A movie ends. The credits roll. A litany of behind-the-scenes names and job titles scroll past. One of the names that you have likely seen dozens of times without even realizing it is also one of the most respected production sound mixers in the business: Alabama native Willie D. Burton. If you’re not sure what a sound mixer does on a film, they are responsible for planning and executing the sound recording and balance during a shoot.
Over the course of over 140 film and TV credits industry since the mid-1970s, Burton has quietly become one of the most acclaimed sound technicians in the business. Now in his seventies with no sign of slowing down professionally, he was born near Tuscaloosa (as he recently said to an NPR reporter, in “a little town called Machaway, Ala. It’s a country town basically in the woods”). Burton has told interviewers that his interests in sound and recording were first sparked in his Alabama childhood, when he lived close to a radio station and then worked in a TV repair shop.
He moved to California, and after graduating from Compton City College, he started making gradual inroads into the industry. His first movie sound department credit was Let’s Do It Again, the Sidney Poitier, Richard Pryor, and Bill Cosby comedy that was among the highest-grossing movies of 1975. From there, he worked steadily, building his reputation as one of the most dependable sound artists in town. Just a select smattering of his most recognizable credits up to the present include the landmark 1977 TV series Roots, The Buddy Holly Story (for which he received his first Oscar nomination), The China Syndrome, Altered States, The Goonies, The Color Purple, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Shawshank Redemption, Panic Room, Spiderman: No Way Home, and the upcoming Captain America and Beverly Hills Cop sequels.
He’s worked on comedies and dramas, big-budget action franchises and small, personal pictures, hits and flops, proving that he can record it all—from whispers to explosions. A sign of his esteem in the industry is the fact that Burton often works with the same directors or producers repeatedly. One of his first credits was on the 1976 baseball comedy The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, starring Richard Pryor, James Earl Jones, and Billy Dee Williams; over the next seventeen years, he worked with the director of that movie, Birmingham native John Badham, on six other movies. He has worked on three movies for director Ava DuVernay (including Selma, about the Alabama Civil Rights movement and 1965’s Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights), five directed by or starring Clint Eastwood, and six produced by Steven Spielberg.
Burton is a history-maker in a number of movie-business categories. According to the trade publication SHOOT magazine, Burton was the first-ever Black member in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 695, a union membership that garnered him invaluable and groundbreaking access to jobs and opportunities. He was the first Black winner of an Academy Award for Best Sound (for Bird, Clint Eastwood’s 1988 biopic of the jazz musician Charlie Parker), and he won a second Oscar for 2006’s Dreamgirls, joining the very short list of African Americans who have won more than one Academy Award. He received his eighth nomination this year, for Christopher Nolan’s historical epic Oppenheimer; had Burton won his third Oscar on March 10, he would have held the record for the most competitive Oscars ever won by any Black person (Denzel Washington has three Oscars, but one is honorary).*
Alabama’s own Willie D. Burton has, in a quiet way, make a loud splash in the art and science of sound and in the history of Hollywood.
Photo Caption: Willie D. Burton is a sound mixing producer and a native of Alabama.
Additional Information
- African American Steering Committee, “Cut to Black: Did You Know? Willie D. Burton, Sound Mixer,” CineMontage Magazine: The Journal of the Motion Picture Editors Guild, February 24, 2024, https://cinemontage.org/cut-to-black-did-you-know-willie-d-burton-sound-mixer/
- Mandalit del Barco, interview with Willie D. Burton, “The Craft that Went into the 13 Oscar Nods for ‘Oppenheimer,’” NPR, February 26, 2024, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1234005051
- Daron James, “Let ‘Tenet’ Production Sound Mixer Willie Burton Teach You How to Build a Lasting Career,” No Film School, September 3, 2020, https://nofilmschool.com/conversation-tenet-production-sound-mixer-willie-burton
- “‘Oppenheimer’ Marks Latest Chapter in Willie D. Burton’s History-Making Career,” SHOOT magazine, February 2, 2024, https://www.shootonline.com/news/oppenheimer-marks-latest-chapter-willie-d-burtons-history-making-career
About the Author
Joanna Jacobs is an assistant managing editor at the University of Alabama Press who has previously written Alabama Heritage articles about classic film actors Henry B. Walthall and Gail Patrick.
