by Logan Miller
Except for a few minutes of baseball in Tucson, Touching Home takes place in the pastoral landscape of West Marin, where we grew up. The sonic landscape needed depth, resonance, shades, and features to accompany its visual beauty. The rhythms of baseball, the cacophony of a rock quarry, the tranquility of a redwood forest were characters, the sounds of which could intensify the emotional experience.
Poor sound is one of the distinct flaws of independent and low-budget movies. But it doesn’t have to be this way. To their detriment, many filmmakers overlook the sonic aspect of storytelling. They’re preoccupied with picture, the moving image, what the camera is doing and seeing, a tricky shot or interesting angle. The movie doesn’t necessarily look low-budget, but it sure as hell sounds like it. Poor sound has an insidious effect on the audience. It’s not always perceptible to the average moviegoer, but they know something is off. The experience just doesn’t feel right. Bad sound can kill a great performance, no matter how good the actor.
We called Richard Hymns.
Richard is a three-time Academy Award–winning supervising sound editor. Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, Indiana Jones, that’s him. He lives in Northern California and works at Skywalker Ranch. We met Richard through a friend a few years back. One of the beauties of Northern California is that the filmmaking community is tiny. It’s also tight-knit. If someone can help you out, they will.
Richard recommended several sound men. All highly distinguished. They had worked for titans like Lucas, Spielberg, Eastwood, Coppola, and so on. We started calling. The next day Richard fired us an e-mail with one more name: Try this guy, Sound Ranger. He doesn’t have the résumé of these other guys, but I just did a small movie with him and his recordings were excellent. Also, you probably can’t afford the other guys, but you can afford him.
So we called Sound Ranger. We met him for lunch at some greasy diner in the Valley and sat outside so he could smoke. The table was on the street, one of those endless boulevards that only Los Angeles can produce, not quite freeway, not quite residential, long and straight and loud, throbbing with traffic and feral drivers, a jungle of radio stations and cranky horns. The table vibrated from the roar of that steamy cement swamp. And we were three of its creatures.
We ordered. We talked. We ate. Each bite was all-American slop mixed with hot exhaust.
Sound Ranger is a hardened veteran of low-budget horror movies. As he explained in his raspy, smoker’s voice, “I just fell into them. They’ve paid the bills for twenty years.” But he wanted to get out of that hamster wheel, wanted to make movies with substance, ones he would be proud of. He also wanted to work with Richard again, whom Sound Ranger called, “A sound god.”
After the meal, Sound Ranger lit a cigarette, shifted in his seat. It was time to talk price. The uneasy moment had arrived, where all parties tacitly recognize that the friendly conversation is over and the negotiation has begun. And since nobody has invented a non-oily, subtle way of doing this, the best transition is usually no transition—cut out the crap and go to it.
“This is a non-union gig, right?” Sound Ranger asked. If the gig was union, there wouldn’t be much of a negotiation; the rate was enshrined in a union contract, roughly $800 for a twelve-hour day.
“Yeah, non-union…If we could afford union rates, we’d pay them. But we can’t.”
“So what are you paying then?” Sound Ranger asked. “Are you going Favored Nations?” Favored Nations means different things in different industries, but in this case, he was referring to the practice of paying all the “Keys,” the department heads, the same rate.
“We’re paying our Keys three hundred a day. Flat rate. No overtime.”
“Twelve-hour day?”
“Yes.”
Sound Ranger took a drag. “Look, I’ll give you guys a great deal. Fact is, I want to work with Richard again. It’s a huge career move for me…But look, if I do this four-day gig for you, will you promise to bring me back when you shoot the rest of the movie—whenever that is?”
“If you do a good job, we’ll bring you back.”
“Will you put it in writing?”
“Sure.”
“That’s fair…I’ve got some hard costs that I can’t get around. I need to cover my equipment rental, which includes microphones, mixing board, and my boom man Voot. I gotta take care of Voot. He works for me. I can take a pay cut, but he can’t.”
“Deal.”
“I don’t know how you boys got to Richard Hymns…,” he said, taking another drag from his cigarette, then chuckling, shaking his head—what am I getting into?
It’s as though your movie is this giant electromagnet. If you have influential—magnetic—people aboard, whose names mean something to someone, for whatever reason—a name like Hymns’s has little currency outside the sound world—then that magnet (your movie) attracts names like iron fuzz. You can get good people for cheap. If you don’t have names attached, people will run from your movie like a stick of dynamite in an outhouse. And what stinks worse—you’ll be forced to pay top dollar for mediocrity. Just about everyone in this business is a mercenary, and has to be; they are all independent contractors. They are on your show for a blip. You’re just another plastic bumper on the assembly line.
We settled on a package deal with Sound Ranger; $3,000 for seven days (four shooting, two travel, and one prep), not including gas, per diem, hotel, and other incidentals.
We wrote and signed a piece of paper that said: “In the event that both parties are satisfied with the work rendered in Arizona, the Miller Brothers intend to hire the Sound Ranger (Randall Lawson) for the remainder of principal photography in Northern California.”
After our lunch with Sound Ranger we drove back to Tucson and decided to expand our operations.
PART III
DESERT SHOOT-OUT
PONYTAIL DUDE AND THE ROCKER
THE INITIAL PLAN for Tucson was to shoot pretty images of spring training with a long lens from outside the fence, cut it together, and make a trailer to show prospective investors. This would be a tool to raise money, nothing more. It would most likely be shot on video, unusable for Touching Home, which we planned to shoot on film, preferably 35 mm; if we couldn’t afford 35 mm, then 16 mm. At that point, we just didn’t have the financial resources or manpower to produce a quality piece of work. But now, three weeks later, our production had undergone a tectonic shift; we now had Panavision cameras, Kodak film, a veteran cinematographer, and an ace sound team. We were no longer going to waste our time recording unusable images. We had the firepower now. If we were shooting, then it was going to be in the movie.
We still had extremely limited funds, but we’d figure out a way to surmount this short-term obstacle.
So we decided to shoot ten pages of the script, all the scenes that take place in Tucson. This decision increased our workload exponentially. It demanded multiple locations: a college, interiors and exteriors, a dean’s office, a library, a motel, baseball fields, access to highways and city streets; oh, and a rather important element, known in the industry as “actors.” It was a prodigious undertaking for two guys. A typical production would have dozens of people in multiple departments handling this.
We started hustling around Tucson and soon met another angel.
We had scouted Pima Community College a few days earlier and thought the location, perched on a hill overlooking Tucson, was visually stunning. In addition, there was ample parking and room to maneuver equipment, a significant production concern; if you can’t get to it, you can’t shoot it.
So we called Peter Catalanotte at the Tucson Film Office, and he gave us the phone number to the Pima Community College Film Department. We left a message with the head professor and didn’t wait for him to call back.
We drove immediately to Pima and walked into the professor’s office unannounced.
We gave him our pitch. He thought we were out of our minds. Don’t think he’d ever heard guys talk so fast.
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sp; He was a big dude with a ponytail and he wanted us out of his hair.
“That’s great guys. But we gotta go talk to the dean. Let’s go see where she’s at.”
We followed him upstairs.
Victoria Cook was in her office. Once again, we had barged into someone’s space without an appointment. She smiled and asked us to sit down. She looked amused. Who are these guys? Twins? People either immediately like us or immediately hate us. It’s just the way it’s always been. Nobody is ever on the fence with us. It’s probably our energy. Like a rock concert at full blast, some can take it, some can’t.
Our first impression: Vicki’s a rocker.
We pitched our story. By the end, she was in tears. She had just emerged victorious from a two-year battle with cancer, her ear-length hair fighting its way back down to her shoulders. She had taken on death, and beat him. Put simply, she inspires.
“I think our school should be involved in this,” Vicki said. “This would serve as a great example for our students. This is what education is all about. Can our students participate? I’m sure our film students would love to gain some hands-on experience, don’t you think?” Vicki looked at the film professor. He was standing at the door, one foot out.
He nodded. “Of course.” He still wasn’t impressed. He was also a filmmaker.
“I need to get back to class,” he said. We never saw him again.
“Where do you guys want to film?” Vicki asked.
“Well…pretty much everywhere,” we said with a questioning smile. It was a massive stretch of a request.
“You just tell me the specific locations, and I’ll put in a request with the board. It shouldn’t be a problem.”
Vicki took us on a tour of the campus and introduced us to baseball coaches Edgar Soto and Keith Francis. As mentioned, we had scouted Pima CC on our own a few days prior. Now we had the guided tour. The location was perfect for our movie. We thanked Vicki and went back to planning.
Another invaluable lesson was impressed on our minds, a lesson employed time and again throughout the making of Touching Home: always, always, whenever possible, meet in person. It’s worth ten thousand phone calls and a lifetime of e-mails. Get face-time. Otherwise they’ll only half believe you.
Never underestimate the human element.
OUR GRANDMOTHER LEFT us a message on our cell phone when we were with Vicki.
We called her as we pulled out of Pima Community College parking lot. Grandma told us that she phoned to apologize for not coming to our father’s wake. He was the second son she’d lost.
“We understand, Grandma. So does Dad. We don’t want you to worry about that. It’s all right. Dad never wanted you to worry.”
Nobody from our dad’s family showed up for his wake. But we had no hard feelings. Our dad wasn’t a man who held grudges. There was no point. Everyone grieves in their own way. And they preferred to grieve alone.
“I know he’s so proud of you two,” she said. Then her voice broke and she started crying. And so did we. Logan pulled over to the side of the road and we stayed there for some time.
Balancing our emotions turned out to be one of the greatest challenges. The loss was so fresh. Early on, the pain could hit at any time. But we had to push on. We had to be leaders.
When we got off the phone we cried some more, the red-rock sunset flooding into our car. We felt completely isolated, struggling to accomplish a vision that only we held, personal and perhaps foolishly idealistic, and in all likelihood, a failure. But there was an energy that we held in those lonely moments, a bond with Dad, a spiritual frequency that came to life after his death. Staring west across the desert and beyond that to the unseen world where the sun was heading filled us with a sense of power and a sense of the everlasting; that time holds no preference for anyone, it moves with or without you, and while you’re here, you might as well be making good time and going after your dreams. Our dad would want that.
We wiped our eyes and drove thirty minutes across town to Anthony’s house in Sabino Canyon at the base of Mount Lemmon. We were staying with him and his wife, Claudia, and their three sons, Logan, six, Marcus, three, and Troy, two. Exhausted, we opened our laptop and got to work, the kids jumping on us, videogames blaring, footballs and toys flying.
There was still a Herculean number of labors to complete before we started filming. And we had only two weeks. We had no actors, no secured locations, no permits, no shooting schedule, hotel rooms, food, insurance, equipment, travel arrangements for our crew 470 miles away—and a multitude of other as yet uncompleted requirements. And this was just the production side. We were also the creative force behind the movie. We needed to act and direct, each with its own manifold responsibilities. Where would the time come from? It was the one thing we could not produce.
Over the next two and a half weeks we spent four thousand minutes on our cell phone.
SERAPHIM
Tucson was floating with angels.
We wanted to film spring training. The real deal. Professional ballplayers. Not some fake re-creation with actors swinging sissy sticks. To accomplish this, we needed the okay from the City of Tucson, and if humanly possible, the okay from the Colorado Rockies. The former was likely, the latter, extremely unlikely.
Reid Park is city property. It’s also the home of the Colorado Rockies Spring Training. It is managed and run by the Tucson Parks and Recreation. Peter Catalanotte started processing the paperwork for our permits to the fields, assuring us that filming there would not be a problem, so long as the Rockies weren’t practicing at the time. But we told him that we WANTED the Rockies to be on the fields, that we WANTED to film them practicing. He smiled, chuckled—thought we were crazy—and told us that he would try to help any way he could. For starters, Peter didn’t know anyone with the Rockies. And even if he did, it would still be nearly impossible to get permission to film the players. We told him to let us take care of that.
We were ex-ballplayers. We knew how the system worked. The front office, president, executives, the “Suits” would never, ever, not in Mother Charity’s finest hour, allow two no-named filmmakers with no money to hop the fence and throw a movie camera and crew into the middle of spring training. For a large chunk of change—they’d certainly consider the request. But for free, and in the short time given for clearance—NEVER. You’ve never seen real baseball like this in a movie because IT DOES NOT HAPPEN. Major league teams are gearing up for the season, their core business. They don’t give a rat’s ass about some movie, and rightfully so. But we needed to depict reality. And that demanded we get on that field—at all costs.
So we started working the back channels through Anthony. He spoke to his friend and Rockies minor league coach, P. J. Carey, about our movie. They had known each other for years. Both are Tucson residents. P. J. had watched Anthony play since Anthony was in Little League, cranking homers all over town. And now, they were both part of the same major league organization.
P. J. was in charge of extended spring training, had been for years. Coincidentally, we had tried out for him years earlier when we were living in Tucson pursuing our baseball dreams. P. J. told Anthony that he would meet with us and see if he could help us out.
Anthony has experienced great tragedy in his short life. He lost his first son and wife, in separate instances, then his aunt was murdered by her husband, all in a six-year span, and we’d been through it with him. He’d do whatever he could for us, and we for him.
Anthony had a monster spring training, led the Rockies in home runs and RBIs, and on the last day, they released him. Yep. Leads them in everything and is released. It all came down to dollars. They had signed Anthony a month prior to spring training for a box of Cracker Jacks and a Diet Coke. It was a pittance, a nominal investment—an expendable investment. Conversely, they had substantial money invested in other players, and when it came time to free up roster space, well, you got it, money was supreme. They offered him a coaching job.
We were
scheduled to have lunch with P. J. and Anthony the following day. P. J. had three days off before the start of extended spring training.
Anthony getting canned the day before our lunch with P. J. didn’t bode well for our enterprise. We didn’t sleep that night. We had the uneasy feeling that our train was about to be derailed. Anthony tried to relieve our anxiety by telling us that P. J. was good people, and that Anthony’s release from the Rockies would not have a negative influence on our situation.
Several days earlier, Anthony had given our script to P. J. We figured that if P. J. read the script he would be compelled to help us. But the odds of him reading it during the height of spring training were slim.
Going into lunch, we felt as though our entire movie hinged on P. J.
WE MET P. J. at Chuy’s Baja Broiler on the north side of town. Anthony was with us.
“So I read your script and started thinking—it was very good by the way,” P. J. said. “Had me and my wife choked up.”
P. J. breathes sincerity and compassion, an old-fashioned tobacco-spitting charmer from a Pennsylvania steel town, skin weathered from a lifetime spent on baseball fields under the sun.
