Sound designer extraordinaire Mark Berger, who collaborated on two Milos Forman films including Cuckoo's Nest, will briefly talk about working with Forman in the early 1970s. Berger has won four Academy Awards for his sound work, including one for Amadeus and one for Apocalypse Now. Mark Berger currently teaches a course in UC Berkeley's Film Studies Program covering the nature, evolution, use, and abuse of sound in cinema.

After completing Taking Off, Milos Forman complained that it was crazier making films in the United States than in his Soviet-controlled homeland. No wonder that his next project should take place in a loony bin. Convinced that a short stint at the nuthouse would be preferable to hard time in jail, the ever-manic McMurphy (Jack Nicholson in a super-sized performance) convinces the prison docs that he's crazy. Inside the asylum, however, the cruelty of the institution is promptly made apparent in the form of Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), a coldhearted matron. Cantankerous to a fault, McMurphy refuses to succumb, becoming the oddball idol of the other inmates, cracked curios played by Christopher Lloyd, Danny De Vito, Brad Dourif, and others. McMurphy's is a fine and tragic madness-his unyielding resistance grows in grandeur as attempts to crush him mount. Nicholson's pumped portrayal became a seventies symbol for the struggle against a soulless System. Alternately unruly, ribald, and tender, Forman's black comedy swept the Oscars.