I can try to answer a few of these but time is precious lately. I'll just respond at random: Intrada is my favorite musical term, and also happens to be the first movement of a five-movement symphonic band piece by Clifton Williams I'm totally in love with. Cine Monde was a small movie memorabilia shop in San Francisco that I came across in 1979. I made friends with the owner, soon formed a partnership with him and added soundtracks to his inventory of posters. My soundtrack part of the business grew, I bought my partner out in 1984, formed a new partnership with an attorney and some fellow collectors and gave birth to Intrada. RED DAWN followed soon after and we're still going strong today.
In those days albums had to conform to 30 minute playing times in conjunction with union rates, but for additional fees a label could purchase additional 5-minute blocks of music. We many times encountered projects in which we struggled over what cues to include and what cues to drop. Standout instances include that first RED DAWN. As costly as it was, I paid for the additional 5-minute block to get a 35-minute album assembled. I still had to delete stuff and I really struggled with losing the music for Jennifer Grey's final scene since I thought it was a beautiful cue.
With regards to engineering albums, I've worked side-by-side with the best engineers in the business: Bruce Botnick, Armin Steiner, Mike Ross, Dan Wallin, Bernie Grundman, Simon Rhodes... I've picked up a lot from them, of course. In the final analysis, most engineering decisions still remain just a matter of personal choice as apposed to right and wrong choices. Yes, violins should be on the left, but Mancini and Hefti moved them to the right sometimes so... who am I to write the rules in stone? I'm not a fan of this current trend of mixing orchestras and electronics into one loud mushy sound and then mastering everything at one maxed out loud level. It's one thing to have an exciting wall of sound come at me but if I can't even tell what the melody or harmony is, or what instruments may be playing what parts in relationship to each other and whatnot... well, I just don't enjoy it that way. It sometimes just borders on distortion to me. But again, I just have my own opinion to work with. Other engineers have other ideas. In a nutshell, I guess since I grew up playing trumpet in bands and orchestras and also know how to write for both ensembles, I tend to want to hear intricate musical details that these sensational groups can offer. 80 players in one room! What a joy it can be to hear just how much incredible detail those guys can provide! So when it's all reduced to loud mush... well, I'm just not the target audience so it probably matters not in the least.
The hardest project I have dealt with really can't be pinned down to one album. Preparing IVANHOE for re-recording was a massive project with an incredible amount of paperwork involved. Recording JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS was a uniquely stressing project because we recorded under full union rates with top London musicians AND hired all those extra tubas, trombones, harps, bassoons and whatever. Locating and transferring all of Universal's masters for BACK TO THE FUTURE was a major challenge since we were looking for all of the early rejected sessions as well as the finished score everyone knows. AMAZING STORIES had similar challenges in finding all of those separate scores recorded at studios all over LA with different engineers and composers on each episode. Roger and I spent years putting together some of our deals and that was pretty difficult as well. The initial deals with Disney that led to us doing all of those Goldsmith and Horner soundtracks took agonizing negotiations, hard work and real money to make happen. So I can't really pin down the most "exhausting" project - only numerous examples of ones that I had tough, individual challenges to deal with.
Speaking of challenges, I'm hard at work mixing 24-track and 32-track elements on simultaneous Universal and Disney projects right now so I'd best get back to them.
--Doug
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