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Sound mixer on Orson Welles's remastered film noir Touch of Evil
The cinema is habitually deemed to be a visual medium, more sight than sound, yet the latter is of equal importance to the texture of any film. Unfortunately, sound editors and mixers tend to toil anonymously in the lower depths of the film industry. Occasionally, some of them, such as Bill Varney, who has died of congestive heart failure aged 77, have their work highlighted when they win Academy awards.
Varney, as part of a small team, won Oscars for best sound on the Stars Wars film The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and was nominated for Dune (1984) and Back to the Future (1985). He was also recognised by film buffs for his valuable contribution to the "director's edition" of Orson Welles's 1958 "damaged" film noir masterpiece Touch of Evil. On the 40th anniversary of the film's release, Varney brought over 25 years' experience to bear on the reconstruction and remastering of the soundtrack.
Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, Varney became interested in movies while working in his 20s on the sound recording of educational films at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first, in 1959, featured the budding folk singer Joan Baez, whose father was a professor at MIT. In 1961 Varney moved to California, where he continued as sound recordist on films made for Encyclopedia Britannica. He soon began mixing sound at the Samuel Goldwyn studio, where he spent the following 14 years. His first credit on a Hollywood feature, as sound re-recordist, came on Billy Wilder's Avanti! (1972). From then on, Varney gained the title of sound mixer, responsible for combining the individual tracks for dialogue, music and sound effects into the composite master soundtrack.
Among the many films on which he mixed the sound were John Cassavetes's Opening Night (1977), Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1978), Milos Forman's Hair (1979) and Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), as well as the work that caught the attention of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In 1985 Varney joined Universal, where he was responsible for the upgrade to digital. He was vice-president of sound operations in 1998, when the studio undertook to restore Touch of Evil to as close as possible to the way Welles had envisioned it.
It was Universal's tardy recompense to Welles for having removed him from the picture during post-production. The producers were afraid that Welles would spend too much time cutting and recutting what was supposed to be a low-budget B movie. The reconstruction by Varney and Walter Murch, the self-styled "sound designer", was based on a 58-page memo that Welles wrote to Universal laying out his vision for the movie, which detailed about 50 specific changes, principally in the sound mix.
One example was the way Welles described wanting the music to sound in a scene between Janet Leigh and Akim Tamiroff. "To get the effect we're looking for, it is absolutely vital that this music be played back through a cheap horn in the alley outside the sound building. After this is recorded, it can then be loused up even further in the process of re-recording. But a tinny exterior horn is absolutely necessary, and since it does not represent very much in the way of money, I feel justified in insisting upon this."
Most of Welles's instructions were met by Varney and his team in the restoration, particularly on the celebrated opening crane shot, which lasts for three minutes and 20 seconds. The Henry Mancini title music was replaced by a blend of source cues: voices, footsteps, goats bleating, and tinny music coming from shops, bars, restaurants and car radios, creating the sound environment of a sleazy Mexican border town, as Welles wished.
The Touch of Evil restoration was the last film on which Varney was credited. He retired in 2001. He is survived by his wife, Suzanne, and daughter, Lisa.
• Harold William Varney, sound mixer, born 22 January 1934; died 2 April 2011