Tom Fleischman: Cinema, Scorsese & the Art of the Mix

Tom Fleischman: Cinema, Scorsese & the Art of the Mix
In this immersive episode, Steve Otis Gunn chats with Oscar-winning re-recording mixer Tom Fleischman to uncover the nuanced, behind-the-scenes craft of cinematic sound. With decades of experience, Tom offers a rare glimpse into the audio side of filmmaking, where emotion is built not just through visuals, but through every carefully chosen sound.
From his early days splicing tape by ear to mixing iconic films like Goodfellas , School of Rock , and The Irishman , Tom shares personal stories and surprising insights from his legendary collaborations, especially with Martin Scorsese. The conversation spans the evolution of sound editing, the intuition behind great mixes, and why sometimes the hardest thing to get right is a single vowel.
Highlights include:
- The challenges and creativity behind mixing films such as Hugo and Gangs of New York
- What a re-recording mixer actually does—and why it’s more grit than glamour
- The mystery and magic of cataloguing forgotten sound effects
- Behind-the-scenes tales from awards season, including rejection and red carpet drama
- The art of “invisible” mixing and why audio is the ultimate cinematic illusion
Packed with anecdotes—like Daniel Day-Lewis bringing intensity and precision even to his ADR sessions, and Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-night wisdom—this episode is a must-listen for filmmakers, sound enthusiasts, or anyone curious about how the soul of a film is often found in what we hear.
🏆 About Tom Fleischman
Tom Fleischman is an Academy Award-winning re-recording mixer with a career spanning over four decades. Known for his collaborations with directors like Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and Robert Redford, Tom’s fingerprints are on countless classic films, from Silence of the Lambs to The Devil Wears Prada . His craft—equal parts science and intuition—has shaped the soundtrack of modern cinema.
🔗 Connect with Tom Fleischman
📢 Follow the Podcast
Stay updated with the latest episodes and behind-the-scenes content:
Podcast: Television Times with Steve Otis Gunn
Host: Steve Otis Gunn
Guest : Tom Fleischman – Oscar-winning Re-recording Mixer
Duration : 50 minutes
Release Date : June 8, 2025
Season : 4, Episode 4
All music written and performed in this podcast by Steve Otis Gunn
Please buy my book You Shot My Dog and I Love You , available in all good bookshops and online.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, Scream Rats, and welcome to another episode of Television Times.
Now, I'm on a mic called a Rode Pod Mic, if anyone cares.
It's made by Rode, who are like this really good, you know, microphone company.
But I am selling it in about an hour's time.
So this is my last use of this one.
I'm paring back my equipment because I went to do a recording the other day in the center of Newcastle, and I used radio mics for the first time.
And I had these big clunky stands and big fucking, you know, mic stands and all these cables in this case and everything.
I've been trundling that around with great difficulty for a couple of years.
And I've realized, hang on a minute, all I need is like minimal stuff.
But you kind of want to appear professional.
You want to have all this stuff and cables.
You don't need it anymore.
You don't need anything.
You can do it with your phone, a little handheld recorder and a couple of radio mics.
Easy as pie.
So I'm going, as my wife said, streamline and sexy, she said.
Get it all down to nothing.
I'm also back on my old audio interface after having a road caster duo.
It turns out I didn't need it.
I bought it because I thought it would be sleek and cool and sexy and all that sort of stuff.
Again, saying sexy again twice.
Didn't need it.
Didn't need it.
Didn't need it.
I'm back on the old gear.
That sounds wrong, doesn't it?
Like I'm taking drugs.
And tomorrow a new mic appears.
It's a Shure mic, a podcasting mic, which is way better.
So yeah, last time you hear me on this one, if that means anything to anybody.
So yeah, this is the road mic, a little road test.
Somebody knocked me down on eBay for the price of it.
And yeah, I found a lot of things.
Cool stuff like, I found this old camera in the house, an old Sony Cybershop.
Turns out, Gen Zers are sick of iPhone photos, basically, and filters.
And these old cameras are flying off the shelves, which is really weird, because I remember about a year or so ago, I looked to see if it was worth anything, this little Cybershop thing from 10 years ago or more, and it was worth like 20 quid or something.
I looked on there yesterday, just for a laugh, 150 quid they're worth.
So I'm selling one for like 125 or something, but everything's worth something, you know, if you wait around.
So I'm just clearing out, I'm getting things down, and you know, this is boring stuff.
Can you hear the creaky chair?
Probably hear the creaky chair.
There might be a little bit more noise in the background, because I'm not able to do so much with this one this week until I get all my new stuff sorted for next week.
Right, to today's guest.
Now today's guest, this was recorded a little while ago, about three months ago, I've been sitting on this one.
This is a man called Tom Fleischman.
Now, Tom Fleischman is basically Martin Scorsese's sound man.
That's the only way I can say it.
He's Martin Scorsese's right hand man, the sound guy.
When Scorsese says he's doing a film, he gives this guy a call and he puts the whole audio soundtrack of the entire film together, all the parts, he puts that together.
You go to the cinema, you watch Goodfellas, it's him.
You watch School of Rock, it's him.
You watch The Irishman, it's him, you know, crazy.
Now, because I spoke to Tom Curley, another sound guy, he was like a production sound guy, right, on site.
This is Tom, he's got an Oscar as well.
He's an Oscar winner, he's an Oscar winner.
Forgot to say that, that's ridiculous.
Tom won the Oscar for Hugo, for Hugo the movie, the Scorsese movie.
But he's been in all, it's like all of the Scorsese films.
Just name them all, pick them in your head, think of them, Tom was the guy who put it together.
I can't believe it, right?
And I get to talk to him, which is amazing.
So this is a bit of a sort of backstage, you know, lift the lid on how they make, you know, Hollywood movies, essentially.
I linked up with Tom on Blue Sky, the social media opposite of X, and we hit it off and we had a few chats.
And I was really, you know, grateful that he came and spoke to me on this here podcast.
So I hope you like that.
And, you know, we'll do some more industry background people.
I haven't got any more of these lined up anytime soon, but, you know, we'll see how it all goes.
And we're having a lot more meandering chats in the upcoming ones.
And also faster turnaround.
This one is old, this is from February time, you know, when I sort of went on hiatus.
But, you know, the one I put out next week, I did on Friday.
So they're speeding up now.
We're going to be doing them a little bit quicker.
Right, let's get on to our guests.
So this is me back in February, February, I had to say, back in February, talking to Martin Scorsese's sound man.
Okay, that's how I'm going to say it.
I hope you like that I've said that, Tom.
I hope that's okay.
Okay, I just wanted to drop in here because I have finished the edit and I realized that I sort of went on about Tom being Scorsese's sound guy, but obviously he's worked on loads of other stuff.
I just want to make that really, really clear.
And the other thing I wanted to say is it's quite a technical podcast.
It's like industry one and it's not for the comedy or anything.
So I haven't put loads of musical stings in.
I should also say that there's a bit of background noise and lots of clicking on Tom's end.
I don't know what he's doing.
I think it's his headphones.
I don't know.
It doesn't really matter.
It's kind of ironic considering he's a sound guy.
But also I should say that I am now speaking to you on a Macbook internal microphone because it's late at night.
I just want to jump in here because the studio setup isn't set up again yet.
The little mic swap over that I mentioned.
So let's get into the podcast now.
So here we go.
This is me talking to Oscar winner Tom Fleischman.
Mr.
Tom Fleischman to the stage.
Thank you.
Roll up, roll up and welcome to another edition of Television Times with your host me, Steve Otis Gunn.
Where I'll be talking to someone you do know or someone you don't.
It might be funny, but it might not be.
But it's always worth tuning in for.
So here we go with another episode of Television Times.
How are you?
Nice to meet you, by the way.
Same here.
I mean, the list of films that you have been involved in is just, I mean, I can't even name them all.
I've got all my favorites, but there's still like another 100 after that.
It's quite wild.
Yeah, I've been doing this a while.
If you were to explain to a layman, say in the UK, what is your job?
How would you describe it if you don't mind?
Okay.
I mean, we really have to start from the beginning and think about how a film is put together.
Yeah.
The first thing that happens is somebody writes a script and then they get the money to produce it and they go on a set and they have actors who read the script and it's a cameraman who shoots the action.
And there's someone with a microphone who's supposed to record what the actors are saying.
And that's really their only job.
They're supposed to get a good signal on what the actors are saying.
Everything else is secondary and their film is shot in pieces and eventually those pieces are spliced together into a narrative storyline.
And that goes for the sound as well, the sound that was recorded on the set.
And that track, that original production track is what it's called, becomes the foundation for the rest of the film track.
Eventually after all of the pieces of film are properly assembled by the editor and the director into the narrative story that they want to tell, it's handed over to a team of sound editors who take apart that production track and they add whatever needs to be added to it in terms of sound, background sound, sound effects, things that are happening, spaceships, whatever it might be, tanks, battle.
And at the same time, they've hired a composer or have put together some kind of a musical accompaniment to what's going to be in the movie.
And these things are happening simultaneously.
And eventually, you've got a group of people who are working just on dialogue, a group of people who are working just on sound effects, and there's a music editor and a composer are putting together the score.
And the film editor also has a lot.
The director obviously, when they're picking songs that might go into the movie instead of orchestral score.
You know, a lot of Scorsese is famous for doing that.
Goodfellas and Casino, it was all scored with songs.
You worked on Goodfellas.
Did he have those songs already planned out?
Like this song is definitely going to be there.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, they did that in the editing process.
While they were putting these pieces of film together to tell the story, they picked the songs that applied to what the action was happening, and they placed them editorially so that it sunk up with certain moments in the picture.
And that became the musical accompaniment to the movie.
The series of songs, if we're talking about Goodfellas, for example.
There are other films that use a combination of both.
There's a composer hired, he does a score, but there's also these musical montages maybe that have a popular song playing over it.
You see that a lot on television, in procedural television shows.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
Eventually, there's all these sound elements that exist now.
The dialogue editors have taken apart the production track and smoothed it out so that it can be one smooth piece of sound that seems natural.
The sound editors have added all the sound effects and the director and the composer have the music.
Eventually, all those things have to be combined into a single track that's going to play when the audience watches the film.
And that's what I do.
They bring all of these different elements to me.
And I put them up.
I used to put them up on film reels.
Now it's all on computers.
We watch the picture.
We play all the tracks and I can manipulate them and blend them together so that what comes out is what you hear when you watch the show.
Wow.
So is that one giant audio file that's like two and a half hours long?
Yes.
Really?
Yes.
Well, actually, we split it up into reels that usually are about 20 minutes long.
A typical movie might have five or six reels in it.
And we work on those 20 minute pieces and then eventually we splice them together and we watch the whole film and make adjustments if need be.
That's wild.
So there's so many people involved.
So when you get that final track and you hear it for the first time, how does that feel for you?
Or are you constantly tweaking?
Do you ever go, oh, yeah, that is it.
How do you know you're done?
You're never really, I mean, you're done when you run out of time and run out of money, basically.
That's how it works.
I mean, they schedule the mix for a certain number of days.
And that's how much time I have to do it.
I mean, if it's a television show, it could be three or four days.
If it's a feature film, it could be five weeks.
You know, a series, for example, a television series for, say, HBO or, you know, Netflix or something like that, you know, usually has eight to 12 episodes per season.
And those are usually about 45 or 50 minutes long.
And I would normally get, I mean, when I was doing, working for HBO, they were very generous with their schedule.
I would get five days to do a 45 or 50 minute episode.
Whereas on a feature film, the budget obviously is much larger and they schedule a much longer time to do it.
You have a two, two and a half hour movie to do and a shorter movie or like a comedy, something simple, they might only schedule four or five weeks.
But, you know, somebody like Scorsese, who's making a two hour and 45 minute epic, those take quite a bit longer.
And also the way those guys work is different.
It's much more detailed.
There's much more care taken in terms of making everything perfect.
So in terms of like a film like The Irishman, at some point that would have been delivered to your house for you to put together.
How long did that take?
They would come in with their Pro Tools sessions, each department, dialogue, Pro Tools.
And I usually do the dialogue and music.
And there's another mixer who deals with the sound effects.
Usually the supervising sound editor or sound designer would be responsible for creating all the sound effects, putting them all together, selecting them, building them into tracks that are in sync with the picture.
And then that person normally is the person who mixes the effects.
And I deal with the dialogue and music.
That's the way it works now.
I mean, back in the day, I used to work alone and I would do it all.
So how did you get into it?
Were you one of these kids with a little reel to reel and a microphone?
How did you start?
Well, I had a leg up.
Both of my parents were in the business.
My mother was a very well-known film editor, Dee Dee Allen.
She cut many great movies like Bonnie and Clyde and The Hustler.
Wow, Bonnie and Clyde.
Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon.
Anyway, I grew up in that milieu.
My father was a writer and director and producer for News Networks.
He made documentary films.
So I grew up in a film household.
I knew by the time I was in high school that I wanted to do something in movie making.
I didn't know what it was.
When I graduated high school, I went to NYU Film School for two semesters, my freshman year, I dropped out.
At that time, that was 1970 and President Nixon had bombed Cambodia.
And the student protests at Kent State for students were killed.
And so everybody in the school at NYU went on student strike.
Nobody went to classes.
I wound up at the end of the term with four incompletes and an F.
And I just never went back.
I took that summer.
I looked for a job.
I originally looked for a job cutting and editing, film editing.
That's what my mom did.
And I kind of, you know, she was kind of my hero at that time.
So did you go to work with her as a kid and see what she did?
Well, I did, actually, when I was in school, I would take my, I would go in and visit her in her cutting room all the time.
So I was familiar with all of that.
But I dropped out of school and I had gotten married very young.
I was 19 years old and I needed to get a job.
And I couldn't find anything.
And then one of her assistants, one of her assistants suggested that I call this guy who had just come from Israel and had opened a little sound facility in the Brill building on Broadway in New York.
So I called him up and he hired me.
I didn't know anything about sound.
And the first thing that he did was he had gotten, when he came to the United States, he had brought a lot of sound effects.
He had gotten it at an auction somewhere, reels and reels of quarter inch tape of sound effects.
And he didn't know what it was.
And he sat me down.
He gave me a little editing room with a tape recorder and headphones.
And I sat there all day listening to these tapes and trying to figure out what was on them and making a list of what was on each reel.
And after that, he showed me how to splice the tape.
And I organized all these sounds and eventually it took me months.
I mean, I worked for him probably six months, the first six months just doing that.
And I had a sound effects library and I knew all of it.
And the sound editors would come in needing sound effects and they would sit with me and I would audition the sound effects for them.
They have a list of effects that they needed for the whatever movie they were working on and we sold the sound effects of $7.50 per effect and 10 cents a foot for the stock.
They'd say, you know, give me 500 feet of those birds and I would transfer off 500 feet of birds for them.
You know, I sold sound effects and they needed Foley.
So the boss was building a Foley studio.
So then I went into engineering Foley.
And I worked for that guy for two years and it was a little tiny shop.
And my mother was working on these movies in New York and the mixer, who was the kind of the big deal feature mixer in New York.
And he had started out his own company and built his own facility with his brother.
And suddenly one day I got a phone call from them offering me a job.
And my boss at the little tiny shop said, go and you know, he'll get me in the union.
And I'd be working with the best mixer.
So they hired me and I for six years after that, I transferred quarter inch tape to 16 or 35 millimeter film.
I transferred dailies for a lot of movies.
The films would be shot at the end of the day.
Quarter inch tapes would go to the lab.
And I would go down to the lab in the morning and pick up the tapes and come back to the France for Rome and transfer them.
And whenever I got a break or had...
We used to get these long things like episodes of one-hour shows that were M&E's, music and effects tracks that were being sent off on 16 millimeter.
So I'd set up the transfer, get it going, making sure it was playing well.
And I'd sneak down into the mixing room and sit in the back.
And my mentor, Dick Vorsak, would let me do it.
Because my mom were friendly and, you know, he knew me as a little kid because I used to go in sometimes.
She would take me to the mix when I was very small.
It's like a sound version of cinema paradisiac.
Eventually, you know, eventually I got a chance to do some mixing.
The studio was offering student filmmakers $25 an hour.
And I would go in on Saturdays and Sundays and mix these student projects, which was a great education.
I ran into every problem you can imagine and had to figure out how to solve it as best I could.
And that was terrific training.
And the other thing was there was a production sound mixer.
Production sound mixer is the guy who captures the original production track.
So when you see that credit in the film, you know that's the guy who was on the set recording.
And that's a whole other aspect of the job I'm not really all that familiar with.
But he was probably the best production mixer in New York.
And he liked me, I transferred his dailies a lot.
And he said to me, is there any way you can get into the studio and use the EQ and try and clean up these tracks a little bit?
Because what they would do is I would do the transfers, it would go back to the editing room, they would sync it up to the picture, and then every evening the crew would come into the screening room, and they would watch the dailies from the previous day.
And he wanted his dailies to sound good at that screening.
So I would go in there and I would do some EQ, and I started learning how to use a compressor and an equalizer, and whatever pitiful noise suppression they had in those days.
And I would transfer the dailies and make them a little prettier.
How did you learn that at the time?
What was your source material for this information?
Because now obviously you can go online, find things.
I went to sound engineering college and we had books, textbooks.
How did you learn?
Where was the information coming from?
I didn't pay any attention to any of that.
I just did it by feel.
I had been listening to all the sound effects, building the sound effects library.
I knew what a transfer was, where you copy one thing to something else.
And basically mixing is just a glorified transfer.
If you think about it, you're just manipulating the sounds as you do it.
So you just did it all by instinct and...
It was, yeah, I mean, I had to, I listened to things.
My first boss, Alicia, who first opened that studio, he had come from Israel, he told me you have to listen, you have to open your ears and tune your ear to what you are listening to and try and tune everything else out.
And he kind of trained me to do that just sort of on a day-to-day basis.
When I was first learning, you know, he showed me how an equalizer worked and what it means.
It's basically a tone control.
You can raise the treble, you can raise the bass or vice versa.
And you can make things sound more intelligible that way.
So I just sort of got a feel for how things go together.
And I guess I had a natural talent.
Maybe I inherited from my mom or something of timing and rhythm.
And because mixing, you know, mixing a film, it's like sleight of hand.
You have to disguise the moves that you make and the manipulations that you do, because you don't want the audience to be aware of that.
If the audience notices that suddenly the music has been pulled down to a lower level, it takes them out of the film.
I mean, it has to be done in a way where they think it's just naturally like that.
So it's a matter of feel, a lot of it, for me.
And listening and just trying to match one thing to another sonically, tone-wise, pitch-wise, you know, a lot of the dialogue is replaced later.
The actors come back into the studio and re-record their lines for a whole number of reasons.
What are the main reasons for that?
Well, they call it ADR, right?
ADR stands for automated dialogue replacement.
Right.
And the reasons are pretty simple.
One is that for some reason, the original production track is unusable.
You know, the microphone went out or the plane flew overhead or there was too much noise.
They couldn't get the mic close enough.
The radio mic was full of static.
For whatever reason, the track couldn't be used.
And there was no other take that could be substituted that was good.
So they'll get the actor back to replace those lines.
The other thing that can happen is that the director is not happy with performance or exposition.
You want to change New York to Chicago in a particular line of dialogue for whatever reason.
And the ADR editor, the dialogue editor, will fit that somehow into their lips so that hopefully it'll go by and the audience won't notice.
I like it when someone walks out of a room and then they'll say something like to do with the plot that wasn't...
you don't see their face and they're just shouting from another room and you just think, yeah, that was dubbed in later.
So that's one of those things that has to be mixed in in a way that it's not noticeable.
You don't want the audience to suddenly realize, oh, that's a VDR line.
And sometimes it's just a matter of replacing a word or even just a syllable.
There's a funny story.
We're working on Gangs of New York.
There's a scene there with Daniel Day-Lewis and he's sitting in a chair and he's got the flag wrapped over him and he's making this big speech.
At one point, he says the word civilization.
Only he said civilization as perhaps an Englishman would say it, civilization.
Anyway, they always have a dialogue code.
The dialogue coach should object.
He said, that's not right.
He shouldn't say it that way.
He should say civilization or anyway.
So we wind up trying to ADR the line and it didn't fit.
He didn't get the right tone or I don't remember exactly what it was, but we started using less and less of the word until we got down to just the uh.
Really?
We just cut the I out and put the uh in its place.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
And that was the answer to that.
I've got a little favor to ask you.
Could you please follow us on social media?
And if you've got time, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get them.
It all helps drive traffic back to the podcast.
But for now, let's get back to the current episode of Television Times.
How did it feel to win an Oscar?
I know you've been nominated many times.
It felt good.
I have a love-hate relationship with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I gotta tell you.
My first nomination came in 1980 for the film Reds, Warren Beatty's film Reds.
And my mentor, Dick Voracek, and I were nominated together for the Best Sound Award.
And we went out to Hollywood, we went to the ceremony.
We didn't win.
The winner was Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Anyway, when I got back to New York, I tried to apply for membership to the Academy.
And they turned me down because I had just really started mixing like a year and a half before.
And they said, you haven't had five years of service.
So I went, okay, to hell with you.
I get nominated and you won't even let me join the organization.
Yeah.
F off.
10 years later, 1990, I get nominated again, the second time for Silence of the Lambs.
Not the classic.
And this time I didn't even have to apply.
They just made me a member.
And I kept saying, I don't want to be a member of that crappy organization.
They turned me down.
I had a big attitude about it.
But finally I gave in.
The editor of the film I was working on, Craig McKay, convinced me, actually he was the editor of Silence of the Lambs.
He convinced me that I should join because, hey, you'll get all the videos.
Oh, you get all the films, all the screeners.
I'll send you all these videos ahead of time.
You get all the screeners, right?
So I finally decided, okay, I'll join.
At that time, I think it was $200 a year.
Anyway, so I got several more nominations.
I got one for Gangs of New York and one for The Aviator.
So that's four.
None of them I won.
And then Hugo, I finally won the Oscar for that.
After that, I had enjoyed going the first few times.
After that, it just became a real schlep.
It's like, I'm living in New York, so I've got to fly out to LA.
I got to get a tuxedo and I got to get a dress for my wife and we're going out everywhere.
It costs a fortune.
It really costs, it's not, I mean, they pay for some of it.
The studio will pay for the hotel and the airfare and whatnot, but it's all these expenses that you wouldn't think about.
And so it got, after four times not winning, I was kind of fed up with that whole thing.
And then finally, the last time I went and we won, and that was very nice.
Do you get an inkling that you're going to win or was that just not true at all?
Yes, we knew we were going to win.
All of my fellow nominees told me, it's your year, you're going to win.
Don't worry about it.
You got it.
The day I won the, that was work, actually working in Los Angeles on a film in Hollywood at Sony at the time.
And so it was very different for me to be there that time because I had never been there during award season for any extended length of time.
And living in New York, I didn't go to Hollywood for the Oscars.
I would go out for a couple of days if I got nominated.
But this time I was working there.
So I was there for several weeks leading up to it.
And they wouldn't leave me alone.
It was like every day I was having to go out on Q&A screenings and publicity stuff.
And I felt like I was had another job.
And I was working on a film and the situation on that thing was not good.
It was very stressful.
Did you get your big goody bag, lots of stuff inside, iPads and whatnot?
I got a few things, nothing really.
Big gold watches.
Nothing like you hear about.
All the films you worked on, I mean, there are so many.
School of Rock, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Devil Wears Prada, Cinderella Man.
I mean, Many Saints of Newark.
That was a great film by the way.
I really enjoyed that.
I thought that might turn into a series actually.
I was hoping.
Actually, now that you mentioned that, it has.
It has?
David Chase is making a series Really?
with Michael Gandolfini.
Oh, that's such good news.
A prequel to The Sopranos.
Really?
Oh, that's just my, that's great.
Yeah.
Funny story about not winning.
Go on.
Just being nominated.
You know, you hear this phrase, it's an honor just to be nominated.
And that's true.
It really is.
The first time I went to the Oscars was for Reds.
And my mother had cut Reds.
We had worked together on it.
Wow.
That's so cool.
Yeah.
We were there at the ceremony.
We didn't win.
And at the end of it, there's a big dinner, the governor's ball.
And everyone sits at their little tables and commiserates because 80 percent of the people there have lost.
So I'm sitting at this table with Craig McKay and my mom, Dee Dee Allen and Jack Nicholson and whoever he had brought with him and my wife.
And we're kind of crying in our beer.
Nicholson pipes up.
Listen, don't feel bad that you didn't win.
Because if you win, everyone thinks your price is going to go up and everyone stops calling you.
Really?
And that made me feel a little bit better.
You must have been around some tables with lots of incredibly famous film stars, not just Jack.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I've met a lot of...
My mother and Paul Newman were really good friends for many years.
So I knew Paul Newman quite well.
So just around the house when you were a kid?
He was.
Yeah, he would come.
If Scorsese's, whatever his next movie is, does he just automatically call you?
Yes.
Although I haven't heard from him in a long time.
And he's getting quite up there.
So I have a feeling he might be finished.
And he may be retired.
Really?
I haven't confirmed that.
But yeah, I mean, he's got a bunch of projects that he's had on the kind of the backburner for years.
But he had one that he was going to do about a pirate ship or something, Leo DiCaprio.
And I was asking Phelma about it.
And last time I asked her about it, she said, Marty is not getting on a goddamn ship in the ocean.
It's not going to happen.
Uncut Gems.
Now you worked on Uncut Gems.
So you're the man responsible for what I heard.
Is that the sound design or is that you?
It's very noisy and uncomfortable all the way through that film.
I noticed the sound in that, not in a negative way.
In a kind of, this is making me uncomfortable.
I feel like I'm being attacked by noise the whole time.
That was kind of intentional.
I mean, just the way it was cut, the way it was shot.
Sandler's act, everything, screaming every line.
Yeah.
It was stressful, yeah.
It's a stressful film to watch, stressful film to make.
It was interesting.
It had a lot going on in it.
Yeah, it did.
And an interesting track, you know, a lot of good music.
Yeah.
I thought it was a good film.
It's a very good film.
But yes, hard to watch.
Hard to watch.
When he acts, when he really acts, it's kind of like, oh, he can do it.
He can do the thing.
He can switch on the thing.
You kind of forget.
I know.
And Adam Sandler is very good.
Yeah, he's a good actor.
This is hard to do, but have you got a favorite film you've worked on?
I guess I have several.
Goodfellas is one of them.
Were you on set as well for some of this or was it all just brought to you?
No, I hardly ever go to the set.
Once in a while, one of the sound mixers will invite me down.
But no, there's no reason for me to be there.
So no, I don't do that.
That's kind of wild to be so involved with films and not be there when they're being filmed all right.
You know what's interesting is I'd prefer not to be, because the only time that I was ever, I remember my mother brought me to the set of Dog Day Afternoon.
Name drop.
When I was watching them shoot Dog Day Afternoon.
When I got back to watching the movie, I could see the set.
That kind of took me out of the suspension of disbelief, because I had been there and I'd seen what the set was like and how it was shot.
And so I didn't quite buy into the fact that it was a real scene.
And that's happened several times when I've been on the set and then seen the movie afterwards.
I can't see it the same way as an audience that would see it.
And it's very important for me in my work to just see it as the audience would see it.
Because I have to put myself in the place of the audience.
I want to create this track that's going to lead them to think that everything is absolutely natural.
I understand that completely.
The voices sound natural.
You know, the sound effects are all in sync and everything is in the proper perspective.
And that's important.
And if I'm there on the set, I don't know, it kind of ruins it.
I remember when high-def TV first came out, you know, like really high-def, and suddenly everything looked phony.
I'd watch the show and I wouldn't believe it because I could see that it was a set and actors were acting.
It kind of took me out of it.
Yeah.
If you can see actors acting, then that's the end of it.
But so there's that thing on the TV, isn't it?
I can't remember what it's called.
It makes everything look like video.
Yeah.
Maybe that's what was switched on, I guess, when I first got my first high-def TV.
It makes everything look like a soap opera.
Everything look like a soap opera.
Yeah.
Could you play an instrument, Tom?
I pretend to play the guitar.
You've got a musician's mind, it sounds like a feel for it, the ear for it.
I never really mastered it and just plunk around with it.
But I like it.
It's fun.
I like to play Bob Dylan tunes and stuff.
Very long songs.
Is there something that happens in films or TV sound-wise?
You've said seeing the sets takes you out of it.
Is there any irritations that you see when you're listening to something that just really annoys me like every time someone goes to a microphone, it feeds back in a movie and that always winds me up.
But is there anything that gets on your nerves?
The thing that annoys me most when I'm watching a film is that I can't understand the dialogue.
Oh, there's a lot of mumbling now.
A lot of mumbling drives me crazy.
Everyone has to watch with subtitles because the actors don't announce it.
I mean, it's a real problem.
Particularly as I've gotten older, my hearing is not what it used to be and it gets harder and harder.
But sometimes you have to tune in to it, don't you?
Like me as a Brit watching The Wire, took me three listens to get into it because I didn't know the vernacular, I didn't know the colloquialism.
So you have to tune in and-
Yeah, it's like another language.
Yeah, once you're in, you're in.
Well, that's another problem is that a lot of films now, international films, actors have the accent.
I have trouble understanding a lot of different accents, so I have to really focus sometimes.
One of the things that I strive to do in my work is to make sure that the dialogue is intelligible.
That's my prime directive.
In terms of other things, things that annoy me, every time you see a shot of a gravestone, you hear a crow, it drives me crazy.
Or some kind of, yeah, it's the same one.
It's the BBC sound effects 1975 record of a crow.
Yeah, you know, tires peeling out and you hear squealing and the car is on gravel.
You know, it's just stuff like that.
I thought all cars sounded like that when I was a kid.
I thought every car that turns a corner must sound like that.
Or the bullets, guns and punches in old films.
They're great.
Yeah.
It's just hilarious.
I mean, there's certain conventions like, you know, people sort of adhere to.
I don't know.
I don't really get annoyed at a lot of things.
Those are a couple of the things.
But mostly it's it's it's unintelligible dialogue.
Yeah, I can't stand it.
And it does happen more and more lately.
That's for sure.
You know, I'll rewind to put some subs on.
Well, you know, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that moviemaking has gone digital, you know, since the early 90s.
It's gotten worse and worse in terms of that intelligibility problem because working digitally, it allows so much more layering and so much more detail and so much more dynamic range.
Dynamic range, the difference between the loudest sound and the softest sound, you know.
And this is why people are sitting in their living room having to turn the volume up and down when the music comes on.
Suddenly, they're definitely loud and then, you know, the music ends and they start talking and you can't hardly hear them.
The dynamic range in digital is immensely bigger than what we used to have in the analog optical track, the soundtrack from movies was mastered and printed on the film on an optical track.
You know, the dynamic range of those tracks was very limited.
So you couldn't really have these wild swings of volume in earlier films.
And that's why the dialogue in those early films and also because the tracks were much, much, much less complicated.
When I started mixing, I mean, 24 channels on a console was a lot.
So that you could have 24 tracks running at the same time.
With digital, it's in the computer, it's running on Pro Tools, you can have hundreds of tracks running at the same time, literally hundreds of tracks, all running at the same time.
And I have to sit there and figure out how to balance it out so that we hear everything we need to hear, that it plays with the music, that the dialogue is intelligible.
It's, you know, it's much harder now.
All of that and the fact that the actors now are, because everything is miked with radio mics, because everyone is shooting with multiple cameras.
So it's very hard to get a boom in close enough to get a good signal on the dialogue.
So you've got all these flat radio mics, you know, and everything sounds very flat.
Well, yeah, there's that TV show that just came out, well, a few months ago, Beast Games, Mr.
Beast, the YouTuber, and he's got a thousand live mics, a thousand mics on the show.
It's like someone's got to sift through all of that.
How are they doing?
Yeah, I don't know, someone's paying them.
I don't know.
Yeah, that's crazy.
That's crazy.
Well, I'm going to end this by asking you one question, which is, okay, what's your favorite jingle, Tom?
My favorite jingle?
Like, ad jingle?
Yeah, whatever.
What's makes you like?
Something you like.
I don't know.
When I was a kid, I used to like, you wonder where the yellow went when you brushed your teeth with PepsiDent toothpaste.
PepsiDent.
It didn't contain Pepsi, did it?
No, it was just a toothpaste called PepsiDent.
That was the jingle.
So everyone had yellow teeth and they would brush them till they went white.
I guess so.
Well, it's been wonderful talking to you.
I hope you had fun.
Thank you, Steve.
It was a pleasure.
I like talking to people about my work.
Yeah.
I think it's important to let people know what people do.
I mean, oh God, I got to ask you one more thing.
Michael Jackson's bad video.
Come on, what was that all about?
Okay.
I don't know.
I didn't mix the music.
I worked on the whole little prelude, 20-minute story line there.
All the films that they did before the song starts.
And then we did mix in the whip cracks and some of the sound effects during the song.
Yes, the over loud claps.
I remember those.
Yes.
He used whip cracks.
He used like bullwhip cracks and it kind of became a theme for that video.
It was fun.
I forgot they had these big preambles before.
Was it in a car park?
Well, maybe it ended up in a car park.
It started, he was like in a private school and he gets out of school.
And I don't know, Wesley Snipes is in it.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's fun.
Well, I also worked on The Wiz.
The Wiz.
I've seen that.
That's the Diana Ross.
Diana Ross.
Diana Ross, yeah.
And Michael Jackson was the scarecrow.
Yeah.
I've only seen it once.
I saw it years ago, probably when I was a kid.
We won't go into what you think of things.
Oh, but I did want to ask, because you brought it up slightly when you were talking about award ceremonies and the Oscars and being part of the Association.
It says online that you resigned from AMPAS, A-M-P-A-S.
Yes.
Because the awards started being popped into the ad breaks rather than being televised.
Is that the reason?
Well, okay.
Here's why I did that.
I had been kind of upset with the Academy for a while, because first of all, I live in New York and they do have screenings here, but they really don't have much going on for Academy members here in New York.
And the dues kept going up to the point where it was like $450 a year, and we weren't getting much for it.
And then the other thing was that I was very upset with them for doing a couple of things.
They started doing these wacky things, like inviting all the nominees up on the stage at the same time to announce the award.
They started allowing talent agents to join the Academy as voting members, which it seems to me is like morally bankrupt.
And then the final straw was when they took the sound and editing awards out of the show and gave out those awards ahead of the show while people were still out on the red carpet and left them out of the show.
And sound and editing and costumes.
And there was a couple of different categories that were left out.
And that was it.
At that point, I just said, fuck it, I'm out of here.
This is not worth it.
I don't want to pay $450 a year to an organization that's going to screw my craft and ostracize us and make us second class citizens.
And so I let them know I'm not paying my dues anymore.
Bye-bye.
What was their reasoning for this?
They were trying to shorten the show.
I don't know.
They've been doing it for years.
You know, their audience has been dwindling and they were trying to get the show shorter, but it was disrespectful to the whole idea of what the Academy Awards are supposed to be, you know, it becomes just a money making venture for them.
So I won't be getting any more Oscar nominations, and that's fine.
I think you're good, Tom.
You got one.
Where'd you store your Oscar?
Don't say in the bin.
Oh, it's in the living room, you know, in the corner.
It's very cool.
It's a very cool thing, even though, at least you're not been replaced by AI yet.
So, well, not yet.
That's on the horizon.
Oh, God, I don't want to think about it.
Okay, well, I'll say goodbye again properly this time.
Thank you, Tom.
Thank you for coming onto Television Times.
Okay, Steve, it's a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Take care.
That was me talking to Tom Fleischman, Martin Scorsese's sound man.
He's re-recorded.
The guy responsible for the things you hear when you're watching Martin Scorsese films.
And also other movies too.
Check out his IMDb online.
He's done so much stuff.
You will have heard his work.
That is a guarantee.
And check out any movies he might be making in the future.
Now to today's outro track.
Right, today's outro track is called 1117.
Now I know that I have put songs on here before from the sort of duo band that I was in called 1117 with E-Finali.
But it's not that.
It's a song called 1117 I recorded in Ireland in 2008 during the After the Fireworks sessions, which is an album of mine.
And it was just thrown together one evening.
I can't really remember how it was put together.
I think I mixed it in a Starbucks in Glasgow or something.
I don't even remember.
It's a mishmash of ideas.
My brother Ruri is making the weird sound at the end and he sort of speaks through it a little bit.
It's a weird one, but I really like it.
I really like it.
And it's a fun little tune.
So this is me.
This is a song of mine from, again, the Transatlantic EP.
This is 1117.
11, 17.
It's another track from the Transatlantic EP which I seem to be featuring right now.
Anyway, I hope you liked the song, and I hope you liked my chat with Tom Fleischman.
Come back next week for another great episode of Television Times.
Until then, thanks, and see you next time.