Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

  I was blessed to have a team of thoughtful, careful editors: Marjorie Baer, Kaitlin Quistgaard, William Rodarmor, and especially Doug Cruickshank. Not only did Doug’s sharp eye, good sense, and informed opinion keep this book focused—he became a friend in the process.

  This volume looks so good because of Kim Scott’s attentive layout and design work on the interior, Aren Howell’s on the cover.

  I would not have had the proper approach nor the observational tools to undertake this book had it not been for my experience making documentaries, writing scripts, and directing a feature film. Many, many people made that possible and I thank them all—not the least of whom is my late father, Howard, a filmmaker, writer, and film editor who never forsook his upright Moviola.

  Walter Murch’s family—Aggie, Walter Slater, Beatrice, Connie, and Carrie—thank you for allowing me to include you in this account. It’s richer for it.

  My family gave me time and space to become as fully immersed in the work as I needed to be. Walker, Gabriella, and Jonah—your spirits of curiosity and strength can be found in here, too—and yes, Daddy’s done with the book now. My wife, Deb Sibony, gave her all (and more) for over a year, along with wise counsel and steadfast support.

  Finally, I wish to thank Walter. But words here will never be enough. May the book that follows suffice.

  Charles Koppelman

  September, 2004

  Berkeley, California

  Chapter 1. The Last Preview

  If people consider film editing at all, they think of the editor as being the person who takes material selected by the director, cuts out the bad bits, and then puts everything together into a coherent whole. Sometimes that’s exactly what happens, of course. But in a motion picture industry dominated by specialists and highly trained crafts-people, the editor needs to be as much a generalist as a specialist, as much an artist as a technician, as much a diplomat as a good soldier. He must take the initiative as often as he follows a producer’s or director’s lead. He needs to be as comfortable with complex databases as a corporate systems manager, and also have the communications skills of an international ambassador when telling the director a scene may not be working as he shot it. In between these extremes are utilitarian duties some directors may not even know are happening for the benefit of their film—like spending two

  hours tweaking the speakers and Dolby sound system inside a working theater to make sure the sound presentation is not just adequate, but superior. This is something Walter Murch will do in Edgewater, New Jersey, when he arrives there tomorrow for the final test preview screening of Cold Mountain.

  Murch has kept a detailed journal for 30 years. He makes entries faithfully every day, grabbing moments here and there. More than simply a detailed record of his activities as a film editor, the journal is like a transcript of conversations Murch has with himself. On departing London September 30, 2003, he writes: “Today screen film and travel to New York. God willing, all will be well. Thank you for guidance yesterday.” The journal will pick up hours later: “Here we are now landing @ JFK 8.15 pm. May this next leg of our journey be fortuitous. Got through customs immigration ok.”

  OCTOBER 1, 2003—NEW YORK CITY

  At 8:00 a.m. Murch, a tallish man with a graying beard, spectacles, and a Lincolnesque face stands waiting on Thompson Street in lower Manhattan. He carries a plain black computer briefcase over his shoulder and wears a blue blazer, open dress shirt, dark slacks, and running shoes. A black Town Car is already parked in front of the hotel, waiting to take him and his son, also named Walter, from SoHo to the theater in New Jersey. Young Walter, 35, is the second assistant editor on Cold Mountain, and came along from London. He wheels a hand cart bearing the film in its seven Goldberg cans to the car, and asks the driver to pop the trunk. The film traveled on the same flight as the two Walters. Like many tools and gadgets in the film business, the cans’ cognomen comes from the name of their first manufacturer—in this case, the Goldberg Brothers of Denver. With three ten-pound reels of 35mm film or magnetic sound in each carrying case, the Lincoln’s rear end takes a noticeable dip.

  Goldberg cans with the work-in-progress of Cold Mountain. They had their own ticket from London to New York under the passenger name “Film Murch,” so they could be hand-carried onto the plane without a hassle for the trip to the last preview.

  On the drive from lower Manhattan to the Lincoln Tunnel, the car passes a large apartment building on 23rd Street in Chelsea where Murch’s parents first lived when they moved to New York from Toronto in the late 1920s. Murch gazes up from the back seat and muses about his home town’s “Cartesian grid of streets and irregular stalagmitic buildings—it’s the opposite of Paris, with its spider web of streets and uniform buildings dressed in suits.” His father, also named Walter, was an artist who made an impact on the New York art scene, going against the grain of abstract expressionism during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. His paintings such as Transformer, Electrons, and Measurement and the Cosmos, placed industrial objects within still-life compositions.

  Like some kind of New Jersey put-down joke, the driver immediately gets lost coming out of the tunnel, despite having a printed set of driving directions. A wrong turn puts the Town Car inside a parking garage. Directions from the attendant get the driver oriented properly and heading along the top of the Palisades north toward Edgewater. Given that Murch has flown in the night before from London and needs to prepare a screening for a major motion picture, one might expect him to show some anxiety or stress. Instead, after a few moments of silence, he asks if anyone knows the origin of the word “Kodak.” Sensing that no one does, Murch continues. “Back in the 1880s, George Eastman hired a linguist to come up with a name that he wanted to be pronounceable by people all over the world. And it had to sound like the click of a camera.” Walter pauses and says it, savoring the syllables: “koh – dak.”

  “Radio,” 1947, oil on canvas. Painting by Murch’s father.

  The car arrives at the Edgewater Multiplex Cinemas—14 stadium-style theaters with the same floor plan and color scheme of any mall cinema in the suburbs of St. Louis, Seattle, or Cincinnati—and stops at the south entrance. The elder Murch peers through the glass doors while his son pulls the Goldberg cans out of the trunk, stacks them on the hand cart, and joins his father at the door. The concession stand is up and running even at 9:30 a.m., but no one is in sight. Young Walter taps on the glass door bearing the small decal, “National Amusements”—meaning that Sumner Redstone’s mega-company (parent of Viacom), owns this theatre complex. No response. Then he pounds on the door. Still no one. A word from Murch, and his son is on the cell phone calling a Miramax post-production person in Manhattan who in turn calls Tim Carroll, the Dolby consultant, who is already somewhere inside the theater, setting up the hard-drive sound system. Another five minutes, and Tim comes downstairs with the manager to let them in.

  “Electrons,” oil on paper, 16 x 20 1/2. Painting by Walter Murch’s father.

  The Edgewater Multiplex theatre in New Jersey where several preview test screenings for Cold Mountain were held. The skyline of Manhattan’s upper West Side, where Murch grew up, is in the background.

  All told, what with getting lost and waiting to be let in, Murch is running nearly an hour behind schedule. Since he allots 11 hours for his tasks today—from leaving the hotel to starting the actual screening—this isn’t a problem.

  The manager, a bouncy woman in blue uniform pants and matching vest, leads the group across the enormous lobby, which is hung with eight-sheet posters for Pirates of the Caribbean, Freddy vs. Jason, and other summer releases. Crazy sound effects and a thudding bass from the theater’s video game room fill the empty space. She opens a door marked “Private.” Down a barren hall is the freight elevator for the ride up one floor. The two Walters, Tom from Dolby, the manager, and the hand truck with the Goldberg cases all squeeze in. The door creaks closed.

  “I hate this elevator,” the theater manager says wi
th a grimace. Up it goes, very slowly, to the projection rooms. Murch stares at the closed doors. Past, present, and future converge today. He’s been working on Cold Mountain for well over a year and the movie will be released in just three months, on Christmas Day. All that effort comes together tonight, in Theater 4 in front of 310 hand-selected, demographically correct suburbanites. Will the film run properly and the temporary mix sound satisfactory? And then what’s in store? Will the audience respond well? Will the producers demand major unforeseen changes, pressing Murch and director Anthony Minghella up hard against the delivery deadline? Metal clanks against metal, the elevator shudders, then jerks to a stop.

  “Thank you, God,” the manager says. The door hesitates, then opens. “Right this way.”

  Anthony Minghella, the director of Cold Mountain.

  This preview, like all screenings for a film before it’s released, is cobbled together to simulate as nearly as possible a true film experience for the audience. A preview does no one any good if viewers are distracted because technical glitches constantly remind them they’re watching a work-in-progress, whether those flaws are visible splices or poor sound, for example, or scenes with colors that don’t match from one shot to another. At this point picture and sound aren’t even physically joined. The images are shown on a 35mm film “workprint,” before the final visual special effects have been completed and incorporated (such as adding stars to a night sky), and before final dissolves and fades have been included. Since scenes are not finalized, either in length or placement, shots are physically spliced together so they can be pulled apart and re-cut or re-ordered later, if necessary. Murch edits Cold Mountain digitally, on an Apple Macintosh, and a “conformed” workprint must be continuously kept up to date to match his digital version so the film print can be screened at previews like these, for producers, and at early press screenings. With a few exceptions, no crucial viewing is held using a video monitor; only a theatrical screen will do.

  The 35mm film workprint that young Walter wheels down the hallway is the only film version that now exists of Cold Mountain. It partly consists of “dailies”—film that was printed overnight by Kodak Cinelabs on location in Bucharest so it could be screened during production by the director, cast, and crew the next day (hence, “dailies”)—along with temporary visual-effects shots. The workprint, true to its name, has a few scratches and dirt from previous showings and trips through the rewinds at the assistant’s editing bench.

  Murch inhabits two very different worlds: analog and digital.

  The soundtrack for these preview screenings is in a digital file, not so different from downloaded music files, though of course the soundtrack contains much more data—three gigabytes, to be precise—stored on a Kingston hard drive, hand-carried from London. Walter is as amazed by this technology as anyone, even though he pioneered the use of hard drives in preview screenings. Prior to this the sound would have been built up from 12 standard reels into one giant reel of 35mm magnetic film, six feet in diameter.

  This preview embodies both old film methods and emerging digital technologies. Like most feature film editors working today, Murch simultaneously inhabits two very different worlds: analog and digital. The images begin on film, migrate to digital video, and come out on the other end on film for theaters. Movie sound begins as digital information and stays that way, for the most part. Today in New Jersey, with the soundtrack in a digital file and the picture on celluloid, the two must somehow run in sync—that is, sound and picture must be synchronized exactly so when an actor speaks, his words match the movement of his lips. Normally this is accomplished in the film lab or in the edit room when sound and picture are first brought together. Right now advances in audio are ahead of film—so the high-quality, professionally edited soundtrack can be stored on a single portable hard drive, 5 by 8 inches square. Sound and image, though physically separated, must somehow “speak” to each other to be in sync. This is accomplished by a special attachment to the projector that generates a bi-phase signal that is sent to the hard drive along an electrical cable.

  Will the sound and picture stay in synch? Will the hard drive seize up, or other-wise fail to generate proper sound? Murch has used separate digital sound like this in test screenings for several years. Still, it feels a bit like Chuck Yeager taking the Bell X-1 rocket plane out to break the sound barrier in 1947 before knowing for certain that old-fashioned welded rivets could withstand the punishment they’d take from a new-fangled supersonic jet engine. Murch also has basic film worries: Will the splices hold, or might the film itself go flying apart? All one can do is plan for disintegration, think through each worst-case possibility, have a backup plan, and work smart. For example, Walter brings a second hard drive with a clone of the soundtrack, in case one drive goes down for some reason. For the workprint it means using the N-VIS-O splicing system—Murch invented it in the 1980s—which maximizes adhesion and keeps visible splice marks from showing on the screen when each edit passes through the projector gate. Being attentive to detail means spending the entire morning prepping the theater, checking sound levels, and doing a complete three-hour run-through of film and sound ahead of time. There is too much riding on a preview screening to be any less vigilant.

  * * *

  What’s a Release Print?

  Images and soundtrack are married together for films shown in theaters. Alongside each frame of picture are continuous strips of digital data that contain all the sound—music, dialogue, sound effects—mixed with each other for proper volume and equalization. Older prints use an optical track—sound waves played by the projector’s optical sound reader. The worst thing that can happen to a release print is that it breaks. Otherwise it delivers a finished film to the screen every time.

  * * *

  Other than projectionists, theater workers, and film editors showing preview screenings, very few people see the “back office” of a movie theater. When glamour gets projected onto movie screens and seeps out into the culture at large, it doesn’t start here. The fluorescent-lit halls are lined with supplies: huge shrink-wrapped packages of toilet paper, palettes of soft drink cases, boxes of paper towels—the cineplex infrastructure. Around the corner and through a propped-open door is a 300-foot-long, dimly lit room. Fourteen Christy halogen projectors, seven on each side, lean forward, pressing up against glass panes overlooking the theaters. With switch boxes on the walls, carts here and there, and the constant hum of equipment being cooled and powered, this could be a corridor in a hospital surgery wing.

  “Hey, Walter, how are you?” It’s Eddie the engineer, a short muscular guy with an earring. Howie, the projectionist, big and heavy, is dressed all in black with a short, cropped beard. He comes over to shake Murch’s hand. “I brought the split reels this time,” Howie says in his heavy Jersey accent, “and the gang synchronizer.” He laughs loudly. “If I hear about a gang synchronizer again, I’ll go over there and hang myself.” At the previous preview, in Charleston, South Carolina, Walter needed the tabletop-geared mechanism to fix a splice, and none was available.

  Howie and Eddie are expert projectionists who travel the country, running preview screenings exclusively for Miramax Films, the studio behind Cold Mountain. Tests like this are too important to leave to the local theater hires—often teenagers who, for minimum wage, handle film prints worth thousands of dollars on projectors that cost six figures. This is the fourth preview screening that Eddie, Howie, and Tim have been through on Cold Mountain. Murch attends every one, so the team is accustomed to one another, and to Walter’s precise, demanding way of working.

  Young Walter takes two small metal cases the size of a shoebox out of his backpack. These are the Kingston drives (a main and a backup); each holds two tracks of sound within a matrix that plays back four tracks inside the theater when decoded properly.

  “SR encoded,” he tells Tim, meaning it uses Dolby’s patented cinema noise-reduction system.

  There’s a sense of mission and dedica
tion in the projection room. “It’s like the Secret Service has arrived,” Murch whispers. “They’re in control now, as opposed to local projectionists who don’t handle these test screenings.”

  Murch announces that the running time of Cold Mountain is now 16 minutes shorter than the last version.

  “Oh, this is like a holiday for me,” Howie says. “Short show!”

  “It’s been on the Atkins diet,” Murch says.

  Kidding aside, there’s work to be done, a problem to solve. At a run-through in London the day before, Murch noticed the film went out of rack. A replacement shot that included a new digital effect was inserted into the workprint, and it was two sprocket holes off. That one-half frame of extra film threw the rest of the reel out of registration from that point forward, and actors’ heads wound up at the bottom of the screen. There was no time to correct this in London before catching the New York flight, so Murch would take care of it here, at projection, in the multiplex.

  The offending reel, number nine, is up on the rewinds. Murch has his hands on the film and examines it over a light box on the editing table. He tilts his head sideways and looks at the frame, like a doctor examining a patient’s X-ray. “This is it!” he says.

  “Do you want me to do the honors?” his son asks.