Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

  Murch describes a movie theatre as having power (movie goers) and coherence (image and sound).

  The manager comes over. “Would anybody like fresh coffee?”

  “Just a little bit for me, thanks,” Murch says.

  “Radio Telescope,” 1955, Oil on canvas, 18" x 18." Painting by Walter Murch’s father.

  “So, you get this beam being projected on a screen; not in an air vacuum, but in the vacuum of darkness. And people are sitting there in the dark, which is kind of strange when you think about it; that 343—or a thousand, or six—people would choose to pay money to go spend two hours with strangers in the dark. But they do it, and they do it willingly. Then this flickering image and some fluttering speaker cones play their relatively modest energies. But the power that film has over the audience is not its physical strength, but its coherence and the fact that 25,000 years of human history is coiled there in the dark, ready and anxious to make a leap. It’s a powerful combination when it works. It’s like that spark in the tube. It’s ready to leap into the void; the audience is ready to let go and abandon itself to the vacuum of darkness. In the moment of that leap, when you’ve let go of who you are and all of your specific concerns, you are highly suggestible to the coherence of the film. What comes out the other side—the audience after they have seen a good film—is, simultaneously power and coherence. The theater’s vacuum of darkness is where those two things come together.”

  It’s nearly 6:00 p.m. when the two Walters leave the River Gorge Restaurant, jaywalk across River Road, now clogged with evening commuters, and make their way to the multiplex. They approach the lobby entrance, which, nine hours ago, was uninhabited. Now it’s full of activity—regular filmgoers coming in, buying tickets, and stopping at the massive concession area for popcorn and super-sized drinks. It’s easy to overlook the fact that a sensitive and secret preview screening is about to take place, unless you notice the proper-looking woman holding a clipboard, guiding a wide range of New Jerseyites, mostly working class, 20 to 50 year-olds, around the ticket lines and toward Theater 4. There are many couples and lots of Latinos, not unlike the rest of the patrons. The Cold Mountain audience is here by invitation, intercepted over the last week by recruiters, either at the multiplex or the nearby mall. It’s not a sneak preview, in the old sense of going to a film without knowing anything about it. They were given a brief description of the film: “a major motion picture, set during the Civil War, starring Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, and Jude Law.” The preview audience knows the film will be followed by a written survey questionnaire, and for 24 of them, a follow-up focus group to be held right then and there.

  Aside from the clipboard lady, several movie industry executives, looking very non-New Jersey, congregate in small knots just beyond the popcorn and Coke, exuding a combination of intensity, nervousness, and power. These are some of the Cold Mountain producers: Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger of Bona Fide Productions, and Bill Horberg representing Mirage Enterprises. Bona Fide and Mirage initiated Cold Mountain as a film when they optioned the novel in 1997 with backing from the United Artists studio. Yerxa, with spiky gray hair and starched white shirt, and Berger, quiet and cerebral-looking, both produced the films King of the Hill, Election, and Pumpkin, among others. Horberg’s credits include The Quiet American, Heaven, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Sliding Doors. He stayed on to help produce Cold Mountain after leaving Minghella’s production company for Dreamworks SKG. Nearby stands executive music producer T-Bone Burnett, famously of O Brother Where Art Thou? and its hugely successful soundtrack album. Burnett, a tall drink of water all in black, just flew in from Nashville, where he’s been recording new songs for Cold Mountain. Sydney Pollack enters the lobby. He is Minghella’s partner in Mirage, which co-ventured with Bona Fide to develop Cold Mountain. Pollack began his career in film as an actor (he still acts occasionally: Eyes Wide Shut, The Player), before moving into directing (The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, Absence of Malice, Tootsie), and producing. He’s been nominated for a directing Oscar three times, and won once, for Out of Africa. Pollack greets the others in his friendly-assertive way.

  “There they are, waiting for the film to begin. But they’ve all got their own tragedies, love affairs, heartbreaks, triumphs.”

  At last, Anthony Minghella arrives wearing rumpled black slacks and t-shirt, a wool cap pulled over his shaved head, eyes twinkling as usual. He exhibits an openness and warmth unusual in film directors. He greets his producers in a barely audible voice, nodding more than talking. He looks rough, having just worked 18-hour days in Nashville, recording music with T-Bone Burnett, while also doing final aerial photography from a helicopter over North Carolina.

  The screening will start at 7:00 p.m., so there’s still time for Murch to have a few words with the producers and to update Minghella on what he’s been doing in London.

  Everyone seems friendly and considerate. This group has worked together for over a year since production began in Romania in mid-July 2002. For some, including Minghella and Pollack, it’s been six years since the original Cold Mountain deal was put together. Behind the small talk and catching up one can picture invisible Cold Mountain scars from battles won and lost, egos bruised and burnished. In spite of having all the reasons in the world to be jaded and cynical, this bunch is still excitable. There’s a film to see. And just like civilians going into the other 13 theaters to see Pirates of the Caribbean or Freddy vs. Jason, these movie professionals get the same rush of anticipation for what Murch called “the great coherence”—when that weak beam of light reaches the screen and is energized tonight by 10,290 years of collective life.

  Cold Mountain producers Ron Yerxa, Albert Berger (top left), William Horberg (top right), Sydney Pollack (bottom left), and executive music producer, T-Bone Burnett (bottom right).

  All during this time, a handful of staff people from Miramax have been keeping to themselves. They stay behind in the lobby, waiting for someone or something, as Murch and the others make their way down the hall toward Theater 4. As he passes beneath each marquee with its red LCD readout, Murch imagines this multiplex as if he owned it, quietly announcing tonight’s showings: “8 1/2, Citizen Kane, Last Year at Marienbad.”

  In obvious ways this isn’t a typical movie night. Two security guards at the doorway inspect handbags and carry-on items, as if it were an airport. The studio wants to prevent anyone from sneaking a digital video camera inside that will put Cold Mountain on the Internet tomorrow, playing across the world in its half-finished state. To make extra sure, every 10 or 15 minutes a guard will stand at the front of the theater during the screening, scanning the crowd with a pair of night-vision goggles to pick up any infrared beams being emitted from a video camera.

  It’s a few minutes past 7:00. Inside, the seats are almost all taken. Walter is in the seat taped off for him, smack dab in the middle of the theater, two-thirds of the way up. He has three tools in his lap for the preview: a little orange box with a black knob to control the sound level, should he decide that the temporary sound mix he finished two days ago in London needs mid-course adjusting; a walkie-talkie to communicate with young Walter, should there be problems in projection that can be solved quickly, such as the film being thrown out of focus by any of the N-VIS-O splices; and a G4 PowerBook with its screen darkened to note any ideas he may have during the screening.

  Harvey Weinstein, Miramax co-chairman and Cold Mountain Executive Producer.

  Finally, at 7:15, a burly man dressed in black pants and a white shirt with black suspenders leisurely enters the theater, carrying a black suit coat and accompanied by a young assistant. He sits down in a reserved row near the left aisle. It’s Harvey Weinstein, co-founder and co-chairman of Miramax Films. Only now do the lights go down. The final test screening of Cold Mountain begins, 465 days after Walter Murch drove from his home in West Marin to San Francisco International Airport for his flights to London and later to Bucharest, where Cold Mountain was set to begin filming.r />
  Chapter 2. Running on the Fault Line

  The lagoon near Blackberry Farm.

  To this day, if you go to the San Francisco Bay Area and want to find the town where Murch lives, don’t look for a sign. It disappears whenever the Department of Transportation puts one up. Over the last 34 years, 22 signs have been pulled down; the people who live here would rather no one else found it. The community, located north of San Francisco on the coast, is a magical village of Victorian farmhouses and clapboard homes, surrounded by green pastures and redwood forests overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The adjacent lagoon that empties into the ocean forms a moat to the south and east; there is ocean to the west and wild forest to the north. From the beach you can see pale apartment buildings on the hills of San Francisco, only seven miles away as the crow flies. Driving to The City, however, is no easy task—the first half of the trip is over convoluted mountain roads and then, as a bracing contrast to the bucolic drive, you run the gauntlet of a commuter-jammed Golden Gate Bridge. It’s over an hour, one way, on a good day.

  The town’s basic mix of farmers, fishermen, and working professionals is peppered with artists, musicians, writers, second-homers, and drop-outs. A few are poor and homeless, and some quite wealthy. With residents bicycling into town to run errands and catch up at the community bulletin board, even a big-city attorney can’t help but want to work at home amid the eucalyptus and clean, salty air. It’s just too idyllic not to.

  In 1987, when Director Philip Kaufman needed a closing American locale for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he chose Blackberry Farm, one of the 19th century farm houses just outside the town. It wasn’t merely a good-luck find by an astute location manager; it happened to be the home of the film’s editor, Walter Murch. He and his wife, Aggie, and their two children, Walter (then 4) and newborn Beatrice, moved here in 1973 from the Sausalito houseboat where they had been living since 1969. With two children, life on the water in relatively cramped conditions no longer seemed like such a good idea. Sisters Connie and Carrie Angland (then aged 10 and 11) came to live permanently with the Murches in 1975.

  Walter and Aggie moved from their houseboat to Blackberry Farm in 1973. George Lucas waits on the shore to help.

  It just wasn’t in the cards for Walter to move back to Los Angeles where he had gone to graduate film school at the University of Southern California. Other budding sound editors and mixers might find steady work there, at the center of the American film industry, but Murch and his college friends all had something else in mind besides getting good jobs in Hollywood. The group included Francis Ford Coppola (for whom Murch had already done sound work on The Rain People), Carroll Ballard (director of The Black Stallion, Never Cry Wolf, and Fly Away Home), Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood (Robbins directed and Barwood produced the film Dragonslayer; they were uncredited writers of Close Encounters of the Third Kind); Robert Dalva (film editor on The Black Stallion, Jumanji, Jurassic Park III, and director of The Black Stallion Returns), and George Lucas.

  Coppola, Lucas, and Murch and their families moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the spring of 1969 to complete The Rain People, launch Zoetrope Studios, begin work on THX-1138, and establish an approach to filmmaking independent of Hollywood that was more in keeping with the low-cost, collaborative way they had made films at USC and UCLA. This was well before Lucas’s success with American Graffiti and Star Wars, and with what became Lucasfilm, Skywalker Sound, Industrial Light & Magic, and Pixar. It was prior to Coppola directing The Godfather. And it was six years before Saul Zaentz, the Berkeley-based producer, would win Best Picture and four other major Oscars for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). By the late 1970s, Coppola’s vision of a Bay Area network of artists and craftspeople had become reality: a critical mass of filmmaking talent and financing that could flourish outside of Southern California.

  Lena Olin as Sabina, at Blackberry Farm, as seen in the motion picture, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

  Director Philip Kaufman, left, and Daniel Day-Lewis, center, on the set of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

  Aggie Murch.

  Beatrice Murch.

  Connie and Carrie Angland.

  Walter Slater Murch.

  The gang from American Zoetrope in 1969. Walter Murch is second from right. Coppola (fourth from right) holds a zoetrope, invented in 1834. When sequenced photographs are viewed through slits in this device they produce the equivalent of a motion picture. The word “zoetrope” is a combination of Greek words meaning roughly “wheel of Life.”

  JUNE 1, 2002—BLACKBERRY FARM

  It’s a windy and sunny Saturday. Murch has lived here now for nearly 30 years. To a casual observer, it is another day for pleasant diversions in this Northern California Shangri-la. Surfers in wetsuits find the curl that breaks off the point. Daytrippers drop into the local café for cappuccino. Honeymooners in rental cars drive up Highway 1, not realizing (since there is no sign) they’ve just passed the real deal—a more authentic Mendocino than the town up the coast they’ll sleep in that night.

  From The Rain People, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, on which Murch did the sound montage and was the rerecording mixer.

  Only 27 days ago Murch was in Berkeley at the Zaentz Film Center on the last day of editing and mixing K-19: The Widowmaker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. As usual, he spent over a year on this single project, and worked consecutive 16- to 18-hour days for the last several weeks to make the release date. So now, with his work done, Walter is prone to what he calls “parade syndrome;” not simply a letdown, it’s a physical sensation. Imagine sitting in the bleachers on Manhattan’s Central Park West, as Walter used to do when he was five, and watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade go by. “After the last float, I’d look down at the asphalt,” he says. “It seemed to be oozing in the other direction, left to right. I knew it couldn’t be so, and yet there it was, the result of a reflex motion of my eyeballs. The effect wears off in about five minutes, but while it lasts it is totally fascinating and disorienting to a child. The same kind of thing happens at the end of a film. For a year, I’m used to seeing the film grow, change, evolve, organize, and get more coherent. And then suddenly—very suddenly—it’s done and the film stops changing. But instead of just stopping, there is some mental reflex and the film seems to be disintegrating each time I look at it, leaving me slightly seasick. The film is done, how can it be coming apart? It will take at least six weeks to get my land legs back.”

  Despite any queasiness, there is too much to do today to lie low. Walter reviews galley proofs of The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, the book novelist Michael Ondaatje has written based on discussions about film and film editing he and Murch had over the last year and a half. Murch is also on a deadline to finish an article for Mix magazine on the history of sound in film over the last 25 years.

  In three weeks Murch will depart for London and Bucharest to start work on Cold Mountain. For logistical, technical, and artistic reasons, he gets involved right from the start of shooting. Technically, film needs to be processed and printed; oversight and troubleshooting at the lab are the responsibility of the editing team. If things go wrong at this stage—improper processing of exposed film, sound incorrectly synched up with picture, or footage printed and organized incorrectly, for example—it could mean expensive reshooting or losing precious time in the editing schedule for delivering the finished film. Most studio pictures begin shooting with an established release date—for Cold Mountain it’s Christmas 2003—and the studio organizes its marketing and exhibition plans based on that date.

  While on location, the editor supervises the preparation of film dailies so the director, director of photography, and other crew members can view the results of their work. Each department head will be given the opportunity to check his or her own work as it appears on film. Sometimes cast members are invited to see “rushes,” as dailies are also called (from being “rush
ed” through the lab for urgent viewing). The purpose of seeing footage immediately is partly technical: to make sure everything “is there,” in case material needs to be reshot while actors are available and sets are still in place. Also, the director needs to evaluate his own staging and the subtleties of the actors’ performances after the momentary thrill of the take is passed. The cinematographer wants to review his work artistically and confirm that choices of lenses, camera moves, and film stock are appropriate.

  * * *

  “25 Years of Film Sound: Making Movies in the Digital Era”

  By Walter Murch, excerpted from Mix magazine, July 2002

  Large-format film sound in 1977–79 had finally reached a level of technical fidelity that had been the longed-for dream of the earlier Eras. Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Apocalypse Now, with their 6-track, Dolby-encoded 70mm magnetic sound, had finally eliminated surface noise, expanded reproducible frequency range to its practical limit, and expanded the dynamic range to the threshold of pain.

  So, here we are in 2002, 25 years on. A whole era has passed, and what has changed? Well, technically, many things—most notably the complete digitization of what used to be a completely analogue process—but remarkably not a significant increase in audio quality when you compare... frequency response, dynamic range, noise threshold, and channel array.