![]() 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 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). “So that sort of adjusted me to one theme that later inspired American Graffiti.”īoth Murch and Lucas were among the cohort that joined Francis Ford Coppola at the new American Zoetrope studio in San Francisco in 1969. “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. ![]() Sharing a passion for cinema, they became fast friends in the bustling community of young filmmakers. Murch and Lucas first met as film students at the University of Southern California in 1965. ![]() This idea that there’s a world out there, the fantasy Modesto world where kids don’t exist without their car. It exploded my mind that a student could actually drive a car. 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. “There was a lot of public transportation. “Our family didn’t have a television or even a car until the late ‘50s,” Murch explains. And the cinematic achievement of the film was due in part to the innovative contributions of Walter Murch.Ī 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. But it was the completion and resulting success of American Graffiti that made Star Wars possible in the first place. That late night request from Murch would be the inspiration for one of the Star Wars saga’s central characters. “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.”Īs they finished Graffiti, Lucas had been making notes for his next project, a space fantasy ultimately called Star Wars. During the day, I’d work on The Conversation, and at night I’d be re-mixing American Graffiti. “At that same time, I was editing The Conversation. “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. 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.
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