As I mentioned a few days ago, all of the original sound rolls for Pause of the Clock have now been transferred. And aside from that missing roll, I think it’s all in pretty solid shape. It’s really been something to hear those voices again, captured on the set so many years ago. A ton of funny stuff I’d totally forgotten about. Like the day our sound recordist Phil Jones decided to call out all the take numbers in a German accent. And all the flubbed takes caused by camera malfunctions, or people being in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Cut! Your hand, Rob! I can see your hand!”

During my freshman year of college, in early 1994, I wrote and directed a rather overambitious short film called She Would Die For Love. Despite lots of shooting, reshooting, editing and re-editing it never quite worked and so I abandoned it. However along the way I did ask my friend Scot Livingston to compose some music cues for solo cello. I timed the shots I wanted music for with a stopwatch, then sent the timings to Scot along with a short description of the action and a crummy VHS tape of the movie created by pointing a camcorder at the screen of the editing table. Maybe a month later he faxed me the score. Why cello? Well, it was probably because I was kind of obsessed with Short Cuts at the time, and with Lori Singer’s performance of “Berceuse” in the movie. I also figured I could probably track down a music student from Roosevelt University down the street who would be willing to perform the score for free. Which is exactly what happened; after putting up some fliers around campus, I got a call from Joseph Harvey. (Cool to see that he’s still playing the cello, and for several soundtracks too!) So one afternoon we set up the Nagra in Tchavdar’s apartment and recorded about 20 minutes of music.

Now, even though I never finished that film, I still had this music lying around when I started working on the initial rough cut of Pause of the Clock. So I tried using it in a few scenes. I never really settled on whether or not it was working, but when I recently decided to restart the film, it seemed natural to continue my experiments. Since I had rented a Nagra already, why not?

Alas, for whatever reason, the cello tapes were not in as good a shape as the other recordings. In fact, it was tricky to do even one pass for playback because the oxide started flaking off. Infamous sticky-shed syndrome. As a result, there’s some occasional distortion in the digital files that will be hard to mask. Anyhow, I’m glad I did the transfer now, while I was able to grab at least something.

Here are a few of the cues (all of which were titled by Scot, by the way, and bear little if any resemblance to what was going on in the scene he wrote them for.)

This one was probably my favorite, and in the rough cut of Pause of the Clock I used it under a slapstick scene where Dylan drops his bag of groceries: