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Behind the Scenes with Jim McKee, producer of Ferlinghetti: San Francisco Locations
Interview conducted by Julie Shapiro
> Where did the idea for this program originate?
Robyn Ravlich from The Listening Room at the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation commissioned the piece.
It's beginnings? To be honest, I would have to say it had it's origins in the
Locations radio series that I helped Erik Bauersfeld put together over the past
seven years. That series had authors write about a specific location. The piece
was then recorded on location with the actors blocked, similar to how you shoot
a film. This piece takes a kind of backwards approach, in the sense that we're
hearing how a location like "The Sea" in this case, plays into the poetry and
aesthetics of Lawrence's writing.
> How much of a role did you play in directing the conversations between
Erik Bauersfeld and Lawrence Ferlinghetti while you recorded them?
Most all of the conversations came out of topics that would regularly come up
at our Saturday Farmers Market caffeine marathons. Lawrence and Erik both
served with the navy in WWII as well as being from the same neck of the woods
in New York. There's a series in that alone. Robyn had asked for a piece about
San Francisco so, I pulled some site specific topics from Lawrence's vast
collection. i.e. Bouncers Bar, Green Street Mortuary Band, At the Golden Gate.
After making my edit selects of the field recordings, I put together a list of
about five to six questions that I felt were needed to tie the piece together.
Erik asked these in the studio, so we get to hear a more intimate side of
things.
> Can you talk a little bit about the music that's used throughout the
piece?
Yeah, what about that music! Around six years ago I was introduced to this
violist, Wieslaw Pogorzelski. At the time he was putting together a CD of
classic works for Warner Brothers that needed some sound design to help bridge
the pieces together. After that, we started meeting every Tuesday evening for
three hours of improvisation or mixing, then beer. We set the three-hour limit
just to keep it on the fun side. In the past six years, we've helped score a
dozen films, made lots of radio and incidental music, given live performances
and consumed countless bottles of beer.
> This program seems to be equal parts a profile of San Francisco, and
an exploration into Ferlinghetti and his poetry. Which story came first in your
approach to the piece?
Actually, it was originally supposed to be about the city with Lawrence as
guide. It turned into a piece more about the companionship between Lawrence and
Erik and their relationship with water and the sea. For instance, if you read
Lawrence's A North Beach Scene, you realize right away how he has recreated the
bow of a Liberty Ship on the roof tops of San Francisco.
> How do you know when you've captured the essence of a place through
audio?
Unless you're looking for something specific, I think it's mostly about being
lucky. You have to record a lot and make tons of mistakes and then something
wonderful happens. Its way too easy to make list of effects, have this postcard
image of the place in your head then go hunting for the sounds. Most of the
time you'll come back empty-handed or at best unsatisfied. What works best for
me is to go to the place at different times of the days, with different people
and just listen. I also believe it's a personal experience, and that both
recordist and listener is going to have his or her own point of view.
> There's such a range of narrative in the program—from casual, almost
overheard conversations at a cafe to intentional, careful recitations of poems.
In producing the piece, what sort of decisions did you make in bridging the
two?
I like to record candid interviews or at least try and make the microphone as
transparent as possible so the subject isn't "performing to the microphone". In
some cases (like poetry and narration) you want this effect, and at these times
I generally give a set of headphones to the talent so they can hear exactly
what's going on. People do things naturally with their voices and bodies that
tell you a lot about their personality and what the scene or location is. It's
amazing how quickly a person will adapt to a situation in the way in which they
speak. If a plane flies over they get louder, if they're in a big empty room
they play with the reverb, if you're in a super quiet room everything is soto
voce. Most of the time it's not what a person is saying, but how they're saying
it that I find most interesting.
> Are there other places that you're interested in documenting?
Yeah, send me to Paris, St. Petersburg and then how about a couple months in
Crete?
What the three of us [McKee, Ferlinghetti and Bauersfeld] are trying do now is
put together a series of works that feature a location, poetry of Lawrence and
some discussion about the artists relating to the site. Currently, we're
putting together a piece on Big Sur/Bixby Canyon and then if the funds come in;
Guadalahara, Mexico; Taos, New Mexico; and Queens/Rockaway NYC.
> What sort of work does Earwax Productions do on a regular basis?
Regular? It's all over the map. The group had its beginnings with theater sound
design, then radio drama, Audiographs (a song/documentary structure we
developed in the mid-eighties) and some commercials work. Now a days it's
documentaries, some feature films, Internet and Product design stuff. I'm
interested in the interactive space of DVDs and museum exhibit work. Currently,
my partner Barney and I are creating a soundtrack for a real interesting
documentary called The Loss of Nameless Things, scheduled to come out this
fall. The piece focuses on a brilliant young playwright in the seventies who
suffered a severe head injury. The piece recounts the story of the accident
through repertoire group associated with< the playwright and brings us up to
date with a West Coast premiere of a play written back in 1976. Barney is
collaborating with cellist Joan Jean Renaud in writing the music and I'll be
doing the design and mix.
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