Boom mics, those big puffballs at the end of a long pole, were once the most common method to record movie dialogue. Now small, wireless microphones are ubiquitous on film sets, and that’s the domain of expert sound mixer Tod A. Maitland.
“I usually go overboard in the miking department,” he said with a grin, describing his work on “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” the drama starring Jeremy Allen White that focuses intimately on the low-fidelity creation of Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska.” That seminal 1982 album was recorded by Springsteen onto a cassette tape while isolated at a house in the woods of New Jersey.
The movie provided a new challenge for Maitland, whose 100 credits include projects on Jim Morrison (“The Doors”), Aretha Franklin (“Respect”), the Beatles (“Across the Universe”) and Bob Dylan (“A Complete Unknown”), in addition to musicals “West Side Story,” “The Greatest Showman,” “Tick, Tick…Boom!” and “The Producers.” Active for nearly five decades, Maitland began his career as a boom operator – that gradually disappearing art – on 1980s classics like “Tootsie.”
“Something like ‘A Complete Unknown’ was like an explosion of a time period and a personality and a music style,” Maitland said. “But Springsteen is more of an implosion. Implosion of music, implosion of the person. And from my earliest conversations with (director) Scott Cooper, that was the goal – really capturing that voice as it was so secluded physically and sonically. It’s a different kind of complexity than other music films I’ve worked on. We were trying to really find that exact environment and feeling that makes Bruce’s work so powerful.”
For scenes set at the woodland hideaway in Colts Neck, New Jersey, Springsteen connected Maitland with Mike Batlan, the recording engineer (played by Paul Walter Hauser in the film) who helped set up equipment in the house. Batlan provided details about the headphones and echo machine used in 1982.
“Everything is period correct,” Maitland said. “And there was an old shag rug in the home, which is wonderful for acoustics.” He listened obsessively to “Nebraska” while testing the small, hidden lavalier mics that White wore. Additionally, “I always put a microphone in the corner of the room,” he said. “When you’re listening to “Nebraska,” you only hear Bruce’s voice, but when you’re in the room with him as he’s recording, you should also hear the ambience of the room.”
The scenes of Springsteen recording sessions are crucial to the point of the film, as he later defies his management team to keep the album’s raw, unpolished sound. No expense was spared to ensure the most faithful re-creation of the audio. The scenes were shot in a house in a rural part of northern New Jersey, next to a lake on a quiet street.
“But we shut down traffic on the road,” Maitland said. “For regular film recording, you can have vehicles driving by far in the distance, but for the music stuff, everything needs to be as pristine as it can possibly be.”
On the opposite end of that pin-drop noise spectrum, the film depicts the hard-rock recording of Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” at the Power Station, a New York studio with a peaked wooden roof like a Swiss chalet.
“It’s a really high-impact song and Jeremy was putting everything into his vocal performance,” Maitland said. “But (singing like) Bruce just kills your voice, if you try it. So after six takes, Jeremy was done. I remember it was the same thing with Val Kilmer on “The Doors.” We always shot the close-ups of Val first, because after five or six takes his voice was completely shot.”
Earlier this year, Maitland received the Career Achievement Award from the Cinema Audio Society, but his mantel still doesn’t feature an Oscar statuette, despite six nominations. (And his odds took a hit five years ago when AMPAS consolidated two sound categories into one.)
But the veteran recordist jokes that he’s still “making my way through all the legends of rock” in biopics, and he also teaches sound design at NYU, where he talks to his students about the subtle differences between what our ears hear and what a microphone picks up.
He is impressed that “Deliver Me From Nowhere” chose to center on Springsteen’s lifelong history of depression and anxiety.
“I have a hard time working on fluff,” he said. “Obviously, doing a film about Bruce appealed to me, but this movie really does have a message and says something. I know about the benefits of therapy, but I never really knew that Bruce suffered from depression. It’s something that lots of people struggle with, and the movie makes a tremendous statement.”
This story first ran in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
