Mark Moormann’s seven-year labor of love, Tom Dowd & The Language Of Music, tells the story of possibly the most influential music recording engineer of all time. He spoke with senior editor Roxanne Bogucka after a screening of his film at South by Southwest.

Roxanne Bogucka: Hi. You’re the director of Tom Dowd & The Language Of Music. Tell me please how you got onto the subject of TOM DOWD.

Mark Moorman: I met Tom at Criteria Recording Studios in Miami about seven years ago. A friend of mine was recording there and I walked in and he took one look at me and said, “I know you from somewhere. Where do I know you from?” And I said, “Well I’m a student of Dr. Ungurait in Tallahassee,” and he said “Oh one of Don’s boys. Come in and do whatever you want.” So I did. I came in and shot the sessions for a couple of days and a couple of days into it I was handed a manuscript. And it was Tom’s autobiography that he’d been shopping around to publishers and nobody was really biting on it, and I read the thing and I was just amazed that one person could have been a participant in the making of so much history. And I really felt an obligation and a responsibility to tell his story, and that’s what we did with the film.

RB: So you filmed on this for seven years off and on?

MM: It took seven years to make the film. It’s right at, first year which was, I did little videotape interview, try to raise money, and got turned down by everybody, you know. Nobody would give us money for the thing so I just started pulling out money out of my own pocket and just getting the film done any way we could. And we’d shoot for a while, we’d run out of money, and I’d go back out working as a cameraman, which is what I do, and then I’d save up some money, put it back in and that’s the way it went for six years. And then we got some money to finish it up and that’s what allowed us to get here.

RB: Well it certainly looks like there was money involved in it. And it definitely sounds like there was money involved in it. You must have quite a music budget. Could you tell me about how you got all the music permissions?

MM: Well in terms of the licenses, well you have to understand Tom recorded all the music in the film. So a lot of people in the film are responsible for licensing of music. Ahmet Ertegun was the president of Atlantic. So because of Tom and his, the love of all the artists for Tom, we’ve got this favored-nation status with the music. And we’re in the final stages of negotiations for that, but it’s going to make it very affordable. So we’ll be able to afford the music and put it into the film. And, I mean yeah. We shot on Super-16, 16mm, and we weren’t going to compromise the quality. We just felt like this thing was important and wanted to get it told right, so we wanted to shoot film and put everything we could into the film to make it as good as it could be.

RB: This movie reminds me of a movie whose name has just gone out of my memory, unfortunately. It was at South by Southwest either last year or the year before. It was about Jerry Wexler and Muscle Shoals. Did y’all do some footage-sharing or…

MM: Immaculate Funk, I believe that was called.

RB: Yes.

MM: No, we didn’t do any footage-sharing. I did meet the, I don’t know if I ever met him, but I talked to the director. He was, when we were starting, he had been doing this for a year already. His took a while as well. But we didn’t share any footage or anything like that.

RB: Tell me a little bit about your research process. I mean, was that sort of ongoing during the seven years when the shooting was ongoing, or how was that?

MM: Yeah, I mean at the beginning there was… Tom gave me a lot of stuff. He gave me videotapes. He gave me, you know, his own manuscript, and then the Internet was certainly very helpful. Anytime I wasn’t going to… I’d sort of map it out, I wrote a treatment. I knew the story that I wanted to tell and there were all these individuals who were in the film and I would research each person. I’d go on the Internet or go to the library and get books and I’d find out who Ahmet Ertegun was, and where he came from. And I did a lot of research on each individual person before I went to interview them. And would formulate all the questions and know the responses that I needed to go into this sort of treatment that I’d written. And know what their sort of role in the storytelling was. And that I needed to get that information from them… Boy it’s getting loud in here.

RB: Yeah I know. There’s no getting away from it. I’d like to ask a question about some of your choices. There were some recreations. What drives the choice to do a recreation?

MM: That was about keeping the audience involved, you know. I mean the content could potentially be rather dry in nature—technical stuff like, you know, knobs and two-track, four-track. I mean it all seemed to be a little bit boring. It could potentially be boring, so I was like, well, let’s spice this up and let’s get these guys in town, these jazz guys, and I used their music. It sounded like it could have been 1940s, but it was modern and cool. So I got the guys who did it and brought them in the studio, we shot it black-and-white, and had an art director come in and make the studio kind of look like 1948. And it was just about keeping the audience interested.

RB: Were there different sound choices throughout? For example, at one point he was talking to Stoller, from Leiber and Stoller, and he was out some place else talking, and it sounded almost like he was mono or something. And then they’d go back to Jerry Wexler, who was talking about something and it sounded like he was stereo. Did y’all play with the sound?

MM: [laughing, groaning] Sure, if you want to put it that way. The reality was just poorly recorded. But if it was to happen anywhere that would’ve been it because he did sound like he was in mono, an old-time sort of mono recording, exactly. [laughs] Our sound man screwed up.

RB: Well serendipitously.

MM: But please give me all the credit.

RB: There you go. One of the things that was really interesting, when someone was talking and I can’t remember who it was now, I think it was one of the Allman Brothers Band members, was saying that Dowd would listen to each player and then listen to the whole sound and then sort of give notes. It sounds like a director. Did you have conversations with him about directing?

MM: That’s a good point. I didn’t really have conversations with him about directing, but it is certainly something that has been brought up before, in that directors actually could get a really, in terms of what they could watch this film and really get some good feedback on how to direct, because Tom wasn’t so much forcing his style on other people, he was getting the most out of the musicians and the artists he was working with. And that was his directorial style in a sense, as you say. But that was it. In the studio, you’d go work with him and you’d see him, you’d see this, he was like a psychologist. And he just knew how to get the stuff, get the best out of people. And consistently throughout the film, the artists talk about that, how Tom was able to pull out of them the best that they could offer.

RB: Thanks very much.