Once described as “The Wizard of Oz on acid,” Human Highway was Neil Young’s mind-bending 1982 post-apocalyptic musical comedy film conceived in the cauldron of Cold War America, which the rock legend wrote, directed and starred alongside an eclectic and eccentric cast including Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Dennis Hopper and members of the band Devo and may also be the secret origin of The Simpsons.
Human Highway was first screened in 1982 at the Mill Valley Film Festival to mixed reviews which caused the producers to and over the intervening 30 years the sections that hit the cutting room floor in that recut have gone astray.
So Shakey Pictures decided to see if they could find all those missing bits and rebuild the film as writer, director and star Neil Young originally envisioned it. However restoration very quickly proved to be problematic and was was further compounded by the fact that several of the original masters were missing.
The team had to dig their way through over thirty years of archives, cataloging and viewing every element ever associated with the film in the hopes of finding the masters.
They found some 2” 16 track analog masters which were transferred to 24 bit at high resolution but it become clear that music and dialog were not on separate tracks and despite extensive searching they were unable to track down the master dialogue tapes. So as a final step, the search was on to find the original reels to get clean dialogue. The dialogue reels were located, and incredibly - the original Nagra IV-S machine was found as well – the exact same machine that had actually been used on set. Now the team had to identify the exact takes that were used in the film, transferred at high resolution and pain staking rebuilt the dialog tracks. Will Mitchell from Shakey Pictures described the process…
As I listened through boxes of Nagra reels, I really felt like a fly on the wall of the set” said Will Mitchell of Shakey Pictures “Often tape was rolling wild both before and after takes, so I got to experience the process and understand just where the crew was in capturing the master performances. As with many films, the improvised lines on alternate takes were incredibly creative and fun. It was clear that this was a fun shoot.
With all the different parts to the puzzle, some fully mixed, others partly mixed and others using the original source takes it was a challenge to bring them all together to produce a seamless mix and this task fell to Tamara Johnson, Sound Designer & Re-recording Mixer of Post-Apocalyptic Studios. I managed to catch up with Tamara and my first question was to ask here how she handled this enormous needle in a haystack.
TJ - When the tapes first arrived it was like walking into a room full of treasure. There was boxes and boxes and it really makes you appreciate that now you can put everything on a thumb drive compared to sometimes needing a fork lift to get everything in.