{"id":6967,"date":"2015-11-15T13:41:55","date_gmt":"2015-11-15T20:41:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6967"},"modified":"2015-11-19T13:55:49","modified_gmt":"2015-11-19T20:55:49","slug":"apocalypse-wagner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/11\/15\/apocalypse-wagner\/","title":{"rendered":"Apocalypse Wagner"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/nautil.us\/issue\/30\/identity\/how-i-tried-to-transplant-the-musical-heart-of-apocalypse-now\" target=\"_blank\">from Nautilus<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<h1 class=\"article-title\">How I Tried to Transplant the Musical Heart of Apocalypse Now<\/h1>\n<h2 class=\"article-subtitle\">Oscar-winning editor Walter Murch describes the surprising idiosyncrasies of film scoring.<\/h2>\n<p>BY WALTER MURCH<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/30QzJKCUekQ\" width=\"480\" height=\"270\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In 1979, sometime during the barely controlled chaos of the last months of finishing Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s Apocalypse Now, someone in legal affairs had the presence of mind to ask if we had secured the rights to use the 1965 Georg Solti recording of the \u201cRide of the Valkyries,\u201d the music which accompanied Colonel Kilgore\u2019s attack on the Vietnamese village of Vin Drin Dop, otherwise known as Charlie\u2019s Point.<\/p>\n<p>The idea of blasting music from Wagner\u2019s opera Die Walk\u00fcre as a form of PsyWarOp (Psychological Warfare Operations) to terrify the Vietnamese had originated deep in the neuronal labyrinth of John Milius\u2019s mind in 1969, when he was writing the original screenplay for Apocalypse Now.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat Valkyrie scene came from a vision I had of the exhilaration of war\u2014right alongside the terror and the horror and the fear of being snuffed out. The glory of it!\u201d John told Lawrence Weschler in a 2005 Harper\u2019s article. \u201cNowadays\u2014unlike during the Victorian era when the glory was all that got discussed\u2014nowadays it\u2019s the horror that always gets talked about. And either one by itself, of course, is a ridiculous half-statement.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cRide of the Valkyries\u201d was so deeply associated with the attack on Charlie\u2019s Point, and had been for so long\u2014from birth, so to speak\u2014that we who were working on the film, editing the picture and mixing the sound, could barely conceive of separating the two. How that particular Solti recording came to be chosen, I never found out\u2014the decision predated my joining the film\u2014but there is a general consensus in musical circles that Solti\u2019s interpretation, conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, has never been surpassed.<\/p>\n<p>So it came as an existential shock when Decca, the record company in question, said firmly: No.<\/p>\n<p>There was so little time left that we were constrained to move forward along three fronts, hoping that at least one would pay off: 1) to continue to petition Decca; 2) to make arrangements to record the \u201cValkyries\u201d with the San Francisco Symphony, trying to duplicate Solti\u2019s dynamics and meter; and 3) to comb through all the existing recordings with the hope of finding one that was close to Solti\u2019s interpretation and available to use in the film.<\/p>\n<p>The last of these approaches fell to me, since I was responsible for the sound design of the film as a whole, as well as being, at that time, the picture editor for this section of the film.<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"http:\/\/nautil.us\/issue\/30\/identity\/how-i-tried-to-transplant-the-musical-heart-of-apocalypse-now\" target=\"_blank\">click to continue reading at Nautilus<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from Nautilus How I Tried to Transplant the Musical Heart of Apocalypse Now Oscar-winning editor Walter Murch describes the surprising idiosyncrasies of film scoring. BY WALTER MURCH In 1979, sometime during the barely controlled chaos of the last months of finishing Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s Apocalypse Now, someone in legal affairs had the presence of mind [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}