12/29/23
Newsletter #539
The Crack of Dawn
I remember Jack of All Trades, and found it an enjoyable show that, as you noted, had terrific costumes and sets, despite what I assume was a modest budget.
Random tangent: I was recently subjected to a 1987 movie called "Alien Private Eye." It credited two guys named Scott Spiegel and Josh Becker as foley artists. The movie is one bizarre dumpster fire, but the foley work is great!
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2 mins agoAuthor
I forgot that one. I wrote about doing foley on real cheapies that Bruce and I did in same place where Scott and I did that piece of crap you're talking about. That was in the old Fox studios on Western Ave, which I'm sure are long gone. "Alien Private Eye"? Really? Another picture had Lyle Alzado and Debbie Foreman. We would gaffer's tape high heels to our sneakers.
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This exchange just occurred, and I am now reminded of that period – which once again I can’t stress how much I would never want to go back to – and why we even had that silly job in Hollywood in the first place.
When we had our offices back in Ferndale, Michigan, we built several versions of foley pits or boxes. They’re like sandboxes made out of 2x4s, but broken up into smaller sections of different surfaces, like: concrete, gravel, Formica flooring, dry leaves, whatever is needed. Back there in Ferndale we did the post on four feature films in five years: Evil Dead, Crimewave, Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except and Evil Dead 2. It was like a factory now that I look back at it.
In any case, we all got proficient at doing foley work.
In Hollywood, my friend Rick’s friend Stacey was a sound editor who steadily worked her way up the Hollywood sound cutting ladder. She started off doing these cheapies in the late 1980s, but just a few years later she was cutting sound on Bugsy and Terminator 2, both 1991.
So foley work was a skill we brought with us from Michigan.
I’m so glad I’m not doing that shit anymore I can’t express it. What is cool to me is that we caught the very end of those old Fox soundstages on Western Ave. William Fox (really Wilhelm Fried Fuchs, a Hungarian Jew), one of my favorite movie moguls, built his original studio, Fox Films, on the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue. Initially, there were sound stages for a few blocks going south on Western, then came Serrano Street, which is where the Fox Film Laboratory was located. Then the soundstages continued all the way to Santa Monica Boulevard. And that was the extent of Fox Films.
Over the years, however, other film stages opened along Western Avenue beside Fox, on the east side of the street, all the way down to Melrose, and the continued south they got shittier and lower budget the farther you went. By the 1980s everything along Western was abandoned or was still sputtering along making the lowest of the low budget shit.
That’s why we were doing foley there, lost among acres of old, abandoned equipment, none of it worth the space of where it sat.
Other than that, here’s my personal connection to that place.
As I mentioned, the Fox Film lab was on Serrano Street. If I’m not mistaken, the lab processed for anyone, not just Fox, and was already referred to as “Deluxe,” although I don’t know why — maybe it was the most full-service lab in town. In 1930 Fox Films filed for bankruptcy. I love the fact that Fox Studios limped through the depression entirely because they had Shirley Temple under contract. In 1934 Fox was purchased, lock, stock and barrel, by the newly formed, 20th Century Pictures, thus forming 20th Century Fox. The laboratory was rechristened the 20th Century Fox laboratory (but was probably still called Deluxe) for the next thirty years. Then in the 1960s it was actually renamed Deluxe Lab.
OK, and here’s where I come in (thank goodness). I did the post-production lab work on two of my movies at Deluxe Lab, Lunatics: A Love Story and If I Had a Hammer, both shot on 35mm negative. And Deluxe did a great job. My only gripe is that they have such a small parking lot. It’s probably the same size it was in 1916.
And yet another day has arrived.
Bring it on.
Which newsletter are you referring to? But no, nothing at Deluxe remains from the old Fox days.
This is a super cool post! Fox spun off the labs at one point (pretty early too like the 30s), which is why they were called Deluxe - not Fox. This is also why it survived, when the actual Fox assets (including the lots on both sides of Western) were demolished. I was wondering if there were any remnants of the old Fox days in the Deluxe buildings that you saw? So much history there.