Farewell Don Hall: Sound Editor and Mentor Extraordinaire
What Do Firestarter (1984), Staying Alive (1983), Megaforce (1982), Young Frankenstein (1974), Tora, Tora, Tora (1970), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and the First Happy Christmas Jody and I Spent in Los Angeles Have in Common?
Okay, that’s a very long title to use for an opening to an essay, but I’m experiencing some very big emotions right now. Last Thursday, I was checking up on friends on the Book of Faces when I saw a piece of very sad news. My friend Rich Hyland, who did the music for my wife’s student film Freshmyn, posted that he had received new that his friend and mentor Don Hall had passed away at the age of 96.
Within moments after I read those words, I began to cry almost uncontrollably. Don Hall is a figure who looms large when I think of what makes Los Angeles such a great city. As many of you know, my wife Jody attended film school at the University of Southern California where she earned her M.F.A. in Film and Television Production. Moving to Los Angeles was a big jump for us. We were scared and had absolutely no safety net as our families lived very far away.
As a graduate student in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, Jody’s schedule was brutal. We spent very little time at home together during the semesters, so we tried to cram in as much quality romantic time together as possible during the breaks. We were very poor grad students and our residence in the Chesapeake Apartments on Rodeo Road (not Rodeo Drive) was not an ideal place for celebrations or days out.
The stress of Film School can be immense and we knew that if Jody was going to be able to make it through, we’d need to maximize the positive when we could and Summer and Christmastime are perfect for this kind of recharge. There was one small hitch in our first year, Christmas in LA that year didn’t feel like Christmas. I recounted how challenging our first year was, and how miserable our first Christmas was, in a recent Weekly Geekly discussing Courtney Howard’s review of the recent film Novocaine. The TL;DR version is that Los Angeles can be a very lonely place and because of that our first Christmas was very lonely. The Santa Cap wearing King Kong light fixture at Universal City Walk only made things worse.
Jody worked hard and was granted a TA Fellowship in her second year at USC in the Sound Department. TA-ships at USC are very competitive and Jody worked extremely diligently to get her, well deserved, slot. As a TA she worked with a number of wonderful mentors that included Rich Hyland (who managed the Sound Department), Midge Costin, and Don Hall. All three of these people are among the most dedicated and considerate people I’ve ever met and they helped to make Los Angeles feel like home.
During the fall semester of her second year in the program, Jody helped students with editing and mixing their student films during regularly occurring “mix weeks.” These week’s were absolutely grueling for all involved, but in particular for the TAs. During these weeks Jody wouldn’t come home at all and I’d visit the Sound Department to hang out and wait for a chance to chat with her. It was fine by me because her peers Kevin Burke and Cory Marciel shared my love of comic books, so when I wasn’t chatting with her I was chatting with one of them and during a mix week they were all there 24/7.
By the end of the semester Jody was exhausted and dreading the Christmas season. We were, as usual, still broke and the prior Christmas had been such a sad and lonely time we had no idea what we were going to do. Then Don Hall, the professor for whom Jody was TA, invited us both to lunch on campus to thank her for her work throughout the semester. As we ate lunch in a relatively hidden place on campus, Don praised Jody for her hard work and handed her a Christmas card wishing her a Merry Christmas and told her that Glendale was a pretty nice place to feel the Christmas spirit.
When we got back to our sparsely furnished apartment we opened the card to read it. When I say sparsely furnished, I mean we had a half sized refrigerator, our dining table was the IVAR pine table from IKEA that we got on sale for $100, and our bed was just a mattress on the floor. We were poor grad students living on Ramen after all.
Anyway, when we opened the card we saw that it included a gift certificate for the Glendale Galleria, one of the larger malls in Los Angeles at the time. I don’t remember the exact amount, and I don’t want to exaggerate it, but I do remember that it was enough that it was our Christmas gift budget. We drove to Glendale, which was a very different vibe from Crenshaw and Universal Citywalk, and wandered the mall. This was at the end of the heyday of US Malls, just before the rise of the modern outdoor mall and decline of the traditional one. Let me just say that Glendale, Montrose (where we drove for dinner), and the Glendale Galleria are living Hallmark Movie sets, and I mean that in the best way. When we eventually moved to Glendale, five years later, Jody would call Glendale “Pops Town” after her favorite puzzle.
Pops Town is a wonderful fictional place and Glendale was a wonderful real place. The trees had Christmas lights on them. The mall was fully decked out for the season. People were shopping and friendly. This, among other places, were where people actually went during the Christmas season and it was warm and welcoming. And thanks to Don, we could afford to do our Christmas shopping there. Our first year in Los Angeles, Jody wept with near despair. Our second year there, Jody wept with joy and gratitude because she finally felt like we were “home.”
That was all thanks to Don Hall. He made Los Angeles home.
Don was amazing in other ways as well. He was a great mentor to Jody who taught her to appreciate ALL of film, and especially the contributions of sound. To this day when Jody hears a particular door hinge sound effect she’ll laugh and say, “Did you hear that?” to me. If a door just opened, I’ll instantly know what she is referring to. When Jack Black opens the record store door in High Fidelity (below) you can hear it in the mix.
Don also invited his TAs to attend the annual “Bake Off” where members of the Motion Picture Academy’s Sound Branch narrow the film selections to the best of the best in sound editing and mixing down to the short list. That too was a magical experience and one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced because Don was kind enough to let Jody bring me along.
So Don Hall was responsible for Jody and my first happy Christmas in Los Angeles, and for making Los Angeles feel like home, but what about that list of films?
Well, Don worked on all of those films…and so many more. Don Hall’s was the sound editor and sound supervisor on many of the greatest films ever made. He also served, for a time, as the Governor of the Sound Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is one of the most important sound editors in the history of film.
As a young man he worked on Anatomy of a Murder, The Alamo, Jack the Giant Killer for the big screen and The Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Land of the Giants for television. This doesn’t include his work on M*A*S*H, Patton, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, The French Connection, Young Frankenstein, and so many more. His career is so vast and important that if as a film viewer you only ever watched a film he worked on, you would still be a cineaste with a strong grasp of a wide variety of genre and non-genre films.
When I first looked up Don’s IMDB page, when Jody was taking classes from him, I saw film after film that held an important place in my heart. Films that were great and broadly appreciated, but also films that only I and my friends love. To think that he played a part in making Megaforce and thus participated in a tangential way in all the in jokes that I have with my friends, warms my heart. I may be the world’s only fan of Staying Alive, but I know that Don worked his ass off as the Supervising Sound Editor of the film. Race with the Devil has the quintessential 70s ending and is in my “Top 5 Satanic Cult Films” list, and there he is again. From now on, if someone asks me what my favorite film genre is, I think I might just say “the kind of film Don Hall would have worked on as a Sound Editor.” That’s a broad list, but it’s an accurate one.
Honestly, I have to stop because I’m about to cry again. I love so many of the films that he worked on. Every time I watch one of them, I think to myself “I knew him and he made Los Angeles home.” His students, and everyone who worked with him, admired him and I know that those in Jody and my circle all loved him.