As Lucasfilm’s American Graffiti celebrates it’s 50th anniversary, sound designer Walter Murch looks back at his collaboration with George Lucas to create an innovative soundscape using classic rock-n-roll recordings.
Near the end of post-production on Lucasfilm’s American Graffiti (1973), director George Lucas and sound mixer Walter Murch (his official screen credit would be “Sound Montage and Re-recording”) were busy making last adjustments to the movie’s soundtrack. “It was two o’clock in the morning, not quite an all-nighter, but close to it in order to meet the deadline,” Murch tells Lucasfilm.com. “At that same time, I was editing The Conversation [released in 1974, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola]. During the day, I’d work on The Conversation, and at night I’d be re-mixing American Graffiti.
“We were going through the film,” Murch continues, “working on Reel Two, and I asked the machine room operator, who had to jockey all of the reels of film, ‘Can you get R2-D2?’, meaning ‘Reel Two Dialogue Two.’ And George, who was asleep in a cardboard box behind me, suddenly woke up and said, ‘What did you say?’ I replied, ‘I didn’t say anything, go back to sleep.’ But he said, ‘No, no, you said something.’ I explained, ‘I asked for R2-D2’ and George said ‘What a great name!’ I had no idea what he meant, but that was it.”
As they finished Graffiti, Lucas had been making notes for his next project, a space fantasy ultimately called Star Wars. That late night request from Murch would be the inspiration for one of the Star Wars saga’s central characters. But it was the completion and resulting success of American Graffiti that made Star Wars possible in the first place. And the cinematic achievement of the film was due in part to the innovative contributions of Walter Murch.
A contemporary of George Lucas, Murch grew up in New York City, and was unfamiliar with the teenage car culture that so inspired the Californian who would become his friend and collaborator. “Our family didn’t have a television or even a car until the late ‘50s,” Murch explains. “There was a lot of public transportation. I must’ve been about 14, and a senior at our high school had graduated, and he drove up in a red MG sports car. It exploded my mind that a student could actually drive a car. This idea that there’s a world out there, the fantasy Modesto world where kids don’t exist without their car [was new to me].”
Murch and Lucas first met as film students at the University of Southern California in 1965. Sharing a passion for cinema, they became fast friends in the bustling community of young filmmakers. “George made a student film called The Emperor, which was not about cruising, but it was about a disc jockey who had a psychic hold on the youth of Los Angeles,” Murch recalls. “So that sort of adjusted me to one theme that later inspired American Graffiti.”
Both Murch and Lucas were among the cohort that joined Francis Ford Coppola at the new American Zoetrope studio in San Francisco in 1969. Together, they co-wrote the screenplay of Lucas’ feature directorial debut, THX 1138 (1971), and Murch also worked as sound designer on the project (an emerging term and role which he helped define). Both young men approached the use of sound as a critical element of the filmmaking craft, something commonly overlooked by many directors and screenwriters. Together, they’d innovate new ways to use sound to help tell a film’s story.
American Graffiti’s story “was very challenging from a structural point of view,” as Murch explains, “because it tells the story of four people and they’re all intertwined. You see all of them together at the beginning, then it explodes and you follow each one of these guys over a single night. It’s a classic, what they call Aristotelian story. There’s a unity of time, though not unity of place or character. You’re following four, which is a big number. You can follow two or three, but to keep juggling four characters – who is this guy, what’s his problem, what’s he trying to achieve, and who’s this girl he’s with? – is a challenge. The screenplay went through a lot of permutations before it felt solid on that ground.”
Production on Graffiti stretched over six weeks in the summer of 1972. Murch made a few visits to the set before his own work began after the filming’s completion (he also served as the location sound recordist for a few re-shoots, including the scene when Curt [Richard Dreyfuss] receives a fateful call from a payphone). Editing on Graffiti took place in the quiet town of Mill Valley, north of San Francisco, at a home owned by Francis Ford Coppola, one of the film’s producers.
“The work on American Graffiti was done over the garage of this house,” Murch explains. “We never went into the house itself, but there was a sort of guest house with two rooms over the garage where all of the editing took place. [Picture editors] Marcia Lucas and Verna Fields and George were kind of higgledy-piggledy in those rooms. My work as the sound designer and editor started pretty much after all of the picture editing had been done.” Murch notes that “the first assembly of the cut was three hours, which was too long for the kind of film it was. There was a desperate struggle, because when it was cut down to close to two hours, that structure broke apart. So then there was another struggle to get into its final shape.”
Almost a character in the story itself, music was essential to Graffiti. George Lucas had developed the screenplay with specific rock-n-roll songs assigned to each scene. Those songs would be presented as entries in an all-night radio program hosted by Wolfman Jack (a real-life disc jockey who played himself in the film). One of Murch’s key tasks was to integrate this broadcast throughout the film, and he and Lucas found a way to do so that made it sound distinctly realistic, as if the music was coming directly from the speakers inside the cars visible onscreen.
“Marcia Lucas cut together the entire one-hour-and-fifty-minute program with all of the commercials, music, and Wolfman Jack stuff,” Murch explains. “We had that on one Nagra recorder playing through a speaker. That was George’s responsibility. Then I was as far away from him as I could get in the yard of this house in Mill Valley, with another Nagra and a microphone. We went through all two hours of this program. George would slowly move the speaker from one side to the other, and I would correspondingly move the microphone. Sometimes they were pointed in opposite directions; sometimes they were pointed right at each other. This gave you a floating sense of reverberation. We did that for two hours, and then we did it all again, knowing we’d never match it up.
“In the final mix, I had three tracks: the original radio program as clear as it could be, and these two atmospheric tracks,” Murch continues. “Depending on the scene, I could shift into high-reverb or I could put the music up front. It’s the acoustic equivalent of depth of field in photography. When you shoot a portrait of somebody, you want the background to be out of focus. This was a way to have the music be out of focus in the background when there was a dialogue scene in the foreground. The dialogue was as crisp and clear as you could make it, and the music was this shimmering veil in the background that you knew was music, and you could kind of follow it, but it wasn’t distracting you from the dialogue.”
Read more at Lucasfilm.com. For those in the US, see an all new remastered version of American Graffiti on the big screen later this month, and a 50th anniversary edition Steelbook 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital is released on November 7th.
Image: Murch and Lucas on the set of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back at Elstree Studios in 1979.
