The Motion Picture Editors Guild (MPEG) will honor veteran sound re-recording mixer Lee Dichter, CAS, with its prestigious Fellowship and Service Award. This is the first time the award ceremony will be held on the East Coast at The Sheraton New York at Times Square on October 20, 2018.
Alan Heim, ACE, president of the Editors Guild, said, “I am delighted that the Guild is bringing the award to New York at last to honor so important a member of our community, thereby demonstrating that we are truly a national union. I had the good fortune to work with Lee on a number of films when I was based in New York for the first half of my career. I found him to be an incredibly talented and generous artist, always striving to deliver the best film possible while working calmly in sometimes stressful environments. In addition, he was a strong union supporter throughout his career.”
The Fellowship and Service Award was established 11 years ago by the Guild’s Board of Directors to recognize an individual who embodies the values the Guild holds most dear: Professionalism, Collaboration, Mentorship, Generosity of Spirit and a Commitment to the Labor Movement. Previous recipients of this distinguished honor include Donn Cambern, ACE; Dede Allen, ACE; IATSE International president emeritus Thomas C. Short; Carol Littleton, ACE; Don Hall; Donald O. Mitchell; Joseph A. Aredas; and Lillian E. Benson, ACE.
“Lee Dichter and his body of work are just what the Fellowship and Service Award Committee was established to acknowledge,” said Sharon Smith Holley, committee co-chair. “Especially important to the Guild is his dedication to the labor movement.”
Added fellow co-chair Jeffrey Burman, “As a mainstay at New York’s premier mixing house, Sound One, Lee was instrumental in making sure the facility was a union shop — which makes it particularly meaningful for the Guild to hold the award ceremony on the East Coast, where Lee has made such an impact.”
Dichter was literally born into the film business. His maternal grandfather was a producer and director of Yiddish films. His father Murray worked for his father-in-law as they made the transition from silent to sound films. Murray joined the Motion Picture Film Editors Guild, IATSE Local 771, as a charter member in the early 1940s. Eventually, he left to open his own studio, “Dichter Sound.”
Many years later, his company merged with Photo-Mag. His father joined IATSE Local 52, the Motion Picture Studio Mechanics, in 1959. Dichter began working at the studio in 1964 and joined Local 52 — which had the re-recording mixing jurisdiction in New York — in 1967, bringing him into the union family. Photo-Mag’s business was primarily a TV commercial mixing studio, and Lee began his career by learning the nuts and bolts of dialogue mixing in which every syllable was essential.
Over the following years, he mixed many socially and politically influential films and TV shows, including The Selling of the Pentagon, Free to Be…You & Me, Harlan County U.S.A., American Dream, The Atomic Cafe, America and Lewis Hine, The Times of Harvey Milk and From Mao to Mozart. Many of these projects went on to win Academy and Emmy Awards.
At Photo-Mag, Dichter mixed Ken Burns’ first film, Brooklyn Bridge, and would go onto mix many of Burns’ additional films, such as The Civil War, Baseball and Jazz, at Sound One, to which he moved when he left Photo-Mag in the early 1980s. There, he met many younger mixers, who were beginning their careers. He was most generous in his mentoring of these mixers; many of them have gone on to very successful careers.
Filmmakers like the Maysles brothers, Alan Pakula, Sidney Lumet, Robert Benton, Robert Altman, the Coen brothers, M. Night Shyamalan, Mike Nichols, Nora Ephron and Woody Allen came to Lee repeatedly to mix their films.
Dichter has won a Daytime Emmy Award for Big Blue Marble (1980) and both an Emmy and a CAS Award for Angels In America (2003). He also won the IFP Gotham Awards’ Below the Line Award for sound in 1996. He is member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the Cinema Audio Society (CAS) and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), as well as being a proud member of the Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE, Local 700, which he joined in 2000, after Local 52 ceded its re-recording jurisdiction in New York to the national Editors Guild.
