David Macmillen, CAS
Photo: Joey Carman
Cinema Audio Society President David E. Fluhr, CAS, announces that the organization will honor Production Mixer David Macmillan, CAS, with the Cinema Audio Society’s highest accolade, the CAS Career Achievement Award. The award will be be presented on February 14, 2015, at the 51st CAS Awards in the Crystal Ballroom of the Millennium Biltmore Hotel Los Angeles.
Macmillan is a member of the Cinema Audio Society, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
“I am pleased to announce that the CAS Board of Directors have chosen David Macmillan as this year’s Cinema Audio Society Career Achievement honoree,” Fluhr says. “David represents the high standards we all aspire to, as a sound mixer, a mentor and an educator. David received the first of his Oscars 30 years ago—as a mixer, he obviously has the right stuff!”
Born In Northern Ireland, David Macmillan began his career in sound more than 50 years ago in Canada, where he served an apprenticeship with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a three-year program that he completed in just a little more than one year. By the age of 24 he was recording series television, news and documentaries. In the summer of 1968, Macmillan traveled to California to record three documentaries, one in Southern California and the other two in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was then he left the CBC and met filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, whose film studio, American Zoetrope, was being built in San Francisco. Coppola hired Macmillan to wire and run the company’s mixing facility.
After three years at American Zoetrope as the in-house dubbing mixer, Macmillan chose to go back into production sound. With experience in both audio post and production sound he quickly became one of the top production mixers in the entertainment industry.
In 1984, Macmillan’s work on The Right Stuff earned him the first of three Academy Awards. Later that year he moved to Los Angeles to accommodate all the work that was coming his way.
To date, Macmillan has more that 80 feature films to his credit. His three Oscar wins came for The Right Stuff, Speed and Apollo 13, which also won the CAS Award for Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Motion Picture. His television work has been recognized with both a CAS and Emmy nomination for HBO’s Game Change. He has collaborated with Oliver Stone, Ron Howard, Alan Parker, Lawrence Kasdan, Sydney Pollack, Philip Kaufman, Tony Scott, Joel Shumacher, Nora Ephron, Mike Nichols, Katherine Bigelow, Jan de Bont, Jay Roach and Judd Apatow, to name a few.
For the past five years Macmillan has been teaching at UCLA, USC, Chapman University and Loyola Marymount University. In addition, he has given master classes at the Targowa Film Festival in Lodz, Poland; the Transatlantyk Film and Music Festival in Poznan, Poland; FEST in Portugal; and two-day mixing workshops in London and Norway.
As the 33rd recipient of the Cinema Audio Society’s highest honor, Macmillan joins an illustrious group of past honorees that includes Don Rogers, Walter Murch, Les Fresholtz, Tomlinson Holman, Richard Portman, Jim Webb, Charles Wilborn, Gary Rydstrom, Willie Burton, Mike Minkler, Ed Greene, Dennis Sands, Randy Thom, Jeffrey S. Wexler, Scott Millan, Chris Newman, and Andy Nelson.
The Cinema Audio Society, a philanthropic, non-profit organization, was formed in 1964 for the purpose of sharing information with Sound Professionals in the Motion Picture and Television Industry.
On the evening of the Awards the Cinema Audio Society will update its Website in real time as the winners are announced.
Visit the Cinema Audio Society at cinemaaudiosociety.org.
