“Dense” is a word that's often used to characterize a film’s sound. But when it’s coupled with certain other adjectives, such as “piercing,” “jangling” and “shrill,” that indicates something more unusual. That may be an apt description for the aural setting of American Gangster, director Ridley Scott’s vivid retelling of the tale of Frank Lucas, the African-American hood who challenged the Mafia for dominance in the heroin trade in New York in the 1970s.

New York at that time had a very specific sonic landscape, one this writer is very familiar with. The Chrysler slant-6 and GM 351-cc V-8 made distinct and memorable growls when revved in the alleys between Harlem’s five-story brownstones; the Plymouth patrol cars of the NYPD, recently transitioned from green and white to blue and white, had especially annoying bullet-shaped sirens on the roof; and the cars of the M line that rattled on the elevated tracks from Metropolitan Avenue in Queens to Manhattan’s low-rent shopping center around Union Square were antiques even then, with their squealing on the curves heard blocks away.

“That’s what I’d call the gritty sound elements that went into this movie,” says Mike Minkler, half of the mixing team, along with Bob Beemer, that Scott depended upon for other sonic blockbusters like Gladiator and Black Hawk Down. “That’s what this movie is made of.” Sound effects editor Per Halberg reached into the Todd-AO sound effects vaults to retrieve clips from the era. That was the first of several challenges for the Gangster crew. “Those sound effects are very authentic-they’re what the city actually sounded like then,” says Minkler. However, the sound of a contemporary film has to meet the expectations of an audience that takes 5.1 for granted. “You have the low frequencies in some of the sounds, like subway cars, but there’s also some funky stuff in there,” says Minkler. “You have to enhance the basic sound effect.”

Beemer worked with the SFX collages that Halberg presented: packages of related sounds from various perspectives and distances. “For instance, an el train would have sound recorded from directly underneath, from 20 yards away, [from] 100 yards away, and so on,” Beemer explains. “We had lots of collages that were construction sounds, street sounds, etc. I’d change the relationship of the sounds that made up the collages depending upon what was on the screen. Also, you can subtly change the volume of certain elements during a conversation to increase the anxiety level, for instance, or to follow the ebb and flow of the conversation.”

Minkler and Beemer got a lot of grit from the production audio, as well. “They did not do a lot of rehearsing on location” in New York and Thailand, says Minkler. “Ridley wanted spontaneity, so we would get a lot of incidental sound along with the dialog tracks. We incorporated that into the overall sound of the picture.”

They also added plenty of incidental sound effects. A typical scene like the one in which Lucas (Denzel Washington) nonchalantly shoots a rival on a Harlem street then returns to finish his breakfast in a coffee shop, had about 25 tracks of traffic and street noises and another 30 tracks of crowd sounds. That gunshot is surrounded by dozens of individual sound effects (Minkler is philosophically disdainful of creating SFX stems, preferring to get all the raw elements to shape the mix with) as well as a murky, moody score by Hans Zimmer acolyte Marc Streitenfeld. But it retains its power, thanks to Minkler and Beamer’s adroit layering of sound elements.

“It was shot on a Harlem street with hundreds of cars and trucks and people going by,” Minkler explains. “The audience knows something is going to happen but not what, exactly. That’s the trick-keep the anticipation up without telegraphing the outcome.” Lucas suddenly pulls a gun out, points and shoots. Screams are heard. The ambient sound is pulled back swiftly and just for the briefest moment on the heels of the shot, letting the act sink in and giving Washington space to utter the film’s terse tag line (“20 percent”). The sound then steadily rises behind the scene to its previous level as the streets of Harlem go back about their business.

“The whole time the score is playing a rhythmic pulse to create the tension, while the everyday nature of the crowd and street noises kind of lull you into thinking it’s just another day,” Minkler says. Adds Beemer, “And by the time [Lucas] gets back to his breakfast, it is again.”

Another scene has antagonist Russell Crowe, the police officer hunting Lucas, leading a brigade of cops up the stairs of a Harlem tenement building. The scene demands that the police movements be quiet but apparent and that the cue sounds that indicate what they’re eluding-guard rooms with loud voices, television sets blaring “Sesame Street, a ghetto blaster radio shrieking, a baby crying-be obvious, all while the score bubbles underneath. “You need to balance elements like a noisy TV set and someone whispering into a [police] radio at the same time,” says Minkler. “It’s all about balance and processing correctly.”

One way to achieve that is to subtractively use the surrounds. “The noise effects are already in all of the speakers ‘ LCR and the surrounds,” says Beemer. “When someone whispers into a radio, I gently take the sounds out of the center channel. It focuses the audience on the person speaking but doesn’t diminish the disturbing sense of danger around them. And as a result, you don’t have to give in to the temptation to raise the volume of the dialog above the ambient sound level. When you do that, it makes it look forced and false. Sometimes it’s OK to let the dialog get a little lost in the surrounding ambience. As long as the audience can hear a key word or two, you’re better able to keep the anxiety level high using the offstage sounds.”

Minkler and Beemer were working on a Euphonix System 5000 console at Todd-AO West. The console’s automation was critical to refining such moves after numerous rehearsals. Minkler relies on the console’s EQ to cut frequencies as often as to add them, looking to create spaces in the music to set dialog or to get an effect out of the way of the score when it’s being used to lead a scene’s emotion. “Figure out which element is the real ‘voice’ of the scene and work around that,” he says. Minkler prefers to use digital hardware processors, such as the TC Electronic TC6000 and Lexicon 960. “I don’t think plug-ins have yet reached the point where they’re as good as the original processor,” he states. In fact, Minkler finds that some of the 1970’s solid-state analog processors-the transistor-based forerunners of DSP-have a certain “coldness” to them that restricts the sound in a way that can define a period piece, sonically speaking. “On Bobby [Emilio Estevez’s 2006 biopic about Robert Kennedy that Minkler mixed] I tried to use some analog processors for that same reason: they subtly convey the sound of the period.”
American Gangster‘s audio doesn’t derive its strength from volume but from its density, from a plethora of sound effects woven around the dialog. “It’s about balance,” says Minkler. “It always is.”