Eastbayri.com

PORTSMOUTH — When you watch the movie “Moneyball,” listen closely.

That background blend of vintage baseball radio announcer chatter and crowd noise doesn’t balance with the actors’ voices by accident.

That this and the 2011 movie’s other sounds mesh so seamlessly is due in considerable part to the work of 1964 Portsmouth High School graduate Deb Adair. For her efforts, Ms. Adair was nominated last week for an Oscar in the “Sound Mixing category.

If she wins, her Oscar will join a slew of awards earned during her career as a movie sound engineer. She won the Emmy in 1995 and 1996 for her work on Disney’s “Aladdin,” and another Emmy in 1997 for Disney’s “Lion King – Timm and Pumbaa.” She has also won Golden Reel awards and been nominated for

television and film work in “Mighty Ducks,” “Casper,” “101 Dalmations,” “Bobby’s World” and more. Her voice can be heard in the movie “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.”

Ms. Adair’s sound mixing competition in this year’s Academy Awards includes “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “Hugo,” “Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon,” and “War Horse.”

 Filmed in 2011, “Moneyball” tells the story of Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) and his knack for using stats to craft a winning team on a shoestring budget.

“One of the biggest challenges working on this film was working with archival sound bites from actual MLB broadcasts and incorporating them into the mix with voices that were recorded in a studio with pristine conditions,” Ms. Adair said. “The broadcast bits usually had crowd sounds and sometimes music married to them, where the recorded parts were clean and sterile sounding.”

Now a re-recording mixer with Sony Pictures Entertainment since 1999, Ms. Adair grew up in Portsmouth’s Sandy Point neighborhood with parents Doug and Kathy Adair, older brother Brian and sisters Karen and Kim.

She had a busy career at Portsmouth High School where she was class vice president in her junior and senior years and was involved in drama, cheerleading, the track team and JV basketball.

“My teacher Tom Perrotti was a big influence on me during that time,” she said Friday.

Although she lives in California now with her husband Al Lopez and two stepdaughters, Christine and Jennifer, Ms. Adair says she tries to get back to Portsmouth every year.

From Portsmouth, she went to Syracuse University.

“I attended classes that covered many aspects of film production and the ones involving sound were the ones that interested me the most,” she said.

She moved to Nashville to work in the music recording industry, then moved to Los Angeles where she has been involved in film making for over 18 years. Her sound work includes music recording, and sound supervision, editing and mixing.

The 84th Academy Awards will be broadcast on Sunday, Feb. 26, at 7 p.m. on ABC.