Mark Berger | |
---|---|
Born | San Francisco, California, United States | May 14, 1943
Occupation | Sound engineer |
Years active | 1973–present |
Mark Berger (born May 14, 1943) is an American sound engineer. He has won four Academy Awards for Best Sound. He holds the Academy Award record for "perfect score" with 4 nominations and 4 wins. He is best known for his work on The Godfather Part II (1974), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Apocalypse Now (1979). [1] He has worked on more than 170 films since 1973. [2]
Berger studied experimental psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. [3] He took part in the recording of some documentaries for radio about the opposition to Vietnam. Through this work, he got a job in the South focused on the civil rights of workers. He spent nine months in New Orleans making the film. When he returned to Berkeley, he started to realize that his filming experience was more interesting than his studies and he found a job recording sound for a documentary on the programs of the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID]. He visited 11 countries in the course of 7 days. [2]
After Berger worked on the documentary The Place for No Story, Walter Murch noticed him. Murch was an editor and sound mixer who had been working with George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. [2] He tried to recruit Berger for Coppola’s new film – The Conversation – but Berger was committed to a trip to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro. When Berger returned and got in touch with Murch he was offered the job of working on The Godfather, Part II. This was his first job in feature film. [2]
Berger created, and has been teaching the “Film 140: The Sound of Film” course at UC Berkeley in their undergraduate program since the year 2000. [2] Berger is married to Berkeley City Council member Susan Wengraf. [2]
Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is considered one of the major figures of the New Hollywood filmmaking movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Coppola is the recipient of five Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, two Palmes d'Or and a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA).
The Conversation is a 1974 American mystery thriller film written, produced, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr, and Robert Duvall. The film revolves around a surveillance expert and the moral dilemma he faces when his recordings reveal a potential murder.
Douglas Graham Shearer was a Canadian American pioneering sound designer and recording director who played a key role in the advancement of sound technology for motion pictures. The elder brother of actress Norma Shearer, he won seven Academy Awards for his work. In 2008, he was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.
Walter Scott Murch is an American film editor, director, writer and sound designer. With a career stretching back to 1969, including work on THX 1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Ghost and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins.
Gordon Hugh Willis Jr., ASC was an American cinematographer and film director. He is best known for his photographic work on eight Woody Allen films, six Alan J. Pakula films, four James Bridges films, and all three films from Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather series.
Gerald Bernard "Jerry" Greenberg was an American film editor with more than 40 feature film credits. Greenberg received both the Academy Award for Best Film Editing and the BAFTA Award for Best Editing for the film The French Connection (1971). In the 1980s, he edited five films with director Brian De Palma.
Richard Marks was an American film editor with more than 30 editing credits for feature and television films dating from 1972. In an extended, notable collaboration (1983–2010), he edited all of director James L. Brooks' feature films.
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American epic war film produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The screenplay, co-written by Coppola, John Milius and Michael Herr, is loosely based on the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, with the setting changed from late 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War. The film follows a river journey from South Vietnam into Cambodia undertaken by Captain Willard, who is on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a renegade Special Forces officer who is accused of murder and presumed insane. The ensemble cast also features Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne and Dennis Hopper.
Angelo P. Graham (1932-2017) was an American art director. He won an Oscar and was nominated for three more in the category Best Art Direction. He worked on nearly 30 films during his 30-year career.
Barry M. Malkin was an American film editor with about 30 film credits. He is noted for his extended collaboration with director Francis Ford Coppola, having edited most of Coppola's films from 1969 to 1997. In particular, Malkin worked with Coppola on four of the component and compilation films of the Godfather trilogy, though he did not edit the first film, The Godfather. Film critic Roger Ebert called the first two Godfather films a "cultural bedrock".
David Randall Thom is an American sound designer and the current director of sound design at Skywalker Sound.
Loren L. Ryder was an American sound engineer. He won five Academy Awards and was nominated for twelve more in the categories Best Sound Recording and Best Effects.
Bernard B. Brown was an American sound engineer and composer, who wrote the scores for many early animated cartoons produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions for distribution by Warner Bros. Pictures. He won an Academy Award in the category Sound Recording and was nominated for seven more in the same category. He was also nominated three times in the category Best Visual Effects. He worked on more than 520 films between 1930 and 1958.
Richard Beggs is an American sound designer who has worked on more than 70 films since 1979. He won an Academy Award for Best Sound for the film Apocalypse Now. a TEC Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Film Sound, and has received seven Golden Reel Award sound nominations. He has designed sound for Sofia Coppola's films The Virgin Suicides, Lost In Translation, Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, The Bling Ring and The Beguiled. His other sound design credits include Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Children of Men, Adaptation, The Godfather Part III, Palo Alto, Bugsy, Rain Man, and Ghostbusters.
Michael J. Kohut was an American audio engineer. He was a seven-time Academy Award nominee for Best Sound, a BAFTA award winner for Best Sound for Fame and was President of Post Production Facilities at Sony Pictures Studios. During his tenure at Sony Pictures Studios, he led the American team in the development of Sony Dynamic Digital Sound the discrete eight-channel playback system for motion picture sound.
Tom Fleischman is an American sound engineer and re-recording mixer. He is the son of film editor Dede Allen, and documentary producer, director, and writer Stephen Fleischman. He has worked on over 170 films since 1978. He won an Academy Award in 2011 in the category Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing for Hugo and has received four other Oscar nominations for Reds (1982), The Silence of the Lambs (1992), Gangs of New York (2003), and The Aviator (2004).
Todd Boekelheide is an American composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, best known for his work scoring documentary films. He won an Academy Award for Best Sound and was nominated for another in the same category.
Lisa Fruchtman is an American film and television editor, and documentary director with about 25 film credits. Fruchtman won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for The Right Stuff (1983). With her brother, Rob Fruchtman, she produced, directed, and edited the 2012 documentary Sweet Dreams.
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film is a book of interviews between novelist Michael Ondaatje and film editor and sound designer Walter Murch. Ondaatje met Murch when he was editing the adaptation of Ondaatje's novel The English Patient. Throughout the book, Murch offers insight into films he worked on, including The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Now Redux. The book is divided into five "conversations" and contains contributions from directors and producers Murch has worked with, including George Lucas, Coppola, Rick Schmidlin and Anthony Minghella and stills from the films discussed.