To listen to more of Walter Murch’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzCodipONmNiROhYCUWyz_U Walter Scott Murch (b. 1943) is widely recognised as one of the leading authorities in the field of film editing, as well as one of the few film editors equally active in both picture and sound. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2016] TRANSCRIPT: At the end of the first semester of film school, a 3x5 card appeared on a bulletin board that said, 'Need a job over Christmas? Phone Grady at dah, dah, dah, dah, dah' and this was alongside other similar notices but we were all hungry and a job? Yes. Maybe that will pay for some Christmas presents and it turned out that Matthew Robins, my friend, and George Lucas phoned that number, talked to Grady and he told… gave them an address to come to which was just off Sunset Boulevard, near La Cienega. So it was in Beverly Hills but just and they wound up knocking on the door and Grady Sutton opened the door to this very nice house and you would recognise Grady as the sidekick from many Western movies. He usually played the slightly slow person who lost that poker or who was killed early in the film. And he was running the house at that time of George Cukor, the director, and this was who the house was and the job was: 'Follow me, boys', he took them up to the attic of the house and the door opened up and there was a large attic probably about the size of this room and there was a pyramid of Christmas presents in the middle of the room. And he said, 'Your job is to wrap those presents' and these were George Cukor's Christmas gifts to his Hollywood friends. And so he said, 'Lunch will be served at 1 o'clock. Get busy. There's the wrapping paper.' And so George and Matthew began wrapping Christmas presents. And Matthew's version of the story is that George became increasingly prickly about this job because Cukor, it was known then, was a homosexual and maybe this was a honey trap to get two students, who wanted to wrap Christmas presents, into the attic of the house and that at some unforeseen moment, George Cukor was suddenly going to spring the trap on Matthew and George. So by the end of the day, George was not going to come back the next day. George's version of the story is that he really had to go back home to Modesto and spend Christmas with his family and so he couldn't continue on this job.

• published: 13 Sep 2017
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