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The Buzz: Turning 'Blues' to Oscar gold? Sound engineer from Scott nominated for Mongolian documentary Saturday, March 25, 2000 By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor
HOLLYWOOD -- So how did a Scott native with the unlikely name Lemon DeGeorge end up in an Oscar-nominated documentary?
His long, strange trip sounds like the quest of an adventurer in a fairy tale. From the banks of three rivers, our hero journeyed through a happy valley and then to a city by a bay before making the difficult trek to a distant, exotic land where the natives render songs of the most unusual nature.
Now, the man who had once hoped to be a filmmaker ends up playing a key role in someone else's movie. If you saw "Genghis Blues" during its recent run at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, you saw DeGeorge -- holding a chain saw as he talked about music and then joining a small group of travelers on their way to the remote Asian land of Tuva, located somewhere beyond Outer Mongolia.
In Tuva, singers have perfected a technique called throatsinging that allows them to vocalize several notes simultaneously. One style of throatsinging sounds a little like that chain saw. DeGeorge should know. He's a recording engineer who did the sound on "Genghis Blues," which vies for the Academy Award in tomorrow night's ceremony in Los Angeles. (The show airs at 8:30 p.m. on ABC.)
It all started when Tuvan throatsinger Kongar-ol Ondar did a concert in San Francisco, where DeGeorge lives, and met Paul Pena, a blues singer who had stumbled upon Tuvan music one night on Radio Moscow. The next time Ondar came to town, he wanted to record with Pena and needed to find a studio willing to do it cheaply.
"I had been recording ethnic music in San Francisco for a long time," DeGeorge says. "Just two weeks before, I was in a record store and saw a Smithsonian recording of Tuvan music. ... They recorded at my studio."
Then, Ondar invited Pena to a throatsinging competition in Tuva. DeGeorge was to go as well.
In the meantime, filmmakers Roko and Adrian Belic, two brothers from Chicago, had contacted a group called Friends of Tuva. The Belics had become interested in Tuva after watching a documentary about physicist Richard Feynman, who also was fascinated with Tuva. The Friends of Tuva put them in touch with DeGeorge and Pena.
And that's how DeGeorge wound up in the movie. He had gone to Penn State and then to CalArts, still interested in film. But his equipment was stolen, and when he got the insurance money, instead of buying new film stuff, he bought synthesizers. But the musical gig died, and he moved to San Francisco in 1976 and became a recording engineer.
Oh, and how did Michael DeGeorge become known as Lemon? "It was an old nickname from my grandfather."
Denzel Washington and David Duchovny avoided the press. Minnie Driver got pulled away before she could talk to everyone. Maybe they realized they'd be upstaged by the old-timers who clamored for the opportunity to be interviewed before this week's annual Publicists Guild luncheon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
In addition to a raft of industry executives being honored by the group, the affair also took note of the 75th anniversary of MGM by inviting some of the surviving luminaries from the studio that boasted in its heyday it had "more stars than there are in heaven."
Here was Tony Martin, still looking dapper. There was Kathryn Grayson, holding court. Anne Francis was looking glamorous.
"It's wonderful to see all the alumni," says Margaret O'Brien, the onetime child star. "We all turn out for MGM."
Of the old days, she says, "It was a wonderful time. It was an exciting time. Mr. Mayer was almost like a king. When he walked through to his private room at lunchtime, we'd have to get up. It was sort of like a monarchy."
Another onetime MGM juvenile, Mickey Rooney, still has that youthful gleam in his eye -- although the spring in his step was not so evident on this occasion.
But his wife, Jan, says, "He's an incredible dancer still. He knocks people dead." They do a two-person show featuring many old MGM song classics.
Janet Leigh is keeping busy, too.
"My fourth book is coming out at the end of the year. A picture that I was in ["A Fate Totally Worse Than Death" with Christopher Lloyd] is coming out in the fall. I'm working on a television special based on my autobiography, 'There Really Was a Hollywood.' "
Asked to compare the industry then and now, Leigh says it has changed so much that comparisons are impossible. "There's so many mediums now. Then, there was movies and radio. Then came the advent of television, then cable -- and they need product. ... You don't just focus on motion pictures. It's an arm of another business."
Roy Disney knows. The vice chairman of the studio that bears the family name has seen the empire grow from an animation studio into movies, television and beyond. It owns theme parks, TV networks, sports teams.
"You have to keep your head down a little bit and remember it's the work that's important," he says. "It's really easy to get bedazzled by all of the goings-on ... You're only as good, as they say in this town, as your next movie."
But Hollywood is still a place where dreams come true. It wasn't so long ago that comic D.L. Hughley was a circulation director for the Los Angeles Times, making a good buck. But he wanted to be a stand-up comic. He tried doing both until he passed out on stage one night from exhaustion. So he quit his day job -- his wife "never flinched," he says -- and followed his dream.
Now, he's the star of his own ABC series and appears in Spike Lee's "The Kings of Comedy," which captures on film the show featuring Hughley and other black comics that toured the country (including Pittsburgh) last year.
"I think that it's amazing that I've been doing this so long, and finally I'm in a position where I'm starting to see the fruits of my labors. Out of the last 12 years, I've been on the road six of them. I guess my father was right -- work hard and see how lucky you become."
Normally, Dawn Keezer tries to get filmmakers to come to her. But the director of the Pittsburgh Film Office is going glitzy in Hollywood this weekend. Today, she's attending the Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, which honors independent film. Tomorrow, she's going to the Oscars, courtesy of her pal Cody Cluff, president of the Entertainment Industry Development Corp.
She's being dressed for the occasion by costume designer Gamilla Smith. Keezer will wear a Pamela Dennis gown and diamond jewelry -- "I have to give it all back"-- and Smith has arranged for Keezer to have her hair and makeup done. After all that, nothing else will do but a limousine ride to the Shrine Auditorium.
But maybe we shouldn't be surprised, considering the company she's been keeping of late. At the industry confab ShoWest, she had lunch with Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America. They talked about Film US, the group Keezer heads that is trying to win government incentives for filmmakers to keep production from fleeing to Canada, with its favorable exchange rate and tax breaks.
At the Directors Guild Awards a few weeks ago, she walked in with Francis Ford Coppola. Well, not exactly with him, but at the same time. After the awards, she was schmoozing at a DreamWorks studio party when someone gently bumped into her. They said their "excuse mes," and only later did Keezer realize that it was Steven Spielberg.
Too bad. Maybe she could have convinced him to make his next movie in Pittsburgh.
But Keezer was happy to notice that Tobey Maguire, who made "Wonder Boys" in the Steel City last year, was wearing his Pittsburgh Film Office jacket.
Look for a modernized, more energetic Academy Awards show as Oscar moves into the new millennium -- but not necessarily a shorter one.
Lili Fini Zanuck, who with husband Richard has taken over the staging of the Oscarcast, can't promise the live telecast will come in at 31/2 hours, as she hoped when they took on the project. "But hopefully it will be a faster, quicker show," she said yesterday on the red carpet in front of the Shrine Auditorium.
"It's just really fresh and modern," said choreographer Kenny Ortega. "It will have a tempo and a rhythm and a drive that is very exciting.
"They've incorporated modern techniques into this production that we haven't seen before -- the integration of video combined with theatrical staging and music and all the glamour that Hollywood is about."
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