speaking Spanish, he was supposed to speak Latin or English I went to the director and said

“are you going to put English into that later on?”, and he said “yes”.  I said “well you'd better slow him down a bit.”, because it was such a quick, and he didn't like

that, and then I protested again, I was trying to get good sound, and the mixer who won't be mentioned     had an insurance policy, the clapper boy always said “253

take four, guide track”, and that absolved the mixer, and eventually   I was fired, I presume because I'd been making objections, trying to get them get good sound. Eventually they ended up doing all the houses with cocoanuts, and they were wonderful tracks. Oh and also, the garage, the motorcar      park was   quite close to the location and cars were pretty rare, you had to be quite somebody to have a car in Spain in those days, and the most important part of the car to my mind seemed to be the horn, the claxon,

and they, the drivers seemed to spend their time tuning up the horn, I protested at that.  

[30.00 mins] But it was rather nice because I was fired and left because the atmosphere was not very pleasant, I lost my allowance but I had a fortnight to get home from Madrid on full pay which was quite nice.

I did a little bit of dubbing there, not on that film, on another one, with a very good mixer, I've tried to get him later on but he's always been busy and he did both, this was just a little pre-dubbing somebody wanted done and he couldn't get used to a sheet, cue sheet, there was no footage cutter, he would see a signal and he obviously had to get in and be that much behind. That was interesting because he was a Franco man and the boom swinger was a Republican and they argued on location.

Then I suppose after that we came to Lawrence which I’ve dealt with. I was told to go to Morocco but I didn't because I knew I wouldn't have time. And that was with daddy and he was trying to shoot stereo. Then he tried to do a 3-track stereo. He ran 35[mm] at the same time. He was quite keen in those days.

LH: Paddy was a pretty good mixer. He did Lord Jim, completely on the side, if Paddy Cunningham hadn't shot Lord Jim and Basil Fenton-Smith hadn't shot The Seventh Dawn, or whatever it was called, Apocalypse Now wouldn't have had any South East Asian general background because they shot nothing on film at all. They had nothing in libraries in America, it all came from those two films.

   WR: But Paddy somehow gave up. I got out on Zhivago and the high frequencies nearly drove you mad. They dressed the other girl, not Lara, the other one, no it was Lara, and the swooshes, I said what on earth is this, it's difficult, to interfere with the

quality of the sound. So, he said there's no sense, I don’t go to rushes, he was shooting on a Leevers Rich [camera] I think, he said “it's alright, it's alright.”           I said “Well I don't know, it's not good on the Movieola, it's not good on this.      It was terrifying. And I arranged, they said that the theatres of Thea [?] Studio were no good and across the town was a theatre in which everybody did their looping in, with good sound. So, I arranged runs of stuff there after shooting one night. And then he couldn't come, and we did it two or three nights and he refused to come. When we got out to Los Angeles, we found out that it was terrible and he wouldn't co-operate at all, it was very strange, and why a lot of it went back to, I think it was transferred at MGM, at Boreham Wood. Why they hadn't said anything, but I think they were very cross about-

LH: The film going to the States.

WR: Not only that but David had taken on whom he wanted-

LH: Oh, I see.

WR: It was an MGM picture but it was almost independent. We had an American sound editor over to do the dialogue which was Norman's idea, which I thought was a good idea, who- I had to redo all the loops because he put 6 frame wipes on it.

LH: And did David Lean, let’s say David Lean normally take you on location to do the

Sound?

WR: Normally, yes.

LH: Did any other directors do the same?

WR: I've been out to Vienna, no not Vienna, somewhere in Austria

for a short time.

LH: You've obviously worked in various countries in having films mixed. Would you have any observations about the differences between say Los Angeles, London and Rome - you did The Red Tent in Rome, did you not?

WR:    I don't think Rome is all that good for mixing.

LH: What is the difference with Los Angeles?

WR:    Los Angeles is very different. The mixers in Los Angeles are very, very powerful. When, and the sound editor is one above the lavatory cleaner I always feel. I think when we took Zhivago there, I think we were the first British crew to go in to cut a film with a British cutting department in Los Angeles, [LH queries] well, very early anyway, perhaps the first at MGM. David was very busy cutting and I was very busy laying tracks, but I had insisted on sticking to 35mm and all the sound editors worked on 17 and a half which I refused to do. They had a 3-way synchroniser, have you seen it, which fitted into a little key way on a bench. They could run four soundtracks because it was 35, anyway I was supposed to go in and supervise the dubbing, to see what Mr Lean wanted. And you won't believe some of the things I'm going to say. No matter who had laid the tracks, and

I hadn't always been able to put all the horses on tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4, because I got short tracks, and I put them on 1, 2 and 3 and then on 7, 8, 9 or whatever. So, the mixer who was about 6ft 6 and a very powerful man, "Put up the first 6 tracks," he'd say. And I said "look you've got horses, wind, bird and over here   there are more horses, why don't you do all the horses?" "Ah shit, put up the first 6 tracks." You know David cuts and shoots for sound. He's the most conscientious sound director there is, or one of them. I'd say "look, that is a sound cut, those horses have got to come crashing in there." "Ah" he'd say, "We'll pick it up on the dub.” This is a pre-mix." I said "But look, you've got wind and a bird ahead of it, how can you pick it up? This went on and we had about 5, 6 or 7 sound editors on it. They didn't think we'll finish it, but it was done in no time at all. They didn't think we'd make it. They’d go in there, almost trembling, I'm not kidding. "Take this fucking crap out and bring it back so I can mix it," he'd say.

We all had supper at night, us British, because they gave David the school house which used to be the school house for all the child stars and he didn't sleep there but he had a bedroom and a living room and an office. It was a little bungalow on the lot, very close to where we were workin g. .  And they gave him a black lady to look after him and cook. Oh, she didn’t cook, they sent out those long menus they send you. And I said “You know, you’re not going to like it, it’s not good. “Oh, you’re a bloody old worryguts! Don’t worry” And I said “Well it’s not right.” “Oh, you worry too much.”

One thing about David is that he's terribly conscious of sound but when he's editing he's a bit impatient if you hammer away at the sound too much.  He's marvellous to work with but he's got this one thing in his mind. So, we get down to the theatre, and I don't suppose he's finished editing by then, if that's the screen [demonstrates] and it's all running and he's there and l'm here,

[40.00 mins] he's doing this, looking at me. And this very nice editor who's dead, was on it as well, and David got the man who's in charge of all the finishing all of films at MGM, allocating cutting crews, theatres and the rest of it, a vice president, got him out of bed at about 3 o'clock in the morning and said "You better ring New York because I'm not going to make the day." By then there were things on television, great big posters up and oh dear, and Norman saved me, I think it was touch and go whether I went or whether this mixer went.

LH: Norman was the editor.

WR: Yes. So, I didn't know anything about this, I go into the theatre the next morning where this great big bully of a man was sitting in the back of the theatre, the theatre was a small stage I think, huge, with a vast screen, and they'd built up a wooden ramp for the seats and the mechanics for the sound side of it was underneath these wooden ramps, so you were in the building almost, you didn't go out through another door.  And there he was with his feet up. I then found out what had happened and I thought, well I don't know, the limey's done this. He's fired and Norman was told to go and find out who should replace - the other man was an absolute idiot, he really was a bad mixer.

RF: Fired off the picture or fired from the studio?

WR: He was very old as well but he was really powerful. What you see, apparently, they used to do, because I worked with an American, on erm, what was Louis Loeffler on: Exodus and he said we'll go Deluxe, won’t we, and I said what? I thought he was talking about the Deluxe lab in America, and Deluxe is all pre-mixing done and the director and the producer just wanders in and says bring this, make the music a bit louder, do this or do that.         Well David is there and he wants the sound as he has had it in his mind when cutting, and I said "This isn't right."   And they weren't used to someone being as meticulous and they wouldn't take any notice of me, no notice at all. Then within a couple of days I'd’ have sound editors come up to me and say "I'd like to congratulate you on what you've just done." They hated this man so much they [chuckling] thanked me for getting rid of him. I nearly, I don't think I'd ever have a nervous breakdown but I got as close to not sleeping and worrying and oh, I think I got out there in September. David arrived either the end of September or the beginning of October and I think we finished, uncut, because he cuts it himself, he'd done six reels or Norman [Savage] had done six reels, and he said "Don't touch them I'm going to take them to pieces." But I did thank goodness, because there's always a lot of work you can do even if they rehash it. And we finished dubbing 18 December. To cut it, shoot the music, dub it and everything else was not bad going. But awful. [in terms of pressure DS].

RF: Did it make the    opening? Did it make anything?

LH: Yes. Well, he threatened them.   But they're a funny lot because I know Maurice Jarre wanted to get a particular woman to sing something. I can't remember if there's any singing in Zhivago but he wanted a particular woman. The music department told him she was unavailable, out of town or whatever. He then found out that she was available but the music department didn't want her and I heard David say to Merle Chamberlain, the vice president in charge of all the finishing, he said "Merle who can I trust, who can I trust? " He's very good at saying it very quietly but cutting you to the quick. I was- in those days, it was before rock and roll, Zhivago,

LH: My goodness, Rock and Roll was earlier than that.

WR: But they didn't have it in America. They sent Harry, the two people who came in, they sent Harry over to France, they didn't have verted [?] loops, they didn't have anything, they didn't use heads on the synchronisers-

LH: [Interrupts] they must have used Tape Joiners

WR: -oh, they used tape joiners but they were way behind us. They called me to a meeting and I said I was going to do it because I'd devised a system on these very busy things like Lawrence of doing, if it was a 300 ft battle,  I would do a 300ft battle.       I didn't see the point of mounting 1000s of feet, this was four on a roll, when for the next 300 ft you probably needed 3 tracks, so I'd do that section, and then assemble  the sections in  the  premixes.  And I was called to a meeting     because I said I was going to do that, up in the sound department and had my knuckles rapped and told we didn't do sections, we did the whole goddam reel, it was a very unpleasant period for me. Apparently, they were spying on me and kept asking John Grover how many reels I’d done, which I didn’t think was very nice either.

LH: How about New York, was that   different?

WR: Very different.

RF: Can we break there before you get into that?WYN   RYDER     Tape 2 of 3

SIDE 4. TAPE     2

LH: So, New York was quite different?

WR: New York was totally different. Most people seem to have been trained by a lady called Dede Allen, who was a very good editor but I thought some of her methods were a bit strange. Insisted on having all the dialogue laid in and if necessary overlaid and made possible so that if you had terrible background you could try and smooth it. I had a bit of a row with them. I said to Sam I think this is ridiculous and we're in a hurry and that didn't

help. But they had a very strange system of an assistant had a Movieola in the projection box. He put up a dupe, sound and action and ran the Movieola down roughly to the footage that they were in the theatre. And if any alteration was needed, they would take the things off, [background crash] put a start mark on, put them on the synchroniser, and put them back and they always seemed to go back in synch, which amazed me. But that did seem quite a quick thing because the mixer who part-owned, was in part ownership of the theatre was alone, he mixed all the tracks by himself to a computer and the computer would, they ran down a 35mm blank film which the computer put it's information down on. It would do everything except filters. It couldn't replace the filtering. But the disadvantage of that was, I think, they could run 24 tracks, and the mixer, if they were in   a hurry, the mixer would go back and help thread up because threading up 24 tracks was quite a performance, but if you had a fairly big alteration it was a long job because you had to take off 24 things, put 24 reels back on, and to try, and keep the director and producer quiet they kept a pin table in the theatre they could play about with. But on The Last Tycoon they were a little afraid of Sam Spiegel and they moved that out.

LH: It's quite common to have table tennis or even a small pool table in American            mixing theatres.

WR: Is it.     This film was directed by Eli Kazan whom I had great regard for but somehow, I was a bit disappointed in the film and I was disappointed in him. I don't know quite what had happened but he must have been a terrific director once but somehow he didn't seem to have the strength or whatnot… Now, the other thing was that I had somebody to  help me, and he, another sound editor, I wanted      to split so he did whatever, as we do here, and I claim I was the first one to do that whether or not I was I don’t know but I claim O was, in this country, someone to do all the footsteps, etc., but he wouldn't  do it. So, we split it. I did three reels and he did three reels. And I had the greatest difficulty         in stopping him. There was quite a lot of sea noise in it, waves on the beach, and he would put three alternatives.            He put one in and two alternatives on track after track after track. And I don't know whether they do it in other places in LA but they do it at MGM, they call the dialogues A, double A, treble A, and so on. The musics are B, double B and so on. And the effects tracks start at C, D, E, and so on right the way through the dialogue [self-corrects], the alphabet which I found stupid. And they did it in New York. And he came to me at one period and said "This is the first time I haven't gone through the alphabet on every reel.", this sound editor. So how many letters there after C I don't know. [chuckles]. Incredible systems…

LH: But, don't you find the fact that you can put tracks up and sit down to them have tended in a way led to an abdication of choice by dubbing editors. Since magnetic came, so putting up, instead of 12 tracks or 20 tracks, or “I think this is the one, you choose”, you then have to say “well look there’s these five tracks and if you don't like this one, there is another one” and the choice is left to the director and the mixer and other people.

WR: Oh, well now with cassettes if nobody likes the thing, up comes something else. I think I've said enough about New York...

LH: Are you conscious of any- I think this is a silly question but are you conscious of any differences in techniques around theatres in England, any different requirements, or do you find you get the same attitudes and therefore the same requirements in theatres in England?

WR: I think l would rather not name theatres. There is one theatre we all know which goes backwards and forwards so much they, it's stale by the time they've finished and particularly       with dialogue and it sounds like they are talking through a mat. And if ever a sound man listens to this, while they're going backwards and forwards, particularly if there is a director and producer in there, for heaven sakes tell them what they're doing. Because I worked on a film in a big theatre not long ago and the director was there most of the time, and they  went backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards and we could not tell a ha’porth of difference and this is very frustrating, particularly for somebody who is watching the money, the pennies, if they go backwards and forwards and you can hear it get worse, or better, hopefully, you can understand it, but oh this going backwards and forwards. And I would like to see them do longer takes to get a longer run, a longer feel of the thing. But the temptation is to do it in, what, 20 ft runs.

LH: Well, the moment something goes wrong you stop. You go back and you correct that little item, and then you go back six feet and you start from there.

WR: But I mean even in rehearsing.

LH: Well, I think's it's easy to lose track of the equalisation on dialogue, you start to harden up dialogue and take out a bit of bass and slowly as the reel progresses, you're comparing it with what you've just heard and it gets out of all proportion, it ends up almost like a telephone voice. When you play it back it gets horrendous but it gets worse throughout the reel. This is just thanks to the ability to punch in and out on one word and go back and forth, rock and roll.

WR: I would think the main thing is obviously quality, at some places I think you get a better dub than others. 0ne theatre in particular, the chief mixer is always thinking about time which I think is a bad thing. He has to be conscious about time but he should let the director or producer hurry him up a bit, but not hurry himself up all the time. And there are some fairly small theatres around which are very good and very fast and I wonder how much difference there is in the long run, whether you take weeks or days.      Perhaps I shouldn't say that.

0ne little story I would like to say, when I was in Madrid, the sound was awful, this was Sevilla Studios so we looped in another studio across the thing and I was looping [Gina] Lollobrigida, who is a moderately            powerful lady, and as you know everything starts late and we broke for lunch about 3 o'clock.  And I went back to the other studio to get something, I can't think what, and I bumped into the director, King Vidor. King Vidor has a very strange voice and he said [imitates] "Hello, how are you getting on over there. I said “she’s being very difficult”, which she was and he said ”Yes, I figured she would be which is why I ain't there" and I thought for somebody taking home half a million or whatever it was and sending the poor sound editor over!

And, two other films I'd like to mention which I think is a bad way of making films, one of the Romeo and Juliets, the one-

LH: Castellani.

 WR:  Castellani directed, was 100% loop, 100% post sync.

[10.00 mins]

Harry Miller did the dialogue and I did the effects. They got, they didn't get loopers, they got people from Stratford, the Shakespeare company, a lot of them, took them over to

the big stage at Denham, I didn't go, Castellani coached them and took ages to coach them and blow me down, when they were saying Shakespeare, although they were English, they had almost this Italian thing. It was a beautiful film, but it was so bad, I'm so much against post- sync. Because the actor doesn't like it, they come in all edgy, they're not free and I think somehow the atmosphere of the set, the atmosphere of the location helps a bit.

LH: Also, body movement. They turn their head and the sound is different, it's a whole different thing.

WR: Another film which was partly the fault of the sound department, the boom swinger refused to go into the water, it was a poor man's life boat, it all took place seven waves away at Shepperton. The camera operator should have had an Oscar for it, he spent most of the time, or a lot of the time, in the water with a camera on his shoulder with the water doing this, it was the story of too many people in a lifeboat and they had to go overboard. And not only did we loop it, every printed tape was looped, and the artists got so cross [they said] “But I’ve done it!” They did it in two-shots three times, three takes.

Then you turn to their close up and they might not like their close up so they wou1dn't do it very well. Then you'd turn to an over-shoulder, it was unbelievable the footage which had been shot on that.

LH: Who was the director?

WR: An ex-sound editor, believe it or not.

LH: American.

WR: Yes. I've forgotten his name. Ted Richmond was the producer. We are getting away from it now with modern mics and also mixers who try harder now. A lot of the old mixers, a lot of them didn't try very hard to get good sound, some were outstanding.

RF: What era? The 30’s, 40’s?

WR: After the war. There was one man who did all the big ones in Spain and he just had announced on all of them guide track which meant you don't have to use it, it's just a guide.           

[Ta p e 2 of 3]

LH: I think that depends on the director as much as anything because a mixer I worked

with was really tremendous at getting original sound was Basil Fenton Smith, yet he did a picture with Ken Annakin, who said "I'm not interested, I don't care whether I loop it" so they ended up with a guide track because he got no co-operation, it was the attitude of the director, not the mixer's ability which caused that.

WR: Oh, I worked on I think the last or the last but one film shot at Denham before it shut down permanently. It was directed by Ken Annakin, the Disney Robin Hood, [The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men] the second live action thing that Disney did. He did Treasure Island which was a tremendous success, done at Denham and then he did Robin Hood. On the opposite page of the script there was always a sketch of the angle and a sketch of the way it should be shot, and Alex Bryce was the second unit director, and they were out at Burnham Beeches somewhere and I was in the theatre with the producer and the producer was really in charge more than Ken Annakin, and Alex Bryce came back and said to the producer, Perce Pearce or somebody, "look in the sketch, the sun is here and the camera is here and they do this but it doesn't work, can I move the camera round like this?"            And he'd come all the way back from Burnham Beeches to ask that, it was only eight or ten miles, but that was the sort of control [he had], anyway.

LH: That is Disney though, isn’t it?

WR: Yes.

LH: Disney didn't care. They were post sync-ers almost professionally.

WR: At the beginning of this film a typewritten page came round to all departments saying sound was not to be considered because there were animals and there was this and that in it. So only was sound to be considered if there was what he called lip-sync in dialogue, and then they didn't bother. Can you imagine showing that to a camera department and see how often they put a blimp on, how often they bother. The mixer that I was working with

LH: Reg Barnes Heath?

WR: Steve was on it-

LH: C. C. Stevens was the mixer.

WR: He wanted to walk off it. He said “you don't need a mixer, you want a boom swinger”.  Anyway, he stayed on it.  Reg Barnes Heath was the second mixer. They had a second unit sound crew. And they had a super set with water, not mirrors but water, some small real trees, lots of plaster trees, on the big stage at Denham was a forest. And it's where Little John meets Robin on a bridge and they have a stave fight. And there were about three stave bangs that didn't have camera noise on, very good. Well Walt was coming over. I never met Walt, I was very sorry about that. Well Walt was coming over so they wanted me to do a pre-mix on this bloody stave fight. He said get [James] Robertson Justice and the coach. You can imagine how pleased Robertson Justice was about coming into the theatre and doing a stave fight.  And they daren't really look at the screen because they'd hit one another. In the end I said “let's get some loud bangs and some scrapes and I'll fit it in”, a murderous job, I got a guide track but terribly difficult, painstaking job. That was shot in the small post synch theatre at Denham, Walt heard it and it was awful, boxy, terrible sound. So, it wasn't Crowhurst, [it was] the maintenance man that later went to Rediffusion or a big television thing, very good chap, very learned and I spoke to him about it and he said “as a matter of fact I've just been reading a paper on the reverberation quality of trees”, and he said “on that set you had a forest and to get back to that you'll have to go into a wood or a forest because of the strange echoes of sound … in all these trees.” So, we get Barnes Heath, and off we go employ a coach and a bloody extra, none of my doing,

LH:  You didn’t.

WR: Was it you then?

LH: Yes, myself and Johnny Cook did that

WR: Not the first time. In Blackpark Forest? The first time.

LH: I don't know. I know we went out one foggy morning and I got my knuckles severely bruised.

WR: The first time we went there, there was a high wind and it sounded as if the shingle on Brighton Beach [was shifting] and you've never heard such a row in all my life. And we came back and then Les did it a second time and I wasn't even there, or was I?

LH: No, Johnny Cook, your assistant who went to New Zealand.

WR: Now that is the stupidity of sound and not bothering. If they'd shot a wild track on that set at the end of the thing. Plenty of bangs and various things, I could have used them, they'd have saved all that work time. It's very strange and the whole attitude on that picture. The Key brothers were on it.

LH: The Key s; a bunch of keys. And Basil again [?].

WR: You've no idea what some of these people are like. This producer man, they had a big crowd down on the archery set, half way to city square at Denham, so I had to go down and shoot the crowd noise from the script before he shot it. So, we arrived with a sound truck and these Key people were so silly, they said "No, no, go away, we can't deal with you.”, loud, in front of all the extras. Well, that was a very good start to try and get extras to work.  I always remember that and it wasn't a very good film. But that was 100% post sync, well if it wasn’t 100% it was very close to it.

LH: Yes, a lot of it, yes. Do you think that editors presumably that means sound editors, or it might mean editors, now have a greater influence on the final product now that the editing process has become so complex?

[20.00 mins]

WR: I don't think the complexity makes much difference, it might, but it so much depends on the director.

LH: One of the things I think somehow escapes, and it might even be an improvement, now that you have to have, particularly on big films, you need three sound editors as a basic need, maybe more, whether the intention of the film and the result of the film is different from how it would be if you were able to do it all yourself.

WR: Well yes, I’m sure.

LH: Do you think that has happened to you? Do you have any instances?

WR: I think so. I did a film on which I took over from you. I don't know if you ever

heard it or saw it.

LH: I tend to forget that film, it's the only film I ever resigned from, Caligula.

WR: I was so ashamed of the footsteps. They were Roman in sandals, soft things, and I’d gone out of my way to say “please, I'd rather have a bit of dress rustle”, and they could have been in army boots, I have a reputation for being difficult and interfering, bad tempered old bugger, so I laid back and kept right out of it. And apparently the mixer

said to this individual, “don't you think they're a bit hard?”, the two footstep-girls, who should have mention because I think they're so clever these girls, said "We're wearing

the wrong things." "No that's the way we want it." And it was frightening, clonk, clock, clonk. And we had lots of time because the music hadn't arrived.  And in fact, I left it a

long time before the music did arrive. The very good mixer, Robin, at Twickenham,

spent ages trying to filter and soften them, but there was not much you could do about it, it was just like wrapping a pencil on this table top.

RF: Where had the effects been done - in Rome?

WR: No, presumably under my supervision. I could have shot myself. I would

always rather do everything myself. I'm slow, Les. And you can always make it a bit better if you try. I think if I did a film like Lawrence by myself, I think would I be

bored with it by the time I'd finish.

LH: I don’t know. It would take an awful lot of work, but I think getting the dialogue out of the way and not having to bother about the dialogue is a terrific boon, and if you trust someone to do the theatre cuts, you're better off not having to worry about that.

But it's like taking the icing off the cake, just doing the effects isn’t it? Dubbing a

film is like doing the washing up a lot of the time. It's necessary, you have to

replace things and you have to shoot things, in the end nobody will never know

they were not the ones which were there in the first place.

WR: If it's done well particularly. I don't like dialogue because if that's done

well, you're getting back to the original, and I don't think I'm all that good at it

and I just dislike it. If I was directing a film, I would put up with quite bad sound to keep the original, as long as I was happy with the performance, but presumably I wouldn't have printed it if I wasn't happy with the performance. I think on the

whole we're much too fussy. We sit in these perfect theatres with perfect sound

and no extraneous noise and you get out into a public theatre, and particularly

with stereo, I mean, some of the stories I've heard about stereo where you've

had not terribly experienced people laying the tracks, and they lay them out on the floor of the charts, you know what a dubbing chart is like, what, 15 inches by 18

inches or something, they lay them out on the theatre floor and put great big

crosses on the ones they don't want to use.

I think it's corrected itself by now but when stereo first came in, the first stereo picture I did was also the first stereo at MGM, Boreham Wood, it was a bit like the blind leading the blind, was The Man Who Never Was, what's the name of the star, I've forgotten?

LH: Clifton Webb.

WR: Clifton Webb, that’s right. We were disliked, it wasn't an MGM picture, not me personally, but the chief of sound would not let them loop in the big theatre; Basil Fenton Smith was on it, Ronnnie [Ronald Neame] wanted Basil to mix the post

sync so we had to have the truck outside, anyway, you know how nervous Ronnie

gets towards the end of a picture, and he was so nervous and every time I met him

he said "0h Wyn I think we'll post sync this line, we’ll do this" and I was writing on bits

of paper and whatnot and we did it over a Saturday and Sunday and up comes the

first loop and Clifton Webb looked at it and Clifton Webb had a very strange habit

of delivering a line and putting the most extraordinary pauses in it where you

wouldn't ever think there should be a pause and Ronnnie didn't like it. Up comes

the first loop, "What's the matter with that?" "Well, I think we could get it just a

little better, Clifton." So, we do that. Up comes the another one and you can see

this sort of edginess coming and about the third or fourth he says "What's the matter with that one, then ?" And Ronnie says the same thing, and he says "look

if you want that redone, you get someone else to do it because I can't improve it."

So, then we come over the pages [chuckles] of post sync madly crossing out other things. Then I had a very terrible experience. We were groping on this bloody thing, you know the story of The Man who never Was, they get a body and dress it. And, again, every time Ronnie saw me, he wanted a different noise up above when they were putting the socks on and they were putting his vest on, as they were dressing the man, and there had to be an air-raid going on upstairs and he  told me what noise they wanted at a  certain thing [point].

Many of the notes contradicted themselves, so just before I came to do it- it was

reel one, I think - I said “look Ronnie what do you want because I’ve got so many

notes and they don't tie up." "You know, do it as you think." I took a lot of trouble and a lot of time and I thought I'd done not a bad job. And believe it or not, it is

very difficult to get good tracks of the London blitz, they're nearly all off discs. It's

amazing and you go to umpteen libraries and they're all the same tracks.

They've all stolen them from the same discs!

Anyway, we start to dub and Ronnie is worried out of his mind and it was in Sir Bernard Spillsbury's laboratory which is two storeys down in Whitehall, that was

in this film and I presume it's true. So we're starting dubbing and the siren goes and Ronnie says "Where are the guns over the estuary     ?" And we're in Whitehall. I say "There aren't any." Well, perhaps I was a bit ruder than that because I was at the

end of my tether too, and it was “if you can't do it, we'll fly someone in who can”, terrible goings on, awful, and in a dubbing theatre there's always an audience,

you're not alone. So, I was hurt and worried, and I had to alter everything because I had got it so that the siren went and there were running footsteps and I don't know whistles and then the bombs came down, and I'd worked it all out, and then the bombs came down and then the fire engine, it all worked. He started altering everything.

LH: [interrupts] Well of course, let’s have them running-

WR: So, I stay up all night. They send cars all round the industry collecting new tracks.

So, I had to stay up all bloody night doing it. And in those days, they used white ink

on a black dupe, I used to put a line both sides of the frame and put gun for gun or

gun one or something because we'd sync them up and then put them away in cans

when we came to thread them all together and I swear to you that after all this terrible upheaval over 3 days everything went back to the same sync mark and that I swear is

true except that we did have guns over the Estuary at the beginning.

[30.00 mins.]

And he's a nice man, Ronnie, very nice man. But he works up at the end of the film.

He's so worried about it that he did that.

LH: Let me ask you another question, well, I know what the answer is, which director

you worked with understood the problems of the editor?

WR: You mean David, because he is the editor.

LH: He was generous enough to admit that Jack Harris occasionally improved on his concept.

WR: He said that Jack Harris was not an editor, he was a film doctor because in those days you got rather an amateurish director, and particularly for the Rank Organisation and Jack was the man you called in to get it together, maybe shoot a couple of extra shots to try and tie it together.

LH: Which director you worked with gave you the most enjoyment and why?   I understand that it was David lean in both cases, but who was the next director with whom you had a special relationship, who understood the problems of editing, best after David.

WR: I might say something which is going to surprise you. Not for personal relationships, and not for understanding things, but the next [best] person I worked with was [Stanley] Kubrick, because whatever Kubrick did and whatever he did to you, and however difficult he made it, which he enjoyed doing, he did produce something pretty jolly good at the end. l would rather work with someone who wasn't too pleasant.

LH: I didn’t find Stanley ever unpleasant.

WR: Not unpleasant.

LH: This is the question which director best understood the problems of the editor.

WR: The editor or the sound editor?

LH: Both. Ronnie or not?

WR: Hm, I suppose. It's such a long time since I worked with Ronnie.

LH: Probably Sam Spiegel as a producer?

WR: He had an instinctive knowledge. I always remember going with Sam. He hired a room, I think in Audley Street and a wealthy American woman had financed a building

for musicians and you could hire a room with a piano in it to use and he'd gone there

with Malcolm Arnold for Malcolm to play-

LH: This would be on Bridge on the River Kwai.

WR: And you know how insistent Sam is, and Norman Spencer was there and I was

there, and he was playing this thing and he said "I can't play the piano, Sam." He said

"Play it" and we had to whistle and we couldn't whistle, but somehow Sam thought

that was alright, conducting it. He was quite extraordinary, so many languages. I went

and had supper a couple of times in his penthouse on the Avenue of the Americas,

the posh street in New York which has flowers down the middle…

RF: It's Park Avenue.

WR: And of course, the penthouse. I think after he died his painting were valued at

£9 million and they were all there on the walls and you took a couple down and they

were portholes and there were two Simplexes [storage carousels] in the thing and you opened the door and he said “be careful” and leaning against the wall were other paintings he hadn't room for. I think undoubtedly Sam was the best producer and a

good producer is far more important than most people give credit for. I think this is

where David has fallen down since he left Sam. He hasn't really had anybody. David

once said that when you worked for Rank there was nobody to really to talk to- I don’t know if I should say this - if you got into trouble. But when he went to Korda, at least Korda was a showman and a film man and you could go and discuss your problems

and he would say it was not worth redoing it, or, you know, and you were on a level

plane. But if you went to talk to Arthur, you'd come away knowing how to sell bruised tinned salmon cans because, [laughs] I presume that was after Filippo Del Guidice left-

LH: He was Two Cities wasn’t he?

WR: But that was still Rank. Now what about techniques?

RF: It might be interesting if you have anything more to say about Kubrick. What did      

you work on with him?

WR: Well, I started off on Lolita and I made a terrible mistake on that because he is

terribly extravagant and then cuts costs in the most stupid ways. They had a composite

set on Lolita which was up for a long time, at, I suppose it was APBC then, so whenever they moved it creaked. Kubrick would not run it to discuss with me what we had to do.

He insisted on running it on the Movieola, there were about three of us looking at

it so you were way away from the thing. Also, he wouldn't let me have a dupe, I said "I need a dupe." He said "How are we going to do the recutting then?" You know he goes

on till the very last minutes. So, he wouldn't let me have a dup because he was terrified we wouldn't alter it, and when I came to run the thing there were creaks and groans everywhere which he didn't seem to mind. But quite a brilliant brain, incredible brain, I have great admiration for this man but he drives you round the bend. I didn't do anything else with him.

0h one little thing which was very strange and I have my own ideas on this, the editor working on this had a very quick temper and had made his mark on a number of people and we were going to have a running one Friday night and they’d gone to America and shot a whole lot of travelling cars, and they kept saying to me "We’ll

put a couple of shots into reel 5, we'll put a couple of   shots into reel 6." And this

was about a week before the mix and I was going spare getting these. And there

was chaos in the cutting room. We come to take the film out of EMI Studios round

to the Gate to run the film. There’s a reel missing: a reel that Lolita was in a

bathing dress, very mild today, and they had a lot of trouble with cameramen

coming in with the extras, cameramen up on the spot rail, you know the reason

that Kubrick came to England was because the League of Decency were after him,

so he came to England and the press was after photographs. We couldn't find this

so we cancelled the running. And nobody knew who'd had this reel last. We

looked in the loos, we looked everywhere, it was such chaos you couldn't say if

you had it. They called the police, they called the outside police, and about 2 days later the boy in the library came to me and said " Here’s your reel." It was in a

reel of spacing, of junk. Somebody had put it there who didn't like Tony Harvey

I think, but I got all theatrical [laughs] and presented it to Kubrick. The producer, Harris, was the son of an oilman and he got the money, Lolita was self-financed

and sold, financed by this man and perhaps Kubrick, it didn't have a big production company behind it and they didn't do anything about it. That was quite a performance.

Then on 2001, I was on that was 15 months, unheard of for a sound editor because

it just went on and on and he would not let me work, very strange. If I went into the theatre to hire a theatre to record in, I was bawled out. I said “there's so much, whatever you do with it, I could prepare”, and he was very worried about HAL, the voice of the computer, and there was a very good boffin there who he said why don't you go to the GPO, they had some sort of scrambling device which they used for testing transatlantic cables, distorting the voice, see if they’ll treat it.

[40.00mins] So, I went to them and they did a little bit and Kubrick liked it. And we had an American comedian over to do HAL's voice, why he chose him I don't know.

I don't know if you know how Kubrick works, if he's doing a close-up he'll do three takes perhaps on that one and say “start again, go back”, and he'll go on and on

and on.

LH: He doesn't cut.

WR: Well, he did this. We had the dialogue written out. I implored him to do it

to picture. "I don't want him to see the picture or something." So, it goes on and

on and on, miles of it for a minute or two minutes of HAL talking. So, I thought

“how on earth am I going to sort this out?” I said to these GPO people, they would

do it, all for free because it's a government department, “how long will it be, how much will it be, about 20 minutes, half an hour.” Kubrick then wanted the entire

thing doing. So, I go back and pleading with them and then he reshot a bit or something. They had to change their set up each time and it wasn't pressing buttons as it is today, it was quite complicated thing. He put a bit into the film and his

wife didn't like it and out it goes.

Then he heard a documentary about space, a small Canadian picture about space,

and he liked the narration and he got his American people onto it and they found

this man and he came over and did it and once more, I think it was this time, he did

it over and over again.    I'm awfully vague, but I can't remember if it was the first one

or the second one, we did, and when I took Stan Fiferman on, his first job was to take every, maybe Kubrick would have done 10 lines so he'd have 3 takes and repeat it 3

times or something. He took every line out, numbered it and assembled them together

so you never got a run of dialogue. My mind was absolutely blank and I thought “how

do I sort this lot out?”. And it all went over to Kubrick and Kubrick did it. I was so

relieved.

But can you imagine, it would be like taking out, well it would be flowing, the other

artists would answer and each time the line had to be taken out and those 3, 5 or 10

lines joined up together and the next line. A very strange man. And we got the

impression on 2001, he had so many units and Wally Veevers slaving away doing

brilliant work and Kubrick took the Oscar which I thought was a bit naughty.

LH: For special effects?

WR: Yes, for supervisor of special effects. We felt if Wally was going too well, Kubrick

would alter the system or something. He doesn't like things to go too smoothly, I always

felt. But when you think that he can go up to 90 takes and print every one.

LH: This is what he was doing on Strangelove. He got into the habit of shooting 1000 ft

at a time, and he would have the master-shot, and the piece covered would last 250

feet and you'd go forward 50 ft and he'd say “don't cut, go back and this time don't

look up”, and you'd look up after you'd done that and you'd then creep forward and

you would never finish the 250 ft because you'd then go “camera reloading”, and

you'd put in another 1,000 ft and you might have six of these. And then because he wanted to finish the cutting himself, he would never select anything. It was impossible

to edit it without some kind of guidance, never cutting, until the camera ran out, you just kept on going.

RF: I’ll say this, it  is a legitimate way of working, it's a pain in the arse for everyone

who has to follow on behind.

WR: I still think it's so extravagant. Don't forget on 2001 we were on 70 mm, 65 mm negative, now that was expensive.

RF:  But Kubrick is, I think a special case. If a conventional case were to do that, then I

think it would be criticised.

WR: They did it again, Dedi Allen came over for Reds.

LH: Reds though was getting 30,000 feet of rushes a day!

WR: But going back to David I was the second assistant on A Passage to India

because I knew there would be such a scramble at the end because there wasn't

a cutting room out in India. [Feedback noise in background] And the number of times David Lean printed take 1 only was unbelievable, and very rarely more than 3. He

might have taken a long time to rehearse it. But I don't see why you need to print

umpteen if you've got it right.

LH: How many - I know that Joe Losey on a picture he did in Rome,

The Assassination  of Trotsky, they had 49,000 feet, 49 rushes rolls. The average take was 1.3, so in other words every three takes he might get a take two, every 3 slates. It depends how-

WR: But I'm talking about the takes, not the angles.

LH: Yes, that's right, the average take was one point three, “print take one, print take one”, every third slate you might go to take two,

WR: Yeah. But, still there was tremendous footage.

LH: 49,000 ft is nothing. The average is at least 100,000 ft.

WR: Are you talking about the whole film?

LH: Rushes, yes.

WR: I'm sorry, I thought you were talking about one sequence. No. I’ve got

it all wrong.

RF: Let’s break.

 

SIDE 5, TAPE 3

LH: At this point can we ask you which film gave you the most headaches, problems and why?

WR: You’ll have to stop it for a moment, I’ll have to think. Do you mean unpleasant?

LH: Shall we say professional problems?

WR: I had terrible, I don't know if you'd call it professional problems on a little thing

called The Canadians, edited by Bob Robertson. I never met the director I think the director fell out with the producer the producer was awful. And it was a mounted      

police thing with Indians and the producer wanted to hear the gunshots. So, I

assembled the gunshots from Pinewood library, five or six of them, and he condemned them, most of them, they were cannons, they were not guns, they were hopeless. So,

I got a lot more and he chose them, personally chose them for the various shots, the

long shots or whatever.  I said "They're no good. You're not going to like them." But he wouldn't listen. So, I'm busily laying up another reel and I'm called down to the theatre and he said "what are these gun shots, they're no good" or something, and I said

"They're the ones you chose." And we had the most awful row. I don't remember

how we could even have a row about that. Anyhow I had to change them and apparently while I was out of the theatre, he said that he was going to stop me from ever coming

into Pinewood again which wasn't a very nice atmosphere. But that again was

interference from somebody in a silly way. I had terrible problems on the thing Ralph Kemplen left. These are not technical problems.

LH: No, no I remember you did a film for the Jewish National People or whatever it was called, which Helga Cranston I believe cut, I believe you had problems with the producer on that. I think what this is trying to get at would be a film like 2001 and the cries of the monkeys and all   the effects which were needed and how it was treated.

WR: The monkeys on 2001, I couldn't find any good ones in England and right at the beginning I said we should get in touch with Jane Goodall, this woman, she's been murdered or something, she lived with them, Kubrick said no, we didn't want Jane

Goodall. So, I tried England and couldn't get them. So, he said "What about America ?"

So, he got in touch with his agent, or his representatives out there and I got some

excellent tracks from-

[Telephone rings-brief break]

LH: So, you went over to Denham to record the music and Stanley was recutting the film.

WR: Well, he was supposed to be, I don't know. Then we hear messages coming from

Alex North to Stanley Kubrick, "Can I see another reel, when am I gonna see some more stuff?" And Stanley says “well Alex”, and this is only hearsay from me, this was in his

office area, "Well, I'm very busy, I'm doing this, I'm working on the publicity, I'm editing it," and so on. Eventually Alex        North takes off because he's not shown any more film

and Kubrick had obviously taken against that. So, then we find out that young men

are going to Munich, to Vienna, and all over, Berlin, coming back with tapes, quarter inch tapes of the Blue Danube, etc. And his wife had heard something on the Third Programme, [now BBC Radio 3] this [György] Ligeti thing, this strange noise they

used for the obelisk cube, and there was in great letters across it not to be removed from the BBC on this tape. Anyway, he got permission to use it. And he thought

it was full of bangs and clangs. It was a choir of 600  and they ran out of time and money before they had a satisfactory recording, it

sounded as if they were knocking over music stands and heaven knows what. He got, that young conductor man, Dods, Marcus Dods, and he thought he could redo it

in the Albert Hall and got in touch with Ligeti and said “Do you mind?” and he said apparently "Good luck, it took us six weeks to get as far as we got, if you think you can improve on it in two days, you're [mad?]." Anyway, we went over to New York-

LH: Did they do it or not?

WR: No, we used the original. We went over to New York, er, Los Angeles to finish dubbing it because we brought two American mixers over. He had lunch with David

and David didn't like the mixer at MGM and did like very much the second mixers

who finished Zhivago and as it was an MGM picture, they imported two American

dubbing mixers over: And then we took it back to LA really to put it on 6-track and to finish one reel, I'm not quite sure. They have really brilliant music editors over

there, that's the one department in the cutting room where they're streets ahead

of us, men that do nothing else but handle the music and this man cleaned it up, it

was unbelievable, you'd never know, it was quite, whether he took little bits and replaced them I don't know, but they are really very good.

I think that’s about all. Oh, I'll do the apes. Was I on the apes?

RF: Yes, you said you got the real apes somewhere in America.

LH: Where did you get them in America. Which I’m trying to recall.

WR: And I did a pre-mix.

LH: Where did you get them from in America?

WR: lvan Tors who runs a menagerie I think for the film industry. Anyway, I thought it wasn't bad. Kubrick didn't like it as usual, never likes anything the

first go off. I said "They're the best I've found" And he then said to me "what about Jane Goodall?" I said "Stanley, 6 months ago what about Jane Goodall." So, he said "Anyway, find out." I rang her mother. She was in Africa in the forest and her

mother told me that all Jane's material was copyright the American Geographical Magazine, who financed her I presume. So, Kubrick gets on to them and he comes

to me, there's forty hours of Jane Goodall tapes coming over, forty hours,

LH: Two weeks work!

WR: So, he said "Who's going to listen to them?” I said "You bloody know who's

going to listen to them." Well, I listened to them and they were hopeless, because she'd stuck a mic up in a forest, there was leaf noise and all that, and she wasn't interested in quality, she was interested in behaviour, what the chimp did if it was frustrated or love making or fondling, that was her thing, and it was a very general mike, and it was really quite impossible. He didn't believe me and he was

surrounded by young men. He had this office block quite near the front gate

where he had his office and he had lots of little rooms and I had to find a tape machine that was the same as the one in the transfer department at MGM, ran

at the same speed, and he was going to listen to the tapes whenever he wasn't

in the cutting room, he wasn't in his thing [sic], looking at his charts, he had charts

all round, bloody charts, you turned them over everywhere. Of course, he never

did but he still wouldn't believe me they were no good.

So then, over come the American dubbers and he gets them to listen,- oh I couldn't find a tape machine which ran at the same speed, they don't really have much

speed, the cheap machines, the sound department, I was the go between, he hated the sound department and the sound department hated me, so I was the

go-between taking all the flak from both sides. So, anyway, he gives that up,

there's a lot more but it's not worth recounting. He gets the Americans to hear

the tapes, they tell him they're no good and he believes them. I was furious! So the rough dub was in the film and they say "Well sir that's not bad, what's wrong with

it  ? " Do you know, this took weeks, oh, and in the meantime there was foot and mouth, a bad outbreak of foot and mouth, [disease] and he had the young men, they were there for three months and they did ape noises, the young dancers who dressed up and did [imitates apes] “Ugh, Ugh, Ugh” and it was snow everywhere and he's always full of gimmicks and electronic things.

[10.00 mins]

He got a tape machine and went out and got them to do this ape noise and somehow the acoustics of the snow on the ground, he asked me over and listened to it and I said "It's pretty good." So we have to get onto an isolated piece of land somewhere

and he told me how  many  yards it had  to be from the mic and we take this mixer out who he doesn't like and is very  hard on and the man in charge of the young men looked  like a Greek organ grinder, he had  one of those moustaches and he wore a very wide

but flat trilby hat, pork pie hat.

So, we go out and record it and I'd made all my notes, “angry and running away” and

 all this. And [sighs] we get back and I have to bully the sound man to come into the theatre, he won't go on the volume controls, so I'm on the volume control. Oh, and

I'd asked Kubrick to hear the quarter inch tape but he wouldn't. I had to get it all

printed and edit and so on. And he said "Bring  it up." So I brought it up, and "Bring it

up." And I brought it up. "Bring it up.” "I can't." "Why?" "I'm at the top of the thing." "Why's that     JB?" And JB, this mixer was sitting there all huddled up in the corner,

I felt terrible about the whole thing, so he say's "These animals, terrible, awful, no good.” And then these mixers said this dub wasn't too bad. And do you know what was wrong with it, it was too exact. If somebody up there on the right-hand side of

the screen had gone “ugh, ugh”,[ape calls] I'd have fitted it, and it was stereo and he’d accepted that, he loves to have loops because if he had loops, he could

control it, he could fiddle about with it and say do this or he even gets on the

controls and fiddles with it. So he accepted what I'd done but it took seven weeks

of my time at the beginning, we were almost dubbing by then and that was reel

one. And if he's had something to do with it, he'll accept it.

LH: Also, you can call his bluff, it's a minor story, when we were on Strangelove he

got all these different weapons, grease-guns and Schmeisers and Brownings, whatever he could lay his hands on for the battle where the troops try to

recapture the airfield and they didn't really get any good tracks. And I said

"Can I have the guns and have a day or half a day and record these things?"

And he said "Can't you get it from stock?" He said "Have you tried listening to

stock shots?" I said I'd tried but I certainly can't get all these, they have different rates of fire all sound different.” So, he said "I want to hear what you've got after rushes." So he ran about 4,000 ft of gun shots from the library and he went

through and said "That's a great shot, that's a great shot," which I think was a

303-rifle single shot, but no machine guns at all. And he said "I want to run

those again I want to run them again." "I'll run them tomorrow." And he ran them again the next night, and to do him credit he picked the same shot and said

"That's a great  shot." He said "OK what I want you to do, I want you to use that shot, I want you to cut that and whatever you have to do make all the guns out of

that shot because it's a great shot." I started to laugh and he said "What's the matter?"I said "I can't believe you're serious." "Sure, I'm serious, can’t you do it?" I said “Yes I could do it but I'm not about to.” "What do you mean you're not about

to?" looking slightly peeved. "It's like somebody using the same note on the piano every time, you're really telling me you want every gun shot to sound exactly the same Stanley, whether it's a machine gun or not." "You mean it wouldn't work?" "I'm fucking sure it wouldn’t work.” "Well, if you don't want to do it, you'd better record them." He grinned and walked away. He would have me spend a month sodding around with a single rifle shot before he rejected it.      

WR: But Les, I couldn't do much about these apes, but the difference with you or

me is that we have a certain reputation or whatever. Now he gets a young person

like they did on, er-

LH:  Barry Lyndon.

WR: Where they ran them into the ground because they would have to go up to

this non-soundproofed place near Watford, Bushey, do the footsteps, he'd run

them every night with them on video, or something and ‘NG’ [indicate as No Good]

80 or 90% of them. Well he wouldn't dare do that with Les or me, there would be such a, but he likes to get these young people, although I've done three with him

and Les has done one, this is, I was told right at the beginning he was not going to

do this, he was going to take people from the film school and muddle through that way.

LH: This last one?

WR: Yes, I was, because as you know my assistant stayed…

LH: Stanley as you know having spent millions on playing around on what have you, he is incredibly extravagant and on 2001 there was this Perspex ball, I don't know what it cost, which didn't work, the slab was originally a Perspex ball which couldn't be photographed.

WR: No, you're wrong, it was a cube it was always a cube.

LH: No, it was a b all.

WR: And they couldn't photograph it because of the angles.

LH: It was  a ball. You could always see the camera reflected on both surfaces.

WR: Now the difference, as my god, as Les has always teased me about it, is David

Lean, David would come up to me, he knows me better, but say he came up to

somebody, and said, "That was bloody good wasn't it" and put his arm around them,

"But don't you think if we did so and so." He has this incredible-, this is why he's such

a good director, he makes you feel so good, so good, whereas Kubrick will say

“oh dear”, I hated to go into rushes because he did it to Wally and when he ran rushes

on 2001 he sat right down, half way down to the screen on a chair which was placed

there for him with a focus, he had a focus button, and the assistant was told to go backwards and forwards on each unit's rushes or perhaps each shot, say they had done three takes and one shot, and he had about 4 or 5 camera units and you never knew

what was coming, and it was never complete and he'd say “right go back” and his assistant had instructions never to go onto the next lot of rushes until   Kubrick had said so. And he'd say "Gee Wally, didn't we say that was going to be white and you made it black"

or whatever. And Wally would be up in in the corner muttering away. And I felt awful because Wally was such a good technician and innovating things and trying so hard and

all you got in the theatre was tearing into Wally. There's quite an unpleasant side to him as well.

LH: Well, yeah, the thing I can remember on Strangelove, I worked on two films with the same floor mixer a man called ‘Dickie’ Bird, who was a very nice man and a good floor mixer. The first time was Sandy Mackendrick and that was kind of order out of chaos and everyone was always talking on the set and people were coming and going and you'd find the red light would be on and they'd be shooting and people would be saying "George, what have you got on at 5 o'clock?" Incredible and Sandy would be talking to the boy over there "Okay, just look up" and you'd be thinking when are we going to get a sound track on this, it was chaos.

[In contrast] I’d got to find Stanley I want to find out what he’s going to do about this and they’d say “oh, he’s on the stage floor” And you’d go on the stage floor.

WR: Dead silence.

LH: Dead silence. He can’t be on this stage, so you walk around the end of the backing, Christ! There’s two hundred people on the stage and Stanley is in there saying “and

what I want to do is-” and everybody there, the sparks, the electricians all listening to Stanley and he’s got them absolutely in the palm of his hand.

WR: Mind you, he'd find that difficult because I don't know if he ever did it but I know

on Zhivago they threatened to fire the Spaniards in the end because they would not

stay, you'd say quiet and start to roll but they would not stay quiet for very long, it was very strange. And David used go beserk. There was the threat that anyone talking could

be fired.

RF: Is the conventional method in Spain not to shoot sync sound, that might be the reason. They’re used to a noisy floor.

WR: I don't know enough about it, certainly it used to be in Italy,

LH: It tended to prevail in Italy.

WR: I hadn't much to do with – but -

LH: [interrupts] The mixer sits out in a truck, there's only the boom man in there.

WR: Really?

LH: Yeah

WR: I enjoy working with David because first of all he's terrific. The script, it's always

in the script.

[20.00 mins]

I've often felt a bit of an idiot. On Passage [Passage to India] I'd go to him and say “so

and so, and so and so, what do I do?” "Read the script" and you feel a bit of an idiot

then. But it's so carefully worked out and he's so good. On one film we had a lot of

trouble at the beginning of dubbing, the mixers were a bit nervous and he spoke of

leaving and after the weekend he brought them down to the office and lifted them

right up. l forget who it was, Hitchcock or some very important person in the film industry,

he said to me once if you don't make mistakes, you'll never be very good, sort of thing, and the improvement the next time they mixed was quite something and that was just his, you know, they were a bit nervous, working on that type of picture with us, and they hadn't long, some of them started a new job as it were, he has this incredible, I'm not sure though he's always in tune with artists. He's had terrible fights with Guinness and so on.

RF: He can also be a martinet, can he not?

LH: David. He can be as hard as they come, as tough as they come.

WR: 0nly to get what he wants. No but some people like Preminger are a martinet for

the sake of being unpleasant.

Oh, there’s one nice little episode in my life, I flew out to Israel, was taken to meet Preminger outside the Abyssinian church in Jerusalem and at that time the Arabs were

in the other side of Jerusalem, you couldn't go in, I'm introduced, he says he wants to

dub it in three weeks. It was twenty-eight reels, I didn't know then but it was a long,

long picture, this was Exodus, stereo and dub that and do everything in three weeks

was almost an impossibility, wouldn't you agree? So busy.

LH: I wouldn't think about it.

WR: I said you couldn't do it. Well mate, up he goes, once more, “we'll fly somebody else

in”, I gradually went redder and redder and got crosser and crosser, and more embarrassed because there must have been an audience of at least three hundred people because

there were the Israelis looking on, there were the extras, the entire crew, and he was screaming at me and in the end, we used two theatres, we dubbed at Shepperton, they

did the fourth track, and any additions, if they missed out a pistol shot or a door shut

it went up to the RCA thing at Hammersmith for York Scarlett with notes and I think 

Janet Davidson took it up and they dubbed it again up there, and   we did it in three

weeks and two days after that, the Wednesday or the Thursday of the following week, everything was burnt, everything was gone, customer satisfied, that film left England in that time. He was about the hardest working producer-cum- director I've ever come across. I - Sandy, no, somebody, Chalkie White, do you know him?

LH: Accountant.

WR: He said every morning very early, he was in the accounts department he was

looking at what he had to look at because he was the producer as well. They'd done

a deal with Fords. I think they got eight Ford station wagons which they used to transfer the crew about and they had them for nothing so long as they left them in Israel, I can't remember the deal but anyway he would get in anyone of those and go out on location,

do his directing, come back, have his supper in the dining room with everybody else, I presume at a separate table, but I can't remember that because I was only there for about three weeks, and then straight into the production office to answer any telegrams to deal with anything on the production side and off to bed.

LH: But did you have any rapport as one does get with directors, did you have any

kind of relationship with Preminger?

WR: No, he was such a monster. I know on one occasion, he was really an awful

man, I know on one occasion he was bubbling, he said “Why didn't you do that?"

I said "I forgot,” you must never lie, if you tried to cover up or did anything, he would

grind you [down] and go on and on and on till he got you but if you said “I forgot.”

there's   not much you could say after that, is there? I was in the theatre, in the cutting rooms in the old thing, the nice- with the teak doors in the old thing at Shepperton,

and they came out, and the film had broken and the projectionist rang down said

a join had gone, and Seymour Logie, I never heard the last of that, I had advised Seymour Logie for it and, dear oh dear, I was blamed for that, and he wanders into the theatre

and sees the film was torn, it wasn't a join, do you know he goes straight into the projection department and carries on at them till they repaired the film and it goes

back in, and he says “If you haven’t got the courage to tell the truth and don’t you tell

me-” and it goes on and on and all that had happened is it had broken. Oh, monster, monster.

LH: I can remember a talk that we had at an editorial meeting once, and David Lean was there and it was a kind of trick question somebody asked, so he said “Mr. Lean, you obviously have a clear idea or a pretty clear idea of how your film is going to be cut

when you shoot it?” So, he said “Yes I do I know exactly how it’s going to go together.”

So, he said “Has any editor cut it differently, and better than the way you conceived it?” “Oh, good Lord yes, I remember old Jack on This Happy Breed, he did a thing” and then

he went on to say, to describe this particular scene, it was concerning the arrival of a letter, and how it was played. And he went on to say that “Jack came to me very nervous and said that I know we discussed it, but I’ve done something different. I would like you

to see it and please don’t be angry if you don’t like it, but I thought it was worth a look.” “And I had to admit that it was much better than what I, the way I’d thought it.”

So, we had another meeting, and then we had Otto. Otto was so sort of arrogant that I thought that it was worth trying this question on him. So, I said “Mr. Preminger, do you have…?” And he says “Yes, of course, I have a complete mastermind overview of this.” I said “Has any editor cut it differently and better than-”

“I don’t understand the question.” So, I repeated the question. He said “Yes I heard

what you said, I understand what you said, but how can any editor improve on

what I have done myself? I am responsible for the whole thing. How can you pretend

that an editor can improve anything that I have done because it is all my work.” 

“OK thank you, fine.”

RF: And he was serious, not joking.

LH: No, no. He was not.

WR: Yet on Sundays, you see he was working a seven-day week out in Israel, but

the unit, because they were getting government support and they had to do with

officials, had to observe the Sabbath, the Saturday. No, it was on Saturdays, of course,

he used to come into the cutting rooms then, and take us out to lunch and he was

just like a benevolent father then. It was in work, oh he was, for no reason was he aggressive. In fact, I saw a photograph in one of the American magazines where

somebody had taken a glass or something, did you see that? Blood streaming down his face.

LH: Who, Preminger? No.

WR: Because he did dreadful things to actors as well.

LH: Yeah.

WR: Everybody. But very hard worker and he got tremendous production value.

Exodus was very anti-British but was made very cheaply I think, all on location, he

wouldn’t loop anything, because I again got the Victoria Cross, because I kept saying

“Can’t understand that, ought to loop that.” And I didn’t realise that was nothing to

do with me, nobody had told me – that was Louis Loeffler’s job, I was told to shut up

very firmly, but he – did you ever see the film?

LH: I think I probably did yes.

WR: It was quite –

LH: Definitely remember the music. Don’t think I’ve ever forgotten once you’ve seen

the film.

WR: Was the music good?

LH: Well, it’s a good tune isn’t it the Exodus theme

RF: I think it had a great success at the time.

WR: I’m not very fond of film music, but who was the man, well- known, he was out on location all the time so he had no excuse for not being ready, not all the time but he was out there absorbing the film so he could write quickly.

RF: Was it Bernstein? That’s Elmer not Leonard.

WR: No.

LH: It wasn’t [Dimitri] Tiomkin was it?

WR: No. And the story is when he'd finished conducting, he staggered off the rostrum

into his car and was not seen or heard of again.

[30.00 mins]

He hated it so much. That story I can’t corroborate.

LH: Which  director have you least enjoyed working for?

WR: Perhaps Preminger.

LH: Or given you the most problems; I suppose that's Kubrick with his 2001 really?

WR: Yes, Kubrick with his strange…

LH: Now do we want to ask these ‘bread and butter’ questions, like a quick run through ACT?

WR: Well-

LH: Can I just ask you the questions?

WR: Yes.

LH: How did you first get involved with the ACTT?

WR: Alan Lawson enrolled me when I was on crutches at Ealing.

LH: He recruited you. What recollections if any do you have, if any, of the early days of ACT, as ACT?                      

WR: Then I wasn't working so I don't remember much about then I lapsed when I

went to-

LH: National.

WR: No, Ealing again, I went back to Ealing.

RF: Can I ask whether ACT was accepted at Ealing or did management frown on membership in the early years?

WR: I can' t remember. [Hesitates] You see, I would have gone back to their-

LH: [interrupts] Was ACT important or did it have any kind of status before the war?

WR: I think ACT was terrific in getting hours reduced because we had no control over hours worked at all and to a lesser extent, -and paid overtime of course, and to a lesser extent wages, I'm not sure how much they helped with wages, with freelancers not

too much, but with permanent sound men a lot. They certainly helped. And we had

to have little strikes, I remembered it happened at Rocks and then maybe it happened

at Ealing, erm, [self-corrects] at Denham.

LH: You see, I can’t - not many people know this but my father was a founder member

of ACT and his name is in the rule book although he later became anti-union for various reasons, he thought that they were doing the wrong things and he paid his subs and

lost interest. But he and George Elvin were always quite friendly. But the impression I

got was that it was really started to improve things in the labs, the labs were one of the primary objects of forming ACT.

WR: I think the studios-

RF: Ah yes, I think the studios came first, it was way before my time, but the stories I've heard it is that it really began at the Bush [Shepherds Bush] and they

tell the story of Captain Cope coming round the back way, and collecting money through the back windows.

LH: He was the one that took off?

RF: He was the first secretary.

WR: Who absconded with the money or something.

RF: Here again versions vary. I've been told he was a villain and it all began in his cafe

in Shepherd's Bush Green, where villains gather.

WR: There were times, particularly at Shepperton when the ACTT was quite ridiculous. I remember, we had - when you're finishing a picture there’s always a certain amount of overtime and we were coming up to Christmas-

LH: You're talking about now since the war.

WR: Yes. I forget the film but I said to my assistant “why don't we do a weekend now, a

bit of overtime, so that closer to Christmas we won't have this terrible pressure. You    

had to put the request in to be allowed to work overtime to the work's committee and

it came back from my production office, overtime refused, what's the need? And Charlie Wheeler was the shop steward and he was on the music stage and you know what the boom man did on the music stage, turn over and that was about all and sat at his desk.

So, I went up to Charlie and said “Charlie, about this overtime.” “Eff off” he said, and

this is my shop steward, my representative, I said “Look we want to work now not nearer [Christmas]” “Fuck off!” I was furious. I wasn't interfering. So, after another

couple of goes and having a flea in my ear, so the producer got onto head office and

I think this is terrible, got onto head office and I was allowed to work; but there was a

time when I was put off ACTT. There was another man in charge of the cutting rooms there, terrified the assistants if they did any little bit of overtime.

LH: There were a few of those. Do you remember Norman whatever his name was who later became a mixer, when he was a maintenance man was one of these chaps who would not let you, nobody, I certainly never wanted to work overtime unless you had

to, but they would say you can't work overtime and there you were with this incredible amount of work and they'd     say “you'll have to take on extra people”, and we'd say “we're mixing on Monday, you can't take on anybody now, we've already got three

people on the picture, we've got to do the work.” They'd say you can't work and they'd come round to make sure you got out at six o'clock on the nose.

WR: I don't know, it's so weak now and when it was going well, we went to meetings

and we were all involved and you knew what was happening, now, I don't know what's happened. Now most people are upset because it's become incredibly   political and

there are certain people-

LH: Well, you see, - I don’t want to start a discussion really - ACT are you and I, ACT is not

them, it's everybody that’s in the union.

WR: I know it's laziness on our part.

LH: It's laziness and people say “our bloody union.” And I don't like, I'd much sooner

stay at home than go to an editors’ committee meeting but I can never bring myself to

say I don't want to be on the committee anymore because it bores the arse off me

because somebody's got to do it. We had to recall our annual general meeting because

we couldn't get twenty people out of whatever it is, two thousand, one thousand, whatever it is-

WR: Editorial you mean.

RF: It isn't just one section either, PD's barely made it. [inaudible]

WR: I don't know if it's because we've become much more

Freelance but I promise you but at Denham, at Pinewood, and in the earlier days of Shepperton, we had a regular meeting once a month, in the lunch hour and there

were at least half the members there.

RF: Yes, but things were so much simpler then. First of all, the sphere of activity

was considerably narrower, people made films, now there's films, television,

satellite tv, all the things they all have a value for the union but it's much more difficult

to organise them and represent them properly. The other is that the industry itself

has changed, it's largely casualised, there aren't these bases of power either for employment or union activity.

LH: Also, I think because of casualisation of jobs, entry has become casualised. People don't go into a studio and become part of a ‘shop’ and grow up with it or start with it, people say who is the union, do I have to belong, who knows if they pay their subs? I

am fully convinced that around here you’ll find that 25% of the people working in the cutting rooms around here are not in the union, I'm sure.

RF: That’s true.

LH: There was a time when Bessie Bond would know every little rat hole in the Soho

area and she would be round there saying “who are you and what are you doing

here?”

RF: This is a question which I know the union is addressing, partly   because of the

Race report, what follows from that, and partly the recognition there are far too

many people out there and with trade union reservations the way it now is and increasingly going to be, people will increasingly perceive they either don't need a

union or they do need an union, and the union has to give them pluses.

LH: But I'm never sure now what kind of right, if we have any right at all, to say “no,

you can't work in films if you're not in the union”, there is no closed shop any more.

RF: There's no legal closed shop.

LH: So, we can't stop anybody doing what they want to do.

RF: No, I think the saving grace is that there are contracts with the various employers in various areas with the ITCA companies and BFTPA.[?]

LH: What about commercials companies?

RF: Ah, commercials companies, that is unionised, must be unionised, like the labs.

LH: But is there anything to stop you using your friend as a cameraman. Him not being in the union?

RF: In commercials. It’s fairly rigorously policed still.

LH: But is it legal?

RF: I couldn't answer whether it's legal or not, probably not, but it's the remnant of the very convenient cartel which still exists between employers and employees that it was better to have that kind of arrangement, it still exists I think with ITV.

WR: How - What I was very interested in-

[40.00mins]

and it didn't work because it was run by the works committee, there was an industrial apprenticeship scheme many years ago, John Dennis was involved, and I was very interested in it because I was lucky working at Beaconsfield knowing what happened in other departments, only superficial but it did help, and I was very interested, and Rank

– I don’t know whether anybody else did it - started it, and they did have apprentices

going round the place, but it failed because after having done their apprenticeship

there were only two departments they wanted to go into, number one: camera, and number two: editing and nobody wanted to become a plasterer or an electrician

because all departments were in it, but I've heard some not very good things about

Jobfit, [An employability skills tool. DS] I'm all for Jobfit but I do feel somehow, we

haven't got the entry into the industry right. I've got my daughter in, Les has got his daughter, it's awfully nepotistic, I'm not blaming Les and I'm not blaming myself but it

is. If an outsider wants to get in God knows how they do it.

LH: Well, they go to a film school.

WR: Yes, but if you're living in Manchester and haven't got a great deal of money…

RF: Well, it’s a problem, but it always was a problem. I had great difficulty getting

my first job. I felt I had a calling. I thought I was going to be the greatest director

since D.W. Griffith. It wasn't easy to get in. It would be interesting to talk of the

union in those days, how you remember it, how it was perceived.   Out of ACT and

NATKE and the ETU, this was a vast power block, it really had control at that stage.

Was ACT equally luddite, reactionary, backward looking do you think?

WR: Well, it did vary tremendously from studio to studio. While I was shop steward

for instance, I get very busy towards the end of a film, I mean dubbing it, and l used

to get told off because I wasn't at the work's committee meeting, that was once a

week, 30 or 40 people; sometimes Rank came to Denham.

LH: But there was a permanent works committee at Pinewood, wasn’t there.

WR: Yes, but you had a meeting once a week. But they were always meeting in the afternoon, there was always something, it was more often than once a week, and if I

didn't attend the management ticked me off. I think one of the reasons the ACT was stronger then, I don’t know, first of all there was togetherness after the war, and Rank,

and the union abused it beyond all measure because Rank came to the meetings and

they did all sort of things. For instance, they cut down from whatever hours it was to

a 40-hour week for the men on the clock, the hourly men, and they said OK but let's

please have 40 hours, but none of this hanging about behind the set and then going washing and really stopping half an hour before work. But it didn't change they were

all queuing up ten minutes before five o’clock.

RF: These are [inaudible] people.

WR:    But the unions generally tended to abuse a bit, having got a little.   After the

war we forgot about class, we forgot all about this that and the other and it all went

back. You had Ronnie Neame and David Lean voting Labour, and going to ACT

meetings. You had ACT meetings with David and Ronnie. I remember Ronnie getting

up. I remember Harold Wilson came and made this speech about another nickel into

the Odeon, [a pun on a popular tune DS] you heard about that one, did you, and Ronnie would get up and say “don't let's kill the goose that lay the golden egg,” and somehow,

we were all in it. Now it's only the left wing or the dedicated people in it.

LH: I'm not dedicated.    I'm really not particularly political at all.

WR: Shall we say conscientious then. But if you don't take an interest the whole thing

will be taken over by people who are absolutely left wingers, complete left wing.

RF: That did happen and it reached the point when the generality of membership said that's it, it's enough. There was the famous meeting at the Central Hall, if you remember that? Do you?

WR: What where they hissed?

RF: For the first time something like 2,000 members were at the meeting.

WR: Yes, I think I was there. And who was this wild blond director charging around

waving his arms?

R F: Oh, that  was Ken Russell. Ken made a sort of fireworks and smoke appearance at the

back.

WR: But Ralph Bond was up on the rostrum and said “Ken, Ken behave yourself.”

RF: Some of the talk was that the studio was in jeopardy at Elstree and the doors at the back flung open and there was Ken Russell with, as you say, the hair streaming, marching down the aisle saying EMI, I'll tell you about fucking EMI…!

WR: Oh, no, this was about Greece and South Africa the one I remember going to. Everybody hissed [Alan] Sapper, [BEHP Interview No 150] Sapper got up to speak and

half the meeting or a lot of the meeting went “hiss” and he didn't know what hit him,

he was silenced. But, I'll tell you a little story, being a shop steward is horrid isn't it.

Now Cineguild helped me, they’d got me into the cutting rooms, they gave me the first picture to dub, I did one as an assistant and then I dubbed Great Expectations believe

it or not, which was a bit horrifying but I had a lot of help from mixers and so on. The Cineguild were making a film directed by a Frenchman, produced  by Havelock-Allan

with Havelock-Allan's wife, Valerie Hobson in it, they're out on location and they're

fiddling about so much and they have to lay a complicated track across a field and by

the time they've got it down and they've decided which way to go, the sun's moved

round and they have to re-lay the track.

[SIDE   6, TAPE 3]

 

WS: I was, they had a little meeting, I was the shop steward, had to go to a meeting

and protest, oh, they refused to work overtime, awful, so I had to go to a meeting and

they told me why they wouldn't work. I said I have to have it in writing, and this was a Cineguild film, the people that had helped            me, who'd got me into the cutting

room and the rest of it, and I felt an absolute shit. I go up, and I don't know if

Havelock-Allan's there, and I read out all these things, and  I'm in terrible muddles, and Stewart  Grainger  was in it and Valerie Hobson and Stewart Grainger hated one another,

and the whole thing  was  utter chaos, and I made quite a good case, and everybody was

agog about this detailed   criticism of the director and I felt pretty rough about this, I must

say, and I'm going along a corridor in the admin block at Pinewood and an arm comes round my shoulders and whispered in my ear, he said "I'd like to congratulate you on how you conducted yourself this afternoon," and it's David Lean, Cineguild, and God I

was “phew” because somehow you don't really [want to] bite the hand that fed you.

But I found I was a bad shop steward, someone like Charlie Wheeler could only see

one side, I'm afraid I could always see [both].

LH: I always thought George Elgin was a fairly reasonable man.

WR: He was terrific.

LH: He was a bright man and a nice sense of humour, he had a sense of proportion

about things.

RF: He and Puff [Anthony ‘Puffin’ Asquith DS] worked very well together, did they not,

and it was the two of them which was the strength of the union at that time would you agree with that?

WR: Yes, and at Pinewood you had, I didn't like some of the things in the sound department but John Dennis was very sensible.

LH: Pinewood ended up as a kind of right-wing Thatcherite group, you mention the

union to someone at Pinewood 5 years ago and they'd almost lynch you on the spot.

WR: Really. Mack had a lot to do with that.

LH: I'm talking about the people in the cutting rooms.

WR: Oh, really. Mack was a right-wing ACTT, quite an energetic ACTT member.

LH: Mack believed he was a conservative but in fact he was more interested in peoples’ rights and the rights and wrongs of things than many a so-called socialist, really.

RF: Yes. Is he worth identifying?

LH: Gordon McCallum. He's like Jim Connock. Jim believes he's a true-blue Tory, scratch old Jim a bit and [accent] “oh they're not getting away with that.”

WR: I think Mack should come from the Sound Department. When you say – you meant interviewing?

RF: No on the tape. You refer to ‘Mack’, for posterity we should have his name.

LH: Well Mack had more bark and more good humanity in him than anybody.   He was terrible to work with.

[50.00 mins]

He'd shout and scream and rant and rave, and become violent, as a dubbing mixer

he'd become hysterical. At the same time, he was one of the nicest human beings that

I've ever been   screamed at by. You couldn't dislike him. You did dislike him at the

time but he was such a lovely guy. The next day it’s all over and he’s forgotten it, and

you're trying to forget it and a week later you love him again.

WR: [Drawn out] Yes, I've probably had more rows with Mack than you've had, I worked

on his units for years, we were mates as it were but never once did he ever apologise,

never once did he ever mention it, so I don't know if it was ever over. It was ignored.

LH: It was ignored. That’s true.

WR: But never once did he say I'm sorry I lost my temper. Towards the end-

LH: I never did to him. I used to say terrible things to him as well.

WR: I just sat there stewing.

LH: He used to really get my goat.

WR: The amount of work that man sent away from Pinewood, he's got to take a lot there.

I don't know what else I can tell you. I've missed no end of things I'm sure. And I haven't told you much about the ACT.

RF: There's a lot of very interesting material there, that we got today. One can go on

for a long, long time. A life’s work is a lot to talk about and one reaches a point where

one is talked out.

WR: The only thing I would say is the man I've enjoyed most and the man who has this incredible ability is David. One story, I think it was Oliver Twist, we took it up for a rehearsal or something to Marble Arch, Pavilion, and you can get a bit more on with magnetic now [telephone rings] carry on, but in those days the range of sound

on track is very small. He said "when I directed this it's all larger than life, I hammed it up purposely, so when we come to the storm and when we come to this you turn up the gain." The bloke, or woman, said "OK, guv."  and in this little talk David had got this projectionist,

who never will take any notice as you will know, so enthusiastic, that he almost blew us

out of the theatre and that is the ability of this man. That he can [do that].

[END]

[There is some chit-chat about cricket and where Wyn was living]

Biographical

Winston Ryder was born on March 25, 1915 in the UK. He is known for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Krull (1983) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). He died on March 24, 1999 in Shropshire, England, UK.

1992 Ghostwatch Sound Design;1989 Lost Angels Sound Editor;1985 A Passage to India Sound Editor;1984 Almonds and Raisins Sound Editor;1980 The Shining Sound Editor; 1979 Caligula Supervising sound editor;1977 Orca... Killer Whale Sound Effects;

1976 La Speranza Sound Editor;1976 L' Omertà Sound Editor;1976 La Legge Sound Editor;1976 L' Antenai Sound Editor;1976 The Last Tycoon Sound Editor;1976 Gli Sciacalli Sound Editor;1975 Permission to Kill Sound Editor;1974 The Tamarind Seed Sound Editor; 1974 MOSÈ Sound Editor; 1973 Some Kind of Hero Sound Editor; 1971 Nicholas and Alexandra Sound Editor; 1970 Ryan's Daughter Sound Editor;1969 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Sound Editor; 1969 La TENDA ROSSA Sound Editor; 1965 Doctor Zhivago Sound Editor; 1965 The Bedford Incident Sound Editor; 1965 Young Cassidy Dubbing Editor; 1965 Becket Sound Editor; 1963 The Victors Sound Editor; 1962 Lolita Dubbing Editor; 1962 Lawrence of Arabia Sound Editor; 1962 H.M.S. Defiant Dubbing Editor; 1961 The 300 Spartans Sound Editor; 1960 Sink the Bismarck! Dubbing Editor; 1960 Exodus Sound Effects Editor; 1959 Ombre bianche Sound; 1959 John Paul Jones Sound;1958 The Bridge on the River Kwai Chief Sound Editor; 1958 Indiscreet Sound Editor; 1958 The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw Sound Editor; 1956 The Man Who Never Was Dubbing Editor; 1955 Summer Madness Sound Editor; 1955 Simba Sound Editor; 1954 The Million Pound Note Sound Editor; 1954 Romeo and Juliet Sound Editor; 1953 The Long Memory Sound Editor; 1953 Desperate Moment Dubbing Editor; 1952 The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men Sound Editor; 1952 KIRYA NEEMANA Sound Editor; 1952 The Sound Barrier Sound Editor; 1952 Meet Me Tonight Dubbing Editor; 1951 White Corridors Sound Editor;1950 Prelude to Fame dubbing Editor; 1950 Madeleine [Dubbing Editor];1949 Obsession Sound Editor; 1949 The Passionate Friends Dubbing Editor; 1948 Blanche Fury Sound Editor; 1948 Oliver Twist Sound Editor;1947 Great Expectations Sound Editor ;1947 Take My Life Sound Editor; 1946 Brief Encounter [Assistant Editor]; 1944  This Happy Breed [Sound Camera Operator]; 1944 The Way Ahead [Sound Camera Operator] [Dubbing Crew]; 1944 A Canterbury Tale [Sound Camera Operator (Interiors)]; 1942 Let the People Sing [Sound Camera Operator] 

Father of sound editor Melanie Ryder