made this company was to have this gear in the hands of the editors,
so we could compile our stuff ourselves."

Sound
editing was not a craft Lievsay came to directly. Aspirations to being
an architect fell by the wayside in recession-afflicted 1970s New York,
but a friend got him a job as an assistant on a low-budget feature. "I
worked on the movie from the very beginning to the very end, every part
of it," he recalls. "I also worked on the editing, and got a very good
overall feel of what that was all about. We edited at a rental house that
no longer exists, and I worked there for a while doing TV versions of United
Artists films and Saturday Night Live commercial parodies. And I made a
rather shrewd assessment of the possibilities--there was farmore work
for sound editors than there was for picture editors. Picture editors tend
to be a force of one over a long period; sound editors tend to be a force
of a dozen over a short period."

In
the early 80s, Lievsay had the great fortune to hook up with the tyro filmmaking
brothers Joel and Ethan Coen on their first feature, Blood Simple. That
low-budget thriller went on to play at the New York Film Festival, enjoy
a healthy commercial run, and attract the attention of Martin Scorsese,
who hired Lievsay to supervise sound editing on his movie After Hours.
Both Scorsese and the Coens became regular clients, helping the sound editor
to compile credits like GoodFellas, The Age of Innocence, and Casino for
the former, and Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, and Fargo for the latter.
"Those two contacts