Dugpa.com
John Neff – Part 1

John Neff – Part 1

Engineer Extraordinaire

Interview conducted October 7th, 2001

Dugpa: How did you become involved in the music industry?

John Neff: I started playing in bands in the Detroit area in 1963; I made my first record in ’65, another one in ’67, my first album in ’69 and ’70. I made about 125 non Motown R&B records as a session guitarist between ’70 and ’73, toured for many, years with lots of different bands. I moved to Toronto, then Phoenix, then Hawaii for almost 14 years, built a studio there with Walter Becker from Steely Dan, we did the ‘Kamakiriad’ album for Donald Fagen and Walter’s Solo album. Walter bought me out in ’92, and I moved to Phoenix, built a great big studio over there and it didn’t do too well, cause there’s no business in Phoenix. It’s too close to LA. I moved here and started designing studios.

Dugpa: So tell me, what were the circumstances for you meeting with Lynch?

John Neff: In 1996, I started a studio supply firm with an architectural firm in Los Angeles that designs world-class studios all over the world. When my studio wasn’t going well in Arizona, one of the partners of the architectural firm suggested that I move to Los Angeles, and we get real official for equipment for studios. One of their clients was David. He owns three houses in the Hollywood Hills, one of which he lives in, and the other two are workshops of the sort. The third one became the studio, which was the one that was used as a set in Lost Highway. Most of that house was demolished, as much as the cities zoning would allow, and then rebuilt as a studio. The design complies to the THX specification for a mixing theater and it has three 35mm projectors with full music recording facilities.

Dugpa: What type of recording gear do you use there? Is it mostly digital? Any analog?

John Neff: We have two massive Protools systems. We also have 24-track analog, DA-88… We use the 24-track a lot as sort of a pitch shifter. On Jocelyn’s record, there was a song where she played a crystal bowl… like a big wine glass. And it had a very beautiful specific note, and we recorded it in Protools and ran it over to the 24 track, and with a guitar tuner, tuned it to I think 11 different notes. Using the vari-speed of the 24 track because that doesn’t introduce digital, artificial glitches. So we built up tracks back in Protools of these various pitches and then using faders on the board, I could play it like draw bars of an organ and change the note that followed her singing. So we use analog and digital interchangeably. Neither one is better, neither one is perfect.

Dugpa: So back to your initial meeting with Lynch?

John Neff: See how we got sidetracked. The studio was already roughed in, but not finished. Not even the final floors were in there yet. We had our first technical meeting in April of ’97. We sat at the edge of the cable trough on cold cement on a Winter night, and had the first meeting about the technical design. During the meeting, we fleshed it out and really started designing how the room would work. Initially it was going to be used in a very limited manner as a production room; that was mostly a screening room. Because he already owned a Euphonix console, it was going to house the console and a few little goodies to be able to perhaps do some contributory work toward a film, but never originally intended to mix a film. As we went through the design process, every week, David would say ‘Oh it has to do this, oh it has to do that’ and the board went from this little tiny 48 channel, series two, to a full blown 64-channel CS2000 with film formatter, and the whole bit. I mean the console got much much bigger. Much more gear got involved. There are three isolation rooms in the studio plus a main floor, plus the screening area. It’s a one-room studio essentially, but it had the functionality of five different specific functions in a normal studio complex. Each of which are somewhat interdependent, but they are also independent, and the room has to be configured differently. The console is sort of a non- standard console. It does not come up knowing what it is. It is essentially a soft desk. You have to program it and tell it what it is for each session, and for each type of work, and you have to build templates and all kinds of other stuff. In the course of installing the equipment in August of 1997, I said to David, ‘I have to start meeting with your engineer’ this is an extremely complex room, and we have to basically write a manual on how this thing is gonna work’, and he goes ‘I don’t have an engineer. I’m gonna use freelancers.’ I started laughing and said ‘Well, this room is so far outside the scope of an ordinary studio, there’s no way a freelancer is gonna come in here and know how it works. They’ll have to come in two, three weeks ahead of time, figure out the room, test some stuff, and then go to work. And then you are still going to have a slow ramp up in your work because they’re not gonna know what to do.’ And he goes ‘Well, it looks like you are gonna have to be the Engineer then.’ I laughed and said I couldn’t afford the pay cut’ which I couldn’t. So the installation happened, and time went on. He had shot a commercial for Honda, and it turned out to be a very tremendous commercial for the Passport in ’97. It ran the whole model year, as a matter of fact, and it didn’t have a single word of narration in it. Very unique spot. Before the room was finished, he wanted to mix that in his room, so he hired me to mix it, and we did. And at that point, he told me that he had an album booked, which turned out to be Jocelyn’s. I told him ‘I had been thinking about what you said, and life is like a hallway with doors and windows, and you’re moving down that hallway, an if a window opens, you can take advantage of it, or if a door opens, you can walk through it, but THAT window and THAT door will never open again. So I’d like to take the gamble and jump in.’ So we started working together.

Dugpa: Wow. That’s a great story. Most recently, you have been working on David Lynch.com.

John Neff: For the last year and a half. Since February of 2000. David made the commitment to go online, and he said (I’m paraphrasing him here’ ‘The Internet allows you to be your own radio station, film studio, and television studio, you’re on the air 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and nobody can tell you what to do.’ Strangely, that appeals to him. He had no idea of what it would take in terms of time, people, effort, cost, etc. None of us did. We just blindly started writing, recording, mixing stuff, and building the backbone. We have a store where you can buy things, lots of things. Well that means that you have to have a whole e-commerce substructure, and you’ve got to have stuff to sell. You have to design it, you have to manufacture it, you have to make it, you have to warehouse it. Oh my God, we had to have a warehouse. Then we had to have a fulfillment operation. I mean every step along the way, people are concerned with how long it is taking the website to come up, and there’s this pre-introductory page, and believe me’ that page costs a heck of a lot of money, because we’ve been building the whole structure behind it. We’re shooting two new series. David built sets on the property. The neighbors complained, so we had to tear it down, and relocate them elsewhere. Some of the scenes are shot on location. You have to write the scripts, hire the actors. We’re shooting it all on DV cam, Sony PD-150’s, 100A’s, and editing on Final Cut Pro on Macintoshes. Apple in fact is a strategic partner on the site. They are assisting with hardware, software, and streaming capabilities. They’ve been very involved, and very wonderful to us. Other people are involved too. Sorenson jumped in for the streaming compression. In Final Cut Pro, you might have four, eight audio tracks, but you can’t do anything with the audio. Now DV doesn’t have time code, addressable outside time code. David wants to mix in Protools in the big studio. So we shoot on DV, and how do we mix the thing, how do we post it’ We bring in actors to do a lot of ADR, because we have a lot of noise on the set. How do you get that in synch’ We had to invent that, because DV isn’t addressable via outside standard time code. I won’t give away all the trade secrets, but we ended up working on them visually as QuickTime movies in Protools, and exporting the audio, and reintegrating it in Final Cut Pro. So we have four Final Cut Pro editing stations, and it’s just massive, and David is paying for this all out of his own pocket. So David Lynch.com is supposed to launch the same day the film opens, October 12th. We shall see’ We’re in a mad crunch time producing stuff. He’s still writing some stuff for one of the series. We’re gonna go shoot the last week of September, some of Episodes of one the series, have it all posted by the 12th, and all compressed for streaming video. So David Lynch.com has been a massive effort. There is lot of people working on it, and we think it’s gonna be really cool.

Dugpa: I’m looking very forward to it.

John Neff: Well, I don’t want to start any avalanches, but he is also going to be going on live chat from time to time, answering questions. His daughter, Jennifer Lynch is going to have a streamed radio show. I’m setting her up with her broadcast setup this week. There will be a chat room on the official site. It’s going to be a fun thing.

Dugpa: So what other type of things can we look forward to from David Lynch.com?

John Neff: We’ve got another thing that is going to show up on the website called ‘Industrial Soundscapes.’ Most of them are David alone, but some of them are David and myself, playing slow, sonorous tone poems. We’re playing the keyboards side by side, and we watch where each other are going and we just kind of freeform these pieces that are 8, 10, 12-minutes long. We’re thinking of doing a CD of industrial soundscapes. David has quite a rig with a Parker Fly with a midi driver on it, and he’s got the VG8 Virtual Amp Roland Floorbox unit as well as the GR-33 guitar synth. The music for Dumbland is David playing guitar through the guitar synth with the arpeggiators doing all kinds of weird stuff like triggering drums and all kinds of baloney. It’s just the wildest, stupidest patches that we could come up with.

Dugpa: That sounds wild. So tell me, what will the infrastructure of David Lynch.com be like? Will it be a subscription service?

John Neff: It will be a subscription site. It’s very reasonable. That’s because this site is literally costing millions of dollars to put up. There is NO advertising. It’s not going to have any popup ads, no banners, no baloney. It’s strictly a private entertainment site. Everything’ EVERYTHING is designed and done by David. He doesn’t sit in an office and tell people to do things. The Dumbland cartoon series’ he animated and drew the whole series with his mouse. 60 hours per cartoon. Then we post it for three or four days in the studio, and then it takes another guy three or four days to marry it up and compress it and get it ready to show on the Internet. I mean, what did that cost’ You got 30, 50 thousand dollars in a three-minute silly thing. How about David’s time’ What’s that worth’ So it is subscription. Very minor cost wise, but without advertising or sponsors, there’s no other way to do it. The store isn’t by subscription. If somebody wants to buy a copy of Eraserhead, which will be out on DVD, or the Blue Bob CD, posters, shirts, all kinds of baloney, you can go to the store. You don’t have to join. There’s also some freebies just for showing up. There will always be things to do on the site, that you won’t have to buy, but to see the series, and the stuff that cost money to produce, it is subscription.

Dugpa: So how soon after the sites launch will the new Eraserhead DVD be available?

John Neff: It’s in production. We are filming some stories about the production of it. David tried to come up with some extra scenes, but there isn’t enough of the old material left. So there might be some stills and some other odds and ends, but there aren’t scenes from it per say, because all the negative and the lifts are just gone. They got shipped or dumped many years ago unfortunately. They’re not recoverable.

Dugpa: Tell us about the transfer of that film to DVD.

John Neff: The negative resides at the museum of modern art in New York, and they shipped the negative back, and we had a high-def transfer made from the negative. Every single one of the 130,000 frames has been digitally cleaned by a poor guy we locked up in a closet, and won’t let out until it’s perfect. The sound will be the stereo Dolby SR track. We really tried to make a 5.1 track, but enough of the original elements don’t survive’ so we couldn’t do a fair job of it. But it’s going to be great. It will be in an 8 by 8-inch box with a lot of photos. Very classy… and reasonable.

Dugpa: Sounds great. Fans have been waiting for this one for a very long time.

John Neff: For a real DVD instead of some of these..

Dugpa: <laughs>

John Neff: See, when you release picture, and even though David owns Eraserhead, there are foreign territories. And you sell the rights to distribute pictures in these various foreign territories. Venus and Mars. So they have the right to release VHS and now DVD’s or whatever, and he’s terminated all of those foreign territories contracts as they have expired, but a few have existed into the DVD age, and there are a few out there. They are not from a new negative. They are probably from an internegative (actually a duping negative). We’re going from the original spliced camera negative. So this will be the definitive DVD. And there won’t be any VHS of it either. David is a real believer of Digital. Tape is over with.

Dugpa: I remember when word first got out that David was working on a new Eraserhead DVD. Then a few months later, a new Eraserhead DVD popped up in the UK. Many people bought and preordered it thinking that it was the new Lynch approved transfer.

John Neff: And they were very disappointed.

Dugpa: Yes.

John Neff: Film scratches and everything. David had nothing to do with that, would like to have not seen that happen, but they had the right to do it, and once the word got out that David was doing it, they capitalized on it. It’s unfortunately part of the movie business. But David’s will be good.

Dugpa: So tell us about Mulholland Drive.

John Neff: Mulholland Drive. My nemesis. The cross on my back. The movie that refuses to die.

Dugpa: So you have actually mixed that film twice.

John Neff: At least.

Dugpa: What were the major differences mixing Mulholland Drive for the TV Pilot versus mixing Mulholland Drive for it’s theatrical version?

John Neff: First of all, the TV pilot’ David’s first cut was I think 2 hours and 4 minutes, way beyond what the network allowed. He said that was as short as he could make it and they should make a special presentation of it’ They didn’t like that. We did not do a complete mix of that. We did a temp mix. He ended up cutting it to 88 minutes running time to be a viewable pilot. He was never ever happy with that cut. We still only did a temp mix of that. However, he was shooting Mulholland Drive while we were mixing the Straight Story. There would be days that David worked in the studio all day, shot all night, and grabbed four hours sleep, just to show up back in the studio. It was a wild time. When Mulholland didn’t get picked up, we thought that was it, that was the end of it, and we kissed it goodbye. David and I worked on a few music projects, and did a couple of commercials last year and then the French company that had produced the Straight Story said, ‘Hey, you’ve got this thing sitting there. What would it take to finish it” And he said ‘Oh that would be too much, that’s crazy. It can never happen. It was a TV show.’ Discussion just sort of went away. And one day. He said, ‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it.’ And he had how he could thread together the two main girls characters into a cohesive, well as cohesive as his stories get, but into a story that he could finish and be happy with. When we went into principal photography again, last September, David shot, and I don’t know the percent, but I’ll guess that 40 percent of the film is all new. Then in December we all went to Prague to score it, and January 2nd we started mixing. It took 14 weeks to mix the film.

Dugpa: One of the things I have heard most about the film is that people have been absolutely raving about the sound mix. Can you tell us about the type of equipment was used to record Mulholland Drive?

John Neff: I took a Protools rig to Prague, and we recorded the whole orchestra direct off the consoles preamps into Protools at 24-bit. The original dialog was recorded on DATs at 16-bit, and the cut effects libraries are 16-bit. Those two stems of the movie resided in 16-bit. It hurts to convert bit rates, and that it hurts the audio quality, so we left those two stems at 16, and the music at 24. We had two Protools rigs running and the Euphonix console. But, we got a new 24-track, 24-bit hard disk recorder; and once the various elements and stems were mixed, they were recorded to 24-bit, 48khz sample rate. We also did safeties to DA-88 at 16-bit, but that makes the quiet parts livable. See in 16-bit digital, if you have something quiet, it sounds sandy and grainy, because it’s really a 4, 5, 6, 8-bit recording because the amplitude helps determine the bit depth. So recording back to DA-88’s or something like that’ God love ’em, they’re great machines. Sorry Tascam, but the quiet moments, never really sounded that good. This 24 bits stuff, which by the way is a Tascam, sounded terrific, and so we were able to do subtle little things in the quiet moments that you could have never gotten away with before, and would never survive optical soundtracks of days gone by. A digital, with essentially a theoretical, beyond the realm of human hearing noise floor, we were able to do some incredible dynamic ranges from itsy bitsy little quiet moments to everything the digital system allows right up to the top zero db level. David of course is very hands on in the sound department. He is the sound designer for the movie. He conceptualizes things and says ‘I need it to sound like a 30 ton piece of metal being scraped across a polished piece of smooth granite’ Well, you have to imagine in your mind how that’s gonna sound, then you have to go make it out of things that exist in the everyday real world. But he directs’ he’s an act and react guy. You come up with something you think might get you started on that path an then he goes ‘ok, no, it’s gotta be lower, it’s gotta be slower, it’s gotta have this, more reverb,” So he directs the creation of the sound like he directs the picture. I mean on this picture, David was moving faders. So he’s very active in the mix. He and Alan Splet, who had been his sound mixer for all of the experimental films through Blue Velvet worked like that. They would just dig in, and make stuff out of nothing. So a lot of the stuff in the film doesn’t come from, it’s not stuff that’s in standard libraries, or stuff you just go out and record. You take some raw material and you work it to death, and turn it into something that doesn’t exist in the real world, but it’s an impressionistic, surrealistic element that supports the picture, and makes it in his mind, and once it’s ok with Dave, it’s part of the picture. So there’s a big dynamic range, extremely low noise floor, quiet moments’ we had to insert room noise in the quiet moments, because it was too quiet.

Dugpa: I noticed on the trailer, there was a new face’ Rebekah Del Rio, who performs a cover of Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’. Could you tell us about that?

John Neff: Yes. A Spanish version of Crying, which in Spanish is ‘Llorando’ or in certain areas of the Spanish-speaking world, it’s ‘Jorando’, which is how she pronounces it. She came into the studio with her agent in November or December of ’98. And she walked in, and the guy was telling us what a great voice she had’ she’s real nice, she’s very personable, and very friendly, and Dave just’ she’s in there 5 minutes and he says ‘Well, sing us something.’ Meanwhile, I had a beautiful old tube mic heated up in an isolation room, and a Protools system up and running. So she walked in the booth, put on headphones, I had some reverb on it, and she blasts out ‘Llorando’ right there. And except for one tiny edit, just to shorten a note just a hair, what you hear in the film is exactly what she walked in the room and did. No EQ. No compression. No nothing. Just reverb added. She walked in and knocked this out acappella, and knocked us out right off the bat. David wrote her into the TV Pilot based on that. So then that didn’t go anywhere, but now she’s in the movie, and it’s sort of a pivotal scene. And we’re also producing some other stuff with her. We’ve got one song finished, and a couple of other songs started with her. We’ll also have some showcase shows slightly after the film is released.

Dugpa: So can you tell us more about the Mulholland Drive Soundtrack’

John Neff: Well, we recorded in Prague, with the symphony there. David and Angelo had been there two other times. Blue Velvet, and Lost Highway. So some of it is orchestral, and some of it isn’t. The opening track is a ‘jitterbug’ kind of theme. We had a band, and members of the orchestra that played other instruments the last day of the session, and they set up, and we sort of coached them through that. The main title theme from the TV show was done by Angelo on the synthesizer, and then in Prague, we recorded the strings to go underneath it. They didn’t replace the synth, because David loved the feeling and timing of how Angelo played, but it’s augmented with the orchestra. Some of the incidental music is recorded by the orchestra, and then once we get it on the mix stage, Dave likes to sometimes slow thing down, add a lot of reverb. He uses reverb like an instrument. Lots of long reverbs that then produce notes that we blend in, and things like that, so he really paints with a broad brush reverb wise. Mr. Roque’s theme was cut back in December of 1998 before David started mixing the Straight Story. There’s other artists music in the film, not like Lost Highway, that really modern heavy metal stuff’ except for mine and David’s music of course (Blue Bob), but he has some 50’s stuff in there as well. We actually ran into a snafu with this movie, one of the songs in the film is not on the soundtrack album because the licensing fees and the other requirements were so far and beyond what the other artists were getting, that the record company said ‘No, we’re not going to do it.’ So there’s already a major song from the film that’s not on the soundtrack CD. The record company does their artist and themselves a disservice by doing that. I’m not badmouthing them, but I’m just speaking in concept. If for a few thousand bucks, you prevent your artist from being on a soundtrack CD, and selling to a whole new audience all over again, they might go out and buy stuff from the catalog that you still own. I mean, that sounds pretty stupid to me.

Dugpa: Agreed.

John Neff: I mean, take the hit in the beginning. It’s not that much money. But it was significantly more than the other songs. So, take the hit. You’re gonna get paid on every CD sold, and if the song helps sell more CD’s, everybody wins. But by being selfish in the beginning, and preventing it from being on the CD, that record doesn’t get heard again. And how many people are going to go and search out the original album it came off of’ Maybe it’s not in print. I don’t know.

Dugpa: That’s too bad, but from what I’ve heard so far of the Soundtrack, I am very pleased. Tell me, was the concept of DVD production a consideration while filming Mulholland Drive?

John Neff: No. David is only really concerned with the film. He doesn’t really care about the home audience when he is making a film. That’s becomes a consideration later. Although, for the first time, as he was color timing and correcting the picture for release, he was also timing it for DVD. So that work has been done now.

Dugpa: What can you tell us bout the aspect ratio used for Mulholland Drive?

John Neff: The picture was shot in a 16×9 format for high def television and for later DVD release. So the theatrical release is a 1:85 ratio. Which is perhaps’ I think it might be just a hair skinnier on the sides. But not much. I think we took from one side. Instead of optically reducing it to make it fit 1:85, which was two generations away from the image. We experimented with it, and David hated it. What we ended up doing was just matting the 16×9 for 1:85 and averaging the field of exposure for the best framing for the overall picture. So the picture itself is incredibly sharp and rich in color because it didn’t have to go through another two generations of optical printing.

Dugpa: I’m definitely looking forward to Mulholland Drive, as I am sure everyone is. Lets talk a little about DVD. You recently finished a new 5.1 remix for the Elephant Man.

John Neff: I finished the Elephant Man for 5.1 this week. Paramount is committed to doing a very good release of it. Mel Brooks of course owns the film. I don’t know to what degree they’ve cleaned it, but they did make a hi-def transfer. I worked from videotape on this mix, and it was real good. The problem with any film that old is all the original sound was analog, been sitting in a vault for 19 years, and that deteriorates a little of the highs. Analog dialogue recording when somebody shouts has the tendency to distort a little bit. And all that is captured in 24-bit digital wonderfulness. Also, all of the original elements weren’t found. So I had to mix from some premixed stems, the unfolded Dolby LCRS mix, and things like that. So I had to piece it together, but it came together really nice, and sounds good. All of the DVD remixes I’ve done under David’s direction. It’s not a remix, per say, a few balances and a few things were changed, and now there’s stereo surrounds. But David doesn’t like a lot in the surrounds anyway. So the surrounds just slightly open up a scene a little bit more when they are involved in any of his pictures anyway. The Straight Story, I got a couple of trucks to drive across the theater, but that took some argument, but he normally doesn’t like to use the surrounds like that. We utilized the subwoofer channel to really develop the low end into octaves that the old film soundtrack just wasn’t capable of producing. The film now has a frequency spectrum much higher than it ever did. It’s much cleaner and much clearer. Yet it’s the original mix in terms of balances, there aren’t new elements brought in, and there weren’t new effects brought in. It’s only stuff that was in the original film.

Dugpa: Do you have any idea of when it will be released?

John Neff: The Elephant Man DVD will be released December 11th, as of the current schedule.

Dugpa: Will there be any supplements with this release?

John Neff: Paramount is doing the entire production on this DVD, and we were brought in at the last minute to do the 5.1 mix just because they thought that if it was done in David’s room under his direction, that that would add a certain value to the DVD, and that nobody would start to take the modern capabilities and get away from the gentleness or sometimes the very suspenseful moments of the track or restrict the dynamic range, or try and artificially expand it. So that part worked out really well, but we don’t know what extra materials are on it. I don’t believe there are any extra scenes, as I don’t think the stuff has survived that long.

Dugpa: And for the film ‘purists’ that would like the original stereo Dolby sound mix, will that be included on the disc as well?

John Neff: It’s probably one of the other 2 tracks. And I think you can go between them and find that the new one is fuller and quieter.

Dugpa: That is great news. So when we first spoke a few months back, you had mentioned just completing a new 5.1 remix of Blue Velvet for an upcoming DVD release.

John Neff: Right. We did Blue Velvet earlier this summer. That came out really well. That one was recent enough that we had a lot of the elements, and it was a modern enough recording that there were some good low frequencies in the raw stuff and we were able to come up with a really good subwoofer track on that. I had to make stereo surrounds because there weren’t stereo surrounds in those days, and clean up the dialogue track and condition it, etc. Blue Velvet came out really nice.

Dugpa: I noticed that MGM had already put out a Blue Velvet DVD in 1999.

John Neff: They did, and it was so poorly received, that they retrenched and said ‘we better do a better job on this’ Even the audio and videophile magazines raked them over the coals for just the original 2.0 mix, which there’s a certain argument that what a movie was released in is what it should always be. And we are sensitive to that. But David wanted to take a crack at utilizing modern technology that could make that soundtrack a little more impactful.

Dugpa: Had anything been radically changed on the new 5.1 remix? Changes in the original elements?

John Neff: No. We always use the original elements. David is not interested in’ although let me backtrack. I think he would like to remix some of the older movies. But you can’t. Anybody that creates a work, years down the road, will go ‘God, I wish I would have done this different, I wish I would have spent more time on that” A project is never done. You just have to finish it and deliver it. In your mind, it’s never done. So when he hears these things today, he goes oh, jeeze, I wish I could have done this, that, and the other thing, but you have to resist that temptation. You don’t go in and start remixing and introducing new elements and new effects or new music or anything like that. You can’t do that, because then you are violating the original work of art that the film was, and to David, unfortunately there is a film business, but to him, the films are art.

Dugpa: For this new transfer of Blue Velvet, can you tell us if David was involved in the Video Transfer, and to what extent?

John Neff: He did go for the color timing. I’ve not seen a final color corrected digital copy yet. I worked from tape. But it looked awful good.

Dugpa: Do you know if there is any information about an upcoming Wild at Heart DVD’ Also, would you happen to know who has the rights to the picture at this time’

John Neff: I have heard that MGM has the US DVD rights to “Wild at Heart”, and that they plan to get to work on it after Blue Velvet comes out in December. Have not heard whether or not I’ll get a crack at a 5.1 mix of it, but I would like to.

Part 2