Willie D. Burton
Biography
Over the course of over 140 film and TV credits 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 said to an NPR reporter in a little town called Machaway, Alabama. "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 recognisable 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 of 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.
