Mark Berger is a sound designer who has won four Academy Awards for his audio artistry in films including Amadeus and Apocalypse Now. He has played a significant role in sound design on almost every film produced by Saul Zaentz. Berger teaches a course in UC Berkeley's Film Studies Program covering the nature, evolution, use, and abuse of sound in cinema.

Peter Shaffer rewrote history in his “black opera” Amadeus, then rewrote the play for Milos Forman's color extravaganza. It takes the form of a confession, thirty-two years after Mozart's death, by his supposed murderer, Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), a mediocre composer who alone, in his envy, perceived the sublime genius of Mozart's music. Amadeus must be taken on its own terms; that is, not as historical drama, certainly not as a biopic, but as the vision of a man obsessed by questions of genius and its absence. Seen through Salieri's eyes, Tom Hulce's Mozart never veers from a cartoon portrayal of the “obscene child”; he is indeed an unlikely if not unworthy vessel of divine inspiration, yet paradoxically, one whose talent could only be explained by divine intervention. Forman returned to his native Czechoslovakia to film Amadeus amid the still glorious eighteenth-century architecture of Prague. He awed critics and public alike with a visual feast that, we suspect, also contains an undercurrent of satire.