Chapter 8
Temp Dubs and Test Screenings:
A Critical Objective View
“We've just had a test screening, and the upshot is that we are
throwing out the first reel and starting the picture with reel two.”
So you think you have a surefire hit—the most important picture of the year. Of course, all producers and directors believe their film is the one, but that's only to be expected. You lived with the project for months, perhaps even years. You know every word, every moment, every cut. Actually, all this places you at a tremendous disadvantage. You lost your objectivity, especially if you were in the throes of the love—hate evolution that so often grips intensively involved craftspeople who are completely immersed in their project.
TEST SCREENING
The time comes to arrange a test screening. Don't screen the picture for your friends and colleagues. They are not the audience that buys the millions of tickets you hope to sell. You made the film with a particular audience in mind, one that buys the tickets for the genre you are carefully nurturing. You kept a keen eye on your audience from the beginning during the writing of the script; you kept your audience in mind as you set up the shots; you kept your audience in mind as you started cutting the sequences together, or maybe you didn't.
If you took the popular and myth-ridden stance that you made a film to suit your own taste—a movie you would like to see—without considering the ticket-buying audience, then you really must have a test audience screening, and quickly! Of course you made a movie you would like to see, but that does not mean you throw away the collaborative and advisory powers of a carefully planned test audience screening.
Keep in mind the words carefully planned in preparing a test screening. The last thing you want is to have a test screening for just your friends. They often do not give an accurate and critically objective judgment of how your film will be received. Oddly enough, this is one area many filmmakers fail to handle correctly, often getting distorted results.
Several years ago, my team and I handled the sound design and editorial chores for a first-time director's feature film. The producer contracted a firm to recruit a test audience to attend a quiet test screening on a studio lot. We sat in the back row with the producer and the nervous director as the opening scenes rolled. Within 10 minutes, audience members got up and walked out. In the middle of the third reel, the action on the screen portrayed the roving vampires as they entered a quiet country bar and had just begun feeding on the patrons. Bill Paxton rose up from sucking the blood from a victim's neck with great delight, “Finger lickin’ good!”
Test audience viewers suddenly rose in groups and left the theater en masse. From an audience of just over 300, we counted 152 people who had walked out by the middle of the film. The director, Kathryn Bigelow, was hiding in the back row, tears rolling down her cheeks. The fault was not hers, but those who had been contracted to run the test screening. I would say that Kathryn has done just fine, going on to direct pictures such as Blue Steel, Point Break, K-19: The Widowmaker, and Hurt Locker.
Many producers would have been sharpening the razor and drawing the warm bath water by this time, but the veteran producer of this picture had been here before. He knew what had happened. The test screening firm recruited the wrong audience by telling them that the picture was a country-western version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, an action-adventure film—and so the wrong audience came to view the film. They expected a PG-rated, fun-filled action picture but got an R-rated blood-and-guts vampire story with a very dark and graphic edge.
Instead of panicking, the producer knew to schedule another test screening, only this time made sure the right kind of target market audience was recruited. Frankly, Near Dark has become a cult classic in its own right.
Jim Troutman, supervising sound editor for such films as Duel, The Sugarland Express, Jaws, Charley Varrick, and Midway, to name a few, recalls how a test audience screening saved a very important and legendary moment in Jaws.
We thought the picture was ready to try out on a Midwestern audience, so we took it to Dallas, Texas, for a test-screening preview. Verna Fields [vice-president of production, Universal] and I sat in the middle of the theater with an audiocassette recorder. We recorded the audience's vocal reactions against the film's audio track as it played on the screen. It was the scene where Roy Scheider is chumming off the back of the boat, trying to attract the great white shark. He turns to look back at the cabin—the shark lunges up full-screen behind him. It's an enormous shock scare. The audience went nuts! We thought we had allowed plenty of time for the audience to settle down as Roy backed up into the cabin where he delivers his line to Robert Shaw, “You're gonna need a bigger boat.”
Well, when we played back the audio cassette tape to listen to the audience reactions, we discovered that the pop-scare was so big that it took far longer than we had anticipated for the audience screams and chatter to settle down—they never heard Roy's punch line. So we went back to the cutting room, found the trim boxes of that scene, and pulled the “out” trims of the sequence. We reconstructed an additional 35 feet of action showing Roy's shocked reaction and a more deliberate pace in backing up into the cabin. This gave enough time for the audience to settle down and hear Roy's delivery, giving the audience a much-needed moment of comic relief.
All through the post-editorial process of Escape from New York, Debra Hill and John Carpenter had not test screened the picture for an objective test audience. We were deep into the sound mixing process, so deep in fact that we were nearly finished with the predubbing process on Stage D at Goldwyn Studios and about to commence with the final mix. Just as we were wrapping a predub pass, John Carpenter and his picture editor, Todd Ramsay, came onto the stage, looking a little pale and unable to hide the fact that their confidence was shaken. They informed us that they had just had a test screening, and, much to their surprise, a number of comments motivated them to rethink the final cut. They were going into an emergency tactical meeting with producers Debra Hill and Larry Franco.
When the dust settled, it was decided to scrap the entire first reel of the picture. In essence, the film would now start with reel 2. So the heist scene at Denver's Federal Reserve was cut, the subterranean subway flight from Denver to Barstow was cut, as was the subsequent ambush by a federal police SWAT team and the takedown of Snake Plisken. Was it the right decision? According to preview cards of the test screening, it was.
With the advent of the Internet, producers and studio execs are having a difficult time having test screenings without finding their film posted all over the Internet within hours of the test, even though they are weeks if not months away from actually finishing the film. This is making it extremely hard to trust a film to an intimate “test” group and feeling confident about keeping the warts and unfinished misperceptions out of instant global chat rooms. Many producers are reacting by saying that they will dispense with the practice of test screenings, but we all know that is not a realistic option either. Somehow you have to get the ultrasound image of the mother's womb to see if you are going to have a healthy bouncing baby or if you are about to hatch a fungus-amungus. Somehow you have to deal with test screenings!
USE OF TEMP DUBS
As the cost of making motion pictures has increased, so too has the use of test screenings. Having to expose their work-in-progress films to studio executives and/ or potential distributors, let alone test audience reactions, directors and producers are reticent to show their projects with only the raw production track.
As a result, the barroom brawl looks real dumb with the actors flying wildly from Sunday haymakers with no chin sock impacts and body falls. What will the audience think of this long dolly shot that moves at a snail's pace and does not seem to progress the action? Arnold Schwarzenegger jumps the fence, swings his big powerful 45-caliber pistol up, and shoots. The production track sounds like a kid's cap gun! The new computer-generated image of the Tyrannosaurus rex rises over the actors and spreads its jaws in a menacing roar, but no sound emanates because the beast is nothing but a CGI (computer-generated image) composited against live actors filmed months earlier against a green screen or blue screen.
The producer calls in the supervising sound editor and reviews the list of needs. We require punches, body falls, furniture breaking, and vocal “args” and efforts for the barroom brawl.
The director chose music from a CD of another, previously released movie for temp music during the long, slow dolly shot to manipulate the audience's emotions and make it appreciate the moment's grandeur and magnificence. We must have high-velocity, bigger-than-life, Hollywood-type pistol shots with bullet zip-bys for Arnold's pistol. We need a sound designer to immediately develop some T-rex vocals—something no one has ever heard before. The producer wants the hair on the back of the audience's necks to stand on end with anticipation and terror. And we need this all for a temp dub tomorrow afternoon!
Do not laugh. This kind of unreasonable request happens all the time. For some reason, directors and producers think that sound editorial can throw any kind of sound at any sort of visual problem instantaneously—after all, isn't that why the motion picture industry turned digital?
Granted, a sound-editorial team can make many things happen very quickly. Standard fare such as fist fight sound effects and weaponry are easy enough to whistle up. Most of us keep a large array of animals, both real and fantasy, from previous projects at our beck and call via DVD-R storage or on large terabyte servers. These can be transferred into a nonlinear digital workstation quickly and efficiently enough. However, new conceptual sound effects, such as noises no one has ever heard before, take a little preparation.
Unexpected temp dubs are the worst. Here a producer is very wise to decide on and set the supervising sound editor and sound editorial team early on; also at this time the smart producer has empowered the sound editorial unit to begin developing conceptual sounds.
I like to have access to review special effects work as early as models are being made or even when concept drawings are approved. On John Carpenter's The Thing, key members of my crew and I attended not only daily screenings of the first unit from Alaska, but also dailies from the visual effects studio. John wanted us to have every moment of creative thinking and experimentation at our disposal so we could make no excuses like “If we only had enough time, we could have. . .”
When a temp dub is set on the schedule, the supervising sound editor sits down with the producer, director, and picture editor to finitely outline what sound effects and dialog work must be covered. (For example, “Do we need to bring in one or more actors for temp ADR or additional wild lines that do not exist in the production track?”) Defining the scope of work that must be done for the temp dub is extremely important; without that, the work-wildly and scatterbrain mentality goes on, focusing on very little and spinning everybody's wheels to no avail. What sound effects, dialog, and music are needed to tell the story?
Many low-budget pictures do not have the financial luxury of bringing in cast members for temp ADR; they often must resort to using members of the immediate production company as temporary voices for a star actor. Later, during the final sound-editorial preparations, the star actor is brought in to replace the temporary ADR with his or her own voice.
Swimming in the swift waters of theatrical postproduction and not colliding with the temp dub syndrome is very difficult. By wanting conceptual material too fast, too soon, producer and director are exposed to truly temp sound effects, material that we have only stuck in for test screening purposes and do not intend to use in the final mix.
Temp dubs are a good-news/bad-news thing. The good news is that we get to try out different concepts ahead of time to see how the material works; the bad news is that the director and producer listen to the stuff back and forth all day long in the editing room for weeks and it gets etched in their brains like a tattoo. Temp dubs often close down their thinking to new concepts. Even when we make the real-thing sound effects the way we intend for the final mix, the client has become so ingrained that it is very difficult to break through and germinate new concepts.
Temp dubs can suck the creative lifeblood right out of a crew. On Andrew Davis's Chain Reaction, cosupervising sound editors John Larsen and David Stone were faced with a daunting series of temp dubs and test screenings that literally marched week by week right down the schedule to the week prior to commencing the predubbing process for the final mix itself.
I was brought onto Chain Reaction with a very focused mission: to design and cut all the major action sequences throughout the picture, passing any sound editorial chores that I did not want to be bothered with off to the two sound editors on either side of my room. However, I was not to concern myself with or be distracted by any of the temp dubs. If I had any material that was cut and ready that could be added to the temp dub process, that was great. But I was not to divert design and cutting energies from the final mix. If it happened to help the temp dub process along the way, that was great, but always keep focused on the only soundtrack that really counts—the final mix!
It is exactly this kind of supervisorial philosophy that separates a great soundtrack from one hardly more than a compilation and revision of one temp dub after another. I have heard many a sound-editorial crew who has completed major motion pictures agonize over the fact that there was never a chance to design and cut the final mix. The postproduction schedules and test screenings were so compressed and intensive that they could barely make the first temp dub. From then on, it was not an issue of being able to design and cut new material, it was only about updating the picture changes between test screenings quickly enough to make the next temp dub update and subsequent studio or test screening.
In the “old days” (early and mid-1980s), a temp dub was a couple of units of temp music transferred from CDs and two or three units of sound effects. The dialog track was usually a 1:1 (one-to-one) of the editor's cut production track that the dialog editor had run through, flipping out various unwanted sounds and adding some temporary additional lines. Today, temp dubs are gargantuan preparation events, even requiring predubbing. Commonly, motion pictures have 4- to 7-day temp dub schedules. After two or three of these temp dubs, your postproduction budget is exhausted. A temp dub used to be a simple monaural 35 mm single-stripe mix, suitable for interlock just about anywhere in Southern California for test screenings. On larger projects temp dubs are elaborate stereo mixes, complete with surround channel. If they are being interlocked to a silent answer print, they will most likely be 35 mm fullcoat mixes with 4- to 6-track head configurations. Today, most test screenings are handled with a high-quality video projector that has an encoded AC3 file of the 5.1 temp mix synced to the picture, in most cases using high-end digital tape; sometimes, on lower budget films, one of the assistant editors is qualified and experienced to make a viewing version DVD from a QuickTime output and the AC3 audio track.
One does not dispute the actual need of producing a temp dub and of having test screenings. The producer and director, though, must embrace the counsel and advice of the supervising sound editor and structure a schedule and battle plan to achieve the mission, rather than just throw mud at the wall and see what sticks.