Walter Murch, The Law of Two and a Half and that horse's head

It's been a while since we posted about an inspirational figure outside the world of brands and planning. It's been a while since we posted anything, come to think of it.

In an effort to correct both, here's a few words about mustachioed film don, Walter Murch.

A sound designer and film editor, Murch has worked on numerous landmark movies and received three Oscars for his troubles, including two for The English Patient (for the sound mix and film editing).

The reason we like him so much is that he's a thinker and a doer. In the process of getting things done (like editing The Godfather and Apocalypse Now) he's contributed much to the process of film-making. Here are a couple of highlights.

When sound mixing THX 1138, a movie he co-wrote with George Lucas, Murch stumbled upon something he came to refer to as The Law of Two and a Half.

The future world of the film includes robot policemen, 600 pound chunks of crime-fighting metal. Obviously, the actors' footsteps didn't convey this, so Murch had to replace the sound of their footsteps with something more robot-like. Having recorded something fitting, he went about replacing each robot footstep on the soundtrack individually. Happily for Murch, he noticed that the human brain gets confused by more than a few things happening at once. Two, to be precise. He realised that he needed only to sync the footsteps if there were one or two robots in shot. But for three or more, our brains can't cope. We cannot tell whether the footsteps of three robots are in sync or not. So for scenes with three or more robots (of which there are quite a few) he simply needed to add a random number of footstep sounds. They didn't need to be synced, they just needed to seem right for the group.

He concluded that between two and three, the brain moves from perceiving individual things to perceiving a group. He points out that the chinese ideogram for forest comprises the symbols for three trees, implying that an ideogram with two trees would be just that, two trees. The addition of a third tree moves the meaning up a level from individual things to group. That's the Law of Two and a Half.

Another of our favourite Murch interventions occurred few years later, when he was working on The Godfather. During post-production, a crisis developed over Nino Rota's score. Studio boss Robert Evans had a problem with it. Not just a bit of it, all of it. He wanted to sack Rota and get Henry Mancini to pen a completely new score. Apparently, Murch discussed things with Evans and discovered that "the pea under the mattress" was the horse's head scene. Rota's music for the scene was a waltz that contrasted heavily with the horror of the action and Evan's negative reaction to this was colouring his opinion of the entire score. Murch's solution was to duplicate and layer the music  - out of sync - so that it sounded more dissonant, and darker, than originally scored.

(You can get a feel for the effect here.)

This was pretty revolutionary at the time, but it did the trick. Evans was placated and Rota kept the gig. And the film kept what was to become one of the most recognisable scores ever.

I could go on, about how Murch devised a notation system for editing movies...

...or how he re-edited Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (including the famous opening shot) based on a 58 page memo that Welles sent to Universal after he'd been kicked off the film.

But this has dragged on for long enough. For more Murch-related interestingness, you could do worse than check The Conversations, four interviews with Murch by Michael Ondaatje.

And the transcript of a Q&A with Mark Cousins in Projections 6.

...both of which provided content for this post.

I couldn't resist one last thing, though. A few years ago, the two halves - the sound and pictures - of the first known recording of film with sound, an experiment conducted by Thomas Edison and William Disckson in 1894 or 1895, were rediscoverd. At the time, the experiment failed because they didn't understand syncronisation, and the two halves were separated and presumed lost. (There's a bit more background here).

When the two pieces were retrieved, who was asked to marry them together? Yep, Walter Murch.

Any competent editor could have done it but such is Murch's standing that he was the only person for such a historically significant job.

Comments

[ilovewalter]

I'm as big a Fan of Murch as any other Film person but please do not imply when you say you "could go on about how Murch devised a notation system for editing movies..." that Walter invented dubbing charts. Perhaps you just used that photo from the Apocolypse book to help your text, but it is offensive to everybody who went before him in the industry.

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