Unsung Heroes: The Sound Design of 'Searching for Bobby Fischer'

Michael C here from Serious Film to showcase an achievement in a film that has been near and dear to my heart for almost two decades.

What is the sound of a person thinking?

Most of us probably don’t often consider such lofty questions, but when you are a sound designer dilemmas like that crop up all the time. The sound design team behind Stephen Zallian’s 1993 chess prodigy drama Searching for Bobby Fischer faced that challenge and then some when they set out to make a chess story work on screen despite it being the least cinematic subject imaginable, give or take the Dewey Decimal System.

Zallian’s solution was to ignore the intricacies of the game, constructing the matches as stylized montages that emphasize the emotions of the players over tactics. The sound designers – under Head Sound Editor Beth Sterner - outdo themselves in these scenes, building crescendos out of the furious clacking of pieces and the occasional island of stillness. Not only does this make chess palatable for general audiences but, more importantly, it gets to the heart of the material.

For a serious chess player, especially a seven-year-old one, the stakes are life and death. When, for example, a queen is blundered away, the echo of the piece against the table perfectly captures the sudden pit of the stomach realization of an irrevocable screw up. Without a moment spent explaining the rules, much less the advanced strategy at play, the sound design allows us to the grasp the changing balance of power every step of the way.

Beyond sidestepping the tedium of the game, the sound team deserves praise for creating a series of distinct aural environments to show the journey of the young chess genius. During the first joyful scenes of play in the park the soundtrack is bursting with life. The main action has to jostle for room in the mix with the sounds of players, passerby, and city life. The more Josh is pulled into the insular world of serious chess the more the life is leeched out of the soundtrack. By the time young Josh is having his final confrontations with his teacher, you would think they were playing in a monastery the way each sound echoes in isolation. From the sound design alone we can understand the sacrifice that is being asked of this boy in order to be the best.

At one point, the chess hustler played by Laurence Fishburne insists Josh remember that his opponent is not the pieces on the board but the flesh and blood person sitting across from him. The filmmakers take their lead from this, letting the emotions of the characters, and not the strategy of the game, take center stage. In its own modest way the sound team, with help from the stellar editing of Wayne Wahrman, does for chess what Scorsese did for Raging Bull, abandon the literal reality of the sport in order to get at the subjective experience of what it feels like to be in thick of the battle. 

How I Did Prediction-Wise. How 'Bout You?

I'm not much for stats but for what it's worth, here's how I did on my Oscar predictions.

74% (89/120) if you include all categories, including those very few others predict like the short features.
77% (81/105) if you drop the three shorts categories which very few people bother with, thus upping their predictive ratio ;). If you'd like to know how I stack up with other pundits, I'm hearing Kris Tapley edged me out with 84/105 but am I in second place this year? Does anyone know? 81 is a good score. Yay me!
88% (40/45) in "the big eight" director, picture, acting and screenplays

Best Categories: I went 100% in Animated Feature, both Actress categories and Lead Actor -- if I'd only seen Hawkes over Garfield, I would have had an historic 100% in all acting categories --  correctly assuming those Big Hollywood Players raving about Javier Bardem (Ben Affleck & Julia Roberts among them) would do the trick for him. Another category I'm really proud of is Animated Short, which is often difficult to guess and I went 4/5 after viewing clips from all the finalists.

Worst Categories: I totally biffed Makeup (1/3) which is, in my defense, year after year the most baffling category (though I think The Way Back is very deserving and I also nominated it in my own awards). But I'm much much more surprised to have done so poorly on the Sound Categories (3/5 in each). In my defense there this is a very unusual year: for once the Sound Mixing and Sound Editing nominations are not virtual mirror images of each other. In fact, I can't recall a year ever with less overlap. Only two films Inception and True Grit show up in both categories. Usually these categories are 4/5 overlaps. Frustrated that I didn't predict the Angelina actioner Salt since I nominated in my own awards and it was my "alternate" that I nearly went with but in the end I chickend out and just used the Sound guilds nominees, which turned out to be not at all what Oscar's sound branch was thinking ;)

Just Curious: Did anyone predict I AM LOVE for costumes? I'm so thrilled that happened for Antonella Cannarozzi.

Very deserving if I do say so myself.

What are you most proud of from your predictions? Where did you fail most spectacularly?

all Oscar race posts
complete list of nominations

BAFTA Swans, Ohio Dreams, Audio Society Listens

With Oscar nominations just 17 days away, it's all over but the stragglers, the ceremonies (BFCA and Globes in a week's time. Whooo) and one biggie precursor the Director's Guild of America, which will announce on Monday. Awards season always starts feeling about deja vu at this point. But we're about to wake up to the NOW. Just 17 days...

But here's three more awards crumbs until we get there: But here's three more awards crumbs until we get there: The BAFTA long list (not their nominees. that happens later), Ohio Critics and the Cinema Audio Society. It's a lot to cover so it's all after the jump.

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