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Skip Lievsay

BRINGING A MUSICIAN'S EAR TO FILM SOUND

In 1982, I was at Reeves Sound Shop on East 44th Street in New York City working on Access, the first digital editing system for feature films. We needed an editor to cut dialog on 35mm mag. This guy walks in wearing dirty white bucks, jeans and an Elvis Costello T-shirt. He was completely uninterested in the million-dollar editing system; his eye went straight to my Oberheim OB-8 sitting on a coffee table. He said his name was Skip Lievsay and he was a bass player. We hit it off right away.

Skip went on to work with Marty Scorsese on After Hours; then came The Color of Money. With each new film, Skip broke with convention: stereo Foley on Last Temptation of Christ. Editing on a music system (Synclavier). He continued to question how things were done and convince people that his way was better. This would be meaningless if it weren’t for the great-sounding films he had supervised and mixed.

The strongest influence Skip has had on me isn’t how to marry a dog bark with a chin sock, but how to fish with a fly. Though we have spent countless hours creating together, we haven’t spent enough time on the flats trying to catch bonefish.
Eugene Gearty, film sound editor

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