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May 18, 2006
Walter Murch, Academy Award-winning Film Editor and Sound Designer, Part 1, 5/17/06
Walter Murch has been editing and mixing sound in San Francisco since starting on Francis Ford Coppola's film “The Rain People” (1969). He supervised the sound on George Lucas’s “THX-1138”, Coppola’s “The Godfather,” Lucas’s “American Graffiti” (1973), and Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II” (1974), won his first Academy Award nomination for “The Conversation” (1974) for which he was also picture editor, won his first Oscar for “Apocalypse Now” (1979), and won unprecedented double Oscars for sound mixing and picture editing for his work on “The English Patient” (1996).
Mr. Murch helped reconstruct “Touch of Evil” to Orson Welles’s original notes, and edited Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley”. Mr. Murch was, along with George Lucas and Francis Coppola, a founding member of northern California cinema. Mr. Murch has written and directed — Return to Oz (1985) — but as an editor and sound man he is one of the few universally acknowledged masters in his field. While working on “Apocalypse Now”, Mr. Murch coined the term Sound Designer, and along with colleagues at San Francisco’s Dolby Laboratories originated the current standard film-sound format, the 5.1 channel array, helping to elevate the art and impact of film sound to a new level.
Mr. Murch edited Anthony Minghella’s “Cold Mountain” on Apple's sub-$1000 Final Cut Pro software using off-the-shelf Power Mac G4 computers. This was a leap for such a big-budget film, where expensive Avid systems were the standard non-linear editing system. He received an Academy Award nomination for this work and his efforts on the film were documented in Charles Koppelman's 2004 book Behind the Seen.
Unlike most film editors today, Mr. Murch works standing up, comparing the process of film editing to “brain surgery and short-order cooking”, since both cooks and surgeons stand when they work. In 1976 he invented a film splicer which conceals the evidence of the splice by using extremely narrow but strongly adhesive strips of special polyester-silicone tape.
Mr. Murch is perhaps the only film editor in history to have received Academy nominations for films edited on four different systems:
“Julia” (1977) using upright Moviola
“Apocalypse Now” (1979), “Ghost” (1990), and “The Godfather”, Part III (1990) using KEM flatbed
“The English Patient” (1996) using Avid
“Cold Mountain” (2003) using Final Cut Pro
Mr. Murch has written one book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye (2001) and was the subject of Michael Ondaatje's book The Conversations (2002).
Posted by David Lemberg at May 18, 2006 11:30 AM Return to SCIENCE AND SOCIETY home page