Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

  Does the transformation of the technical landscape go along with an improvement in the aesthetic quality of the soundtracks produced today? Well, there is always a developmental synergy between the creative urge and the technical means—a kind of yin-yang interdependence. If you listen to the pre-Dolby films of the early ’70s, you can often hear the sound straining against the technical limitations of the time. Back then, we wanted to achieve more than the equipment would allow, so we “souped up” the old sound engine to its maximum and relied for effect on unusual juxtapositions of image and sound... the urge was already there; it was not elicited by the new technology.

  Listen to the complex, provocative integration of image and sound in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) or Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and Touch of Evil (1958). They are technically primitive by today’s standards, but it is sobering to realize that on the creative, conceptually daring level, we probably haven’t made as much progress.

  * * *

  The editor begins reviewing footage as soon as it becomes available, logging notes that get incorporated into a massive database in preparation for editing. As soon as enough film has been accumulated—usually after a week or so of shooting—the editor starts to cut the material into scenes and sequences, beginning the lengthy process of assembling film. “The first compilation helps flush out subtle continuity problems that may have snuck under everyone’s radar,” Murch says, “and begins to give the director a sense of how the finished film will look and feel.” Also there is simply a logistical issue of using available time efficiently: if the editor were to begin assembling the material only after shooting was completed—with a backlog of 40 or more hours of film, in the case of a major studio film—it could add months to the editing schedule.

  Like all members of a film crew, Murch must be willing to go where the work is. In 1976, this meant editing Julia in London for director Fred Zinneman. Directing Return to Oz involved another two-year stint in London in the mid-1980s. K-19 was shot in Toronto and finished in Los Angeles.

  The Cinecittà Studios outside Rome, Italy, where Murch edited The Talented Mr. Ripley.

  Murch situates his editing rooms within easy striking distance of the set—but not too close. For example, on The Talented Mr. Ripley, his base was the Cinecittà film studios near Rome, while filming took place at various locations around Rome and Italy. Murch may meet actors on the set, or socially, but he intentionally keeps a certain distance. He will be living with the performers and their characters in his edit room for over a year, and will wind up knowing their onscreen tics and habits perhaps better than they do. Being outside the typhoon of film production not only safeguards Murch from its gale-force winds of emotion, physical exertion, and stress, but it gives him a degree of much-valued objectivity. However, getting ready for a project still means preparing physically, as well as creatively and logistically. Going 8,000 miles from home to work in a former Soviet-controlled state will make it more of a challenge for Murch to do things the way he likes, and put him far from the support systems of familiar film labs and edit facilities. It also means being away from family and friends. The journey to Romania will be an expedition to an unfamiliar world where unknown tests and adventures await.

  Walter Murch with the director of Julia, Fred Zinneman.

  Even in the edit, far from the set, there will be long nights, missed meals, and tensions, so Walter uses the time leading up to a film’s start date to get in good physical condition. This being the week of the summer solstice, there is ample daylight to schedule four- or eight-mile runs every day. Sometimes he’ll go out along the open ridge tops bordering the seashore, where on days like this, you can see the Farallon Islands 30 miles out into the Pacific; other runs are through shadowy coastal glens where bay trees give the redwood forests a tangy scent.

  June 7, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Run Arroyo Hondo, which is exactly 2.5 miles. On the trail, I suddenly come across a woman taking a piss by the side of the road. “Hello” I say. She says nothing. Later on, I meet two guys coming back toward me—they were probably all camping together, and the guys had taken a hike so she could do her business. Maybe.

  Thirty years earlier, in the fall of 1973, when Cold Mountain was a just another peak in North Carolina, Murch took a noteworthy eight-mile run that began, as they all do, down the dirt driveway through his front field. Murch had The Conversation on his mind—his first film as a film editor. He made a right at the street and headed west. Four miles down the road, the aging asphalt gives way to dusty dirt. It’s an ideal run, since few cars travel here. Walter had been working for almost a year on The Conversation, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, the idiosyncratic eavesdropper, and expert in sound bugging whose anti-hero point of view lies at the heart of the story. At the moment, thought Murch, things weren’t going well.

  Arroyo Hondo trail.

  Up until The Conversation, Walter had created sound effects and edited them to fit the picture. He’d also been a re-recording mixer—the artist/engineer sitting at a mixing board who, at the very end of the filmmaking process, brings dialogue, music, and sound effects together at proper volume levels and equalization. By 1973 Murch’s feature film credits included Coppola’s The Rain People, (sound montage and re-recording mixer), George Lucas’s THX-1138 (co-writer, sound montage, and mixer), The Godfather (supervising sound editor), and Lucas’s American Graffiti (sound montage and mixer). He’d also edited picture on some documentaries, commercials, and educational films.

  It is unusual for sound editors to cross over into picture editing. The film business is traditional and hierarchical; craft boundaries are strict and were even stricter in 1973. In part this is because each skill—be it lighting, cinematography, wardrobe, or editing—requires years of apprenticing and experience before you achieve proficiency. Then too, it can take longer to solidify your reputation in the business, becoming well enough known among producers and directors who make hiring decisions.

  So it was a creative risk for both men when Coppola brought Murch on to edit picture as well as design sound and do the mix for The Conversation. Coppola wrote the screenplay in the mid-1960s, then put it away for several years. When he formed Zoetrope Studios in 1969, The Conversation was part of Zoetrope’s proposal of future projects to Warner Brothers. The package included Apocalypse Now, and American Graffiti, among others. As Walter dryly puts it years later, the executives at Warner Brothers felt these “weren’t interesting films,” and turned the package down. This devastating rejection led indirectly to Coppola’s signing with Paramount to direct The Godfather—a script that Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann, and Sergio Leone had already turned down.

  But when The Godfather was released and became an instant critical and commercial success—at that time the highest grossing film ever—Hollywood became very interested in Coppola. Paramount wanted him to get started immediately on a sequel, The Godfather: Part II, but Coppola would only agree if the studio would first let him make The Conversation.

  The problem was how to squeeze in The Conversation between the end of The Godfather and the start of production on The Godfather: Part II. The solution was for Coppola to be less involved with editing The Conversation on a daily basis, and that was a precondition when he asked Murch to edit the film. Coppola would plunge into development on The Godfather: Part II as soon as he was finished shooting The Conversation—casting, choosing locations, rewriting the script, and all the thousands of overwhelming tasks that occupy a writer/director/producer. The plan on The Conversation was that Coppola would show up every month or so, once Murch and associate editor Richard Chew (it was his first feature, too) had the film assembled. The three of them would screen it, spend a couple of days together going over ideas and making lists of things to try out. Then Coppola would disappear for another month into the maelstrom of The Godfather: Part II preproduction.

  “The first assembly of The Conversation was long,” Murch c
ontinues, “just under five hours, so one overriding issue was how to get the film down to a releasable length. Needless to say, this wasn’t the usual kind of editor-director relationship. But it was my first feature editing job, and since I had nothing to compare it to, it seemed normal. Richard and I were working on Zoetrope’s new KEM 8-plate editing machines and relished the technical challenges and the freedom. Francis told us that if we thought of anything that wasn’t on the list we had, we should just go ahead and try it out without bothering him; he would see it when he next came back to town. The first assembly was completed at the beginning of May 1973—about six weeks after the end of shooting—and we went along like this for the rest of the summer: screening every month, then revising and shortening the film.”

  Gene Hackman as Harry Caul in The Conversation, directed by Frances Ford Coppola. The first film edited by Walter Murch.

  Gene Hackman in The Conversation.

  From The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Its success made it possible for him to then direct The Conversation.

  Adding to the uncertainty of making a comprehensible motion picture was the fact that ten days of shooting never took place. Because the picture had gone over budget and was behind schedule, 15 pages of the original screenplay—10 percent of the needed material—was never shot.

  “There were three areas of struggle,” Murch said later. “Trying to reduce the overall length while keeping things coherent; finding some way to re-knit the story line to compensate for the missing days of shooting; and a more fundamental issue of balancing the story’s two thematic elements—character study and thriller—since Francis had conceived the film as an unlikely fusion of Herman Hesse and Alfred Hitchcock.”

  Murch and Chew made progress in finding solutions to the first two problems, but the third—balancing the two themes—proved to be more difficult. Coppola’s monthly screenings in the projection room at his home in San Francisco would always include several “civilians” who knew nothing about the film or indeed nothing about the film industry. These audiences admired the work-in-progress but were unclear about what had really happened at the end of the movie. More crucially, they also found it hard to identify with the introspective, socially uncomfortable central character of Harry Caul, and felt the thriller parts of the story did not integrate with the character study, or vice-versa. The editors tried different solutions, but audience reactions remained the same. By September, five months after finishing the first assembly, Coppola was getting worried. He was about to start shooting The Godfather: Part II, and The Conversation remained unfinished and problematical.

  Murch and Chew flew to Lake Tahoe with the latest version of the film. Coppola was shooting the spectacular, party scene for The Godfather: Part II. They screened The Conversation in the evening and developed a new series of notes, but everyone could see that Coppola was consumed by the logistical and creative demands of The Godfather: Part II. At the beginning of October, Coppola called Murch with a bombshell: he had decided to suspend work on The Conversation until after The Godfather: Part II was finished.

  On the outbound leg of that run in 1973, Murch passed a Coast Guard facility. There, overlooking the ocean, what look to be conceptual sculptures support webs of antenna wires. This array uses great power and coherence for ship-to-shore communications, and it would fascinate someone caught up by all things audio, like Harry Caul—or Walter Murch. But on that day Walter was focused on what to do about The Conversation. Should he go along with Coppola—his mentor, the first director to give him a shot at picture editing—and halt the edit?

  Richard Chew, who co-edited The Conversation with Walter Murch, went on to win an Oscar for editing Star Wars, along with Paul Hirsch and Marcia Lucas.

  The dirt road soon comes to a dead end and the coast trail begins. Four miles to the east lies the San Andreas Fault. This is where the Pacific plate, moving northwest, meets the North American tectonic plate traveling southeast. Their grinding together caused the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Ground zero was not far away. In a single violent moment, the earth now under Walter’s running shoes had leapt 20 feet to the north. Many violent temblors like the one in 1906 have been bringing most of Northern California and Southern California closer together for millions of years. This geologic activity, an excruciatingly slow conveyor belt, keeps nudging Hollywood (on the Pacific plate) inexorably closer to the Northern California film community (on the North American plate) at an average rate of 35 millimeters (the width of motion picture film!) every year. In a little over 16 million years, Sunset Strip will lie just offshore of San Francisco.

  By now, Murch was running back the way he’d come. And he had made his decision. He describes the moment 30 years later, still fresh as highland water: “I decided to kick against the idea of postponement, convince Francis that I could fix what was wrong with the film—somehow find the right balance between the thriller and the character study—and come up with a plan to finish it on time.”

  The Coast Guard radio antenna array along the route of Walter’s run.

  Coppola agreed to let Murch have one final crack at the film, and when they screened it a couple of weeks later the new version seemed to have done the trick. The Conversation was released in the spring of 1974 at the height of the controversy over Nixon’s Watergate tapes; it went on to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The Godfather: Part II was released in December of the same year, and both films received Academy nominations for Best Picture of 1974. The Conversation was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best Sound. The Godfather: Part II was nominated for eleven Oscars and won six, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, boosting Coppola’s career to an even higher level than it had reached with The Godfather. Murch later won two British Academy Awards for his editing and sound work on The Conversation.

  “If we had postponed,” Walter says now, “The Conversation would have probably come out in late 1975, but with a cloud over it which would have been blamed on me—a re-recording mixer who had never edited a feature before. And the crucial topicality of Watergate would have been lost. Both Francis and I had a lot invested in the film coming out on time.” Murch couldn’t know it then, but the challenges he faced in The Conversation as a rookie editor—solving major structural, storytelling problems, often working autonomously of the writer/director—would soon become as familiar to him as his favorite running trails.

  The Conversation begins with a young couple, Ann and Mark (played by Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) walking through San Francisco’s Union Square at lunchtime, having a conversation they don’t want overheard. Harry Caul, the “private ear,” has been hired by the young woman’s husband (the “Director,” played by Robert Duvall) to record the couple with several hidden long-range microphones. Back in his workshop, Harry Caul uses his sophisticated technology to uncover a key line from the partially garbled conversation, as spoken by Mark: “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” Harry becomes more and more convinced that the Director might be planning to have the young couple killed because they are having an illicit affair. This weighs on Caul’s guilty conscience: it won’t be the first time his snooping resulted in someone’s murder.

  Work-in-progress audiences were having problems understanding the intricacies of the plot because Harry himself doesn’t fully understand what he has gotten involved in, and the story is told strictly from his point of view. Given the structure of the screenplay, there was no easy way to swing outside events and show them in wide shot, so to speak.

  During production, while Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams were still easily available, Murch took them to Alta Vista Park, a quiet square in a residential neighborhood of San Francisco, to record a complete take of their conversation, audio only, in case he needed “clean” dialogue to augment the original production sound which was being spoiled by microwave interference. In that “wild sound” recording with Murch, Forrest did one reading of the “kill us” lin
e with an unintentionally different emphasis. Instead of saying, “He’d kill us if he had the chance,” implying that the couple is in danger, Forrest accidentally read it as, “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” Says Murch: “That makes you imagine three dots at the end of the line, and in parentheses at the end of the line, the implied conclusion: ‘So we have to kill him.’”

  Frederic Forrest as Mark and Cindy Williams as Ann in The Conversation. Notice Gene Hackman (Harry Caul) on the park bench.

  Murch re-recorded dialogue for this scene, and by chance got a line reading he later used in editing to clarify the story.

  “I noted that reading at the time,” Murch continues, “and filed it away as being inappropriate. But a year later during the mixing of the film I suddenly thought, let’s see what happens if we substitute that ‘inappropriate’ reading with its different inflection into the final reel. It might help tip audiences into understanding what had happened: that the ‘victims’ were really the ‘plotters.’ So I mixed it into the soundtrack in place of the original reading and took the finished film to New York where Francis was halfway through shooting The Godfather: Part II. I prepared him for the change and wondered what his reaction would be when he heard it. It was a risky idea because it challenged one of the fundamental premises of the film, which is that the conversation itself remains the same, but your interpretation of it changes. I was prepared to go back to the original version. But he liked it, and that’s the way it remains in the finished film.”