In this pivotal scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, surveillance expert Harry Caul assembles, splices, and transforms a collection of tapes recorded earlier in the film. At this point in the film, Caul has been hired to surreptitiously capture an exchange between a man and a woman walking though Union Square in San Francisco. Each tape reflects a distinct vantage onto the square and eponymous conversation from two long-distance microphones perched on nearby ledges and one bug stashed in a shopping bag at ground level. As Caul cycles repeatedly through one section of the tape, he attempts to reduce the noise and isolate the few words the man has uttered. Upon filtering out sounds of street chatter and a nearby drummer, Caul extracts a message:
“He’d kill us if he got the chance.”
Interested in achieving verisimilitude, Coppola sought out consultants in the making of the film from a then-nascent private surveillance industry. This team included famed fixer Hal Lipset and surveillance operator Martin Kaiser, who professes in his autobiography to have been the direct inspiration for Harry Caul. Though Kaiser contributed his business catalog and many of the bugging and bug sweeping techniques featured in the film, he hesitates to call The Conversation an entirely accurate portrayal. He writes, “I was a step removed from Harry Caul. I only made the surveillance devices to meet a specific target need. I did not conduct the eavesdropping.”
So how do we arrive at this scene of Caul reviewing the tapes? The answer might lie instead with the film’s editor and sound designer Walter Murch. Coppola left the production partway through shooting to work on the second Godfather film, and Murch was left to record any remaining dialogue and put the story together with the remaining fragments. Murch worked night and day to finalize the cut and described the experience as a kind of “doubling.” Caul’s work onscreen was similar to that of a film editor. In an interview with the novelist Michael Ondaatje, Murch said, “several times I was so tired and disoriented that Harry Caul would push the button to stop the tape and I would be amazed that the film didn’t also stop! Why was it still moving?”
In short, Coppola and Murch present Harry Caul as a kind of hybrid. The character appropriates the technologies of private surveillance and practices common to editing and sound design. The filmmakers draw from their own professional world to animate the accounts of fixers and detectives, making an editor into a hacker. In this short scene, Caul’s attention to detail and intuition of hardware allow him to separate a signal from noise, render a private moment legible.
As the film progresses, Caul finds himself lost not in what his subjects are saying but in what their conversation means. So too would be the fate of the film, released at the height of the Watergate scandal. Critics commented on the apparent intersections between Caul’s work and that of Nixon’s men, though few ventured any concrete conclusions. News coverage, meanwhile, highlighted DC police’s use of Martin Kaiser’s radio frequency detector to find bugs at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and Hal Lipset’s brief service as the Senate’s Chief Investigator in the Watergate case. The once obscure trade of private surveillance, which Coppola had originally intended to explore as a metaphor for personal alienation, now emerged as integral to national politics.
