From the Archives: Film Editor and Sound Designer Walter Murch.

DATE November 3, 2000 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Film editor and sound designer Walter Murch discusses
the editing and re-release of the 1958 film "Touch of Evil"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Last month, Frances Ford Coppola, George Lucas and other filmmakers gathered
to honor Walter Murch at a tribute produced by the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts & Sciences. Murch is a film editor and sound designer who's been
nominated for eight Academy Awards. He won in the categories of sound and
editing for "The English Patient," which made him the first person to win in
both categories for the same film. He also did the sound for "Apocalypse
Now," "The Conversation," "The Godfather Trilogy" and "The Talented Mr.
Ripley." He worked on the restoration of the Orson Welles classic "Touch of
Evil," which has just been released on DVD and video. He'll talk about the
restoration in a few minutes.

First, we're going to hear Michael Ondaatje's comments about Murch recorded
last month at the academy tribute to him. Ondaatje wrote the novel "The
English Patient."

Mr. MICHAEL ONDAATJE (Author, "The English Patient"): Driving the curving
road into San Francisco, Walter Murch glances down at the speedometer and
says, `This car has almost reached the moon.' What? He says, `The distance
to the moon is 238,713 miles. This car has gone 238,127 miles, and most of
it
has been on this winding road.' This is a typical Walter Murch piece of
small
talk.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. ONDAATJE: He's a man whose brain is always peering over the wall into
the world of scientific and technical knowledge. The book on his table that
he is probably reading is "Our Place in the Cosmos," by Chandra
Wickramasinghe. He has written "In the Blink of An Eye," a wonderful book
on
editing. He has translated the works of Malaparte. He doesn't watch
television at all. He doesn't watch too many other movies when he's working
on one himself.

As a writer, I discovered during my peripheral involvement with "English
Patient" that when I watched Walter Murch edit, this was the stage in film
that was closest to the art of writing. Walter likes to quote the dictum
that
`A film is born three times, in the writing of the script, in the shooting
and
in the editing.' With "The English Patient," there were, in fact, four
births. And I'd like to chart and show how different and variable these
births are in terms of one scene.

In the novel of "The English Patient," there's a moment when Caravaggio,
whose
hands are bandaged, watches a dog drink from a bowl of water and remembers
how
he was tortured three years earlier. Something about the table he is
sitting
at begins this quick shot of memory. The scene is about two paragraphs long
and the dog beside him is in the present and the torture scene is in the
past,
and they merge. He doesn't want to face that traumatic moment, so it is
vaguely--intentionally vaguely--remembered. It is dreamlike, not at all
realistic.

When Anthony Minghella wrote the script, the scene went on for about four
pages of sharp and frightening dialogue. It was now a scene where the
German
interrogator, not Italian as in the book, tries to break down the defenses
of
the caught spy, Caravaggio. In order to link Caravaggio more to the crimes
of
the English patient, it is clear in Minghella's version that Almasy is the
cause of the capture of Caravaggio, which leads to the torture. We are
therefore already a long way from the scene in my book. In the novel, the
past just haunts them at a certain moment, but none of this torture is
described in detail, just suggested. Minghella's scene, brilliantly
written,
has tense dialogue repeated again and again with the interrogator casually
circling around to catch him by surprise.

The next, third birth was the shooting of the scene. As Willem Dafoe, who
played Caravaggio, said, `We shot the hell out of this scene.' And they
did,
at least 15 takes and then close-ups, an opening razor, close-ups of the
typist recording the interrogation, a fly crawling over Caravaggio's hand
that
buzzes off as a razor enters the frame. I remember one stunning take where
the camera's still on Dafoe's face all through the scene and stayed with him
as he pulled the table he was handcuffed to all the way to the back of the
room to avoid that razor.

When I saw the assembly, this was the moment in the film I thought most
remarkable. In any case, Minghella had taken another step forward from the
written screenplay with the shooting of the scene. Now he gave it to Murch.
And what did Walter do with the scene? Well, he had been reading the
Italian
writer, Malaparte, on the Nazi character, and he plucked from his reading
the
fact that the Nazis hated the showing of weakness. If they witnessed it,
they
were so appalled, they would try to force that weakness out of you by
exerting
even more cruelty. This idea was certainly not in my book, not in
Minghella's
script, nor in the 25 minutes of footage that had been shot and which had
now
had to be cut down to a terrifying three minutes.

Every scene for Walter needs to have a larger science of patents at work
within it, and this was going to be the idea or concept that governed the
way
he cut the scene. At one point, Caravaggio--Dafoe--says when he sees the
razor, `Don't cut me.' He says it once. Walter has the interrogator pause
in
his questioning when he hears this, extending the time of the response. He
has threatened the spy with the idea of cutting off his thumbs but only in a
casual way, not serious way. When Caravaggio says, `Don't cut me,' the
German
pauses for a moment. The interrogation continues.

At some point, Walter found another take of Dafoe's line, this one with more
of a quaver in the voice, and he decided to put it in again a few seconds
later, so Dafoe repeats his fear, his weakness, and now time stops. We see
the look on the German and now we know he has to do what he was previously
just theorizing about. To emphasize this, Murch at this very moment pulls
all
the sound out of the scene and plunges the soundtrack into silence. And we,
if we don't realize it as we sit in the theater, are shocked for some
reason,
and it is because of that quietness. Something terrible has been revealed
about the spy, about his own nature, and now something terrible is going to
happen.

Up till now, Walter has built numerous layers of sound to give us the
feeling
of being within that cavelike room. He even provides sounds taking place
outside the room, a favorite device of his. In this scene, there is the
sound
of firing squads outside, soldiers yelling, typing, flies buzzing,
telephones
ringing. Then when Dafoe repeats that line, which, in reality, he did not
repeat, it was not even there in the script, Murch makes the response to the
line a total and dangerous silence.

Walter said that the use of sounds in movies did not come in until the
invention of synchronous sound in 1927. Till then, there was the continuous
accompaniment of music, live orchestra, organ or piano. As an editor, he
always tries to find a moment in his films to have that shock of silence
filling the theater, and in this film, it happens now. It feels as if it
lasts five minutes, but in reality, just about five seconds. And during
that
time, all is decided. And after that moment, all hell breaks loose. This
is
where members of the audience begin to close their eyes and where some
faint.
In fact, they probably faint because they close their eyes, because we see
nothing violent on the screen, but we hear the suggestions of it. And the
ones with closed eyes are now under the control of this master sound editor,
and so they imagine it all.

Thank you.

(Soundbite of applause)

GROSS: Michael Ondaatje wrote the novel, "The English Patient." His
comments
about sound designer and film editor Walter Murch were recorded at last
month's Academy tribute to Murch.

Murch was the editor and sound mixer for the restored version of the Orson
Welles 1958 film "Touch of Evil," which has just been released on DVD and
video. The film is generally acknowledged as one of Orson Welles' great
achievements, but it was first released as a B movie and flopped at the box
office. But the audience never saw exactly what Welles had intended. The
studio did the final cut and that version infuriated Welles. In response,
he
fired off a 58-page memo explaining his original intentions. The complete
memo was tracked down a few years ago by Rick Schmidlin, who used it as the
basis to produce the restored version of the film. The restored version
follows Welles' intentions, as outlined in the memo.

"Touch of Evil" is set in a seedy town on the Mexican border. Charlton
Heston
plays a Mexican narcotics officer honeymooning with his new bride, played by

Janet Leigh. The honeymoon is quickly interrupted by a bomb explosion which
Heston feels compelled to investigate. But he's up against a corrupt
American
police chief, played by Orson Welles.

Murch describes the opening shot as a Rosetta stone for film students, a
shot
that is logistically and technically difficult, which is made to look
effortless.

Mr. WALTER MURCH: The shot is a three-and-a-half-minute-long single take
which involves the population of an entire city, a very lively border town
at
the crossing between the United States and Mexico. And you begin on the
Mexican side of the border with a big close-up of a pair of hands putting a
bomb in a car, turning the clock to three minutes and 20 seconds, which
justifiably becomes the entire length of the shot. So he predicts right at
the beginning of the shot how long the shot will be because that's when the
bomb will go off. And then the camera cranes way up into the sky and has an
overview of this entire street and almost the entire city and then drops way
down to street level, sees people on the street and then picks up Charlton
Heston and Janet Leigh, who play the leads in the film. And then the car
with
the bomb in it comes into the shot and leaves the shot, and then there's
some
other bit of business and the car comes back.

So it's a very complicated shot that ends with the whole dialogue scene
still
part of the same shot, and then the dialogue scene ends. Charlton Heston
and
Janet Leigh go off and they have a kiss, and then right in the middle of
their
kiss, the bomb goes off. So everything is contained, except for that final
bomb, within this single shot.

GROSS: Now in the released version of the movie, this spectacular shot is
obscured by the opening credits and also Henry Mancini music plays--you
know,
the opening credit music plays over this entire scene. Now that's not what
Orson Welles wanted. What did he want?

Mr. MURCH: Well, let me just read you from his memo. This is a document
that he wrote in a single night. It's about 58 pages long. And he was
allowed by the studio to see his film one time only. He had been fired off
the film effectively four months before the film was finished, and those are
four extremely critical months in the life of any film. He saw what they'd
done to it, he saw that they had written new scenes, added new dialogue,
shot
whole new sections of the film, and this is his response.

He begins, actually, with talking about this very thing. This is Orson
Welles
talking now. `I assume that the music now backing the opening sequence of
the
picture is temporary.' In fact, it was not. This was Henry Mancini's title
music. Then, `As the camera moves through the streets of the Mexican border
town, the plan was to feature a succession of different and contrasting
Latin-American musical numbers; the effect, that is, of our passing one
cabaret orchestra after another. In honky-tonk districts on the border,
loudspeakers are all over the entrance of every joint, large or small, each
blasting out its own tune by way of a come-on or pitch. The special use of
contrasting mambo-type rhythm numbers with rock 'n' roll will be developed
in
some detail at the end of this memo, when I'll take up the details of the
beat
and also specifics of musical color and instrumentation on a scene-by-scene,
transition-by-transition basis.'

You can get from that paragraph the depth of detail that he was going to go
into in this memo, but what we read there was our instructions from Welles
about what to do. Once the titles had been eliminated from that opening
shot--and we were very lucky to find what's called a textbook background,
which is just the images without any titles on it. So we found that
negative
and we were able to use that to integrate into the rest of the film and have
that shot have no titles over it. So now you can see everything that's
going
on in the shot. The way it was, you had to look around the titles to see
what
was actually happening in it, which Welles hated.

GROSS: Now had Welles recorded all the sound that he wants to use there?
And
if so, did you have access to that recording, or did you have to do the
sound
from scratch for that opening scene?

Mr. MURCH: Well, that's another interesting thing. We actually found the
original sound for that scene, not the music part, which I had to
manufacture
by lifting pieces from other places in the film of music that he had also
used
in the film: strip joint music, rock 'n' roll music, mambo, cha-cha music,
all coming out of little, tinny loudspeakers which he had recorded. But
once
the Henry Mancini original title music was on, the studio made the decision
to
eliminate almost everything of the effects track, the soundtrack that Welles
had also produced. So the sound of people walking, the sound of a crowd,
the
sound of a group of goats that they come across in the middle of a shot, the
car sounds, all of this was really absent. And when you heard the previous
version of the film, your memory is of nothing except Henry Mancini's music.
So by eliminating Mancini's music, we were also--surprisingly because we
didn't know it was there. We were able to reveal this whole other dimension
to the film which has never been heard before.

GROSS: Let's hear how that opening scene sounds. We won't hear all three
minutes of it, but we'll hear some of it and hear that kind of very varied
sense of different cultures in one town that he wanted to establish in this
opening.

Mr. MURCH: OK.

(Soundbite of cacophonous music and street sounds from "Touch of Evil")

GROSS: Sound from the film "Touch of Evil." We'll talk more with Walter
Murch about restoring the film after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Walter Murch. He was the editor and sound mixer for the
restored version of Orson Welles' 1958 film "Touch of Evil." It's just been
released on DVD and video.

Now I believe Orson Welles, in this long memo that he wrote to the studio
telling them why they should do the film the way he wanted it cut, he said
that the sound in this scene should be as bad as it would've been in real
life. I mean, he wanted the sound from these speakers and car radios to be
really tinny, like in real life. So that's instructions that you followed.

Mr. MURCH: Yes, absolutely. This was a very revolutionary thing at the
time. In 1958 when you made a film and you put music to it, everyone's
impulse was to make the music sound as good as possible. This is roughly
the
equivalent of when you're shooting a scene in a slum. Even though it's a
slum, it's not really dirty. There's a whole other aesthetic that says make
it as dirty as possible, and that was what Welles was following in his use
of
music here. Again, let me just read from his memo, and I should emphasize
that this is the only time in the whole memo that he goes into a narrow
column
with capitals, very big.

It says, `It is very important to note that in the recording of all these
numbers which are supposed to be heard through street loudspeakers, that the
effects should be just that, just exactly as bad as that. The music itself
should be skillfully played, but it will not be enough in doing the final
sound to run this track through an echo chamber. To get the effect we're
looking for, it is absolutely vital that this music be played back through a
cheap speaker in the alley outside the sound building. Since this is not
very
expensive, I feel justified in insisting upon this as the result will really
be worth it.'

Now right in that, you can get a sense of how mysterious Orson Welles was to
the studios because here he's saying at the beginning of it, `It should be
as
bad as it really is, as bad as possible.' And at the end, he says, `The
result will really be worth it.' And this was a mentality, certainly at
Universal in the late 1950s, that people just had a hard time understanding,
but it adds to the realism. And since that time, this technique is now
universally applied in film, but in 1958, it was completely outside of
anyone's experience.

GROSS: Now one of the things that the studio changed was Orson Welles'
cross-cutting in the movie. There were two main characters. Janet Leigh
and
Charlton Heston play an American and a Mexican who have just married. He's
a
cop. And the story kind of alternates between her point of view and his
point
of view. He's investigating a murder while she's getting terrorized by the
bad guys, and the film cuts back and forth. And I guess the studio found
that
really confusing.

Mr. MURCH: This happens in the opening reel of the film, and Welles had
intended the two stories--that the married couple gets separated quite soon
after this explosion. And for the rest of the film, really, we're following
their two independent stories, which finally get linked up together during
the
climax.

This also was a--not a usual technique for any films in 1958, particularly B
films. So they felt, `At least in the opening reel, let's make it all
normal.
We'll just play the whole scenes. We'll play them out as they were intended
to be as full scenes.' This is their interpretation. The trouble with that
is that you're grafting the limb of a tree onto an animal, that the two
things
just don't mesh. The whole film is about cross-cutting so if you make the
first reel not be about cross-cutting, then you're essentially teaching the
audience to understand this film in a different language than the rest of
the
film will be.

So that was probably--the main note that Orson had in this entire 58-page
memo
was, `Restore my cross-cutting. It's essential because each story is
equivalent. The man's story is just as important as the woman's story, and
vice versa, and I want each time we go back and forth for it to be not too
long and for each section to be just about the same length.' The way it
was,
you spent five or six minutes with Charlton Heston. Janet Leigh was long
gone
by that point, so at the end of five minutes, you probably thought--you were
justified in thinking, `Yeah, this film is about Charlton Heston.' So then
when it goes to Janet Leigh and her story, you're thrown for a loop.

GROSS: Walter Murch. He was the editor and sound mixer for the restored
version of "Touch of Evil," which has just been released on DVD and video.
Our interview was recorded in 1998. I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Credits)

GROSS: Coming up, we talk with Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog
synthesizer. He also manufactures Theremins, the eerie-sounding instrument
we're listening to now. Maureen Corrigan reviews "One Market Under God" and
David Bianculli reviews the "Charlie's Angels" movie.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: In book "One Market Under God" writer Thomas Frank
takes socially critical look at today's stock market
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

In a new book called "One Market Under God," leftist social critic Thomas F.
Frank gives new meaning to the by now familiar slogan, `It's the economy,
stupid.' Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN (Book Critic): I've devoted my life to the study of
literature for lots of reasons, and one of those reasons is that I'm afraid
of
math. Whenever anyone begins talking about mortgage rates or mutual funds,
I
go into brain lock. So I'm not the kind of person who ordinarily would be
interested in a book about the current economy, or more precisely, a climate
of thought about the current economy. Except the book in question, called
"One Market Under God," is by Thomas Frank, a founding editor of that smart
literate magazine of social criticism, The Baffler.

Frank is a thoughtful and impassioned observer of his own time. In the
great
Anglo-American tradition of outraged sages like William Cobbett, Thomas
Carlyle, Twain and Mencken, Frank understands that wit can be the greatest
ally of anger. In "One Market Under God," the target of Frank's anger is
what
he calls `pro-corporate market populism,' the arrogant notion, he says, that
markets express the popular will of the people more articulately and more
fairly than do mere elections.

In the new economy of the 1990s, according to Frank's bemused take on
things,
markets are seen as the friend of the little guy. Zillionaire entrepreneurs
like Bill Gates are hailed as lovable outcasts, and the New York Stock
Exchange has become the house of the people, a place whose invitations of
affluence are now extended to small investors, like those emblematic
Beardstown Ladies. All that age-old nonsense about class conflict, Frank
wryly says, has disappeared in this brave new economy. Liberated workers
are
supposedly being empowered by their personal computers and the booming stock
market. They no longer need pension funds or unions or government
regulations. When those same workers are downsized out of their jobs,
they're
encouraged by the pop therapeutic culture to see unemployment as `an
opportunity to engage in a search for personal authenticity.'

To criticize market populism is to run the risk of being labeled a cynic, an
egghead or an anti-democratic elitist. Frank deftly repels all those barbs
with his abundant reason and gallows humor. The new economy of the 1990s,
he
drolly comments, produced a populism of acquiescence in which endless
salutes
to the people's power covered the people's growing powerlessness, in which
constant talk of popular wisdom served mainly to justify the ever-widening
gap
between rich and poor. It was a 1930s, without the New Deal; all Kapra, no
CIO.

Frank's argument in "One Market Under God" is so rich and provocative that
any
quick overview like this runs the risk of dumbing the book down and drying
it
out. He devotes chapters to incisive discussions of how he thinks this
radical political shift in attitude toward big business came to be. He
surveys the contemporary literature of management theory that enthuses about
the corporate soul and promotes superficial employee freedoms like casual
dress codes and pet-friendly offices. Frank has a lot of fun in a horrified
sort of way analyzing the new populist-era business ads on TV that use 1960s
rock soundtracks to legitimate their companies' rebel status, as well as
images of children and indigenous peoples to attest to their genuineness.

Looking closely at events like the Microsoft antitrust case and the World
Trade Organization protests in Seattle, Frank characterizes as topsy-turvy
the
logic that rendered the opponents of big business in those cases,
specifically
the Justice Department and labor unions, as elitist defenders of special
interests. And in withering screeds, Frank claims that most journalists and
academic intellectuals, particularly the cultural-studies crowd who like to
fancy themselves as resistant to dominant ideologies, have become little
more
than pod people propagandists for the new gospel of market populism.

According to that gospel, which Frank dissects, the marketplace offers a
more
perfect vision of democracy, and the goal of business is service and
universal
affluence. Uh-huh. Like I said before, I'm not a numbers person, but Frank
has me convinced that something here doesn't add up.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She
reviewed "One Market Under God" by Thomas Frank.

Coming up, Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer. This is FRESH
AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Robert Moog, inventor of Moog synthesizer, discusses
the invention and the advances it brought to music
(Soundbite of synthesizer music)

TERRY GROSS, host:

Electronic music is so pervasive now we take it for granted, but it was a
new
concept in the mid-60s, when Robert Moog created the first music
synthesizer.
The Moog synthesizer generated sounds electronically. It caught on in all
forms of music, from the avant garde to classical, rock and novelty. The
synthesizer became more accessible to musicians and composers after Moog
made
his first portable, the Mini Moog, in the early '70s. Now Robert Moog lives
in Asheville, North Carolina, where he heads his company, Big Briar, which
manufactures Moogs and Theremins. The Theremin is the eerie-sounding
instrument that has been used in many science-fiction films. Moog wrote the
introduction to a new book called "Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage."

When we spoke earlier this year, he brought a Mini Moog to the studio with
him. I asked what the Moog synthesizer could do that couldn't be done
before.

(Excerpt from February 28, 2000, interview)

Mr. ROBERT MOOG (Inventor, Moog Synthesizer): The very first electronic
music
modules that I made could make dynamically varying sounds, sounds that moved
in musically interesting ways: sirens, trills, whistles, effects that
modern
composers had been trying to get for a while with conventional instruments,
but really responded to when they could get them electronically.

GROSS: Demonstrate what you mean.

Mr. MOOG: OK. So here's a plain sound (plays steady note). This is a pure
electronic pitch. Now I will frequency modulate it. By that I mean that I
will vary the pitch of its tone periodically (plays wavering note). So most
people would say that was a different sound than just this (plays steady
note). Now I can speed up and slow down the modulation (plays wavering
note)
or make it a different shape (plays wavering note). Here's what we call a
square wave. It makes the tone sound like a trill (plays rapidly trilling
notes).

So that's just one example of how we can use one electronic circuit to
periodically or even aperiodically change the operation of another one, and
make musically interesting sounds in the booth in the process.

GROSS: Now what were you using to adjust the sounds that you just made?
Was
it a keyboard, knobs, buttons?

Mr. MOOG: Here, let me describe the instrument that I'm using here. It's
called a Mini Moog. It has a keyboard. That's just one control device.
The
most important control devices are a panel full of 27 knobs, and there are
what we call left-hand controllers, wheels, on the left-hand side of the
keyboard that we can also play in a live-performance musical situation, but
in
a demonstration like this I'm using it just as if it were a knob.

GROSS: Now, you know, regular instruments, acoustic instruments, operate
through physically doing something to the instrument. You pound it, you
press
it, strum it, bow it, blow air into it. Compare that with the principles of
an electronic music instrument like the Moog.

Mr. MOOG: The energy to make the sound is there. It comes out of a wall.
So
the sound...

GROSS: Electricity. Mm-hmm.

Mr. MOOG: Yes. So what I'm doing is controlling the sound. It's as if I'm
driving a car rather than pulling a wagon.

GROSS: So...

Mr. MOOG: I'm steering the sound with my hands.

GROSS: So what you're doing is actually changing the shape of the sound
wave
as opposed to pressing on a drum, pounding on a drum or something.

Mr. MOOG: That's right.

GROSS: And so your knobs allow you to just change the shape of the sound
wave, the amplitude, the shape of it. Mm-hmm.

Mr. MOOG: Yes. Yeah. And we can increase the complexity of the sound; for
instance (plays tone) there's one tone. Now we can add a second tone (plays
tones). Here's one (plays tone); the other (plays tone); together (plays
several tones). They form a richer third tone. So we can add sounds and
wave
forms together. We can even use one wave form to shape what we hear from
another circuit, and we can also filter out the overtones, the harmonics,
that
are made by these wave forms.

GROSS: You want to give me an example of that?

Mr. MOOG: Yeah. Here's (plays note). Let's get a brighter sound (plays
note). There (plays note). This is called a low-pass filter. Originally
it
was a technical term, but musicians these days, at least ones who plug in,
understand what that means. So I'll close the filter, and we'll cut out at
first the higher overtones and then all of them (plays and modulates note).

Now when I vary the filter slowly like that, you can hear what's happening,
that the sound is getting more mellow and less bright as I turn down the
knob
here labeled `cutoff frequency.' But if instead of my turning the knob I
use
a wave form that goes up and then down every time I hit a key, we'll get a
sound like this (plays modulated note). Now that opening and closing of the
filter was done not by me, but by the envelope generator. Now I'll make it
faster and you'll see what effect that has on the sound (plays note twice),
and still faster (plays note twice). Now that happened so fast, if I had to
do that with my hand I couldn't possibly, because my hand can't move that
fast. But electronics can move that fast.

So now I have a different sort of sound. I have a plucked-stringlike sort
of
sound (plays several notes) because I've set up a sound here that's bright
and
with lots of harmonics at the beginning, and then within, say, oh, I don't
know--a 30 or 40,000th of a second, it dies down and our ear identifies that
as a stringlike sound.

GROSS: So it's through this kind of principle that you're able to mimic the
sounds of many instruments.

Mr. MOOG: Yeah. Not only can we mimic the sounds of many instruments, but
we
can make many new sounds. Now, for instance, I'll change the operation of
the
filter a little bit with the knob called emphasis here, which now emphasizes
one harmonic, or overtone, at a time, and we'll get (plays sound) that sort
of
sound, which is more vocal than stringlike. Turn up the emphasis a little
bit, (plays sound) so now we're getting such strong emphasis that it's
actually a separate whistle from the sound.

GROSS: Now your Moog synthesizer was designed to do things that a piano
could
never do, yet you gave it a piano keyboard. Did you ever consider an
alternate design since you were creating a new system altogether?

Mr. MOOG: We considered a lot of alternate designs and, in fact, the first
synthesizer systems that we built in the mid-60s had a wide variety of
control
devices. Besides a keyboard, we had a device called a ribbon controller
that
you run your finger along as if it were a violin string. We had drum
controllers; we even had doorbells, you know? We experimented with
everything--joysticks--and we arrived at a keyboard because, A, musicians
were
familiar with it; B, at that time they were readily and cheaply available so
that we didn't have to spend a lot of money on tooling; and B, it did serve
a
musical purpose that at least some of our customers wanted served--not all,
but some of our customers were interested in playing conventional melodies
and
harmonic content from a keyboard.

GROSS: Right exactly. I mean, you know, on the one hand you had, like,
Walter Carlos, later Wendy Carlos performing "Switched On Bach," using the
Moog to play a kind of newfangled-sounding version of Bach. And at the same
time you had a lot of avant garde composers and musicians using the Moog
synthesizer to create a kind of avant garde music that hadn't been possible
before.

Mr. MOOG: That's right. One of our first customers was Vladimir
Ussachevsky,
who at that time was the head of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music
Centre. He's sort of the grandfather of taped music in this country. And
he
was interested in getting away from the keyboard. He bought quite a few
electronic modules from us, but he never bought a keyboard from us.

GROSS: Are there records from the '60s, when you were first--and the early
'70s--when the Moog was first catching on, that you think sound almost
embarrassingly dated today?

Mr. MOOG: (Laughs) Well, you know, the first use of a Moog synthesizer on
the
West Coast sounds embarrassingly dated. It's a record called "Zodiac Cosmic
Sounds."

GROSS: How can that not sound dated?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. MOOG: Well, what happened is--this is in 1967, and we were wondering
whether we could stay in business because, you know, we weren't making any
money and nobody understood our product. We were invited to exhibit our new
synthesizers out at the Audio Engineering Society on the West Coast. So at
that exhibit, we were then invited to bring this one instrument that nobody
had ever seen out there to a recording session of "Zodiac Cosmic Sounds."
And
the synthesizer was used to make some distinctly novel electronic effects,
one
of which begins the album.

What the album is--it starts off with very conventional-sounding Hollywood
movie music: Bum, ba-ba-bum, ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-bum,
ba-ba-bum. It was a mono record, too. Imagine how dated that is now. It
was
1967; it was a mono record. So it starts off that way, and then with a low
organ tone the narrator comes on. He had a voice as deep as crude oil, and
he
said, `Nine times the color red explodes like heated blood. The battle's
on.'
Then, ba, ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-bum, ba-ba-bum,
ba-ba-bum, like that. The producers at the time were very impressed with
themselves about how `in' this was and how hip and how many they were going
to
sell. Now when you play it, people just break out laughing.

GROSS: So it's the bum-ba-bums that you were doing on the synthesizer?

Mr. MOOG: No. They were done more or less conventionally.

GROSS: Where did the synthesizer come in?

Mr. MOOG: The synthesizer came in making--just drop-in sounds. Let's see
if
I can set one up. The Mini Moog is really not big enough to do all the
sounds
that we did, but let's, for instance, start with one sound (plays sound),
play
another sound (plays several sounds), OK? So that's about a whole tone
apart
(plays several sounds). I'll add a third sound (plays several sounds). OK.
OK. Now that's the general sort of sound that they liked (plays sounds),
and
then we just glide up a little bit here (makes sounds glide up the
scale)--that sort of sound.

GROSS: Great. Yeah.

Mr. MOOG: Now with the large synthesizer that we had back then at the
studio
in Los Angeles, you could glide more slowly. You could add more
frequencies.
You could make a sound that was fairly striking for those times.

(End of excerpt)

GROSS: Robert Moog, recorded earlier this year. He wrote the introduction
to
the new book "Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage." Coming up, David
Bianculli reviews the new movie "Charlie's Angels." This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: New movie version of "Charlie's Angels"
TERRY GROSS, host:

The new movie "Charlie's Angels" is an adaptation of the 1970s TV series
which
made stars of Farrah Fawcett, Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson. TV critic
David
Bianculli reviewed the series back in 1976. He saw the new movie and has
this
review.

DAVID BIANCULLI (Television Critic): There's a lot of revisionist history
going on about what "Charlie's Angels" meant to the '70s, a lot of talk
about
empowerment and women doing it on their own terms and positive feminine role
models. But I was there and watching closely, and I have one word to say
about all that. Here's the one word: Hah!

Back then, "Charlie's Angels" both pioneered and exemplified a genre of TV
programming that came to be known--I'm not kidding about this--as `jiggle
TV.'
It was a TV show with a definite and almost defiant absence of bras, and
viewers could watch with the sound turned off and not miss any of the
important points. "Charlie's Angels" was one of the most popular shows of
the
era, and a poster with Farrah Fawcett jump-started the fantasies of millions
of teen boys.

For girls, the women of "Charlie's Angels" were more like action Barbies.
Yes, they always beat the bad guys, but that wasn't as important as how good
they looked doing it. Whether they were going undercover as disco queens or
sitting around taking speaker-phone orders from their unseen boss, Charlie,
they looked marvelous. Backstage, the real energy of "Charlie's Angels"
didn't go into the scripts; it went into the wardrobe and makeup trailers.
To
put it bluntly, "Charlie's Angels" was a pretty bad TV show.

And that made it possible to hope for good things from the new "Charlie's
Angels" movie. When Hollywood tries to make a movie remake of a good TV
series, it usually fails miserably. I'll cite "The Avengers," and rest my
case on that awful example alone. But when it revisits a show that was
campy
to begin with, like "The Brady Bunch," the results can actually be superior.

This time, the three angels are played by Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and
Lucy Liu, and sidekick Bosley is played by Bill Murray. That's good casting
across the board. So all that remains is to find the right tone, tell a
good
story, make it visually interesting, and let audiences sit back and enjoy
the
ride.

The references to the old show are there. There are slow-motion hair flips
and lots of silly undercover disguises, and happy laughter at the end of the
adventure. An action montage during the credits even has the new angels
chained to one another in the same blue prison uniforms as in the old show.
And the case begins as it always did, with the voice of John Forsythe
delivering exposition through that boxy speaker phone.

(Soundbite from remake of "Charlie's Angels")

(Soundbite of ringing telephone)

Mr. JOHN FORSYTHE ("Charlie"): Good morning, angels.

Ms. DREW BARRYMORE, Ms. CAMERON DIAZ and Ms. LUCY LIU ("Angels"): (In
unison)
Good morning, Charlie.

Mr. FORSYTHE: Dylan, Alex, Natalie, I hope you're rested and ready for your
next assignment. Meet Eric Knox, a brilliant engineer and the founder of
Knox
Technologies, an up-and-coming communications software company. Last night,
Knox was kidnapped, and his voice-identification software was stolen.

(Soundbite of woman screaming)

Unidentified Angel: Who's the lady left behind?

Mr. FORSYTHE: Vivian Wood. She's the president of Knox Technologies.

Unidentified Angel: Oh, she did it.

Unidentified Angel: I guess we can all go home, then.

Mr. BILL MURRAY ("Bosley"): Angels, meet Vivian Wood, our new client.

(End of soundbite)

BIANCULLI: Each angel gets at least one showcase moment during the movie.
Diaz gets hers when her bubbly character gets to be a featured dancer on
"Soul
Train." Liu gets hers when she gets to play a variation on a leather-clad
dominatrix she played in the Mel Gibson movie "Payback." And Barrymore gets
hers in disguise as both a fantasy blond pit-crew member and the bubbliest
member of a Swiss singing trio.

This new "Charlie's Angels" is rated PG, so any sex appeal is about as tame
as
it was in prime time. But it's still overt, with the message that these
women
use their sex appeal aggressively, like any other weapon in their arsenal.
They're all master martial artists, doing the same physics-defying Hong Kong
movie stunt moves that were mainstreamed by Hollywood in "The Matrix." And
I
guess the most commendable thing about the 2000 vintage of "Charlie's
Angels"
is that the heroines don't carry guns.

What's not commendable about this new movie are its pace and tone. It's so
choppily edited, with such an incessant music soundtrack, that most parts of
the movie play like outtakes or trailers rather than finished scenes. The
three angels are given just enough time to establish character traits, but
Bosley and the villains are shortchanged. And as anyone who's ever seen a
James Bond or a Batman film can tell you, the better the villain, the better
the movie.

Bottom line: I was disappointed by this new "Charlie's Angels." Even
though
I loved some of the costuming--the geisha girls, the belly dancers, the rock
band, even when they went undercover as guys--Charlie still comes off as a
long-distance pimp, and too many scenes come off as frenetic, disconnected
or
out of sync. But one woman at the screening I saw insisted, and I quote:
"A
lot of young girls are going to like this movie." So I pass that on for
what
it's worth. I guess the retro glamour that worked then still works now.
But
my recommendation is just to pass, period.

GROSS: David Bianculli is TV critic for the New York Daily News.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross. We'll close with music from the new CD by
clarinetist and composer Don Byron. Tonight at a concert in New York he
pays tribute to Henry Mancini and Sly Stone. Byron's new CD is called "A
Fine
Line." This is a Four Tops hit played as a duet with Orrie Cain.

(Soundbite of "I'll Be There")
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.