In the 1960s, Murch was primarily editing commercials and industrial films, when he joined Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studio, one of the first attempts at establishing a San Francisco-based filmmaking community far from Hollywood's control. (George Lucas of course, would eventually resurrect the idea and reshape it into his own Industrial Light and Magic mega-enterprise in nearby Marin.)

Murch replaced the stock sound of movies with complex sound schemes that were carefully designed to fit each picture; that created an atmosphere of their own, to match, or often, to go far beyond the visuals that they accompanied. The Godfather films have his stamp on them, (Murch describes in detail how sound enhances Michael Corleone's (Al Pacino) shooting of Sterling Hayden's crooked policeman, and how he labored over choosing just the right door slam for Michael's closing of the door on Kay (Diane Keaton), his fiance-the last sound heard before the film's end credits) but it was really on The Conversation and particularly on Apocalypse Now that Murch really made his mark.

The Film About Sound

The Conversation, which Leonard Maltin once described as one of the most important films of the 1970s, was a film literally about sound. Gene Hackman's Harry Caul, who goes from introverted to the ultimate paranoid in the course of the movie, is a professional soundman whose living is earned, not through film, but through wiretapping and audio surveillance. The plot hinges on what Caul hears on a tape, and how to interpret it. Of the film, Roger Ebert once wrote:

Coppola, who wrote and directed, considers this film his most personal project. He was working two years after the Watergate break-in, amid the ruins of the Vietnam effort, telling the story of a man who places too much reliance on high technology and has nightmares about his personal responsibility. Harry Caul is a microcosm of America at that time: not a bad man, trying to do his job, haunted by a guilty conscience, feeling tarnished by his work.

The movie works on that moral level, and also as a taut, intelligent thriller. It opens with a virtuoso telephoto shot, showing a San Francisco plaza filled with people. Faraway music mixes with electronic sounds. There is a slow zoom in to the back of Caul's head, and then the camera follows him. Other shots show a man with a shotgun microphone, on top of a nearby building, holding in his cross hairs a young couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) who are the subject of the investigation. Eventually we go inside a van packed with electronic gear, where Stan (John Cazale), Harry's assistant, is waiting.

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