David Fluhr, president of the Cinema Audio Society, announced that the organization will honor production mixer David Macmillan with its career achievement award, to be presented at the 51st CAS Awards on Feb. 14 in the Crystal Ballroom of the Millennium-Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles.
“I am pleased to announce that the CAS board of directors has chosen David Macmillan as this year’s Cinema Audio Society career achievement honoree. David represents the high standards we all aspire to, as a sound mixer, a mentor and an educator,” said Fluhr. “David received the first of his Oscars 30 years ago – as a mixer he obviously, has the right stuff!”
Born In Northern Ireland, Macmillan began his career in sound over 50 years ago in Canada where he served an apprenticeship with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a three-year program 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 Bay area. It was then he left the CBC and was fortunate to meet filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, whose film studio, American Zoetrope, was being built in San Francisco. Coppola hired him 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 post and production sound he quickly became one of the top production mixers in the entertainment industry.
In 1984, his work on The Right Stuff earned him the first of three Academy Awards and later that year he moved to Los Angeles to accommodate all the work that was coming his way.
To date, Macmillan has more than 80 feature films to his credit. His other Oscar wins came for 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.
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.
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.