A month or so later from that, we were playing back the sound effects of a reel at a special theatre that was capable of playing this back. And again, this is technologically very primitive to today, but in those days, you would... you had a Moviola, and you would cut one sound effect at a time. But if there were three or four sound effects intending to be played simultaneously, you had to imagine what they might sound like. You couldn't play them together at the same time. There were some Moviolas that had been retrofitted so you could play two together at the same time, but certainly not three or five. So there was a theatre that was not a mixing theatre, but it was a small preview theatre where you could thread up six soundtracks simultaneously, but not seven. And we were looking at a reel, and there was me, and Paul Haggar, the head of postproduction, and Howard Beals, and a couple of other sound effects editors, and the person who was sitting at the mixing desk. And we were just reviewing the work to make sure that everything was in sync and so that there weren't any surprises when we got to the final mix.

And suddenly, the door bursts open, a side door to the room, and in came the kind of the second-in-command of the studio, a man named Jack Ballard, who was the enforcer for things that Bob Evans wanted to have happen, that Evans didn't want to necessarily dirty his hands doing, he would send Jack to make sure that these things happened. And there was a lot of bad blood, consequently, between Jack and Paul Haggar that goes back probably into deep history that I didn't know anything about. But they were very at loggerheads with each other quite frequently. And Ballard came in, and he collapsed onto a sofa that was in the room, and he listened to what we were playing. And then after about three minutes, his head popped up and he said, 'These are the worst sound effects I've ever heard. If the sound of this film is going to sound like this, none of you have a future in Hollywood. I'm going to fire all of you.'

And there's a moment where you kind of sit there and a little voice in my head said, you have to defend what you did, with unknown consequences. So I said... No one else spoke up, and I said, 'Jack, you don't know what you're talking about, because this reel, most of the sound effects are being carried on the dialogue track, so the sound effects you're hearing are supplemental to the dialogue track. And this room is not equipped to play the dialogue track and these other sound effects tracks, so intentionally, we don't have the dialogue track up. So you're hearing only 30% of what the final mix will be. And besides that, you're drunk.' Which he was. And he sort of swayed back and forth, what's he going to say? 'Well', he said, 'you're right. I am drunk, and I don't know what I'm talking about. Keep up the good work.' And he left the room.

And you know, there's a big sigh of relief at that, and without my knowledge, I had secured a decade of good will from Paul Haggar because of the enmity between these two guys, and this person, who was then 28 years old, you know, who was a nobody in the hierarchy, had stood up to Jack Ballard, had accused him of being drunk, he had admitted that he was drunk, and he didn't know what he was talking about, in public, in the presence of his enemy Paul Haggar, and there were witnesses. So I had shifted some big power-play within Paramount Studios without knowing that I was doing that. But that was the kind of environment that was going on, and I'm sure there's... I know there's the equivalent of that today. But you know, it had its particular flavours like that at the time.