11/29/07

The Beast Has Returned

The boxing matches on TV tonight bored me so I decided to do some digging in my piles and piles of magazines, newspapers, maps and whatever various randomness has found a home in The Monstropolous Beast. Recently I have been thinking a lot about artists and the other things they did, the efforts they are not known for (this will be a future post...stay tuned). I find myself returning to Mailer. At an anniversary party for all involved in the making of the film "Tough Guys Don't Dance," in which Mailer directed the film adaptation of his own novel, Mark Singer was in attendance and observes in this Talk Of The Town piece:

""Tough Guys' turned out to be the last movie Mailer directed, but not the end of his celluloid legacy. At one point, Leslie Shatz, the sound designer, described Mailer's perfectionist quest to capture the sound of a punch in the face. 'Norman said, 'The sounds of the punches in movies are all phony,' Shatz recalled. 'He wanted me to record his own punches. He was a boxer, of course. So we were in my cutting room with a portable digital recorder, and I remember thinking at the time, I'm watching Norman Mailer hit himself and I'm not stopping him. He hit himself at least twenty times-in the face and the chest-until we finally got it right. I saved that sound effect, and I've used it in about twenty movies since. I always tell other directors, 'You hear that? That's Norman Mailer punching himself. He's in your movie.'"