Cover-Up review – atrocity exposer Seymour Hersh, journalist legend, gets a moment in the spotlight

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Hersh’s record on uncovering the big stories, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib, speaks for itself. This documentary watches him at work: dogged, nonconformist and combative Renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was never played in a film by Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman, like the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But as this documentary portrait argues, he’s probably more important than either. Hersh has a longer record of breaking big stories, from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam to torture by US army personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq – the latter a historic scoop underscored by the stomach-turning photos which Hersh brought to light. Hersh is asked if Abu Ghraib would have been the story it was without those pictures and replies: “No pictures, no story.” Well, maybe. But his other scoops had no pictures of this kind. One incidental thing Abu Ghraib showed was how ubiquitous digital photography became at the beginning of the century; how easy it was to take...
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‘That train sound? It’s a hovering mothership!’: legendary Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt reveals his secrets

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Burtt, the man who created iconic moods in George Lucas’s sci-fi blockbuster, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Alien and WALL-E, explains the nuts and bolts – and hammers, ceiling fans and squeaky doorknobs – of his trade

When Ben Burtt Jr was invited to look at the concept art for Star Wars before filming began, he says he heard the lightsaber as much as saw it: it was the sound of a film projector. “I was a projectionist at a theatre,” he says. “I could hear a projector motor – not when it’s running the movie, but as it sat still: a musical humming. Fifty per cent of the lightsaber is that projector. I mixed it in with the buzz of a television tube.” So when you hear one of Burtt’s most famous sound effects, you are listening to cinema.

Yet it’s only one part of an amazing aural universe that Burtt has created, as instantly recognisable as John Williams’ theme music. Where would Star Wars be without the sound of Han Solo’s blaster – made by hitting a high-tension wire with a hammer? Or the plaintive yowls of Chewbacca – a melange of vocalisations and animal recordings? The voice of R2-D2 is Burtt himself. “I was trying keyboards with electronic effects, and it didn’t have life. It wasn’t coming from something alive; something that was thinking. It’s only when I was able to channel a voice element into it that it changed. It’s about 50% vocal, 50% electronic.”

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