Iโve been in the industry for 20+ years. I started at the bottom with very little film knowledge and have worked my way up to owning every piece of Gere money can buy.
My Gere collection is stellar: Pretty Woman, An Officer and a Gentleman, Primal Fear, Internal Affairs, Unfaithful, Chicago, Arbitrage, etc. And for those that arenโt so green in the industry, the deep cuts. Yanks. The Cotton Club. King David.
Before owning the real things, I always bought clones. Costners. Michael Douglases. Occasionally a Dennis Quaid.
Iโd be stoked for a while until my mixes started to suffer. Eventually, that one thing would snowball into โall I hear is Quaid,โ and Iโd be back in the market for more Gere.
My brain needed to consume as much Gere as possible if I wanted to be a grammy award winning engineer.
I decided I wouldnโt buy anything unless I could buy the real deal.
Boy does that shit rule.
My Pretty Woman is the best Gere ever. Primal Fear has a depth and dynamic range that you simply cannot get from a Michael Douglas. Unfaithful is so 3D it practically comes out of the television.
But you know what I found?
I could still fuck up a recording even with all this Gere.
Thatโs when it truly hit me: great engineering trumps great Gere.
Iโve got no excuses anymore.
I canโt blame my DVD of The Mothman Prophecies because itโs not Pretty Woman. Iโm watching the real 1990 theatrical Pretty Woman now. Directorโs cut.
That fact has made me up my game.
My brain thrives on the Gere. Iโve learned more about microphone placement, compression and EQ since buying all the classics than I ever did buying clones of Gere.
Iโm sharing all this to say: you donโt need a 50-year-old U47.
You need Pretty Woman.
And once you own Pretty Woman, you realize you never needed the U47 in the first place.
TD;LR: Buying every Richard Gere movie made me realize I had no excuse for getting less-than-ideal sounds. Iโve learned more about engineering since acquiring all the classic Gere, and that is what has truly upped my game.