Murch, Walter (Scott) 1943-

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MURCH, Walter (Scott) 1943-

PERSONAL:

Born July 12, 1943, in New York, NY; son of Walter Tandy and Katherine (Scott) Murch; married Muriel Ann Slater, August 6, 1965; children: Walter, Beatrice, Carrie, Connie. Education: Graduated from University of Southern California Film School.

ADDRESSES:

Home—77 Bolinas Rd., Bolinas, CA 94924. Agent—The Mirisch Agency, 1801 Century Park E, Suite #1801, Los Angeles, CA 90067.

CAREER:

Editor and sound designer of films. Worked on films including (as sound recorder) It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, 1963; (as sound editor) The Electronic Labyrinth, 1968; (as supervising sound editor and re-recording engineer) The Rain People, Warner Bros., 1969; (as sound technician; with others) Gimme Shelter, Cinema V, 1970; (as supervising sound editor and re-recording engineer) THX 1138, Warner Bros., 1971; (as supervising sound editor, re-recording engineer, and production consultant) The Godfather, Paramount, 1972; (as supervising sound editor and re-recording engineer) American Graffiti, Universal, 1973; (as sound montage and re-recording engineer, with Arthur Rochester, and editor, with Richard Chew), The Conversation, Paramount, 1974; (as supervising sound editor and re-recording engineer) The Godfather: Part II, Paramount, 1974; (as sound technician) The Great Gatsby, Paramount, 1974; (as editor) Julia, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1977; (as sound designer, montage, and re-recording mixer, with Mark Berger, Richard Beggs, and Nat Boxer, and editor, with Richard Marks, Gerald B. Greenberg, and Lisa Fruchtman) Apocalypse Now, United Artists, 1979; (as sound re-recording mixer, with Mark Berger and Dale Strumpell) Dragonslayer, Paramount, 1981; (as documentary editorial researcher) The Right Stuff, Ladd, 1984; (as director) Return to Oz (also known as The Adventures of the Devil in the Sky), Buena Vista, 1985; (as special creative consultant) The Adventures of Mark Twain (animated), Atlantic, 1985; (as editor) Captain Eo, 1986; (as editor, with B. J. Sears, Vivien Gilliam, and Steven Rotter) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Orion, 1988; (as editor) Call from Space, 1989; (as supervising sound editor and editor) Ghost, Paramount, 1990; (as supervising sound editor and editor, with Barry Malkin and Lisa Fruchtman), The Godfather: Part III, Paramount, 1990; (as supervising sound editor and editor) Romeo Is Bleeding, Gramercy, 1993; (as supervising sound editor and editor) House of Cards, Miramax, 1993; (as editor) I Love Trouble, Buena Vista, 1994; (as supervising sound editor) Crumb, Sony Pictures Classics, 1994; (as supervising sound editor and editor) First Knight, Columbia, 1995; (as editor, re-recording mixer, and sound technician) The English Patient, Miramax, 1996; (as editor) As I See It, 1997; (as editor of director's cut and re-recording engineer) Touch of Evil, (originally 1958), 1998; (as editor, score producer, and sound re-recording mixer) The Talented Mr. Ripley (also known as The Mysterious Yearning Secretive Sad Lonely Troubled Confused Loving Musical Gifted Intelligent Beautiful Tender Sensitive Haunted Passionate Talented Mr. Ripley), Paramount, 1999; (as consulting editor) Dumbarton Bridge, 1999; (as editor and sound re-recording mixer) K-19: The Widowmaker, Paramount, 2002; and (as editor) Cold Mountain, 2003. Provided the voice of God for the film The Electronic Labyrinth, 1968; appeared on episodes of American Cinema, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 1994.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Academy Award for sound editing, 1979, for Apocalypse Now; Academy Awards for film editing and sound editing, 1996, for The English Patient.

WRITINGS:

(With George Lucas) THX 1138 (screenplay), Warner Bros., 1971.

(With Gill Dennis) Return to Oz (screenplay; also known as The Adventures of the Devil in the Sky), Buena Vista, 1985.

In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, Silman-James Press, 1992, 2nd edition, 2001.

(With Michael Ondaatje) The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, Vintage Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2002.

Also author of foreword for Audio-vision: Sound on Screen, by Michel Chion, edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, 1994.

SIDELIGHTS:

Film editor and sound maven Walter Murch "is one of the few universally acknowledged masters in his field," Harry Caul wrote on the Internet Movie Database. Murch started out in the film business in good company: he attended film school at the University of Southern California with George Lucas—writer and director of the Star Wars films, among others—and he worked regularly with director/producer Francis Ford Coppola until his death. Murch is probably best known for his innovative sound work on Lucas's breakout hit American Graffiti and Coppola's Vietnam classic Apocalypse Now. For the former film, Lucas and Murch borrowed Coppola's back yard to create "the sound equivalent of depth of field," Christopher Grove explained in Daily Variety. The soundtrack consisted of a radio show by deejay Wolfman Jack. "The idea was that every teenager in town in the film was tuned to the same station," Murch told Grove. "And therefore everywhere you went you heard this sound echoing off buildings and passing by in cars." In order to create this effect in the days before surround sound (that would come with Apocalypse Now), Lucas and Murch walked around Coppola's backyard, one playing a tape of Wolfman Jack's show, the other recording the sounds of the broadcast from different angles. From this low-tech approach, Murch jumped into the high-tech world of quadraphonic (four-channel) sound for Apocalypse Now, the first film to have its audio recorded in anything more ambitious than stereo (two-channel). Murch garnered an Academy Award for the sound editing on that film.

Because he is considered to be such an expert on film and sound editing, Murch's perspective on those arts are of interest to many aspiring filmmakers and film buffs. His first book, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, began as a lecture that Murch gave in 1988. In its original form, the book was largely a transcript of that lecture; for the second edition, Murch added an afterword about the new methods of digital editing. Although the work was largely devoted to technical topics, In the Blink of an Eye is "a book as pertinent for writers and readers as it is for film-makers and audiences," Michael Ondaatje wrote in Film Comment. Murch's second book, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, sprang from his work on the multiple-Oscar-winning film The English Patient, based on the novel by Ondaatje. Two of those Oscars went to Murch, for the sound editing and film editing. The sound editing for that film was particularly tricky, as Murch explained to Film Quarterly interviewer Michael Jarrett. Much of the film was set in the Sahara desert, but "the desert itself was absolutely quiet," which "if you simply played it the way it was, it would sound artificial. So we had to develop a signature of the desert … a sound that wouldn't raise any suspicions and that seemed quieter than if we had absolute silence."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 4: Writers and Productions Artists, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Daily Variety, May 31, 2002, Christopher Grove, "Enduring Partnerships: Collaborations between Helmers and Sound Pros Result in State of the Art," pp. B1-B2.

Entertainment Weekly, June 26, 1998, interview with Murch, p. 24.

Film Comment, May, 2001, Michael Ondaatje, interview with Murch, p. 43.

Film Quarterly, spring, 2000, Michael Jarrett, interview with Murch, p. 2.

New Republic, July 15, 1996, Stanley Kauffmann, review of In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, p. 26.