Dan Wallin, Oscar-Nominated and Emmy-Winning Music Mixer, Dies at 97

Jon Burlingame

Dan Wallin, the music scoring engineer who recorded such classic film scores as “Spartacus,” “Bullitt,” “The Wild Bunch” and “Out of Africa,” died early Wednesday in Hawaii. He was 97.

Twice Oscar-nominated for best sound (1970’s “Woodstock” and 1976’s “A Star Is Born”), he won a 2009 Emmy for sound mixing on the Academy Awards telecast and received two additional Emmy nominations in the sound mixing category (1992’s “Citizen Cohn,” 1996’s “Gotti”).

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But it was Wallin’s skill behind the console, recording and mixing musical scores for movies and TV, that won him legions of fans among nearly all of Hollywood’s top composers and ensured steady employment for more than half a century.

He recorded the music for an estimated 500 films, including those for “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Cool Hand Luke” and “Finian’s Rainbow” in the 1960s; “The Way We Were,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Nashville,” “King Kong” and “Saturday Night Fever” in the 1970s; “Somewhere in Time,” “The Right Stuff” and “Prizzi’s Honor” in the 1980s; “The Fugitive,” “Waiting to Exhale” and “The Insider” in the 1990s; and “Far From Heaven,” “Seabiscuit” and “Rocky Balboa” in the 2000s.

His television credits were equally stellar, including multiple Emmy winners “Roots,” “Eleanor and Franklin,” “The Day After,” “Lonesome Dove” and “Lost.”

Composer Michael Giacchino, who often hired Wallin to record his music (including “The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille,” and “Up”), told Variety: “Danny came up when being an engineer really meant you were an engineer. He could build anything and also understood why and how it all worked.

“In working with him, you’d think he’d be most valuable in teaching you about recording, but in getting to work with him for so many years, what he taught me most was about the orchestra itself: How to properly orchestrate for any size group, what the old masters that he had been brought up with did to solve certain problems.

“He’d lean over and say ‘have the first violin go up an octave over the rest of the section’—and after doing it, it suddenly sounded like the scores I grew up listening to. Lessons from the past!

“Danny delivered a constant stream of small lessons that continually raised my game and made me better at what I did. He was a genius and an endless fountain of knowledge from a period of Hollywood that is long gone. I’ll forever miss him and be grateful for the time I spent with him.”

Born March 13, 1927 in Los Angeles, Wallin grew up in a Van Nuys orphanage, learned to play drums, and later served as a Navy aviation radio operator during World War II. After the war, he worked in live radio, handling big-band remotes from popular L.A. venues for CBS, and then moved to television, working at KTLA in the 1950s.

Wallin joined Warner Bros. in 1965 and became the studio’s in-house music engineer, choosing and placing microphones—often dozens of them, capturing the sound of individual musicians and then balancing the sound of 70 or 80 of them at million-dollar mixing boards — for such composers as Alex North, Lalo Schifrin, John Barry, Bill Conti, David Shire, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, Henry Mancini and John Williams.

He spent 18 years at Warner Bros., but also worked on scoring stages at Paramount, Sony, Todd-AO and the Record Plant. He even recorded the gunshots for Sam Peckinpah’s Westerns, including “The Wild Bunch” and “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.”

He once explained his recording philosophy to Film Score Monthly: “Most people use microphones for the first chairs [of each section]. I go the opposite way: I mic the sections, and then I fill in with the room [sound]. I think a scoring mixer should be able to produce all the sounds, not just an orchestra scoring sound.”

He and his wife, Gay Goodwin Wallin, who survives, retired to Kauai in 2013.

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