‘Hindenburg’ VFX Man Was 101 Years Old – The Hollywood Reporter

Peter Berkus, the Universal Pictures sound effects maestro and hero to sound editors everywhere who shared a special Oscar for his work on Robert Wise’s disaster epic. Hindenburg, He died. He was 101.

Berkus died Tuesday in Rancho Bernardo, California, his friend, Bray Wyckoff, said Hollywood Reporter.

When Berkus was editor-in-chief of Motion Picture Sound from 1963 to 1966, he began a successful campaign for his colleagues to gain full membership in the Motion Picture and Television Academies and to receive on-screen and off-screen credit for their work.

Berkus himself was not even certified for the first twenty years of his career car wash (1976), and the Academy Awards eventually revived the dormant competitive sound effects category from 1983 onward.

Over the course of four decades, he worked at Universal on films such as Orson Welles. Evil touch (1958), four films directed by George Roy Hill — Totally modern millie (1967), winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture sting (1973), Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and Slap shot (1977) – Bob Fosse Sweet charity (1969), George Seton airport (1970) and Daniel Haller Buck Rogers in the 25th century (1979).

for the original ABC channel Battlestar Galactica In 1978, Berkus created the synthesized sound of killer Cylon Centurions through a vocoder, and for the sound of the show’s laser shots, “he went to a telephone pole with a metal bar and hit it with a sledgehammer, and then I had to add the high note and take the low note out.”

In the mid-1960s, he was tasked with mentoring Steven Spielberg, then 19, in the art of sound editing. “He turned out to be the most enthusiastic movie guy I’d ever met,” Berkus recalled in a 2015 interview. “He’d be there in the morning, waiting for me to open my newsroom. He never wanted to go to lunch.

Born on August 15, 1922, in Cicero, Illinois, Berkus pursued a career in the arts at the behest of his teacher at Columbia College in Chicago, and ended up directing plays, then stomping in sandboxes and slamming doors loudly for live radio plays in Haines, Illinois.

He was prevented from joining his twin brother, Paul, on active duty in World War II in Europe due to a policy change implemented following the deaths of the five Sullivan brothers aboard the USS Juneau in 1942. Instead, he served as a radio operator in a squadron Night Fighter and remarkably survived the Black Widow plane crash that killed its pilot.

After his military service, Berkus and his wife, Sally (a Columbia College graduate), moved to Hollywood. He was inspired to do so after reading the 1950 book Behind the Scenes Film case historyco-written by writer, producer, and future MGM president Dory Sharry.

Berkus started as a junior warehouse employee at Universal, but was promoted to sound editor within two months due to the sheer volume of films being produced at the studio.

While working alongside Welles for just one day, he helped the director re-record 62 lines of dialogue for his nearly finished film noir. Evil touch.

on Hindenburg (1975), Berkus recreated the sound of Zeppelin engines by recording a PBY Catalina amphibious aircraft starting at full power. However, he struggled to find the right noise for the airship’s groans and creaks as its aluminum frame came under stress.

Berkus recalls: “I went back to my room and sat in front of my chair, leaned back to fold my arms across my chest, and suddenly the chair I was sitting on squeaked! I started moving back and forth, squeak, squeak! I called my assistant George and said: Book me a studio now!

(The film’s climatic explosion, complete with those sound effects, lasts more than 8 minutes, much longer than the 30-second real-life tragedy.)

On Oscar night, he shared the Academy Award for Achievement with visual effects artists Albert Whitlock and Glenn Robinson.

“I want to thank the Motion Picture Academy for a very special Academy Award in recognition of the creative contribution of a sound editor in motion pictures,” he said. “And Mr. Bob Wise, thank you for the job.”

Berkus was also honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from MPSE in 1996, won seven of the organization’s Golden Reel Awards — he designed the trophy — and received an Emmy nomination for his work on the 1972 ABC television movie Short walk to daylightabout passengers trapped in a New York subway car after an earthquake.

After retiring in 1987, Berkus turned to writing short stories and novels and published a book of his wife’s poems after her death in 2000. At the age of 100, he wrote his memoirs, Vignette of my life: book 2.

His twin brother died in 2020 at the age of 97.

Talk about his work on Hindenburg“You never know where you’re going to get votes from,” Berkus noted. “It’s creative, and that’s the part of the job I liked the most. I paid the most in satisfaction.”