The actors have gone through the motions. The dialogue has been rehearsed many times. The director is ready. The production mixer and the boom operator are too. "Sound!" The Nagra or Dat recorder is activated. "Speed!" The microphone at the end of the boom swings in position, aimed at the actor who will speak first. "Action!" The scene now slowly unwraps: actors go here and there, do this and that, saying their lines at the appropriate moment. The sound mixer tracks their words on the recording device. "Cut!" The scene is over: it is ''good for sound" too. In many films, this is as close as the director gets to the audio. In other words, at the crucial moment of the shooting process, sound is confined to recording the dialogue without distortion. No more. Whereas the rest of the script at this moment is finding its breadth, its full measure, the audio in effect is left alone. Somehow directors are not engaging that aspect of the film, leaving it for the time oddly undeveloped. But what about preproduction? Well, it is highly unlikely, Randy Thom tells us, that there was even a discussion regarding the narrative potential of the sound track. 1 And everything afterwards the manufacturing and positioning of the audio on the multiple sound tracks is left to specialists with little input from the director. Does this make sense? At the very least, it should be possible to turn the production mixer from a perfunctory member of the crew to a creative collaborator
