Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

  His forecast for digital editing? “The future is in the Final Cut direction,” Murch says. Editing systems from here on, he predicts, will give users maximum flexibility and be engineered so third-party developers can invent elegant solutions for niche users (like editors of big feature films), while also providing high-quality images at affordable prices.

  But there’s a catch. “As with all digital non-linear editing, its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness,” says Murch.” It gives you what you say you want, but that may not be what you need.” The speed and precision with which digital editing systems deliver results for the editor can also cut out artistic surprises that come by accident. “These systems don’t talk to you very well,” Murch warns the editors. He shows photos of his scene cards and picture boards. “These are my ways to kick back at non-linear editing.”

  Murch has been speaking for nearly 90 minutes. He looks at his watch: “I’m perfectly happy to go on...” he says. The audience stays put.

  What about working with temporary music tracks?

  “If I could change one thing in the industry it would be that: No temp tracks. A composer should be on the film from the beginning, writing music that evolves with the film, working in offices down the hall, where we’re all next door to each other, and at the same time, so that the music influences the edit, the sound effects influence the music, etc. What usually happens is the composer parachutes in almost at the last minute and spray-guns music onto the film. There’s no time for the music to seep into the film and change it.”

  A brave soul puts her hand up and asks Murch about documentaries, an orphan child when it comes to most discussions about film editing. Murch pauses for a long, almost uncomfortable moment. Maybe he has nothing useful to say about the genre.

  “I haven’t edited a documentary since the late ’60s,” he finally says. “But that’s where my heart is. My approach to features is a documentary approach. I don’t treat the material as if it’s intended for anything. That’s why I don’t want to know what the director thinks about any one shot. I treat the footage as if it’s a found object.”

  “I hate to interrupt,” Horton says from the side of the stage. “But the L.A. Film School says we have to leave.”

  It’s after 11:00 p.m. and the janitor is in the auditorium, ready to begin vacuuming.

  “We have a tradition,” Horton says to Murch. “We’re a user group and we have a raffle at the end. Would you pick for us?”

  He agrees. The audience stands and applauds. Murch acknowledges the warm response. He puts his hand up and waves. Walter starts pulling ticket stubs out of a paper bag, calling out the numbers for winners of donated goodies, such as Final Cut Pro books, CDs of stock footage, FCP graphic plug-ins, training guides, and a T-shirt.

  Family friend and Aggie’s hair stylist, Tom Brophy, helps Walter get ready for the Oscar ceremonies.

  Epilogue: A Jazzy Seventh Chord

  In September 1965, on Walter Murch’s first day of graduate film school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Samuel Goldwyn was sitting at his desk at Goldwyn Studios, contemplating retirement; Jack Warner was running Warner Brothers as he had since 1918; and 92 year-old Adolf Zukor was occasionally coming in to work at Paramount, the studio he founded in 1912. But motion-picture theaters were closing all across the country, the television networks were waging their relentless war of attrition against the studios, and corporate vultures were circling: Gulf+Western, a sugar conglomerate, was poised to take over Paramount in 1966, and Kinney National—whose main interests were (ominously) parking lots and funeral homes—was sizing up Warner Brothers. Gene Peterson, the head of the USC camera department, looked around the room, smiling wanly at the hopeful faces of the 80 or so entering students. After a long, uncomfortable silence, Peterson shook his head and then finally spoke.

  “Get out, now,” Murch remembers him saying. “There’s no work. And next year there’s going to be even less. I don’t know why all of you are here. Go do something sensible. You can still get your tuition back.” The students reacted with uneasy laughter. Several took it to heart, though, and left the next day—quitting film school to become real estate agents, lawyers, and businessmen.

  “Under those circumstances, you had to be kind of crazy to stay—which I guess we were,” Murch says of himself and the other members of that 1965 class: George Lucas, John Milius, Matthew Robbins, Caleb Deschanel, John Bailey, Randal Kleiser, Hal Barwood, Robert Dalva and many others. “Jobs? Who cares about the future? We’re here to make films now!”

  Nearly 40 years later Murch and I sit in a sunny corner of his comfortable living room at Blackberry Farm. Out the front window morning sun glints off the lagoon. We’re talking about filmmaking past and future, digital technology, and—now that Murch’s “parade syndrome” has finally eased—what he gathered from the experience using Final Cut Pro on Cold Mountain.

  Murch continues speaking of the mid-1960s and two terrifying undercurrents that resonate today—the Vietnam War and uncertainty about the future of cinema: “The feeling our film school generation had back then was well, shit, if the whole house is going to come crumbling down, we might as well do something. The old studio system paradigm was dysfunctional, but what could we do about that? The freedom of all bets being off created a vacuum into which some interesting films rushed: The Rain People, THX-1138, The Godfather, American Graffiti, Jaws, Mean Streets, The Sugarland Express, The Black Stallion, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars.”

  The head of the USC camera department was partly right—there would be no future for cinema—at least as things had been done in Hollywood during its heyday. Unbeknownst to him and his students, American movie-making in 1965 was headed for a roller coaster ride of dips, rips, plunges, bends, and g-force changes. And that trip is still not over: not for the studios, nor for the very substance of movies themselves: film.

  “Celluloid right now is at the end of its development curve, much like the four-stroke engine,” Murch tells me. “We’ve probably wrung out of 35 millimeter film and its photo chemicals as much as we’re ever going to. But digital is at the start of its development curve: no one can tell how far it will ultimately go.” Film making may soon become a misnomer. Anthony Minghella noted this in his Foreword—as a director he glimpsed very little celluloid during the making of Cold Mountain. Indeed, in the last five years hundreds of shorts, documentaries, and features (from Lucas’s megabudget Attack of the Clones to Sanchez and Myrick’s microbudget Blair Witch Project) have been shot in digital video, edited on computers, and exhibited in film transfer, in cyberspace, or on digital projectors. Directors Wim Wenders, Steven Soderbergh, Lars von Trier, Spike Lee, Wayne Wang, Mike Figgis, Alison Anders, and Richard Linklater have all shot and released films digitally, some of them many times. Film-quality digital image recording and projection are immediately around the corner if not already parked outside the building. Does this mean the end of cinema? Doubtful.

  For Murch, the cinematic experience fulfills a primal need: to sit in the dark with other people and listen to stories. “The unchanging human hunger for stories in the dark,” Murch says, “has been with us since the invention of language. It bonds us together and takes us out of ourselves. For two hours we are all dreaming the same dream. But exactly what renewed form cinema takes during the 21st century will be determined by the digital forest fire now really getting into its burn.”

  How might those digital flames alter, reshape, and color this chimera we still call (for now) a film?

  In 1982, German film director Wim Wenders shot a documentary at the Cannes Film Festival, Chambre 666. He invited all the film directors present to speak to camera on the future of cinema as they saw it. Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Steven Spielberg, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michelangelo Antonioni, among others, took the challenge. But only Antonioni ‘s statement went into the finished film unedited. I brought Wenders’ book, My Time with Antonioni, with me to Blackber
ry Farm. It includes a transcript of the comments the Italian director made that day in Cannes. I read Antonioni’s words to Murch:

  “It’s true, film is in grave danger. But we shouldn’t overlook other aspects of the problem... part of the reason that the situation seems so grave to us is because we belong to an older generation. What we should do is try to adapt to the different visual technologies that are coming into being... I’m just as worried as anyone else about the future of the cinema as we know it. We’re attached to it because it gave us so many ways of saying what we felt and thought we had to say. There probably always was that discrepancy between the present and the unimaginable future... High-definition video cassettes will soon bring (film) into our houses; cinemas probably won’t be needed anymore... My sense is: it won’t be all that hard to turn us into new people, better used to dealing with the new technologies.

  “I hear what he’s saying, and much of it is uncannily correct,” Murch says forcefully, after I finish. “But Antonioni was 70, and at that age you can regret the passing of the familiar, then immediately second-guess that regret, and embrace the future too unconditionally. Remember, Italy was the country of...” Murch pauses, then makes a point with fine Italian pronunciation, “Futurismo!” “Can we really be turned into new people by technology?” Murch asks. “The Soviet Union tried that and failed. I don’t think it’s true that the future is all going to be unrecognizable. There’s something fundamental about storytelling. Human beings are human beings. If someone from the Stone Age walked in here we’d be chatting and laughing pretty soon, I bet. He’d tell us about something funny that happened to him on the way to the cave. Antonioni said that cinemas wouldn’t be needed in the future. But I don’t think so: movie-going survived the television crisis of the mid-1960s, and I think it will survive the challenges of the present. But it will change, without question—both technically and creatively. On average, DVD sales and rentals now bring in more money for a film than its theatrical exhibition. And the Internet is looming as a means of distribution.”

  While collective movie-going might not disappear, the processes by which those movies get made and distributed is riding a tsunami—powerful, unrelenting, and ever changing—Murch is himself right there riding its curl.

  Murch likes to compare the way films get made to the way Renaissance-era frescoes were painted. Those masterpieces credited to artists such as Giotto, Piero della Francesca, and Michaelangelo were realized by teams of artists working in close collaboration. The very nature of the medium required a large group working in tight coordination under severe time pressure. The pigments were immediately embedded within wet plaster applied to the wall that morning and they changed colors as they dried. Errors were very difficult to fix and compositions had to anticipate the cracks that inevitably formed around a day’s work. It took a group of artisans—journeymen, apprentices, and assistants—all led by a visionary artist, to create works that have continued to inspire over the last half-millennium.

  Feature filmmaking, as we’ve known it, also requires a collaborative community—similarly hierarchical and likewise dependent on powerful patrons (the commercial churches of studios, distributors, investors). Filmmaking now faces the same kind of upheaval that was triggered several hundred years ago when new tools and materials meant the end of fresco painting. Oil paints, brushes, and canvas became relatively cheap and accessible, Murch says, and painting gradually turned into an individual pursuit—oil painting was easy to revise, could be done anywhere, any time, without assistants or apprentices—and sheltered from the gaze of self-interested sponsors.

  We can all be painters now if we choose, and the art form has benefited from such pluralism. But there may be a price to be paid for such freedom, as Murch points out: “The presence of other people during the act of creation kept painting grounded in a way that it is obviously not today, when it’s done almost exclusively in isolation.” Likewise, the artist who inhabits a self-contained world of silence and imagination is vulnerable to demons and distempers—look at Van Gogh, Murch says.

  Movies have only been around for 100 years but the comparison to fine art is instructive. Digital technologies are to today’s filmmaker what inexpensive art supplies were to European artists four centuries ago. Economical editing systems such as Final Cut Pro, used in conjunction with other new digital filmmaking equipment and techniques, permit a filmmaker working alone to take on complex functions previously handled by dozens, even hundreds of crew members and craftspeople—shooting, editing, graphic effects, color correction, music recording, and sound mixing—and there are no apparent sacrifices in production values. (The music industry has preceded film by about a decade and a half in this regard.) Digital films can be exhibited just as widely as expensive productions made in traditional ways. For directors who prefer taking on more and more jobs themselves—and who have the energy, disposition, time, and talent to do so—methods are available for them to become one-person bands. Directors George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez come immediately to mind.

  In other realms, such as documentary and corporate media, savvy clients and underwriters demand this new “crewless” approach. A very accomplished cinematographer I know recently purchased and taught himself Final Cut Pro in part because funders and clients are no longer allocating budget line items for an editor or editing facility. This may be a good thing—lower costs, more efficient workflow, singular visions being realized—but this trend discourages collaboration—not necessarily a good thing. Movies seem to magically appeal to widespread groups of people, according to Murch, because they are created by a team of diverse people, each bringing something different yet essential to the final creation. Take those creative contributions away and a pure, individually expressed conception can become odd, bizarre, and appeal only to the narrowest audience. “Is that single vision unique, communicative?” Murch wonders. “Or is it hermetic and obscure? And that’s the danger of digital cinema pushed to its ultimate conclusion.”

  Beside empowering lone rangers, digital technology opens up another set of options for distribution and exhibition: the adaptable release print. “Why not make, say, a New England version of your film, why not a Southern version, a California version, a Bangladeshi version?” Murch asks. “Digital technology makes it quick and easy to tailor a film to a specific audience. Back in the 1930s and ’40s, studios actually used to do something like this, but it was cumbersome. The distressing thing is you could spend the rest of your life on a film—it would never be finished!”

  This could send film even farther down the shadowy road of test previews into a brave new world where each screening becomes an interactive focus group: “Let’s give the audience exactly what it wants and tailor the material, geographically, locally, and temporally—meaning I, the filmmaker, don’t care what I want. We’ll be able to tune the film to this audience at 8 o’clock on Saturday the 21st of September—what it wants to see—because we can now somehow detect they’re a rowdy audience and we can reconfigure the film on the fly to the rowdy version of the film. Here cinema becomes more like live theatre where actors respond to the feedback they’re getting from the audience.”

  These kinds of scenarios take us closer to Mephistopheles’ cinematic black box, as Murch calls it: a filmmaker’s mythical deal with the devil. In exchange for his or her soul the filmmaker gets a black box through which the film vision inside his or her head is “thought” into existence for others to see, untouched by human hands. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting close. Pixar, like other animation studios, is a way station to that ultimate goal: every single pixel in every frame is put there by a conscious decision.

  By now the sun is high overhead. Shadows slant at slight angles across the room since the fall equinox is not far off. Behind Murch, outside a large paned window, ripe pears hang ready for the picking.

  “Some filmmakers would grab the black box and to hell with their soul! Another group would run away screaming! What the second group
loves is the ‘snow-flakiness’ of cinema, the randomness of it, the fact that they don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next. We’ve always had the Hitchock types who want complete control, and the Coppola types who want to be surprised. In fact, nobody is completely one or the other. But digital technology forces the bifurcation of choices: the Snowflake or the Black Box.”

  The most recent iteration of “snowflake” filmmaking might just be an event Murch’s son, Walter, helped organize recently in London: CinemaSports’ Film-in-a-Day.

  “It’s a kind of art-happening done for almost no money at all. Just lots of energy and good will,” Murch says.

  Forty people got together, organized over the Web, and divided into eight different filmmaking teams, each group getting the same list of sketchy story elements they are obliged to include: there must be an image of falling flower petals, for instance. The participants were let loose in London with DV cameras and shot their footage in six hours. In the afternoon, using Final Cut Pro, everyone started editing their material together. At 8:30 that same night they reassembled at Mr. Young’s screening room in Soho (the same place Murch and Minghella first screened a film version of Cold Mountain) and watched six finished short films projected digitally from DVDs they’d just burned.

  “Forty people and their friends looking at 50 minutes of film, which at eight that morning not only didn’t exist—these people didn’t even know each other!” Murch says in wonderment. “Thanks to this technology they’ve come together, produced something, and they’re completely jazzed by that experience, by each other, and by each other’s films. Something emerges that’s not contained in any of the films—it’s all about people coming together to do something, be excited by the process of doing, and by its random, rapid-fire elements. There’s very little control: you can’t predict the weather, you can’t control what you’re going to find in the street when you shoot. You don’t even know in advance what story you’re going to tell.”