Forty years ago this spring, Walter Murch (on far right in photo), Mark Berger, and Richard Beggs were mixing Apocalypse Now in a small studio on Pacific Street in San Francisco. The dark figure lu…
Often, when an air strike is reflected or referenced in media, Richard Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” is usually heard. A famous song by The Doors would be “The End”. One popular movie quote would be “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” These are all a major part of the Omni Zoetrope (AKA American Zoetrope) production, Apocalypse Now.
Apocalypse Now is a very important production in the history of media as it contributed to many amazing technologies. About 19 people doing post-production sound/editorial/music on the original film went on to popular sound services like Skywalker Sound (a Lucasfilm Ltd. company, formerly known as Sprocket Systems), The Saul Zaentz Film Center, Studio C, Berkeley Sound Artists, Russian Hill Recording, and The Sound Service. Namely with Skywalker & SZC, those people would include Randy Thom, Dennie Thorpe, David Parker, Tim Holland, Mark Berger, and of course the editor, Sound Montage and Design guy, Re-Recording Mixer and Re-Recordist, Doctor of Media Walter Murch. Skywalker Sound’s North division helped Murch remix this iconic film in Digital Stereo with Dolby Surround and the Home THX Audio System, while Saul Zaentz’s film center remixed the AC-3 (that is, 5.1) version of the film and provided uncredited post-production sound services for the “Redux” version. This year, Apocalypse Now was remixed in Dolby Atmos + Vision by Pete Horner at Zoetrope itself!
Speaking of THX, the restoration processes for the 1991 remaster of the film became the THX Laserdisc/Digital Mastering/Quality Control Program, in addition to using Home THX Audio System in restoring the audio. The 1997 Laserdisc release (which included the 1991 THX-Certified, Skywalker remixed track) was officially THX-Certified with their Laserdisc logo, which debuted on the 1993 laserdiscs of James Cameron’s The Abyss (Special Edition). I tweeted about the 1991 release to Randy Thom when he tweeted, “Big bass rumbles in Apocalypse Now worked rather well, I think.“
Fun fact: in 1975, 4 years before Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, legendary sound designer Ben Burtt, who founded Skywalker Sound with George Lucas and Rick McCallum, designed, created and recorded the famous sound effects for George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, redefining the important, beautiful and amazing art of creative sound design in post-production.
The sound effects of this particular film were preserved with Hollywood Edge’s CD Sound Effects Library The American Zoetrope SFX Collection - Apocalypse Now. Also, according to a Skywalker Sound/Saul Zaentz/Zoetrope veteran, Douglas Murray, on the HBO documentary Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1987), Richard Beggs was given thanks from the producers for letting the sound team “use a lot of battle sounds from Apocalypse Now.“ Plus, in a lesser-known Skywalker Sound project, Romero, sound designer Edward Beyer used a particular sound effect from the iconic film (as I tweeted about this): "If you remember the opening of Apocalypse Now, there's a great heli- copter sound of blades spinning around. I used the exact same sound for Romero."
Randy Thom learned about one of the most important aspects of sound design--to put the viewer in that movie/media--when he noticed that Dr. Murch put a helicopter sound in the shot of ceiling blades, which, in the mind of our character, weary from war and drugs, reflects helicopter blades. Randy always talks about this when he teaches sound design, and one of his more keynotes is called Teaching the Camera to Listen: From Apocalypse Now to The Peanuts Movie (2015).
It’s worth noting that the role that Richard Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries played in the film depended on an intense, creative, careful orchestration of balance between music and sound, as an article about Walter Murch’s work says... as if editing a million and a half feet of film wasn’t labor-intensive already! Also, Bambi was a source of inspiration for elements in the score, according to Apocalypse Now’s featurette on its sound design.
Apocalypse Now is not only known as an artistic, disturbing masterpiece of cinematic art, but also as a movie that had an unbelievable amount of effort that was put into it; likewise the efforts of George Lucas on Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope and Phil Vischer on The Toy That Saved Christmas put them in dangerous health conditions. It’s shameful that the end credits are often skipped on TV and Netflix’s prints (including the redux version’s credits), given how much effort they put into making this film.
One of the biggest efforts in the post-production of this film was for the 2019 Dolby Atmos remix at Zoetrope, looking for a cleaner audio master to remix. It was entirely sourced from “one of the 1979 film’s original six track print masters” which was surprisingly “tossed in a dumpster”, according to an article on the remastering of the “Final Cut”.
Despite the adult content of Apocalypse Now; the value of the efforts put into this popular film calls for an edited version to help educate people about movies and the Vietnam war--which came to mind as 300 (2007) was made into a PG-rated version for education purposes.
Ultimately, I am absolutely inspired and astonished at how important this film is in the very geeky subjects I love that are post-production sound and digital mastering/restoration.
Thanks, Randy Thom, Walter Murch and Francis Ford Coppola, for the amazingly important and defining efforts you put into this film.
BTW, Douglas Murray of Skywalker Sound shared this post on Twitter!
