Alan Splet and the Sound Effects for

D U N E

Ric Gentry

In the autumn of 1968, Alan Splet left his job of eight years as an accountant and went to work, for less than half the same pay, as a soundman for Calvin-Defrenes, an industrial film company in his hometown of Philadelphia. Splet had demonstrated a talent for audio in high school, primarily by recording live music at high fidelity, but, until then, never considered work in sound as having a future. A friend at the company, Bob Collom, with whom Splet had experimented with sound years before, talked him into it, and with ostensible self-doubts and harsh remonstrations from his family, Splet changed careers.

"We just recorded sounds or slugged in stock music" Splet recalls. "But the whole film procedure, even if it was industrials, was so new and interesting and exciting compared to my prior years of accounting. It was just a lot of fun.

A year and a half later, a local art student, who lived about four blocks away, visited Calvin-Defrenes in search of sound effects for a 30 minute film he´d made entitled The Grandmother. The student was David Lynch. With an already established propensity for mechanical intonations, and the rather unique idea of counterpointing picture with atmospheric and exaggerated rather than realistic tracks, Lynch was naturally drawn to the sound department of an industrial film company. As once before, with another short film, Lynch anticipated working on The Grandmother with Collom. But this time Collom was busy, and Lynch inherited his assistant - the new guy, Alan Splet.

Lynch soon discovered that his assistant was as meticulous, tireless and creative as he was. "We worked on The Grandmother for eight weeks solid," Splet goes on, "even Sundays, 12 hours a day, building this track out of nothing. Some of the effects we got off records, but most of it we made ourselves. All we had was a couple of 16mm dubbers and a little tiny board. And we were making effects out of (the sound of) pencil sharpeners and plungers and junk in the machine shop and whatever we could get our hands on.

"We wanted to reverb a whistle, David actually made the whistle, and we didn´t have any reverb device. So we took a piece of aluminium heat ducting, which we found in the shop, and put a speaker on one end and a microphone on the other, blew the whistle and we got a little reverb. Not very much, so we put it through again, maybe 20 times, and kept re-recording it through this thing to get enough reverb on it because we didn´t have a proper reverb device. That´s all we knew so that´s how we did it."

Sound would never be the same for the young filmmakers. They were artistic "primitives," in the sense that their lack of sophistication led to discoveries that were new and unconventional. The world of sound began with what the ears heard and the mind could imagine, not what standard professional technology implicitly circumscribed and dictated it should be. The track for The Grandmother has been regarded, in style, as musique concrét, the orchestration of everyday sounds - either left intact, multiplied or distorted - into an audio collage that emotionally charges, often very subtly, the visual images.

Audio expressionism might be another way to describe it. "I tend to amplify what you see on the screen," says Splet, "to heighten the picture by sort of interpreting what´s there. The sound may or may not correspond with the visible movements of the things on screen. Instead, it kind of adds to it to create a mood, an atmosphere. I´m still not very technical."

After The Grandmother, Splet went to work as the head of the sound department for the American Film Institute.

Today, perhaps because, as well as in spite of it, his origins as so-called primitive, Alan Splet is one of the best recognized of all feature film sound men. After numerous projects with young filmmakers at AFI, including Jeremy Kagan, Caleb Deschanel and Tom Rickman, Splet went to work on three major productions, each with one or two directors who were fellows at the AFI. With Carroll Ballard, Splet won an Oscar and a Golden Reel Award (sponsored by his peers, the motion picture sound editors) for The Black Stallion in 1979, his very first job as a professional, and an Oscar nomination and another Golden Reel for Never Cry Wolf. With Lynch, who arrived at AFI almost simultaneously, Splet did the disturbing, landmark Eraserhead in 1976, a film gorged with audio-visual torsion and experiments, and then The Elephant Man in 1981.

Now there is Dune, the Dino DiLaurentiis production of the epic space fantasy novel by Frank Herbert, written for the screen and directed by Lynch. Splet began officially on March 7, 1983, 19 days before the first day of principal photography. His talks with Lynch, however, preceded the production by several months.

"They were just general ideas that we discussed rather than specific ones," Splet says. "These were like breakfasts at Bob´s Big Boy. A lot of what we talked about, like a strange system of echoes in the desert, never found their way into the film. On The Elephant Man and Eraserhead we worked a little closer than we did on Dune, actually. We were much more separated, because David had so many responsibilities with the optical effects and so on. On Elephant Man we spent 63 consecutive days with one another (longer than the duration of the principal photography). This time I went more on my own, actually working stuff up and the playing it for him. He might love it or ask me to change it or add something. But it worked out well. I hit more than I missed. I guess we´ve worked together enought that I´ve sort of got the feel for what he´s looking for."

Splet´s working title on the film was Supervising Sound Editor, but it´s a deceptive title. Sound personnel on most productions are quite compartmentalized. There are sound designers, for example, who conjure up sound effects. There are also sound editors. Then there are re-recording mixers and engineers. Splet, no doubt because of his comprehensive concern for the most detailed application of his effects, plus his origins as an all-purpose audio man at a small industrial film company, maintains an influence if not direct bearing on each of the above mentioned areas. He finds and makes effects, edits them to picture, and often mixes them as well.

For Dune, Splet began recording and creating effects far in advance of the first exposed frame of film. Eighty percent of the sounds for Dune, besides the music," he says, "were made. Lynch´s sense for atmosphere minimizes the value of on-location sound.

"Very rarely did someone make a noise on the set which was useful as a finished product," Splet continues. "It was basically just the dialogue. No effects, not even footsteps. The footsteps were all on sets and they didn´t sound right. All that stuff was stripped out, all the cloth movements, anything that was there. There might have been one or two effects in the whole thing, except for the dialogue as I say, which was very well recorded by Nelson Stoll an his assistant John Hauptas."

Before screening a frame of footage, Splet began recording and processing sounds. "I started working up sounds that I thought would fit, in my own mind," he says. "I read the script, talked to David, and then worked them up. In fact, I would say that two-thirds of the effects were worked up before I ever saw the picture."

Guided by his sense for what Lynch was looking for, and his own imagination, Splet had three general categories, or environments, for which his sounds were to be applied. First was Caladan, home of the Atreides family, a kind of replica of earth, fertile and lush. Then there was Geidi Prime, a grotesque mechanical world of rails, steam, metal and petroleum spills, where the malevolent Harkonnens originate. And then Arrakis, the desert planet, arid and stormy, otherwise known as Dune.

The raw, unprocessed material for these environments were extrapolated from several sources. To begin with, Splet has an enormous library of sound effects. There are well over 200,000 entries that fit into more than 20 large cartons. Part of it is comprehensive panoply of Hollywood standards - gun shots, screeching tires, etc. - that he recorded from 35mm magnetic tracks years ago while still at AFI, all catalogued in a three-ring binder that covers over a thousand pages. Much of the remainder are the reels and reels of effects collected while working on his previous feature films.

"I used some sounds from Never Cry Wolf in this movie," he says. "I used some from The Black Stallion. But you´d never find them. They´ve been altered to be something entirely different." In all, Splet is in possession of over 2000 reels of sound.

But despite the overwhelming volume of the library, Dune is primarily comprised of new sounds freshly recorded. "I like to go out and get new material." he says. "On Dune, I used far less of the library than I have before."

One reason for this is that the imaginary worlds of Dune had no precedents. "You can´t find sounds that correlate with things in the film because they aren´t there," Splet remarks. "At least with Never Cry Wolf you had tangible references, like the wolves and the wolf pups. But here you had nothing. Only ideas, only how you thought it should sound." So Splet´s approach at the start was to locate, record, process and combine sounds that seemed applicable to the respective environments of Dune. "Maybe I would work up something for the planet Arrakis that would have the right feel, but I wasn´t sure there it would go. Or for Geidi Prime. Then I´d just go down and play those things for David and he´d comment and we´d discuss it."

While the production got underway at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City, Splet was situated at the Fantasy Sound facilities in Berkeley, only a few miles from his home, playing back and experimenting with sounds that he and sound recordist, wife Anne Kroeber, recorded throughout the Bay Area.

Armed with a Nagra IV stereo and several microphones, including a Schoeps CMC4 and a Frap contact mike manufactured by Arnie Lazurus (a one man operation located in San Francisco) Splet and Kroeber went in search of new and what they thought were appropriate sounds for Dune. One of their first locations was the Chevron Oil Refinery in nearby Richmond, where they found a virtual Hades of sounds applicable to Geidi Prime.

"Ann took the Nagra and put the mike wherever she thought something interesting was coming from," Splet explains. "She mainly went to get heavy steam and possible oil flowing through pipes. But she actually got some other stuff by what I call 'soundman´s luck.' Lots of things just sort of come our way."

One of these was an empty, 50 foot diameter oil tank. "Some of the Chevron people were working on it," Splet continues, "and one of them threw something into the tank as she was going by and it made this great 'pinging' sound. So Ann put the contact mike right on the tank and then held a conventional mic in the air as they started to hammer this tank with all sorts of chains and metal bars, kicked it and what have you." Out of that came weapons for some of the major battle scenes in Dune.

Splet and Kroeber also visited a Pacific Gas & Electric Company, the local utilities outfit, and recorded various exhaust sounds through valves, as well as wires humming with currents of electric power.

Still another location was brought to their attention by a fellow soundman working at Fantasy. He recommended a place where scrap steel is melted with 15,000 volts of electricity pulsing through carbon rods. "It´s basically an electrical furnace," says Splet. "They put all this scrap steel in there and lower three huges electrodes, carbon rods about a foot in diameter. And they shoot electricty through the scrap steel. Then there´s the guy who comes in with an overhead crane, kind of dollies in and wheels this snout into the furnace. With all the voltage and stuff going on in there, he shoots gas in, under immense pressure. So not only is the electricity going in, there´s gas, shooting onto the flames. It gets white hot in the furnace. You have to wear sunglasses to look at it, it´s so brilliant. It makes a whining, screaming sound like you wouldn´t believe. Like the world ending. The process, called electrical arcing, was a sound Lynch became particularly fascinated with, requesting different processed versions of it for several scenes in the film.

For Arrakis, the desert planet, hot, dry winds, perhaps discernible as such to only the most discriminating ear, were largely drawn from the library. "I used three, four, sometimes five of these winds simultaneously," Splet says. "I sped them up, slowed them down. Changed them in one way or another. Les Wiggins (associate sound editor) brought a couple of winds from England. I had some from Scotland and from Never Cry Wolf (none of which originated in the Arctic, incidentally). We get a lot of mileage out of winds, once we have them."

More complex and perhaps more interesting was the house shield that encircles and protects the palace on Arrakis. "The exterior effect was a squeaking cable which I slowed down six or eight times to make a roaring sound."

A squeaking cable, slowed down, to make a roaring sound? Why this? "It just came to me," he says. "There´s a point where you can talk about things logically and then, after that, you have to leave the world of logic. I don´t know where a lot of these ideas come from. They just do. In this case, I got the sound from guy wires, wires that support TV antennas and things like that, and they were vibrating from some sort of machinery running. I don´t know why I decided to do that, really."

"You sort of work backwards, You don´t know you´re going to need a certain sound to go with a certain thing. And that thing may relate to something that exists in reality - our reality. So the natural assumption would be: 'Well, maybe I can go out and record this such and such, whatever it is, alter it and make an interesting, useful sound out of it.' Finding this stuff as I say, is sometimes luck, like the arcing or the oil tank. Other times it´s something that just seems to be right, a sound that something like guy wires make. Then you just go get it, distort it until it´s right."

Splet is very aware that in this phase of his work, altering and distorting, he is engulfed by a hallucinatory world of his own making. "Oh, sure" he says. "But it´s interesting. One of the things that I like about working with natural sounds and then changing them, as opposed to synthesizing things electronically, is that you do have your foot in reality. It sort of gives you a hook. That´s just my personal feeling. Even if you totally alter the sound, it´s still coming from something that´s natural." A roto-rooter, an electric fan, a jack hammer, or even the sound of car wheels over the highway begin to seem pregnant with meaning, portentous, possibly musical. The world we return to after the movie seems much more alive, very different than the way we left it. If one of the ambitions of art is to expand our appreciation of ordinary phenomena, then Splet´s tracks, which work on the body and the nerves as well as the ears, are discerning but powerful examples of what sound and motion pictures can effect.

While the recording of effects continued almost until the day of the final mix, Splet moved from Fantasy in February of ´84 to the Vander Veer Photo Effects building on Victory Boulevard in Burbank, processing and re-processing the multitude of effects for Dune. He often prefers simple technology, like the three-head upright Moviola he cuts on, but much of it is highly sophisticated.

"You process these sounds through the different devices," he says, "combine them, overlap them. It´s like making a stew. You have a few potatoes, a few peas, some carrots, a little beef. I put it in the pot and taste it every so often to see how it´s coming along. Then maybe you need a little more of this or that, and you blend it all together until you get your sound. You know when it´s finally right by instinct. It just begins to feel right."

A good example of how Splet builds an effect is the compilation of sounds that went into the "body shields," an electrostatic aura that surrounds and protects warriors training in manual combat. On Caladan, Paul Atreides and Gurney Halleck, the former´s martial arts mentor, throw on the shields while fighting.

"The sound of the shields is made up of several different elements that I put together on the eight track to make a single effect," Splet says. "On track one, there was a shrill hum. It´s a sound I´m not sure of what the original base was, but I put it through the harmonizer, which changes the pitch without changing the time base. I raised the pitch slightly. On track two is a heavy power leakage, an arcing and sparking sound. Then on another track is what I call a 'shield proximity sound,' a low roaring that came from an Ultra-sound machine, a cleaning mechanism, and I put that through the harmonizer. Then there´s a rapid buzzing, an industrial sound that I put through the flanger, which alters its harmonic structure."

The flanger is basically a device that feeds back on itself, but slightly out of phase with the original sound. Manufactured by Eventide, like the harmonizer, Splet likes to adjust the phase differences to get cancellations and build-ups of certain frequencies. The common effect it produces is somewhat like a passing jet plane, a doppler. When the "rapid buzzing" was driven through the flanger, the sound rather resembled angry electronic bees.

"On track 7," Splet goes on, "there´s a low pulsing hum that I added without altering. And on track 8, there´s a sound for when the shield comes near to another surface, so that it makes a low kind of mechanical growl, like a motor boat in the mud, or maybe a lawn mower buried in hay."

Splet also takes advantage of several equalizers. The graphic equalizer is UREI. The parametric equalizer is an SH901 by Technics. "Actually," he says, "that´s not a professional unit. It´s on the home market. I got it several years ago, but I like it." Nearby is an 8-track tape recorder by Teac and 12-input mixing console by Panasonic. There´s also a dip filter, which enables a sharp drop in the volume. The depth and width of the drop are adjustable, and can be inverted to create a very sharp peak. This, a discreet tone in the audio can be isolated and removed, especially if the tone approaches a sine wave.

"For instance," Splet adds, "if you have a sine wave at 400 cycles, it´s not going to have a component frequency. It has no harmonics on it because it´s a pure sound. In a complext sound with a lot of other material, you can literally single out that 400 cycle signal and remove it completely, just take it right out of the track."

Splet also sports an Eventide digital delay that suspends sound for up to 5 1/2 seconds; a Lexicon 224 digital reverberator; and a Dolby noise reduction system. Any one of these, including drags or accelerations on the time base, or reversing the track, might be used individually or together to transform the original sound recorded in the field or taken from the library.

For the sound of the sandworms, one of the most memorable features of Herbert´s book, a kind of totem creature for the oppressed Fremen and the source of the sacred, vision-inducing melange, the chied commodity of Arrakis, Splet gathered together the sounds of four different animals: a horse, a baboon, a puma and a pig.

"The horse came from reels I had for The Black Stallion, " he explains. "The baboons came from The Elephant Man. The puma came from our library. There were several pigs, actually. One or two pigs came from the library; and a third from another person´s library, someone I made a trade with. I´m not sure how I processed all that, but in the beginning I felt it was raunchy and powerful but didn´t have a lot of thrust. It needed some kind of scream. So I went back and made a whole other 'worm scream' sweetener, which I got from the puma and put on top of the other sounds.

"A lot of those animals were made larger by slowing them down. In some places I used a Vocoder, a device by Sennheiser used to imprint speech onto other sounds, like making a whistle talk. But I didn´t use speech. I used the sounds of the animals to embed them in one another. Then I used the harmonizer and the reverb unit. I wound it all tightly together in a pre-mix, so that it all sounds rather mystifying, frightening and unworldly, not a creature from this earth."

The worms, which are usually two to three miles long and dwell beneath the desert surface, generate huge waves in the sand as they travel and a thunderous, oncoming rumble. "For that," says Splet, "I again combined several things. Some of it is made from bom blasts that I took from the library and slowed down about five or six times. Then, Ann went out with a Frap and bonded it to a piece of plexiglass in the sand at a playground and did all sorts of things to it, rubbing sand over the top of it, scraping it, dragging it. I used almost everything she got. I processed that through the phlanger in places and the harmonizer in others. It came out well, like a mild earthquake traveling under the desert."

One might think, for the sake of argument, that the reproduction of an authentic earthquake would be sufficient, and much simpler. "Not necessarily," Splet retorts. "In the first place, no one´s ever around to record an earthquake. It happens and it´s over and no one´s sitting there with a Nagra. Even if they were, the quality of the sound would be inferior to say the least. You´d have a noise, a rumble, that comes on like an overloaded truck down a residential street.

"But fidelity is one thing. Using that material for a movie is another. Many of our experiences are very subjective. Exactly how an earthquake sounds is kind of arbitrary. It´s really more of a feeling than a sound. What appeals to me, as in the case of the subterranean movement of the sandworms, is combining the magnitude of the bombs, slowed down, with the miniscule nature of sand on plexiglass to build an audio texture. It´s something you can hear, but also something you can feel. You have to feel a sound for it to be effective sometimes. Because they´re less abstract than the dialogue, effects tend to work on the subconscious or unconscious level."

Working on the 8-track, Splet constructed effects that averaged, per scene, 25 overlaps. These amalgamations, it would turn out, were, technically, among the most dynamic and robust of any recent film made. Splet took full advantage of the 70mm format which was at once an opportunity and an imperative.

"We just went all the stops out," he says, "as opposed to doing a film that I know is just going to be Dolby stereo, an optical print, which most films are. In that case, I´ll impose certain limitations on myself because I know damn well that anything more is never going to print."

But here there are sharp electro-chemical sounds throughout the battle scenes, reverberating and sustained explosions, the roar and cry of the sandworms, sounds with an inordinate amount of bass energy. "On Dune, those sounds are sometimes really low and powerful. We´ve got some weaponry sounds that are very strong, and I´m not holding back. I went full tilt." So much so that the needles on the volume meters during the mix frequently hovered or were driven into the red. "In fact, Bill said (that) Dune has more low end than any other film he has ever heard. It just became a real challenge to get all this stuff on film and to get the dialogue to be heard. It was a really trying mix. We had a lot of effects running in some cases and, of course, they often had a full score." The music for Dune was largely provided by the rock band Toto, and by New Wave composer Brian Eno.

Just as David Lynch has a penchant for dark imagery - a way of shrouding visual impressions with mystery as well as often invoking dream-like chiaroscuro - his sense for low end sound represents an audio equivalent. This is perhaps true in two rather paradoxical ways. The use of dark, of absence, is compensated for by a wide open, multilayered sound track, augmenting what an audience, sometimes quite subconsciously, comes to suspect, even fear, is undisclosed by dark. On the other hand, as cinematographer Freddie Francis confirms, Lynch continually presses for more reduced illumination just as he presses for more low end sound: as he narrows one, he dilates the other. Both rest on the margins of what is commercially acceptable.

The re-recording mix for Dune began on May 28 at Goldwyn Studios on Formosa Avenue in West Hollywood, and was completed on August 24th. The supervising mixer was Bill Varney. The sound effects mixer was Kevin O´Connell. Steve Maslow was the music mixer. Splet was present and influential throughout the three month period.

"David was ultimately in charge," Splet remarks, "and David got what he wanted. But I didn´t hesitate to make suggestions, and if I thought something wasn´t right, I would tell him. Sometimes he listened, sometimes he didn´t... I definitely had ideas."

Splet´s material on certain tracks was complemented by Les Wiggins and Theresa Eckton, who paralleled his sound editing with their own. At times over 60 tracks, despite earlier pre-dubs, were set-up to be mixed at once. The excellent Foley work, supervised by Donald Flick and assisted by Jerry Ross, also worked in the complicated algebraic formula.

"There really was a lot of stuff," Splet says, "Even after we pre-dubbed, Kevin had so many inputs on the board that they had to add an auxiliary board. So he had not only his normal number of 24, he often had to resort to the auxiliary mixing console to make 40." Including the individual sounds that were earlier composited into one sound for one effect, there were at times up to 200 total tracks coursing through the mixing board.

"But that´s the whole idea of pre-dubbing," Splet adds, "to reduce the numbers. Lock it all together and achieve balances so you can get things you can handle. You´re dealing with the level of the pre-dub then, rather then 8, 10 or 12 tracks you used for an effect. But I don´t mean to imply that you can pre-dub everything. There´s a lot of elements that you can only mix properly by doing it to picture."

But tracks of over 60 at times for Dune were nothing compared to The Black Stallion. "On that film we left more to the final dub," Splet explains. "I was a little bit greener then, and I´ve since learned to be more efficient and spare. For pre-dubs, in fact, I worked on 4-track for that movie. But we laid out more elements on the dub than we do now. On one particular reel we had more elements on the dub than we do now. On one particular reel we had 104 units, and 70 units was not unusual."

One especially complex scene for Dune, and which required, on Splet´s part alone, some 45 to 50 units, was the scene that involved the "fighter robots." These were revolving mechanical creatures that descend from the ceiling and whose appendages randomly hurl cleaver-like blades in all directions.

"These were whirring and flinging sound," Splet says. "We had to cut a lot of tracks, because in order to give the robot a real sense of space, we had to pan a lot of these things: screen left, screen right. So all these sounds had to be split out into a lot of different tracks so we could aurally pan them properly. We wanted to deliver this feeling of blades shooting out all over the place." That is, a tactile, physical correspondence of the sound with picture. "Yes, like that," he says, "and actually we used the surround a bit too, so we could get a sense of encompassment in the theater."

Such effects and the fastidiousness that went into their creation will unfortunately be depreciated or lost on the other audio formats in which Dune will eventually be released. To accomodate all theaters, there will be a Dolby stereo optical release, as well as a monaural. "But it´s going to be a pale facsimile of the 70mm magnetic 6 track," Splet declares. "There´s just no way you can get the power on the stereo optical that we´ve got on the 70. No way."

Others on the production were Leslie Shatz, the dialogue editor. Veteran George Brand was the music editor. John Verbeck was an assistant to Splet.

It is curious to not, however, that within a circumscribed are in Berkeley, where Splet lives, there are five people with six sound Oscars. In addition to Splet, Mark Berger has two, and Jay Boekelheide, Lisa Fruchtman, and Randy Thom have one each. There is nothing new in affirming that the Bay Area has, since early 70´s, been a vanguard for high quality, imaginative and daring sound. Some credit the atmosphere created by the 1960´s, when San Francisco was the mecca for Rock and Roll, and new standards and higher discrimination toward sound quality were established.

"I think another reason, too," Splet suggests," is that it´s a little fresher up there. There were and are directors residing in the Bay Area who´re really sound conscious, really maverick guys like Francis Coppola, Carroll Ballard, Phil Kaufman, and of course George Lucas. These are people known for their hefty sound tracks. They´re all sound-oriented, so there is a sort of Bay Area approach, which is 'Don´t use the library. Go out and get it.' And they take a lot of time in post-production, a lot longer than standard to get it right."

"My feeling is that if somebody has got the imagination," he says, "they´ll figure a way to do something no matter what the limitations are. As I was saying before, when David and I worked on The Grandmother, we had nothing like we have now, and we still got what was needed, sometimes just out of junk lying around. For Eraserhead, we floated a big five gallon bottle in a bathtub with a microphone inside. We recorded the innards on an old Bell & Howell movie camera as it chugged away. David blew into an old metal heater and put a microphone in the bottom of it and got some kind of weird sounds, and then we altered them and slowed them down. You can do all this, and you don´t need a big budget or thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Sometimes that stuff just gets in the way. You just need to use your imagination."

But tracks of over 60 at times for Dune were nothing compared to The Black Stallion. "On that film we left more to the final dub," Splet explains. "I was a little bit greener then, and I´ve since learned to be more efficient and spare. For pre-dubs, in fact, I worked on a 4-track for that movie. But we laid out more elements on the dub than we do now. On one particular reel we had more elements on the dub than we do now. On one particular reel we had 104 units, and 70 units was not unusual."

One especially complex scene for Dune, and which required, on Splet´s part alone, some 45 to 50 units, was the scene that involved the "fighter robots". These were revolving mechanical creatures that descend from the ceiling and whose appendages randomly hurl cleaver-like blades on all directions.

"There were whirring and flinging sounds," Splet says. "We had to cut a lot of tracks, because in order to give the robot a real sense of space, we had to pan a lot of these things: screen left, screen right. So all these sounds had to be split out into a lot of different tracks so we could aurally pan them properly. We wanted to deliver this feeling of blades shooting out all over the place." That is, a tactile, physical correspondance of the sound with picture. "Yes, like that," he says, "and actually we used the surround a bit too, so you would get a sense of encompassment in the theater."

Such effects and the fastidiousness that went into their creation will unfortunately be depreciated or lost on the other audio formats in which Dune will eventually be released. To accomodate all theaters, there will be a Dolby stereo optical release, as well as monaural. "But it´s going to be a facsimile of the 70,, magnetic 6 track," Splet declares. "There´s just no way you can get the power on the stereo optical that we´ve got on the 70. No way."

Others on the production were Leslie Shatz, the dialogue editor. Veteran George Brand was the music editor. John Verbeck was an assistant to Splet.

It is curious to note, however, that within a circumscribed area in Berkeley, where Splet lives, there are five people with six sound Oscars. In addition to Splet, Mark Berger has two, and Jay Boekelheide, Lisa Fruchtmann, and Randy Thom have one each. There is nothing new in affirming that the Bay Area has, since early 70´s, been a vanguard for high quality, imaginative and daring sound. Some credit the atmosphere created by the 1960´s, when San Francisco was the mecca for Rock and Roll, and new standards and higher discrimination toward sound quality were established.

"I think another reason, too," Splet suggests, "is that it´s a little fresher up there. There were and are directors residing in the Bay Area who´re really sound conscious, really maverick guys like Francis Coppola, Carroll Ballard, Phil Kaufman, and of course George Lucas. These are people known for their hefty sound tracks. They´re all sound-oriented, so there is a sort of Bay Area approach, which is 'Don´t use the library. Go out and get it.' And they take a lot of time in post-production, a lot longer than standard to get it right.

"My feeling is that if somebody has got the imagination," he says, "they´ll figure a way to do something no matter what the limitations are. As I was saying before, when David and I worked on The Grandmother, we had nothing like we have now, and we still got what was needed, sometimes just out of junk lying around. For Eraserhead, we floated a big five gallon bottle in a bathtub with a microphone inside. We recorded the innards of an old Bell & Howard movie camera as it chugged away. David blew into an old metal heater and put a microphone in the bottom of it and got some kind of weird sounds, and then we altered them and slowed them down. You can do all this, and you don´t need a big budget or thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Sometimes that stuff just gets in the way. You just need to use your imagination."