After welcoming Welles back from Europe with his promising rewrite of an uninspired screenplay Badge of Evil, Universal eventually banned the director from the editing room and hired another to clarify plot points they found too ambiguous or strange. The executives perhaps had trouble comprehending the wild scope of Welles’ vision—the innovative camera and sound work, the use of actual locations, and a disturbing story claustrophobically focused upon the visage of a bloated man in the prolonged, caustic throes of his demise. Upon viewing Universal’s edit, Welles wrote a fifty-eight-page memo with his detailed editing recommendations. In 1998, famed editor and sound designer Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The Conversation) followed Welles’ instructions, making several precise alterations, many of which add to the overall coherency, unity and subtle moral complexity. One of the most significant is his removal of the credits and Henry Mancini music from the whirlwind opening sequence to reveal Welles’ immersive collage of diagetic sounds—setting the stage for the assorted crisscrossing dramas within the perilous border town.