PART II - POST EVIDENCE (CONTD)
AMAZING REVELATION - A M A Z I N G
SO....lets talk about The Godfather Part II and my theory that the much lauded structure was created in post production after the longer rough cut.
(I'll come back to the previous post and the funeral procession march, tomorrow...since I'm still working on it).
So, yesterday, I did manage to complete on more , in fact the last 1917 transition and the is the one outside Genco when the car almost knocks over Clemenza.
I found some more irrefutable evidence that not only was Part II filmed to be seen chronologically, but the change to the non-linear structure, to help accommodate drastic cuts, appears to have come late in post-production. Now, I hear you exclaim, how on earth can you know that let alone prove it based on just playing around with the movie on your PC?
I looked at the transition on the EPIC, SAGA, TRLOGY and AMC cuts...they are all fairly similar, similarly flawed...and I wont go into all the ins and outs. However, sometimes, especially when I amd doing sound work, I will wear headphones (Sennheiser for the record) or ear buds. When you aound edit on speakers, it is quite forgiving, and a good guage of what viewers will hear. You can get away with a lot of imperfections....but when you need total precision, you need that sound pumped down that auricular canal (that's the tunnel you shove cotton buds down).
So while listening to the point that the car passes Clemenza and sounds its horn, I happened to be looking out of the window. The combination of these two things revealed something truly amazing! Before I get to that, let's do some science. How many out there have heard of THE McGURK EFFECT? Some of you will have, most I presume not...so STOP READING and watch this short 2 min clip from the BBC sceience anthology series, HORIZON, then we can talk more.
AMAZING HUH!
Well, I'm fortunate enough to have come across this a while back and I have carfully used this in a number of edits to change onscreen spoken words to solve editing roadblocks. I will post a clip from my unrealesed Superman The Movie: The Donner Cut/Shooting Script to show how I used it, and the original footage to prove IT WORKS. So why am I mentioning it here, when all I was doing was looking out of the window and listening to the car horn that goes off passing Clemenza before the clumsy crossfade to the Train in Sicily? Because, by accident, looking at the birds out the window, I removed the MvGURK effect from what I was hearing. YOU, ME and the whole world have seen that scene, and we all hear what we were suppose to hear; a car horn. What I heard for the first time was a car horn initially, but it turned into a train whistle.....a steam train whistle....the steam train in the next scene. YES FOLKS, this film was in rough cut but the sound mix must have been near final. That scene was clearly supposed to be a jump vut to the train in Sicicil, softening the hard cut with a strong audio override CARHORN LOUD, CROSSFADE the audio to a Train almost instantly, hard cut to train and continuing trainwhistle. It's a technique used in many memoreable hard jumpcuts in movies. And it was used here too.
I took the audio from it, and loaded into an audio mixer. I found an old car horn claxon sound on the net...took about 10 minutes to finad a very similar one, and I substracted from the soundwave....I then played back the result: YUP you guessed it, I has left with a train whistle, albeit a shitty sounding one, but it was there. CONFIRMED!!!!!!!!!!!! The main downmix of this was already in the can when they previewed to the studio. With studio shouting for 45/60 minutes of cuts, there would not have been the time or the money to go back to the original Negative, make new editing dupes...since the Negative is usually used for the cutting. So they would have had to remove the additional material from a near final down mix. So they cut, re-arranged, and the Oscars flowed.
When this was re-assembled, the audio that should have been overlapping, was separated into what we now have as a lengthy cross fade. It's too much of a coincidence, that when I then brought the two clips together, tightening the cross fade (by losing 1 sec on each side) the audio was almost perfect...It should not have been. One is a car horn, the other a train whistle...it should not blend....BUT it did...WHY, coz it had already been done for me....The imperfection was not that bad on speakers either...go on....get your copy out and watch that scene and SHUT YOUR EYES. It does not matter which version. If its the theatrical, get a picture of a train on your phone of tablet, look at it and play the clip...I did...it's uncanny!!!!
SO, next, I went off and found some good ol' steam train sounds, found two I liked, and smoothed over the audio....frankly not much to do, but HUH, you all know what a lunatic I am by now! I should also add, it works much better as a hard jump cut, so there is another tweak made, which I genuinely believe is what thos studio suits saw in that smoke filled room 50 odd years ago (I was probably watching H R Puffinstuff at the same time)...LOL
FRANKLY, I did not expect to find any more insightful revelations. IN fact, this was suppose to be an easy edit; DONE IN A WEEK, 14 rearrangements, bolt on Part 1 and II (with the missing bits), pick the titlaes that work, replace the NAME, and we are done....
THESE MOVIES DESERVE BETTER I HAVE DISCOVERED, and that shot for shot analysis (which was meant to save me time by revealing ALL the changes) ended up being so much more interesting (as you already know).
SO, what next? I don't really think there will be any more revelations BUT, I'm on 1.25 hours into a 10 hour movie....with more than 8.5 hrs left, there are bound to be a few more surprises...that keeps me excited. We shall see.
Tomorrow, I'll return to the captionless opening scene (and the solution), and then, we are into the body of what is The Godfather (Part 1) extended.
This is turning out to be so much fun!
"Where you go from here is a choice I leave to you.”
