Sound engineer helps restore ’40s film-noir drama ‘Detour’
By Terry Mikesell
The Columbus Dispatch
Posted Feb 21, 2019 at 4:30 AM
Restored films including “Detour,” will be screened during “Cinema Revival: A Festival of Film Restoration” at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Audio engineer John Polito led the effort to restore the movie soundtrack.
As an audio engineer, John Polito used to think that poorly recorded music and movie soundtracks were painful to hear.
Now, not so much.
“Over the years, I learned that once I’m done with work, I just want to enjoy the music or the sound,” he said. “I’m like the plumber with a leaky faucet at home; l don’t want to be critical outside of work.”
As founder and chief engineer of Audio Mechanics, an audio-service provider in Burbank, California, Polito restores and preserves movie soundtracks among his many projects. One of his works, “Detour,” will be screening on Saturday at the Wexner Center for the Arts as part of “Cinema Revival: A Festival of Film Restoration.” Polito will attend the screening.
“Detour” (1945) is a film-noir drama starring Tom Neal and Ann Savage. A product of Hollywood’s B-movie mill, the hard-bitten drama is about a pianist (Neal) who hitchhikes from New York to Los Angeles to be with his singer girlfriend (Claudia Drake) but is trapped in a tale of murder and blackmail involving a woman (Savage) that he meets along the way.
“It is so entertaining and gripping; it’s film noir stripped down to the essentials,” said David Filipi, director of film/video for the Wexner Center. “You want to show someone what film noir is, here you go.”
The gritty film was a critical success, and in 1992 “Detour” became the first B-movie added to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
But like its characters, the movie had a tough life. After entering public domain, the film was frequently shown in the 1950s and ’60s by TV stations trying to fill time cheaply. The film prints started to wear out.
In 2017, Polito was approached by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences about doing audio restoration work on “Detour.” He didn’t have a lot to work with: his primary source was a 35 mm original nitrate print that offered the best sound. His backup sources were two 35 mm composite prints and a 16 mm print with inferior sound, his source of last resort.
“You take all your sound sources and you rank them,” said Polito, 53, of Pasadena, California. “And then you pull from your primary source until there’s an issue, then you use your secondary source, and etc.”
The project, completed in 2018, required five or six days’ work, Polito said, and was relatively complicated for a 68-minute movie.
“What makes a film complicated is the quality of the sources,” Polito said. “We had these multiple sources, and we had a lot of pops and crackles to deal with, and there was missing material.”
The missing segments were retrieved from the secondary sources.
The human ear learns to adapt to a constant background sound such as a hissing noise, Polito said, and pay attention to more important sounds, such as a voice or music.
“The approach should be to make sure the hiss is stable,” he said. “That’s more important than bringing it down.”
But overcorrecting is also a concern.
“That’s something you have to develop your skills for, setting the treble and bass, setting the overall sound correctly,” Polito said. “When it comes to noise reduction, there’s a tendency to overdo it, to take out too much noise; that makes the sound very stale and dry.”
One of the trickiest jobs is synchronizing the audio and the visuals. Once the visuals are complete, Polito gets a silent version of the film to mate the pictures with the sounds.
While the restored visuals often impress an audience, improved soundtracks sometimes don’t attract as much attention.
“We are so visual, it’s very obvious to people what they see,” Polito said. “It’s more evident. Sound is more of an emotional thing. People, they like it or they don’t like it; they feel a certain way. They don’t understand why, but they’re not trained to listen like a sound engineer.”
And sometimes, people don’t even notice the sound.
“That might be a good thing,” Polito said. “If they didn’t notice the sound, they weren’t distracted, and that’s a win for me.”
The restored film made its premiere in April at the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, where Polito saw the finished version.
“It’s fun, in a film noir way,” he said.
