Part 3 of a 4 part series

[When we left off from Part 2, Bruce had moved to LA and set up some ground-breaking real-time audio-visual monitoring soundstage which became the de-facto standard for movie production. Interview continues...]

Bruce: Okay. So after Last of the Mohicans, an interesting inflection point happens in my career. One day I’m in the studio and one of my dear Synclavier friends comes over, this is a Synclavier operator -- not an owner, Jason King is his name -- and it turned out Jason was a very busy sound effects editor. Now at this point in time, I didn’t know sound effects from a hole in the wall -- but Jason came over one day and we got to talking, and he said “I really hate this thing that I’m doing -- I really want to get back into making music.” And I said what are you doing? He says, “well, I edit sound effects for television. I’m working on the Dinosaurs television show, and I really want to get back to making music, because that’s really what I love.” Now, remember that phrase, because it’s going to come back around to haunt me 20+ years later.

Bruce: So he smiled at me, and said have you ever thought about doing sound effects? And I said what are sound effects? And he said well, we build all the sounds for this TV show on Synclavier. And I said, tell me more. Now you have to remember that this was happening at the height of the demise of middle line studios. The availability of cheap gear had created this proliferation of project studios, and in much the same way that I had done with the Automatix years earlier, artists were taking their budget money and buying studios, instead of spending it on studio time. This was now becoming pretty much the way that middle level artists were spending their budgets. And as a consequence, the middle line studios were losing money hand over fist, because project studios were springing up everywhere. And at that point, I was kind of feeling the pinch in the studio business, and I said no, I’d kind of like to go do something a little bit different.

Hugh: You were concerned about middle line studios?

Bruce: Yeah, I was, believe it or not - because I didn’t have the big mixing room, I didn’t have a fancy console or something, I didn’t have a gigantic live recording room that looked beautiful - I had a functional studio that could do amazing things, but it wasn’t something that had mass appeal. So I talked to Jason more, and the next thing you know I’m going off and talking to the supervising sound editor of the show, and right after that, I’m hired! And I’m renting them one of my Synclaviers, and renting him a console that I own, and he is building the show, and the next thing, a little while later I’m involved in doing sound effects editing.

Hugh: For Dinosaurs?

Bruce: For Dinosaurs.

Hugh: Yeah just for my listeners, remember back in 1991 and there were 2 TV shows that I watched regularly and one was America’s Funniest Home Videos, and the other was Dinosaurs. And I just loved both of those, and I remember seeing your name the first time coming across the screen, and I would say yea, Bruce!

Bruce: Well, Dinosaurs was popular with a lot of people because it was like the old Honeymooners TV show, but done by dinosaur characters in 65 million BC!

Hugh: I just love that show. I recorded every single episode.

Bruce: I loved that show too. The writing was very much like the Warner Brothers cartoons. It was low brow enough that the kids could get the overt jokes, but there was a lot of high brow social commentary buried in there as well, that the adults could get. There were literally morality play lessons in many of those episodes, but it was done very low key. The comedy...

Hugh: Yeah, it was amazing how they did that... like the TV anchor man, his name was Howard Handupme (!) and there was a whole story arc about the [first] Gulf War. It was just amazing.

Bruce: Yeah, the writers were so brilliant in the way that they were able to synthesize present day social commentary. It was overtly a comedy show. And of course the comedy was slapstick, so I got an opportunity to make loud noises, and as one of the producers on the show Mark Bruell used to say, “make it louder. Louder is funnier”.

Hugh: And you are the one that puts together the multi track sound of the frying pan, and the baby hitting the dad on the head with the frying pan. “Not the Mama!”

Bruce: Well, I don’t know that I was the guy that originally did that, I suspect Jason probably did. But I quickly got it to the point where there were 18 elements in there, and it was LOUD.

Hugh: There you go!

Bruce: And it hurt...

Hugh: It hurt the daddy 🙂

Bruce: Yup! There was an anvil, there was a bell, there was the hammer strike, there was a body fall, there were like so many layers I can’t even remember, but when Baby Sinclair hit Earl the dad, you knew he got hit.

Hugh: Yeah, I love that, I just loved it.

Bruce: “Not the Mama!”

Hugh: That baby was so cool.

Bruce: It was, and you know who was doing that voice, right? That was Kevin Clash from Sesame Street – the same guy who did Elmo.

Hugh: Oh, okay.

Bruce: He was the only non-Henson puppeteer that got brought on the show. And here’s a little Hollywood inside baseball: The puppeteers inside the dinosaur suits who were actually walking around were not the voices that you heard.

Hugh: Right.

Bruce: They would record the voices during production but all of the voices were replaced in ADR [automated dialogue replacement] by well-known Hollywood stars.

Hugh: The only one that I knew was Sally Struthers.

Bruce: Right -- because she did the daughter.

Hugh: I didn’t recognize the other ones.

Bruce: But what’s interesting was Kevin Clash did the voice of baby in production and we never ADR’d him.

Hugh: ADR means what Bruce?

Bruce: Automated dialogue replacement.

Hugh: Automated Dialogue Replacement.

Bruce: Right. This is a Hollywood sort of secret behind the scene when a line would get clobbered in production - meaning it would get obstructed, a plane would fly by or a car would backfire or the actor muffed the line or did it with a bad accent. After production was completed, they would bring the actor back into a studio that was specifically built to synchronize audio to film and record it again, replacing the original dialog – hence, ADR.

Hugh: They did that a lot for years, in the early years of movies too right?

Bruce: They still do it. Yeah it’s done all the time, but what was interesting about the show, was that the show was nearly 100% ADR. Almost all the dialogue was replaced, except for Kevin Clash, because he was brilliant. And he had the voice of Baby Sinclair down... just like he had Elmo.

Hugh: Yeah, I am just laughing, just to think about it.

Bruce: Right, the guy was hysterically funny, just in and of his own skin -- and when he became the Baby, the puppet the crew would crack up, because Baby Sinclair was just so insouciant and funny that you couldn’t stop from laughing. And we were laughing in post production when we were listening to the recordings. After a season or so of just doing the show, one thing leads to another -- my company wound up getting the contract to do the sound effects editing. So I created a post production company, and did the sound effects editing on that show until production ended.

Hugh: What was the name of that company?

Bruce: It was called Plus 3 Post. Plus 3 of course is the red line on a VU meter.

Hugh: Right, right, okay, cool.

Bruce: So we did that for a while and started getting into feature films. As I got to know more and more about how post production worked, I realized you couldn’t really be a post production company and successfully bid for packages of post production if you were dependant upon having to negotiate with the dub stage. Honestly, that’s where most profit in post production is, and the outrageous amounts of money they can charge for dubbing stages. We are talking over $1000 an hour for dubbing stages on like the Sony lot -- the old MGM lot. Now it takes a lot of infrastructure to charge $1000 an hour.

Hugh: Yeah but I mean you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment or whatever.

Bruce: Exactly -- and very talented staff that makes money. But one thing leads to another, and next thing you know, I’m looking around for how we can make our little editing company grow beyond the 5 or 6 rooms of editorial space that we had. We had now grown from one Synclavier system to many Synclavier systems, and now we are doing a lot of editing for animated TV shows and Saturday morning cartoons, and we are actually winning MPSE [Motion Picture Sound Editors] golden reel awards for mixing and for sound effects editing, and we had quite a clientele of animation producers who were coming to us to do that. I’m looking ahead to the next thing from the business standpoint, how do we need to grow? Well, we need a dub stage. I found an old studio in Burbank that had seen better days, and I said “well, I need this space, and this place needs somebody to come and breath life into it.” So one thing led to another, and I bought the old BNB studios in Burbank and turned it into Magnolia Studios. And what was really interesting about it was that they had a beautiful giant dub stage that hadn’t been upgraded in like 10 years. So we yanked out all the old crap gear.

Hugh: Wait, tell me exactly what a dub stage is. It’s like a sound stage?

Bruce: Imagine a medium size movie theater and a forty foot screen in front, okay? Now, imagine that maybe two thirds of the way back from the screen, is a gigantic mixing console. And the fun is, you watch the film and you listen to it just as if you were in a movie theater. And you mix the sound so it sounds great in the movie theater.

Hugh: Oh, awesome. What a great job.

Bruce: Yeah, well yeah, but it costs you a shitload of money to build one of those. So what I did was I parlayed all of the resources that Plus 3 Post and my other productions had garnered over the years, and we got a contract from Disney.

Hugh: And this was what year?

Bruce: About 1995.

Hugh: 1995, okay. With Disney, that’s huge.

Bruce: And we had grown to know the Walt Disney Television post folks very well, because Dinosaurs was a Disney show.

Hugh: Right, they were involved with Disney. Sure.

Bruce: Right, so technically, we were working for Walt Disney Television doing the show, and Walt Disney had an animation division. They also had a live television division, and they also had a feature film division, and they had movie-of-the-week’s, that’s television movies. One thing led to another and I had a nice long talk with the Vice President of Television Post, and I said, would you be interested in mixing your TV movies at a beautiful state of the art digital post stage that I propose to build? And he said well, show me the place. So I brought him by what was then BNB and was going to become Magnollia Studios and I showed him what it was and I told him what was going to become and he said okay, give me a contract. We got a contract from Disney, 4 or 5 movies of the week and we used that as leverage to transform BNB Studios into the Magnolia Studios. Now what’s interesting about this is that if you go into a modern post production studio today, you’ll see Pro Tools on both sides of the stage.

There’s Pro Tools there for sound effects, there’s Pro Tools there for dialogue editing and they didn’t do that back in 1995. There was only one other guy in town that had the same vision that I had -- that was John Ross from Digital Sound and Picture. John was using Pro Tools and he was pushing it to the edge with what it could do. And I had Synclaviers and direct to disk systems. So what we wound up doing was we took our editorial flow, which was building stuff on Synclavier and direct to disk systems, and we put two direct to disc systems on a dubbing stage, along with the digital console and all these other digital tools followed along and we did a beautiful face lift -- I had Steve Klein rebuild the room. Steve was a brilliant acoustician. He knew how to make it sound good. We got techs in from THX and we got THX certification, which the stage had never had before. And, we built maybe the first or second fully digital post production dubbing stage in Hollywood. I knew John Ross had the only other one at the time, and our trick was we used the Synclavier and Post Pros. And we would build stuff upstairs in our editorial suites and bring it down to the machine room, plug in the disk drives and presto -- the same sounds that we had upstairs in the edit room would magically be online, in the dubbing stage, and the thrust of that was when the director looked over and said I hate that sound, do you have something you can put on top of it, or can you change it, we go, “Sure! Give me a couple of seconds. ” We click, click, move, edit, edit, here -- try this. Rewind, play forward. It was the digital music preview concept, but applied to live post production mixing.

Hugh: And that’s amazing -- and I would imagine that it in other houses, they would actually just take a lot of notes and then go back to the drawing board right?

Bruce: Well, yeah, because if you didn’t like what was on the dubbing stage, you had to go back and re-edit, and if you had to build mag units -- I mean, don’t forget, this was still the day of people using 45 millimeter magnetic film for sound. And that was what BNB had originally built. That was a dub stage that was built for 35mm mag play back.

Hugh: I’m sorry to be so ignorant, but is that like regular camera type film but it has a magnetic strip on it to record the audio?

Bruce: Yeah. Imagine if you took 35mm movie film, but you made it look like 24 track recording tape.

Hugh: Right, okay.

Bruce: Put magnetic oxide all across it so that you could record one or two or three or maybe six tracks of discreet audio.

Hugh: While you were filming the movie itself.

Bruce: Well, you would usually build the elements in editorial, and then you would hand them on mag playback.

Hugh: I see, so you would have all the visual and the audio on the same spool?

Bruce: Yeah, well, you’d have the projector, and you’d have all these mag dubbers that would play back the built mag sound units and when you roll the projector forward, the synchronizing system would synchronize the sound with it. This was the precursor from long ago in Hollywood – precursor of things that we now very much take for granted using SMPTE.

Hugh: I see. And it was probably much more difficult what you were doing then, right?

Bruce: Well, it was actually easier.

Hugh: Really?

Bruce: In the sense that, what we were doing was MUCH easier than synchronizing mag dubbers. Because the problem with mag is you had to build the mag film units - it’s not like they were virtual. I mean, when you edited a mag unit for sound, you were physically splicing stuff in place to make it play at the right sync point for that particular effect.

Hugh: Okay, I see.

Bruce: But the advent of virtual sound editing computer driven sound editing... yeah it’s like, you just bring up a gun shot -- okay, and fine I’ve got that sample, and I put it in the track and synchronize it to reel one at five minutes, twenty seven seconds, five frames. And then while the picture is rolling, the Synclavier is tracking the SMPTE time code from the picture, and bang goes the gun at the time you edited it in. You don’t like the gun, change the gun. It’s a mind-bogglingly different way of doing things, because it was instantaneous – on the other side of the dub stage was the dialogue and the ADR playback unit. And if the director was saying, “I hate the ADR, what does the production dialogue sound like?” or “can you mute the ADR on the digital playback and go hear what the original production dialogue sounds like? Oh I like that sound better - let’s use that instead. ”

Hugh: Amazing.

Bruce: Or, “I like the second take of the ADR instead of the first take. Did you edit that in?” “No problem, we edited the first take in, but I’ll bring up the second take and drop it in the same place.” Bing, done.

Hugh: Amazing. So that was your life for a number of years doing that kind of work?

Bruce: Yeah, I did that from 1995 until 1998 when I realized that over the course of those three years I had gone from being a very happy creative supervising sound editor to being a very miserable executive running my post production studio.

Hugh: Oh really, by 98?

Bruce: Yeah. And I hated it. So basically I got out of the...

Hugh: Why did you hate it Bruce?

Bruce: It wasn’t creative. I was sitting in an office signing pay checks for people. I wasn’t doing what I loved.

Hugh: Right. You wanted to be shredding that funk?

Bruce: Well, I wanted to be creative. I mean at a point in time, part of the story that we sort of bypassed was when Jason King came to the studio and said hey, I want to get back in making music, and I said well, I want to get out of being in the impoverished studio, and I’d like to do something different, and when I got into making sound effects -- I hung up my guitar. I figured well, I’ll do this for a couple of years and I won’t play music -- and I didn’t. I didn’t play music, and one day I looked at my watch and I realized that it’s been 15 years since I stopped playing music. Yow!

Hugh: Wow, that’s something, that’s a strong statement for Bruce Nazarian.

Bruce: Yeah, it is.

Hugh: The funk man.

Bruce: Well, you know the opportunities changed, and the world changed -- I wasn’t sitting in the middle of the studio scene in Detroit, which, by the late 80s, had died.

Hugh: Right, the economy went bad in Michigan.

Bruce: Oh yeah... and Motown moved out to L.A. So there was a big engine, but you know, yes, the economy was dying, and that meant a lot of free money that had been around to fund record production was now gone.

Hugh: So that whole part of the society that I mentioned before that was intertwined with culture and stuff, I saw a lot of that gutted around the time of the oil crisis or the energy crisis and all that, people moved out of Detroit and everything.

Bruce: Right. And I found myself in a strange place because here I was this sort of weird avant-garde technical guy with all these digital things, Synclavier and direct-to-disk, and doing all this whiz-bang state of the art stuff in basically a blue collar town that didn’t have a clue.

Hugh: Right, you were all dressed up, and nowhere to go.

Bruce: And people just didn’t get it. And so that was what precipitated the move to New York and then coincidence precipitated the move to L.A, and once I got to L.A, I was surrounded by the film industry, and that made moving into post production a natural thing -- because the technology lent itself to solving the problems of synchronization and post production very early on. By the way, I will take pride in noting that I don’t think you can go to any dub stage or mixing stage in Los Angeles today that doesn’t do things the way we were doing things back in the early days with Magnolia, everybody’s got Pro Tools now. Everybody’s got synchronized playback. This is become a fact of life. I’m not saying I did it, but I...

Hugh: You probably did Bruce.

Bruce: No, I think I was on the leading edge of the change. I think we opened a lot of people’s eyes.

Hugh: Well, you have this unique vision and the ability to take all the parts and see the relationships that other people didn’t see, and how to get over the hurdles and create new ways of doing things.

Bruce: Yeah, but the trick is you’ve got to be there at the right time -- not too early. Sometimes I might think I’ve been there a little bit too early.

Hugh: Maybe so.

Bruce: Whatever, you don’t kind of control when it is that you get those flashes of inspiration --because hey, I can take those and put this with that, and the next thing you know, boom -- we’ve got digital music preview. We’ve got digital post production dubbing.

Hugh: Man... you worked really, really hard on all the little details to get them all in place so that they’d actually work like a system, and then that definitely would have paved the way for a lot of these other people that you mention.

Bruce: Yes indeed. So, that takes us to 1998 ourselves to now looking around for something to do, next thing you know, a technology comes calling. I do some freelance getting back to post production sound supervision for the rest of 1998, then in early 1999, I find out about this thing called DVD -- and boy! Again, it’s like music. It burrowed in, and it hooked me. So I became DVD trainer and technical presenter -- I sort of dove into that whole hog and became the Director of DVD training for Video Symphony, one of the big post production training facilities in Los Angeles, and did that till I became a freelance DVD consultant from 2001 until a couple of years ago. And then what happened was, remember that prophetic phrase... tired of post production, I want to get it back into music, remember that line?

Hugh: Oh yeah.

Bruce: That was me in 2005. And all of a sudden, I realized that tapping that I thought I had felt on my shoulder was my music career, going “hey, you can’t ignore me!”

Hugh: Right, but before we get to that, let me just touch on the DVD thing a little bit. You’ve gone over that a bit quick but when I reviewed the literature about you, it seems that you became pretty much the world’s expert on DVD creation, authoring and the technical side of DVD creation. Is that true?

Bruce: Well, I became a prominent force in promoting it and training people about it. I won’t say that I was the world’s expert, but I certainly absorbed the tremendous amount of knowledge about it, and I think my biggest contribution was that I was able to translate a very technically complicated topic into a relatively easy to understand presentation. So I became an Apple Certified Trainer, then I became the factory trainer for Sonic Solutions, which was one of the big companies that made the high end DVD authoring systems that a lot of studios used. And, I also became a big proponent of Apple Solutions for DVD authoring. In fact, there’s a funny story about how I had actually sort of glommed on to the product that eventually became DVD Studio pro. I had to learn about it couple of years earlier, when it was still a product from Astarte in Germany called DVD Director -- I had done the world’s first training class on that product a year before Apple announced they were buying it. They purchased the entire Astarte DVD team, all intellectual property and products, the whole nine yards. And migrated it to Cupertino and started rebuilding it as DVD Studio Pro. As luck would have it, in 2000 I had met Paul Kent who runs Mac World. I met him at QuickTime Live in Los Angeles and we got to talking. I said Paul, you know there’s this stuff that’s coming called DVD, and do you suppose that the Mac folks would be at all interested in learning? There’s really great program on Macintosh for DVD authoring. And he said, well, put together a class syllabus and make me a pitch. So I did, and I pitched him, and he hired me to do a presentation at MacWorld the following January 2001.

Hugh: Fantastic.

Bruce: And as luck would have it, it turns out that my class was scheduled the day after Steve Jobs’ keynote speech, during which he revealed not only the new improved Macs to the world, but also the brand new DVD Studio Pro 1 and iDVD. Everybody takes DVD very much for granted these days. Back in 2001, that stuff was revolutionary. It was a simple DVD authoring program, with drag and drop stuff and ready-made templates and menus all ready to go. Steve announced it the day before my class, and the next day people were literally hanging from the chandeliers to get in the room for my session on DVD authoring for the Macintosh.

Hugh: Awesome.

Bruce: Thank you very much Steve, I never had a chance to say thank you but thank you for priming the audience.

Hugh: Yeah, really. Man, you’ve ridden so many waves in this business, it’s just amazing.

Bruce: Yeah. I feel like the constant surfer.

Hugh: Well, that’s because you are fast on your feet, you know you can feel the waves coming, you can feel the undertow and you jump on it. Like you said, maybe you got on those waves a little bit early sometimes, but you rode those babies man!

Bruce: Well, it makes the ride a lot of fun.

Hugh: Yeah. Okay, well cool. That’s great. We filled out your DVD expertise and that’s really fascinating now. You want to go back to the music calling you?

Bruce: There’s one last thing to fill out.

Hugh: Yes, please.

Bruce: Along the way, a friend of mine got me a book deal. I had achieved enough prominence that I was considered a respected voice and a very knowledgeable person about DVD Studio Pro, so I got a contract with McGraw-Hill to write a book about DVD Studio Pro 2, and then next thing you know, they renew the contract and I redo the book for DVD Studio Pro 4, which was the last version of DVD Studio Pro that had ever been released -- it’s kind of like the last book now that’s out there. Along the way, Blu Ray Disc was starting to rear it’s head and I was into that early on because of my involvement with DVD -- and also because of my involvement with the DVD Association, of which I had become president in 2007. And there were literally no books on how to make Blu-Ray on Macintosh. Now I’m a really big Mac guy, and have been one for decades. My very first personal computer was an Apple II and I went on from there to buy a Macintosh in 1984 when they first came out. And I’ve been Mac user since 1984.

Hugh: I got a Mac SE in 1987.

Bruce: Well, there you go, you were right on the leading edge of the wave, and the Mac kind of changed things for most people because computers used to be hard.

Hugh: Right.

Bruce: I know computers used to be hard, because when I was in college, I programmed IBM mainframe computers for the State of Michigan. It was one of the few jobs that I ever had during my life. Now, here’s a funny story -- I got the job because of a friend of mine in college who was the French horn player in the orchestra who was the project supervisor for the State of Michigan. I’m not talking about what you know, it’s who you know.

Hugh: Yeah, right!

Bruce: So I learned FORTRAN and I learned COBOL and I learned IBM 360 assembler language...

Hugh: Amazing. When did you learn all that stuff man?

Bruce: When I was in college.

Hugh: So that was even in the 60s?

Bruce: Yeah, early 60s. I graduated high school in 66, went off to college in the fall of 1966 and while I was doing that, while I was playing professional stuff I was also programming for the State of Michigan. Now, you asked, what was the project you were programming computers for?

Hugh: What was the project you were programming computers for Bruce?

Bruce: The automated entry ramp traffic signals on the freeways in the city of Detroit.

Hugh: Wow, cool!

Bruce: That system was the very first system in the world, and it was a project of the Michigan State Highway department.

Hugh: Were you writing (IF)(THEN) logic for that?

Bruce: I wasn’t programming and controlling the actual traffic lights, but what most people may not have realized is there were sensors under the pavement that managed the number of cars that are backed up on a ramp and the traffic flow in all the lanes of the freeway.

Hugh: And that was in the 60s too?

Bruce: That was in the 60s. So you know all these things... and the IBM, well, see now you do. And the IBM computers in the State of Michigan had bought or leased or whatever were doing all the data analysis to crunch the numbers to generate the flow patterns and calculate what is the optimum entry lane flow and exit lane flow. Where are the sticking points? How do we solve the problem of backing everything else? So they were working on that in the mid 60s and I was programming data analysis after the fact. They had an IBM system 1800 that would gather the real time information from all the sensors and then we would use a system 360 we would FORTRAN analysis on the numbers.

Hugh: Okay, I think I get the picture.

Bruce: Well, imagine if you will, several very large blue boxes the size of double wide refrigerators and this was before there was such a thing as a simple SCSI drive...

Hugh: Those are the big tapes in them right?

Bruce: We had tapes we had punch cards, we had front panel switches, we had TTY terminals, teletype terminals that would print - this was early days.

Hugh: I was just going to say that, it sounds like another situation where you got it in a bit early.

Bruce: Well the computer business got started before I got in, but I was certainly in it before and during the personal computer revolution. Because I was in at the main frame level, at the tail end of the mainframe level and watched as personal computers sort of came about and then became the rage.

Hugh: Right. And all that technical background that you had, that I had no awareness of at the time that I was hanging or working with you and stuff, I mean all that stuff just really, really served you to no end, with all these other things that you’ve done.

Bruce: I think all the technical stuff that I’ve done helped reinforce my understanding of the technology in music making, and I’m kind of a left brain / right brain guy -- a combination of the artistic side of it, the musicality side of it and the technology of it. And I think that’s what gave me the urge to combine those two all along the way.

Hugh: And you’ve done an amazing, amazing job of all of those things and the more I learn about you the more I’m just blown away by your accomplishments and all of the things that you’ve done.

Bruce: Yeah, I’m just one of many. There were a lot of ground-breaking guys who were breaking the same technology, married with art kind of thing like the affirmation Trevor Horn and Steve Lipson.

Hugh: But you are a Detroiter, Bruce and that’s...

Bruce: There you go.

Hugh: That’s why we love you man.

[Stay tuned for part 4, in which Bruce discusses his long-overdue, successful return to the music production business, this time out of LA. Coming soon...]