The decision was sound-but it wasn’t safe and sound.
Five years ago, Brian Basilico of Wheaton decided to quit a lucrative job with a major corporation to open his own sound production studio in Lombard.
Sound Decisions, Basilico said, opened on “a whim and a prayer,” financed by the sale of his home. “It was one of those things when you just know it’s the right time,” he said. “I figured it’s either going to work or it’s not going to work.”
Now that his sound studio has borne a second corporation, Sound Publications, and is about to publish a not previously published book-on-tape done in a radio play style, Basilico can safely say it worked.
Both Sound Decisions, a service-based company that produces music and sound effects and audio tapes for other companies, and Sound Productions, Basilico’s product-based company that creates instructional and music tapes, operate from his two-leveled workspace in Epic Office Park in Lombard. He opened the offices four years ago, having outgrown the basement space he had been operating from.
Upstairs, his offices are surrounded by piles of tapes and taping equipment, while the lower level houses a complete sound studio and computerized sound rooms. Basilico has two full-time employees, at least two interns, a national distributor and sales that doubled in number after its first year of operation; the first quarter of this year, the business’ income was half of what it had been during all of 1993. Basilico won’t give any figures but suggests his success can be measured by plans to become a homeowner again soon and that he has advanced from driving his wife’s beater to buying a new car.
“I put in 90 hours a week,” Basilico estimated. “I start when my dog wakes me up at 5:30 in the morning, and after dinner I’m often doing laundry, watching TV and working on my laptop (computer). I literally sleep and dream business sometimes. That’s my hardest thing, letting it go. Ask my wife. As the business grows, the only resource I’m short on is time.”
Basilico is used to undertaking several enterprises at one time; he married Cheryl and became stepfather to then-4-year-old Alex in June 1990, the same month he moved Sound Decisions to the office center.
“It was great,” Basilico recalled. “The employees came in with hammers, and we built the studio. We had a lot of fun. Basically, everybody worked for me for free to get the ball rolling; they had an immense amount of faith. The people are really the backbone of the company.”
Now Basilico is embarking on a project that calls for equal amounts of faith from the people involved with it: putting an unpublished novel, “Only the Young Die Good,” on tape, using a cast of local readers to re-create the dialogue of the book. Cast members will be paid $1 each, basically donating their time out of a love for the project and in hopes that its success will lead to paying roles later on.
The book project started after two Villa Park free-lance writers, Mary Breslin and Luann Grosscup, who have written articles for Tempo DuPage, created an instructional tape for free-lancers through Sound Publications.
One day shortly afterward, Grosscup was painting a dresser when she was struck by an inspiration: Why not put an original book on tape?
“Mary loved the idea,” Grosscup recalled, “so we threw it out to Brian, and he got really excited about it. We talked about what unique angle we could come up with. Why buy a tape of an unknown author when you could buy one by Tom Clancy or Stephen King? That’s when we decided to resurrect the old art form of the radio play (for tape).”
Most books on tape are read by a single narrator. “Doing it as a radio play,” Basilico said, “is a whole new way of approaching the audio book market, which is really a booming industry.”
The three struck a deal: Breslin and Grosscup would act as agents to find the project, and Basilico would produce the tape. There would be few overhead expenses, and profits could be split three ways among the novelist, the agents, and the producer.
Breslin and Grosscup put an ad in a national publication soliciting a novel. “We had submissions from all over the country,” Grosscup said. Of the nearly 100 manuscripts received, only one seemed perfect: a detective novel written by David Baurac of Downers Grove.
“David’s book really lent itself to tape,” Grosscup said. “For one thing, it’s written in first person, and his dialogue was perfect. It was also set in Chicago, which I thought gave us more promotion locally.”
For Baurac, the project is bringing to life a novel that had reached the resting place of so many unpublished books: the writer’s desk drawer.
“I finished it in ’87 and had tried to sell it upwards of a dozen times,” said Baurac, who is also director of public information for Argonne National Laboratory. “I last sent it out over a year ago, so it was just sitting. My sense of the situation out there is that there are a lot of people writing good novels, and the competition is stiff. I wrote a hard-boiled detective thriller where the hero was male. Today, if you have a hard-boiled detective, they want her to be a female. Female detectives are hot.”
Ned Cassidy, however, is a traditional male detective, the kind of guy who wakes up with a .45 automatic pressed against his nose with his partner lying dead next to him.
“The elements,” Baurac outlined, “are revenge, mass murder, a nymphomaniac, the federal witness protection program, a child custody suit and drugs. It’s set in the Chicago area and Door County, Wis. Some of the suburbs are named, like Burr Ridge and Willowbrook.”
Ultimately, Baurac hopes he can establish himself with this story and pick up a print publisher. “It’s kind of a lark, something that fell out of the sky,” he said. “I helped out with auditions, and it was interesting to hear strangers read my words, and I have to say I kind of liked it.”
Those auditions brought 30 people to Sound Publications’ studio to try for a role; 17 got parts. Many heard about the auditions through community theater groups that Breslin and Grosscup had contacted, and several, like Andy Hanahan of Glendale Heights, came because they heard about it through a friend. To his great surprise, Hanahan, a railroad inspector in real life, won a more dramatic fictional life as Ned Cassidy, P.I.
“It was a fluke that I walked into it,” Hanahan recalled. “I was at a 25th grade school reunion and met a classmate who was friends with Mary Breslin, and she told me about the auditions.”
The classmate didn’t try out, but Hanahan, who had once hoped to go into radio broadcast as a career, did. “I was as surprised as anyone that I got the lead role,” he said. “I’ll be 40 this summer, so it’s a nice little midlife shakeup.”
Hanahan’s role as narrator and main character is extensive and will require much time in the studio, but he’s having no second thoughts about his commitment.
“It seems like they’re going to have a very good time doing it,” he explained. “Brian seems like a lot of fun to work with. We connected almost immediately.”
John Pecak of Lisle would agree; he has worked for Basilico from the beginning. “It’s been the best job I’ve ever had,” he said. “I get a good feeling working with the people I’m working with, so I don’t come in to work with a bad feeling. That boosts my abilities in the job I do, with the people I’m around.”
Pecak is an audio editor, often working with a narrator who records a script in the studio. Pecak then loads raw narration into his computer system, editing out extraneous sound and pauses and adding music and sound effects into the final product.
Bruce Dickert of Westmont met Basilico when he went to repair a copying machine at AT&T, where Basilico was head producer in the video production department. When Basilico decided to open Sound Decisions, Dickert left what he called a “stable, secure position” and “jumped into the deep end.”
“I took my chances, and I never wondered if it was the right decision,” Dickert said, “because I jumped into what I’ve always wanted to do.”
Dickert, who works as audio engineer, editor and technician, hasn’t regretted his choice and has nothing but praise for his boss. “Brian gives us all the tools we need,” he said, “and then pretty much leaves us to do the job. John (Pecak) and I both think he has complete faith in us, and we try to not make him think otherwise.”
Those tools are a bit more sophisticated than the ones Basilico started with, the ones that produced enough sound to crack the ceiling in his parents’ home when he was a student at Wheaton North High School.
“I worked sound for Swing Choir, and I ended up buying a lot of audio equipment that I’d cart around with me during the shows,” he recalled. “Then I started a studio in my parents’ basement, which they were crazy enough to let me do. They were really tolerant, although they had their days when I’d be going to 11 p.m., and they’d be trying to get to sleep.”
Basilico still uses some of that equipment but estimates that his sound investment is nearing a half million dollars as he has rolled his profits back into the company. He believes that his success in a highly risky field is partly a result of careful investments and sound business decisions.
“There are so many people who want to get into this industry,” Basilico said. “They see the glamor and want to be the next to produce a Dire Straits record. But an investment in equipment is very expensive. I wanted to follow a path that hadn’t been taken before. I thought we could be more streamlined and cost effective.”
While working at AT&T, Basilico said, “if I had an extra $100, I spent it on equipment.” He saved money by focusing on equipment that is geared toward industrial and corporate production rather than on music production. “We’re not slaves to the equipment,” he said, “but my customers feel that the quality is excellent.”
Sherry Rubin, director of marketing for Linden Oaks Hospital in Naperville, has no argument with that. Rubin has used Sound Decisions for production of three different community service tapes-on parenting, self-esteem and stress.
“Brian provides very good service,” Rubin attested, “and he makes it easy to complete complicated projects. If I say it’s kind of dry, he’ll write music. He’s very creative, very accommodating and very efficient. I’ve recommended him to a lot of other people.”
He has also recorded or produced training tapes for such corporations as Avon, Eckrich, Northern Illinois Gas, Sears, Prudential Insurance and Motorola. His computer system offers a full range of computer music scoring, and he has also recorded radio commercials and digital telephone patching-the recorded voice that goes on telephone systems. “The key to making this business work,” he said, “is diversity.”
With that in mind, he and Cheryl produced their own tape packet a few years ago, “Caring for a Living,” a guide to home day care that includes text written by Cheryl, who spent three months gathering information from national day-care organizations; legal, licensing and medical forms; financial and scheduling worksheets; and four audio cassettes.
At about the same time, he began producing music tapes for a well-known local children’s performer, Bill Hooper, a venture that has netted more than 1,000 tape sales; tapes are distributed through local bookstores, through Basilico’s company, at Hooper’s performances and in Target stores through Valley Record Distributors in California.
“It’s a very supportive environment,” Hooper said, “and when you’re doing creative projects, that’s very helpful. John is an excellent engineer, and it’s fun for me, because I play all the instruments-I’ve always wanted to do records where I could play all the instruments-and Brian gives an (unbiased) perspective. When I did an intro to a song, he said, `You’re talking way too fast,’ and he was right. He also helps design the packaging.”
Basilico has also been working with Baltimore writer Nina Tassi, who wrote the non-fiction book “Urgency Addiction,” which deals with time stress that controls the person rather than the person controlling his own time. Tassi is recording her book through Sound Publications, and Basilico is hoping to have her project completed by midsummer so he can distribute his first non-fiction book project and his first fiction project concurrently.
“I put everything out on the line every single day,” Basilico said. “I’m not a risk taker, I’m a risk manager. I evaluate every risk and take the least dangerous way of doing things. To me, failure is a learning experience.”
Although the summer release of “Only the Young Die Good” may open doors for Sound Publications and the people involved with the project, Basilico’s continuing success isn’t dependent on it.
“We’re working on so much stuff, the business has grown beyond my resources,” he said. “What drives us is being able to use a lot of creativity. We have a blast-this is fun. There is no other business where we could get to play this way. It sure beats working for a living.”
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The cast will be doing a live performance of “Only the Young Die Good” on July 17 at Arrowhead Golf Club in Wheaton as part of a benefit for The Caring Place at Loyola University Medical Center’s Ronald McDonald House. For more information, call Mary Breslin at 708-279-7014.
