[upbeat music]
- [Band leader] You're about to have your best show of 2012.
All it takes is you doing what you do.
Close your potential.
Can you feel it?
- [group] Yes, Sir! - [Band leader] I feel it, too.
The moment you enter that tunnel and step out there,
fear exits the body.
You'll be Madison Scouts for real.
I'm very proud of all of you.
[rally shouting]
[marching]
- [Man] Go to war guys.
? ?
- Hi, welcome to Director's Cut .
I'm Pete Schwaba and we just saw a clip from
Scouts Honor: Inside a Marching Brotherhood ,
a documentary about the historic Madison-based
drum and bugle corps.
I'm joined today by the film's director, Mac Smith.
Mac, welcome to the Director's Cut .
- Thanks so much for having me, Pete.
- Great to have you here.
I love that I have a guy named Mac Smith on the show.
It's just a great name, if that is your real name.
So tell us a little bit about--
Obviously you have a connection to
the drum and bugle corps, the Scouts.
Tell us about your connection to this group.
- Yeah, I marched in the Madison Scouts in 1995.
I was 21 years old and this was my last year
of age eligibility, so I was a rookie and an age-out
at the same time so I just got the one year to do it
and it was definitely one of the best things
and one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.
- Yeah, a little bit of age-ism going on there with
the Scouts, they're done at 21, right, that's the--
- It comes down to one of the rules that the league,
Drum Corps International set up.
You think of drum corps is like football teams
and they have the NFL that kind of overseas everybody,
DCI, is sort of the umbrella organization
of these drum corps and there are about
two or three dozen in existence.
- Great.
I saw in your bio, it said that you saw the film
Star Wars in 1977 and it changed your life.
I have to ask you about that.
How did it change your life?
- I was a wee, wee, wee lad, and
my parents took me to see that
and I was just blown away.
You know, my jaw was on the floor, and I decided,
I don't know if it was that initial experience
or seeing it again and again in the theater
every time it re-released, but at some point,
I sort of pointed at the screens and,
"I wanna do that."
I didn't know exactly what that meant,
but I know I wanted to be involved in with movies.
- You didn't know if you wanted to act or direct
or do sound like you do now, or,
but it just had that kind of effect on you.
- Definitely, yeah. - That's awesome.
- Rearranged my chromosomes.
[laughs]
- Star Wars chromosome.
Let's take a look at another clip from Scouts Honor .
[marching band music]
[applause]
- It's kinda interesting trying to explain
to someone who's never heard of it.
- A marching band without the woodwinds.
- It's like marching band on steroids.
- I basically say, "We're the NFL of marching band."
- Just a higher degree and caliber of musicianship.
- Making music, marching.
- So you guys sleep in hotels, right?
And it's like, "No, we sleep on gym floors."
- Being around with friends working really hard.
- Oh, that's really cool, so you can probably
get paid a lot of money, right?
Immediately you're just like, "No, I pay money to do it."
- You get to fly places, right?
It's like, "We get on tour buses."
- Drum Corps is basically, as I describe it to people,
it's like professional marching band.
It's a marching band show just like
a high school marching band competes.
You know, we go and we compete and we learn a show.
The difference is we spend two and a half months
on the road doing it every single day
where as a quote-unquote normal marching band
may do a couple, three rehearsals a week
and so we get things to a much, much, much higher level
than a high school or a college could.
- Mac, when we spoke earlier, you talked about the sound
and I kind of equated that--
I love when you watch a TV commercial, like,
look at this picture on this TV, you gotta buy this TV,
and you're looking through your TV going,
"Oh, yeah, that's great."
[laughing]
How do you capture sound, like this, it's all about sound
with drum and bugle corps, so you're a sound guy
and you talked about what a challenge that was.
So tell us about that.
- It's a big-time challenge if you think of
an ensemble that has 150 members.
- With an indie budget.
- True. - Right.
- 150 members in this group: brass, percussion,
color guard, and they're on a stage that's
100 yards wide and they're not standing still.
In that last clip, they were doing a standstill performance,
but for the most part, they're doing a show
where they're moving at high velocity
from one end to the other and back and forth.
So that's really difficult to capture sonically.
You see these performances in person
and it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up
'cause it's this wall of sound with extreme dynamics.
You know, symphony orchestra plays very quietly
and very loudly, very dynamic,
so my co-producer, John JT Torrijos,
he actually works with me at Skywalker Sound.
He pulled me aside.
This was probably 2009 into a small home theater room
and said, "I just want to play this for you."
He knew my drum corps background and he played
a performance that he recorded in Northern California
of the Blue Devils and Santa Clara Vanguard,
which are competing groups of Madison Scouts
and I was blown away by the clarity
and how well he captured sonically these performances
and I was like, "How'd you do it?"
He told me and so I talked to Tom, who is my co-director
on this film, and told him that I wish more people
could hear the clarity of these kinds of recordings
'cause the typical fan just kind of goes,
"Oh, it never sounds like it does live,"
but this is the closest I'd ever heard,
so JT, in a large part, was an inspiration to make the film
'cause we decided that's gotta be a key part
of making the film is we wanna capture and reproduce
these wonderful, amazing wall-of-sound performances.
- Yeah, you told me earlier that it had never
been captured like that before, is that true?
- It's true, yeah.
I mean, DCI, the league, does their own recordings
and they do a good job, but this was sort of like
one step closer, and it really comes down to
the mic placement and then also in post-production
we did a lot of work mixing the different channels
and really trying to make it sounds like it sounds like
when you're there sitting right in the middle
on the 50-yard line.
- It's funny because sound is--
People don't realize how important it is.
Crummy sound, and I've seen a lot of indie films,
if the sound is not there, it just becomes like noise
and a racket, but if you have a great,
like my sister Julie works for Dolby.
In their screening room, I saw a YouTube concert.
You could blare it and it's not noise.
It's beautiful.
- Right.
- It is so important and you did a great job.
I'm glad you said that because that wasn't
on my list of questions.
Let me ask you something about these guys
that are in the Scouts.
What does this lead to typically for them?
Do they go on to careers in music typically
or is it just kind of a fun hobby for a while?
They're very talented musicians.
- It's definitely changed quite a bit since when I marched.
When I marched, it was, you didn't have to be
a superior musician.
You still had to audition and make the cut,
but they trained you a lot on the go and on the field.
Nowadays, the sort of the bar has been raised.
There's such a high caliber that you
have to be a really, really good musician.
So a lot of the people that go into drum corps
are going towards a career in music:
to be a music teacher or something of that nature
and they see it as sort of like a whole summer-long clinic
to work with some of the best music educators
and really up their game.
- They're probably not in as good a shape
as they were when they marched with these guys.
I couldn't believe how hard they worked.
- Oh, yes, the physicality is insane.
- And to be able to play while you're doing it is crazy.
- Well, and they are typically rehearsing
eight, nine hours a day in the hot sun.
- Wow.
Let's take another look at a clip from Scouts Honor .
- Madison Scouts were founded in 1938,
which were a group of business men in the Madison area
had seen the Racine Scouts perform and were inspired
to start a similar group in the Madison area.
Originally stemmed from a Boy Scout troop, hence the name,
and they continued connection to this day
to the Boy Scouts of America.
It's been through a long 70-plus
year history to get to where we are today.
- In the early days, in the '40s,
it was primarily a parade corps
and as the activity evolved into the '50s,
that's kind of when the more traditional field show
started being developed.
- They're in this league called DCI
and it's kinda like a marching league,
kinda like a basketball, like a conference and they go,
"Oh, okay, so you have other players in that league."
I'm like, "Yes, there's about
"23 of us in the same division."
- A ton of groups who are world-class musicians,
the cream of the crop, and they are,
they are fighting for one title.
- We do it exactly how we want it to do every day.
We just get better for this whole summer of three months
until it's perfect on Finals.
[corps brass music]
- How do you even begin to judge something like that.
You got 150 guys and sometimes they put
the standings, and it's percentage points
and I mean, how do the judges even do that?
- It's a really complicated process and there are a lot
of people who put a lot of credence into the judging process
and some that just go for the entertainment factor
'cause they're judging music execution,
they're judging marching, they're judging innovation,
all kinds of little finite details.
- They're has to be like a wow factor there, though, right?
I mean-- - Yeah.
- You miss a step, but you're blowing people away, right?
I mean, how-- It just seems impossible.
- It's tough, but you know, in our American society,
people love competition, so.
If you took the competition nature out of it, you know,
who knows if it would still be what it is.
- Right, yeah, good point.
- You said these guys, they don't make money for doing this?
- Oh, no, not at all.
- Does it cost the families money?
- It does. - To have them in this?
Wow.
- And people think you're crazy.
"What, you're gonna pay $3,000 to spend the whole summer
going off and doing marching band," in essence,
but there're a couple guys that told me, like their friends
are huge soccer players,
soccer stars in their high school or whatever
and they said, "Well, would you spend $2,000 to play soccer
every day, all day, with the best teachers?"
They're like, "Oh, yeah, of course."
It's kinda like that.
So they're helping fund the transportation
and the food and uniforms and costs like that.
- I guess I equate it to all these guys
are tremendous musicians.
Not everybody on a soccer team is a great soccer player.
You've got your couple guys, your go-to guys,
but then, so, that just blew me away, but I guess
it's something that probably looks great on a resume
and they do it, it's worth it, the money they spend?
- Yeah, and personally for me, like I wasn't gonna go
into a music career, but it pushed me past
what I thought I could achieve physically and mentally,
like, far surpassed what I thought I could accomplish,
and then I took sort of what I learned in the drum corps
and I was like, "Wow, if I could harness that
"and put it towards anything, I could maybe be unstoppable."
- Wow, how do you, I mean, there's a point in the movie
where you say, or some of the characters, or subjects,
says what the drum and bugle corps stands for.
What does it stand for to you, other members as well?
- The Madison Scouts in particular?
- Yeah.
- Brotherhood, it's all about these guys
and it doesn't matter if you marched in
the Scouts of 1952 or 2017, everybody are brothers.
They totally have your back when it comes to anything.
And then I've seen it time and time again
where somebody has some emergency in their life,
some huge medical bills or they're down on their luck
or looking for a job, the brotherhood build, you know,
swarms up and helps take care of each other.
And when times are good, when times are bad, all that stuff,
they're just incredibly supportive.
It's really about doing the right thing
'cause it's the right thing to do.
- So it's kind of like, I maybe compare it to
being on a movie set with people you bond with
really quickly, you all have a goal.
- Oh, definitely.
- Kind of the same type of thing.
- And also like a fraternity to some degree.
- Talk a little bit about getting the music rights.
You have, like you said, "Celebration" is in there.
"You'll Never Walk Alone,"
these have gotta be expensive songs.
How do you circumvent that whole thing or did you?
- It's funny, it just, we have--
- Let the cat out of the bag. - No, no.
We had to get all the music rights taken care of,
but we went into this knowing it was gonna be
a music documentary, but I think we're also a little
naive of the process of how hard it was gonna be.
Initially, we tried to just approach
the music publishers ourselves to say,
"Hey, we're a tiny filmmakers, first-time filmmakers."
- How'd that work out for ya? - Give us a break.
- [laughing] They don't really care, do they?
- No, not great, so we ended up hiring a music supervisor
out of Los Angeles, and he was able to do all the legwork
for us, and figure out a deal where everybody,
all the publishers were getting paid the same price,
but we were told no on a couple of pieces.
And it's not like the Scouts had a huge repertoire
in 2012 when we shot the film, so we were very limited
to just a handful of songs, so if more of the publishers
had told us no, we would have been in trouble
as far as having a finished film.
- Right, good answer.
- Let's take another look at a clip from Scout Honor .
- Hunter's an interesting young man.
When he first showed up, he was 15 years old.
He was green.
He was definitely a child and I was apprehensive about
taking him into the horn line.
He kept showing up and he kept getting better.
You know, at some point when someone keeps
showing improvement and they keep coming
to the rehearsals and every camp, you have to take them.
- We were into rehearsal in the gym.
A lot of the people who were getting contracts
had already been contracted, and Hunter was
getting a little bit anxious about that
and we could see it in his face, and then Dan walks in,
and he taps Hunter on the shoulder and we're going,
"Hey, this is gonna happen.
"We think this is gonna happen."
And he walks out and then he comes back in
with a sheet of paper. [laughs]
"Hey, what is that?"
He goes, "I got a contract, I got a contract."
What's that? - Contract.
- For what?
"I gotta go, I gotta go," and he runs back
into the formation."
[speaking amongst themselves]
What a proud moment,
very proud.
- That's probably my favorite part of the whole movie
right there, that's great.
How did you pick, you have Brandon, Jo, and Hunter,
are your main three subjects.
How did you decide on them?
Did you shoot a lot of the kids and just pick
the ones that were the most interesting, like,
or did you, from the get go, know these are
the three stories we want to follow?
- Well, we went out on the road for what
we like to call a test shoot in 2011.
We were with the Scouts for eight days through probably
the hottest portion of the summer through the South
in late July and we were--
My main job was, first off, is the survival thing
that we can actually make movie.
We're shooting a bunch of test footage
and then I was also meeting as many members as I could,
ones that were probably coming back the next year,
weren't aging out or gonna be done with the corps
and try to find out do you have unique stories.
Every person in the corps has a unique story
and something interesting, but Brandon and Jo,
we both met during that test shoot.
I don't wanna give too much away of the film,
but Jo has something that's sort of
really life-changing happen to him shortly before
we were on the test shoot, and he came forward
and told us what that was and he decided right then
that he was willing to tell the story on camera.
So we really settled on Jo.
We knew Brandon was good on camera, well-spoken,
you know had that sort of sideways baseball cap,
which made him visually sort of stand out.
And then Hunter, we didn't end up meeting
until partway through the winter camps the following season.
Actually met his parents first and just really
wonderful, charming family, and he ended up being
the youngest member of all 150 in the corps,
so he's a rookie, a lot of people who are watching
this movie for the first time who don't know
about drum corps feel like rookies, so they end up
sort of going along with Hunter on his journey,
and really learning about everything through his eyes.
So we put all of our eggs in the basket of those three guys.
We didn't end up shooting additional people,
so it was a big risk, but we didn't have the budget
to have tons of crew members at different points
filming all different members.
- That's a great segue to budget because you mention
your work at Skywalker Studios.
You worked on Toy Story Three, some really huge movies.
I've written films for studios and you just kinda
hand it in and they pay and it's great.
I've also made an indie.
To me, making my own film and being so passionate about it,
involved in it is much more fulfilling.
What about you?
You've got a great track record, an incredible resume,
and then you do this passion project.
Talk about the differences and the challenges
of each and what you prefer.
Ah, it's,
it's, ah...
[laughing]
- They are totally different, but there're a lot
of things that I learned from working in sound
that I definitely, working on a team and collaborating
and, that I put towards this.
As far as budgetary, it was very hard
to figure out how we're gonna make this movie.
Luckily, it's about a subject that we're
closely involved with, especially the Madison Scouts,
'cause we came from this corps.
Tom and I both marched in the Scouts in the '90s
and so we knew we had this family of corps brothers there
and sort of pitched the idea to them through
the alumni page on Facebook and said, "Hey, you know,
"we're doing this," so we started crowd funding online
and were able to sort of get money to start with.
We had a very ambitious goal and we didn't reach it
initially, but we just kept chipping away
and just trying to build up enough money
to go on each trip that we needed to go on
to shoot the film, but we weren't on tour
all summer with the Scouts.
I was still trying to work at home
and pay the bills, and
kids at home, and all that stuff,
so it was definitely a big balancing act
trying to make the two work.
Documentary filmmaking is not something
you go into to become rich.
- [laughing] Right.
Let's take another look at a clip from Scouts Honor .
- Brandon, he's got a really good vibe on and off the field.
He knows how to get people pumped up.
- I think Brandon is a good influence on the line overall.
I mean, he took what he's learned from the past two years
of the Madison Scouts and applied himself
in a really strong manner this year,
and it allowed a group of overall inexperienced guys
to come together well and play at a very, very high level.
- Um.
Phew, I'm sorry.
[laughing]
- Don't be totally--
- No, you don't want me to.
I think they, I...
You don't want me to be totally honest.
[laughing]
On the most serious note, you don't, I'm sorry.
It's just, I...
Everybody does. - Yeah.
I'm sorry. Everybody has conflicts.
Actually, what they said was not true at all.
I'm sorry, I don't, I'm right next to 'em, I see--
- Yeah, me, too. [laughing]
- It's just seems like he goes through the motions
and it kinda tears us apart.
- [James] Release, come on man!
[metronome ticking] [drumming]
- When you don't affiliate him with snare drum
or drum corps, he's a great person.
He really does care for you,
but in the activity when we're out on the field,
it's really driven by the staff.
[drumming]
The staff here is phenomenal.
Without them, I don't think we'd be anywhere.
Like the two weeks that we didn't have a snare tech,
we actually kinda just fought a lot of the times.
We would argue and Brandon would just say,
"Quiet," and just kinda let it settle and that's dangerous
because you don't know what an argument can lead to.
[drumming]
- I love those tan lines, by the way.
It was like, "What's going on with these guys,"
and I saw the, "Oh, the equipment is there
and that's why, okay."
Thought it was some sort of
brotherhood tan line or something.
Talk a little bit about what's going on there.
It sounds like they're not happy with Brandon,
but then they respect him and the backhanded compliment,
what's the deal there?
- It was something that definitely threw me off.
It happened--
You must've loved that kind of to get--
- Well, it was, yeah, yes and no.
- Oh.
- It was one of those things that I wasn't expecting
'cause we weren't on tour all summer with them
that kind of took me off guard.
It was kind of late in the season.
I was pulling these guys aside
and expect them to not go in this direction
'cause I hadn't been seeing the conflict
that was happening behind the scenes
and it was something that initially that I wasn't
gonna put in the film, but when I was starting
to put it together in post-production
in the editing room, decided their needed to be some grit,
some conflict. - Yeah.
- And I've also, people in the activity have told me
this scene represents just how hard the activity is,
not just physically, but you're living with these people
24 hours a day, seven days a week all summer
and tempers do flare, especially with a drum line
'cause you think about it, if you're a horn player,
if you don't play one note, the audience isn't gonna notice,
but with a drum line, they all have to have their sticks
in unison and you can't bow out for a second
or have a slip up or just a brain fart.
You have to really be on your game at all times
and Brandon, a huge responsibility
being in the role of center snare
'cause I was telling one of the crew members earlier,
the drum major actually looks at the center snare's feet
and broadcasts that tempo to the whole drum corps.
- Yeah, I can't even imagine.
If I was on a bus all summer with a bunch of sweaty dudes,
I think I'd be pretty, a little ornery myself.
[laughing]
So you have some great shots in here.
We have just like a minute left, but talk about,
did you use a lot of handheld, 'cause you're kind of
weaving and I thought, he has to have been in the Scouts
because how do you know where to go, like, talk about
your camera work and getting the shots you got.
- Well, I did some of the camera work,
but I lucked out that there were a couple of guys
that I met along the way who marched drum corps
in the past who found out I was making the film
and jumped at the chance to be on our crew.
- Nice.
- One of those guys, his name's Nathan Haugaard,
and he brought along a glide cam,
and he was a tenor drum player in the Seattle Cascades
and he was so excited and he would kind of learn
the drill and where the pockets were
and during some of the rehearsals he would get in there
and kind of weave in and out of the members
while they were marching and really
gave us some phenomenal footage.
- I figured you had to have known a little bit
what the choreography was and where they were going,
but it's just a great job on the movie, Mac,
and thanks so much for being here today.
- Thank you. - Great to meet ya.
- Appreciate it. - Thanks for coming.
And thank you for watching Director's Cut .
For more information on Scouts Honor ,
please go to WPT.org and click on Director's Cut .
While you're there, send us an email
or find out how to submit a film.
Also, don't forget to like WPT on Facebook
or follow us on Twitter.
I'm Pete Schwaba, and I have no tan lines
or any tan to speak of for that matter.
We'll see you next time on Director's Cut .
[upbeat music]
- [Brandon] After having been a part of this corps
for a while, after you start to realize the bond
that we all share, the fact that it really is a brotherhood,
you start to see some other aspects of that play.
I mean, brothers fight,
but brothers make up at the same time.
Brothers overcome things together
and in the end, brothers prevail.
[marching music]