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The Rum Diary | Frogs and Fiats

MARK MANGINI AND THE RUM DIARY

Coquis: the tiny little chirping-frog natives of Puerto Rico. In San Juan, where Bruce Robinson’s The Rum Diary was filmed, they are literally everywhere—even on the soundtrack—whether one wants them there or not.

But supervising sound editor Mark Mangini (Soundelux) did want them there, just under the control of the sound department. “With the soundstages they shot in down there, they couldn’t get rid of them,” Mangini explains. “We never had a properly clean dialog track.”

But Robinson was keen to use the production recordings to keep favorite performances intact. So dialog supervisor Curt Schulkey, using iZotope RX and other spectral repair tools, carefully isolated the actors’ dialog from that of the frogs. But the Coquis are part of life in San Juan and still needed to be heard—everywhere.

That was one of Mangini’s challenges as sound designer: to help put audiences in the world of late writer Hunter S. Thompson’s Puerto Rico, where journalist Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) slowly finds himself enveloped. “Most filmgoers aren’t aware of how sound is affecting them, dramatically, as they watch a film,” Mangini says. “I think great sound design is most effective when it works at that subliminal level, a place at which much great cinema art works.” So, Coquis.

Sound supervisor Mark Mangini in his design/mix suite

The trouble was, Mangini could find no library recordings of the amphibians to insert into the background, even among his own 2TB library of 200,000 sounds collected during the past 35 years. “No one’s ever really done a proper recording of them,” he says, noting the exception of the production track. “Between dialog lines, Curt would clean out the Coquis. So he just gave me a bunch of the most egregious takes, where the Coquis were as loud as the dialog!” Mangini then cobbled together, from hundreds of takes, a clean 4-minute, stereo-ized ambient sound effects bed, which could then be placed underneath the dialog in a controlled manner.

Another part of Kemp’s San Juan life that plays a big part in the film is his car, the venerable Fiat 500. The tiny two-stroke, rear-engine, air-cooled auto—recently reintroduced by the company, though not with that unique-sounding drive train—had been out of production since the early ’70s, so a controlled recording for sound effects purposes became a problem.

“You just can’t find them in Southern California,” Mangini says. “The couple I did find were restored and in flawless condition. I needed to beat ’em up—drive them like crazy and skid around corners with them.”

Mangini called his “usual sources” (i.e., his buddies in the business) and eventually found one of the cars in Barcelona, Spain. “A good friend of mine, a fine sound designer, mixer and editor in Madrid named Gabriel Guttierez, found a collector who was willing to rent us his car for two days. And we did everything with it.”

Not only was Guttierez tasked with recording the usual “full series” of basic car sound effects (starting, idling, driving away, pulling in, interior constants, etc.), but also a laundry list of “performance” recordings corresponding to a specific action taking place onscreen. “I gave him a list of sounds that were specific to this movie that would be too hard to edit from whole cloth, without them actually being performed,” he says.

In one scene, the Fiat is found stripped by thieves, not in particularly good running condition. Onscreen, the car is seen bobbing up and down as Kemp struggles to control the vehicle, even driving it down a set of stairs. “So I gave Gabriel specific directions: There’s a scene where Kemp is bobbing back and forth, and the engine should be revving and stopping, revving and stopping, in a sort of silly, cartoon-y way. Do that for 20 seconds. And then he drives down the set of stairs, so we need even more weird revs and the bouncing suspension sounds.” Mangini sent QuickTime videos of the scene to further assist Guttierez in visualizing his recording needs. The designer then fine-tuned the recordings to match specific visual cues. “I don’t time-stretch,” he says. “I just take out little slivers along the way to get a moment to hit.”

Guttierez recorded a total of 215 such cues of the Fiat, in multichannel, to give Mangini material to create a full, rich spread.

Mangini was also able to take advantage of additional background material recorded for the film by production sound recordist Ed Tise. “He’s an extremely conscientious sound recordist,” Mangini says. “He would get up at 2 in the morning—this was all on his own time—and record these dawn and dusk recordings for us, knowing we’d love to have them. For us in post, this is just gold.”

Among Tise’s recordings were a number of group wallas made specifically for the film. “There’s a gambling component where there are crowds of 50 men in these open-air plazas, betting on cockerel fights. And it’s a unique sound that I could never reproduce. It’s a certain kind of Spanish, a certain kind of guy that goes to these things that says certain kinds of things. A group walla could never reproduce this, so Ed captured a whole bunch of wild track.”

For those and other crowd scenes, Tise not only recorded the close-miked dialog of characters seen onscreen, but also made multichannel ambient background recordings of those same takes. “The dialog recording has those same 50 guys betting, but it’s in mono. He got a wild track, in stereo, that I could then lay on either side of it. It’s like a perfect marriage of sound effects and production sound that doesn’t sound artificial.”

Good sound effects design usually gets plenty of attention when it involves big action scenes or sci-fi effects, but Mangini notes the type of work created for The Rum Diary is equally important to the moviegoer. “It gives you a sense of place and time,” he concludes. “There’s no T-Rex attack or backward screaming monkeys; I don’t have any of those stories on this one. [Laughs] I just think I’ve done a nice job of putting you in Puerto Rico in the ’50s. Everything feels real; it just supports the film.”

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