Juvenalia,
or
How I came to own a Blu-Ray of Point Break
Jamie Hilder

I have an idea that I don’t think I’ll ever follow through on, but I
like thinking about it a lot. It is to extend the montage sequence in
Martha Coolidge’s Real Genius (1985) that uses The Comsat Angel’s “I’m Falling” to include the entire 108-minute film. There are
a couple of reasons why I’ll never follow through on this idea, one
of which is that I don’t think anybody besides me and a few close
friends would find it interesting or funny. The primary reason is
that I don’t think it’s possible. And that impossibility is an acoustic
impossibility.
I suppose I should categorize what I mean by impossible. If I were
able to source the original master tapes from Tri-Star Pictures or
Sony or whoever has them and access the original dialogue and
Foley tracks, I might be able to work things out, but I just don’t
think I have that kind of pull in Hollywood. Even if I did, the idea
would still only be a reworking of a juvenile idea I have about a
juvenile film, though a film that − like Top Secret (1984) or Weird
Science (1985)− I would gladly watch again with anybody who is
interested.
I know how much trouble scoring a recut film would be because I
tried a similar project with Kathyrn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991),
another movie I saw at an impressionable moment in my life, and
which I have also watched too many times. There are two skydiving
scenes in Point Break that are structurally integral to the narrative,
and they’re both ridiculous. They go on way too long, have conti-

nuity issues, and are, also, acoustically impossible: people can’t
hear each other speak while falling at 200 km/h, yet the characters
manage to have complete conversations with each other. I don’t
think pointing out the absurdities of commercial films is anything
heroic, but I am often struck by how easy it is to absorb ideas from
cinema, and to be disappointed when the reality is otherwise. I
know that people can’t have conversations while skydiving because
I went skydiving as research for the project and couldn’t even hear
myself screaming while falling. And I was screaming as loudly as
I could.
So: by “impossible” I mean that turning the entirety of Real Genius
into a montage is not possible to do well with the technology, access, and energy that I have. I could recut the scenes and assemble
them with a narrative logic, and score the new cut with a 108-minute loop of “I’m Falling,” but that’s not what a montage set to music is. A montage set to music has other sounds in it, incidental
sounds that ground the viewer-listener (it’s a problem that we so
easily categorize film audiences as “viewers”). There might not be
dialogue, but there are exclamations and other diegetic sounds that
remain tucked into the sound design. For instance: in the “I’m Falling” montage (a rare case that uses the entire song), when Mitch,
the fifteen-year-old math prodigy and college freshman is in his
advanced math class, the professor’s voice is absent but the sound
of Mitch flipping through his notes is present; when Mitch is in
the lab with Chris Knight (played by Val Kilmer in just his second
film role [Top Secret was his first!]) and Prof. Hathaway, their conversation is muted but the rustling of blueprints and lab-notes is
present; when Mitch is studying alone in the dorm room he shares
with Chris, their closet door creaks open as Lazlo Hollyfield (a former math prodigy who suffered a complete nervous breakdown)
emerges from it, and the sound of the dorm door opening and closing is there as he sneaks out of the room. We hear the door again as
Mitch rushes to open it, hoping to discover where Lazlo is heading,
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only to be met by his crush, Jordan, who wants to show him the
page-turning machine she invented. We don’t hear either of their
voices, but we hear the whirr of the machine during the demonstration. In the next scene there is the sound of footsteps, which
fall in and out of sync with the song’s drum machine, and in the
following scene there is the sound of Mitch rearranging his books
in that same math class, where students are slowly being replaced
by recording devices, including several oversized 80s ghetto blasters (“ghetto blasters”? Nice work, 1980s). The following scene
includes the sound of car tires screeching and a horn blast, as
Mitch and Chris’s nerd nemesis, Kent, nearly runs Mitch over in a
crosswalk, prompting him to drop the stack of books he had been
precariously engrossed in. We don’t hear Kent’s laughter, despite
the camera’s close-up on his braced mouth smiling and shouting
“C’mon!” When Mitch and Chris are in the lab, testing the laser they have committed to magnifying to five megawatts so that
Chris can graduate, not yet knowing that they are building a satellite-based weapon for a shadow cabinet of the US military, we hear
the buzz of the laser and the small fire it causes, and we clearly
hear Mitch and Chris high-five each other, but no vocal eruptions.
Cut to: Mitch reading while walking across campus, where we hear
the sound of him dropping his books and then the sound of him
hurriedly gathering them again after Lazlo, who emerges from behind the steps lit like Jesus, picks up one of the books and hands
it to him. We hear the footsteps of students as Mitch rushes to
tell Chris about an idea he has, only for Chris to silently yawn his
response while simultaneously rolling quarters down the knuckles of each hand, a skill I can only imagine Kilmer convinced director Martha Coolidge to let him show off. In the penultimate
scene, Mitch is in the lab by himself, and we hear a more powerful laser, one that burns through the safety wall, to Mitch’s pleasure. And finally, as the rigid, almost mathematical post-punkpop song comes to an end, we see Mitch walk into a classroom
comprised entirely of recording devices in the places where students should be sitting, and a reel-to-reel at the front of the class.

[Fig. 11] Jordan shows Mitch her page-turning machine in Real Genius (dir:
Martha Coolidge, 1985).

As the song fades out, the recorded voice of the professor rises in
the mix, telling us that “...plus y equals zero.” Behind the reel-toreel, written on the blackboard, we can read, “Math on tape is hard
to follow, so: Please Listen Carefully.”
*
Listening carefully is something I’ve never been very good at. In
songs, I am drawn to lyrics over melody or beats. I never learned
to play an instrument, despite buying a guitar and amp in my
teens, believing − with the audacity of a suburban white kid −
that I could teach myself (pre-internet). As a result, I have a guitar and an amp and some sounds that I can make but not with
others. Whenever I have attempted to play music with people,
they always have to follow me, because when they say something
like, “Let’s try this in D,” I just stare at them with a blank shame.
And then, when we do start playing, I have trouble distinguishing the sounds I’m making from the sounds they’re making.
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My fingers follow the other’s rhythm, and things end up falling
apart. I blame my parents, and their parents. I can’t think of a
single person in my extended family that knows or cares about
music in any way that would require knowledge beyond being a
fan of a song.
So, when I had the idea to recut the skydiving scenes from Point
Break, it was literally a stupid idea: it was only made possible by my
complete lack of understanding of how sound functions in film. I
watched the scene, noticed there was a pretty manipulative musical
soundtrack, and figured all it would take is a reorganization of that
musical composition, something I could ask a friend to help me
do. But when I started cutting the scenes and rearranging them,
the other sounds in the scene announced themselves as a problem
immediately. If I had known in advance how complex it would be
to carry out the idea, which operates right on the border between
joke and artwork, I don’t imagine I would have pursued it.
My initial idea was to reuse shots within the skydiving scenes to
extend the scenes, to point out the film’s absurd masculinities, to
stretch the already over-the-top suspense, and to illustrate how
short our visual memories are, how easily we can be duped by cinema. It wasn’t until I re-assembled some of the shots that I realized that it wasn’t just the soundtrack that I would have to adjust,
but the entire sound design. Assuming that dialogue, Foley sound,
and soundtrack were in separate channels, I didn’t think it would
be too much of a challenge. But a few conversations with people
who know about film sound later, I realized that there was no way
to separate the dialogue from the Foley, and to separate both from
the soundtrack. I even bought a Blu-Ray version of the film on the
off-chance that the channels for surround sound would have the
sound components separated. T he sound wasn’t separated, just a
little clearer than my downloaded versions, and now I own a BluRay of Point Break. At this point in the project I had done too
much to abandon it. I had separated all the scenes and logged

them, and, most significantly, I had told a bunch of people what
I was doing. The only way to make the piece work would be to
re-record all the dialogue and to source and edit Foley sounds
of rushing wind, parachute rustling, parachute deployment, and
bodies landing in water and on land. I recorded all the dialogue
by doing poor impressions of the actors: not only Patrick Swayze
and Keanu Reeves, but the rest of the Dead Presidents bank robbers, too. I discovered something else through that process: my
range as a voice actor is not great. And yet some people are still
surprised to discover that the dialogue is not the original. They
can hear it when I point it out, though, which makes me think that
bad listening skills are more common than I had thought.

[Fig. 12] A still from “The Capacity for Joy Part One (First Jump)” by Jamie
Hilder, or a still from Point Break (dir: Kathryn Bigelow, 1991).

So: re-cutting Real Genius into a single montage would not be impossible, but it would be way too much work for what it would
end up being. It’s probably less difficult than I’m making it out to
be, simply because I could discard all the film’s dialogue and just
include some diegetic sound as punctuation. But just as I started
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hearing things in the “I’m Falling” montage that I didn’t catch the
first several times I watched it, I imagine I would discover sounds
in every scene that would require close attention. The sounds of
footsteps or car horns are easy to find and fool ears with. The
sounds of lasers and other lab equipment would be more difficult.
And I’d have to re-record the screams of a student breaking under
the pressure of exam studying that is included in the film’s other
montage sequence, set to Chaz Jankel’s “Number One.” At the end
of all that, after re-cutting and arranging the hundreds of shots to
construct a kind of music-video-movie, I would still only have an
extended movie montage of a minor 1980s sci-fi teen comedy, and
one that would have too close a relationship to a bland pop song by
The Comsat Angels, a relatively minor post-punk band from Sheffield. It doesn’t really hold up against the projects of Aleesa Cohene, or Christian Marclay, or even the Point Break piece, which
all repurpose found footage to more coherent ends.
But the value of the Real Genius piece − the part that makes me
like thinking about it so much − is not in its making, but in how
the challenge of making it forces me to think about the way sound
operates in film, and to recognize how bad I have been at listening.¹ I still consider film a visual medium, despite how obvious it
is that sound plays just as much a role in my emotional response
to it. That understanding was first challenged by being on film
sets, and watching actors recite lines that would come across as
stiff and empty if it weren’t for a dramatic musical score, and comparing that experience to that of attending theatre performances
where actors are forced to sonically command the space of the
—
¹ I also have an idea to recut the final chase scene in Annie (1982), where Tim Curry

and Carol Burnett’s characters chase Annie up a raised train drawbridge, only for her to
escape when Daddy Warbucks arrives in a helicopter, and his man-servant, Punjab (!)
(played by Trinidadian actor and dancer Geoffrey Holder), unwraps his turban and offers it to Annie as a rope. This idea will likely also go unmade, since its primary interest
for me is that that scene was the source of a recurring nightmare of mine from my early
childhood until my mid-twenties.

theatre with only their voices. I know that there’s a funeral scene
at the end of Robert Townes’ Without Limits (1998),a film about
the 1970s American mid-distance runner Steve Prefontaine, that
makes me cry every time I watch it, and that those tears are not
triggered by the images on screen (it’s a pretty bare scene of just
a podium in the middle of a small track-and-field stadium) but by
the sound design. Donald Sutherland’s voice cracks as he gives the
eulogy, which is often enough for me, but it’s the birdsong that sits
low in the mix, paradoxically intensifying the silence of the assembled funeral crowd, that clinches it. When I went back to listenlook at it more closely (and to cry a bit) I noticed that there’s even
the sound of an analogue clock ticking down when a digital clock
is shown, which I’m sure must have instigated a conversation
among the sound de-signers about how acoustically dumb
audiences can be. A friend of mine who used to work in postproduction sound likes to tell the story of how one of the head
engineers dealt with a particularly uptight director. The director
was not quite satisfied with the mix and asked the engineer to
adjust the bass. The engineer reached onto the mixing board and
visibly turned a knob on a channel that wasn’t included in the mix
and the director said “Yeah, that’s much better, let’s go with that.”
I always laugh at that story, particularly my friend’s impression of
the engineer slyly rolling his eyes to the other sound mixers, but if
there’s one person in that scenario I can identify with, it’s the
director who can't listen.

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