THE SOUND OF FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
A new book highlights many that helped make masterpieces, including sound wizard Walter Murch
I was twenty-two year old college intern at the Amsterdam News in New York when, because there was no film critic, I was able to get the paper’s invitation to the premiere of ‘Apocalypse Now’ at the cavernous Ziegfeld Theater in midtown. I will never forget the sound of helicopters filling the theater before they appeared on screen. It was audio visual assault on the senses that foreshadowed a film that was a nightmarish dream of war, madness and death. In 1979, the sound design of ‘Apocalyse Now’ was one of the many elements that made Francis Ford Coppola’s epic memorable, controversial, and visionary.
I had no idea what Walter Murch’s credit for “sound montage and design” meant. It was just one in a huge laundry list of names at the film’s end. Over time I got better grip on Murch’s contribution’s to this film, and to the overall art of sound design. Sam Wasson’s beautifully written and deeply researched ‘The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story,’ is focused on the journey of Coppola’s American Zoetrope, a company that grew, crashed, and was reborn multiple times from the ‘70s onward. Wasson, who’s last book was the insightful ‘The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Days of Hollywood,’ looks in debt at two films, ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘One from the Heart,’ and the long gestating ‘Megalopolis,’ coming out this year.
There are numerous fascinating subplots and characters in this tale but I was particularly taken with Walter Murch and the way, with Coppola’s encouragement, he revolutionized movie sound through both ‘Godfathers,’ ‘The Conversation’ and ‘Apocalypse Now.’ From childhood in NYC, Murch was obsessed with sound, toying with a tape recorder and splicing different sounds together as a kid. At University of Southern California film school in the ‘60s, he fell in a posse of aspiring filmmakers that included John Milius, George Lucas, and Coppola.
When Coppola broke through with ‘The Godfather,’ Murch was an integral part of that masterpiece. As Wasson writes, “For the sound of the door shutting on Kay, the final shot of the picture… Murch created a cut beyond the literal, a sound that “needed to the give the audience more than the correct physical cues about the door; it was even more important to get a firm, irrevocable closure that resonated with and underscored Michael’s final line: ‘Never ask me about my business, Kay.’” Another prime example is the famous scene where Michael kill’s the corrupt Captain McCluskey and “the cue conjures the image of a New York train, but in pure, emotional sound, the screech describes the growing anguish with Michael.”
Wasson goes into great detail on Murch’s work on ‘The Conversation,’ a paranoid thriller about a man who bugs and wire taps, ultimately becoming a victim of his own techniques. The sound design elements of the film are essential to the tale. It may be Murch’s masterpiece and it took him to a place of artistic transcedence: “You get to a place where time is not all issue at all and you’re oddly at the center of thing, but also you are not. You’re the person doing it, yet the feeling is that you’re not the origin of it, that somehow ‘it’ is happening around you, that you are being used by this thing to help bring it into the world…the best times this process reaches the point where I can look at the scene and say ‘I didn’t have anything to do with that — it just created itself.”
That’s as good an illustration of artistic fulfillment as you’ll find. Wasson’s book is full of such a gems. This is a great book for a cinephile on a cold winter’s night.
Great take and I love reading about film process. Reminded me of Blow Out by Brian De Palma. Also the critical role that a soundtrack plays. The original Planet of the Apes had the first soundtrack that as a kid I was drawn to.