Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas directed some of the most important films of the 1970s, including The Godfather, The Godfather II, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, THX-1138 and American Graffiti. Besides the involvement of Lucas and/or Coppola, those films share another connecting element: their sound, and often their editing, was designed by Walter Murch.
In 1996, Murch edited the film version of The English Patient, based on a 1992 book by Michael Ondaatje. The film won nine Oscars, including a Best Editing Oscar for Murch, and best picture. Ondaatje returned the favor in 2002, by editing a book titled The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, based on an ongoing dialog that two men have shared since collaborating together.
Murch is not just a top-flight film craftsman. Based on The Conversations, he's an extremely insightful and articulate film theoretician, capable of discussing his films in particular, and film theory in general, in great detail and depth (and Ondaatje's thoughtful questions clearly help to draw out his subject).
And it's a book that's remarkably free of politics, with the exception of one photo, which caused a somewhat well known weblogger to quietly blow a gasket in response, and then watch his server get nearly blow out, when Glenn Reynolds linked to said post.
Because the book is a series of edited interviewed, it truly is a series of conversations, based on spoken word, and transcribed and edited by Ondaatje into a form of English recognizable to the layman. Believe it or not, this is no small feat for books on film theory, much of which these days would be right at home in postmodern college textbooks full of overly inflated verbal gobbledygook. Here's a sample, from a book on Stanley Kubrick:
And while Kubrick feels strongly that the visual powers of film make ambiguity an inevitability as well as a virtue, he would not share Bazin's mystical belief that the better film makers are those who sacrifice their personal perspectives to a 'fleeting crystallization' of a reality [of] whose environing presence one is ceaselessly aware.'Instead, the reader truly feels as if he's in the same room with someone who understands film and its potential as an art form, and how to shape it until it reaches that point.
Sound No Longer an Afterthought
While there were previous attempts at using sound as an element in the movies, particularly by Orson Welles (whose 1958 noir-classic Touch of Evil Murch re-edited in the late 1990s to better conform to Welles' original wishes, rather the heads of Universal in the 1950s), and by Kubrick (particularly on 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Murch sites as a key influence), sound as a dramatic element was an afterthought for most Hollywood directors. Even though films could be projected with stereo sound, and even with early surround sound schemes, most directors were content to distribute their films with mono soundtracks, often reusing the same sound effects that were Hollywood clichés by the 1940s.
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