Part 8 - George Groves & Warner Bros. (1957-62) - George Groves becomes Head of the Sound Department at Warners
I do feel that we had one of the smoothest running sound departments in the business...
The main object was...to glorify the product and get out a good show. - {George Groves}
The main object was...to glorify the product and get out a good show. - {George Groves}
The word from Jack Warner to his studio manager was simply, "Let Groves do it", and so Mueller's job was given to George who held it for fifteen years. Originally known as Director of Sound, the job title became Head of Sound and George was very proud of his department:
I do feel that we had one of the smoothest running sound departments in the business with a minimum of personnel trouble, a minimum of jealousy and a group of men who worked as a team. The main object was not how to glorify themselves but how to glorify the product and get out a good show.
Marlon Brando and Miiko Taka in a scene from Sayonara which won the Best Sound Oscar for George
During that year same Warners made Sayonara, with Marlon Brando. It was a story of American servicemen stationed in Japan during the Korean War who fall in love and marry Japanese nationals. George had first encountered Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire some 6 years earlier and was unimpressed with his diction. He thought he was "A perfect actor but very hard to understand...a mumbler." However unlike some other actors and directors, Brando was happy to 'loop' lines in Sayonara. Looping - aka ADR - is the process of repeating lines in the studio when the quality of recorded dialogue isn't up to scratch.
He was very affable about it, very nice. He came up in comfortable street clothes. He lay down on the dubbing console while we were getting ready for the next loop and was very relaxed and was most accommodating. He really was very nice. Some people are just terrible, they go into tantrums over it.
At the Academy Awards ceremony held on March 26th, 1958, the acclaimed war film won seven Oscars, including the coveted Best Picture award. So George was surprised but absolutely delighted when his sound department won the award for Best Sound.
His Oscar was presented to him on the night by the beautiful American actress Dorothy Malone:
It was a very rewarding moment, I must say… I was rather nervous but completely overjoyed....We were very proud of the fact that Marlon Brando was quite intelligible in the show and you didn’t have to wonder what he was talking about.
In early 1960 George worked on Oceans 11 with Frank Sinatra. Shortly afterwards Sinatra moved his office onto the Warner lot, just across the street from the scoring stage. The building was redesigned to accommodate his company staff and for six years he ran Frank Sinatra Enterprises - including Reprise Records and his motion picture organisation - from there.
It was a pretty large operation and he moved bag and baggage onto the lot at the completion of the redesign of this building and made his home there.
George found Frank to be very business-like while on the scoring stage. However, music mixers were only given one opportunity to make a good recording. If Sinatra was satisfied with his own performance, he'd walk off the stage, put on his hat and say "fine that’s it, print it", with no concern for whether the mixer had made a good take. "Heaven help anybody who said 'Let’s do another one' ", remarked George.On one occasion George got a call to go down to a stage where Sinatra was filming. They sat down in his dressing room and Frank asked George why he had to go to a recording studio across town to make his records. "Why can’t I just walk across the street to a wonderful stage and do the recording there? " George explained that he'd asked Jack Warner to modernise the scoring facilities but no money had been forthcoming. He told him his ideas and showed him his plans and Sinatra said "Get an estimate of what it takes and I’ll have the money for you". George did just that but nothing came of it and Frank Sinatra Enterprises eventually moved off the Warner lot. The suggestion was that he and Jack Warner had fallen out. George had to wait for two changes of ownership before his studio modernisation programme could materialise.
As far as Frank personally is concerned I always found him very engaging and very charming. Very business-like on a scoring session…In the shows that he worked we had people like Bing Crosby and Sammy Davies Jnr. So they were pretty talented people working with him all the time and it made for fun. There was a lot of fun on the scoring stage actually. Kidding around with each other. Frank was on the serious side. I never heard him do much kidding around on the scoring stage. Very business like.
George Groves at a Warner Bros. dubbing console in their studios in Burbank
There were three films of note released during 1962, Days of Wine and Roses, The Music Man and Gypsy. The title song for Days of Wine and Roses was written by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer and won an Oscar for best original song. This award pleased George as he'd lent his pre-war Schmidt French horn to the first horn player of the orchestra who'd used it to play the song's horn solo.
George Groves described The Music Man as a "fun job to work on" and it won an Oscar for best scoring for arranger Ray Heindorf. The film was also nominated for best sound. A considerable degree of 'sweetening' was used on the song 76 Trombones to enhance the original orchestrations. The recordings of about 20 trombones were over-dubbed to create the feeling that it was a really huge trombone section.
The technology was continuing to improve and in 1962 George and his team of engineers in the sound department created a reversible dubbing system which soon became standard in the Hollywood studios. This would prove useful when they worked on the next big picture at Warners, My Fair Lady, a film which became George's pride and joy.
Next - Part 9 The Making Of Oscar-Winning My Fair Lady (1963-64)
