His very first credit, unbelievably, was assisting sound wizard Walter Murch on Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 masterpiece. Broucek was in San Francisco, sleeping on a couch in his sister’s apartment and in need of a job, when he heard that Coppola’s company, American Zoetrope, was hiring. He and his pal, Doug Hemphill (now a multi- Oscar winning sound mixer), applied and suddenly found themselves in a slightly disorganized but loving Italian family business. Broucek would drop reels off at Coppola’s house “and his mom would be in the kitchen,” he remembers, “and she’d say, ‘You’re too skinny—you need to eat!’”

Murch was already a legend, but he liked to work by himself; when the film’s post-production moved to a 24/7 all-hands-on-deck operation, Broucek and Hemphill volunteered to work the graveyard shift with Murch (“the first pot of coffee went on about 2 AM”), and in doing so, got an unprecedented “film school” and the apprenticeship of a lifetime.

“Maybe he was working on a sequence with gunfire, explosions, and he’s got all of his elements up,” Broucek says, “and then it could be up there for several hours. We were allowed to sit in the back of the room and just watch. He wouldn’t say anything, and then he’d want to take a break and he’d just sort of push back and say something professorial, and you’d get one question in, and he’d answer it, and then he’d go to the restroom and get some coffee. It was great. It was like working for Yoda.”

Broucek learned a core lesson in those ten months with Murch—that “all sound is tonal, and all sound is music.” It turned him on to sound experimenters like David Bowie and Brian Eno, “although I still like a good Johnny Cash song,” he adds.

Music was the oxygen in Broucek’s house, growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1960s. His dad was a salesman by day but a singer at heart, and would teach Broucek and his three siblings to sing old spirituals in four-part harmony, which they would do on car trips or gathered around the family piano (an heirloom which Broucek still owns today). When the Beatles turned up on The Ed Sullivan Show and rocked the planet onto a new axis, Broucek immediately picked up a tennis racket and played air guitar in front of a mirror—and knew he had to breathe only music for the rest of his life.

After learning real guitar and joining several bands as a teenager, he got his first taste of a professional studio when he recorded a song written by the lead singer in his struggling group; the song was horrible, Broucek says, “but I was bitten with the bug of: the studio is where it’s at.” He was also experimenting with a cassette recorder at home and his own quarter-inch tape machine, and became a pretty good “hobbyist” operating and cutting tapes.

An avid record collector by the time he moved out to California (after graduating with a music degree from Columbia College), he read the credits on every sleeve and knew that many of the greatest albums were made at the Record Plant in Hollywood. He was now overqualified, having launched his career with Murch, but advised by Chris Stone, the studio’s co-founder, to earn his stripes by starting out as a janitor. Which is what he did.

Six months later, he was on the recording crew working the Eagles concert album, Live from the Forum MMXVIII. Savvy and personable, Broucek was witness to a parade of legends coming through the studio; in 1982 he was on the small recording team as Aretha Franklin and Luther Vandross laid down vocals for a whole week. Franklin, “who was like the queen in my house growing up,” even took it on herself to order Broucek lunch at Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles because she knew how to get it right. On another occasion, he sat in a remote recording truck with Stevie Wonder, playfully debating the values of a controversial Marianne Faithfull album.

More and more film soundtrack work was coming into the studio—Broucek was a “fly on the wall” for the songs featured in An Officer and a Gentleman and Tootsie—which then led to his playing a key role in modernizing and reopening the famous Stage M on the Paramount lot, where one day Harrison Ford—visiting a session for his buddy, Jimmy Buffett—gave Broucek an impromptu carpentry lesson.

After a stint running the Record Plant up in Sausalito, then running the L.A. office of the Fairlight synthesizer company, Broucek found himself working as a music supervisor on the hip high school drama, TV 101—overseeing rock artists like Stewart Copeland and Todd Rundgren. That opened a new door, and with his business partner Evyen Klean, Broucek formed a company that did the music supervision on Baywatch and several independent films, a growing CV that, in 1996, landed him a job as music executive at New Line Cinema.

He became president there in 2001, and during his 12 years at New Line Broucek managed orchestral score projects—including Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings epics—and produced soundtrack songs by Annie Lennox and Roger Waters, never straying far from the studio.

After New Line was absorbed into Warner Bros., he became president of music at the historic studio in 2009. Here, working in the old offices of Warner Bros. Records near the iconic WB water tower, Broucek oversees a team which plans and problem-solves film music productions, all the way from budget and labor concerns, to hiring crack producers and songwriting teams, to plotting on-set source music, to running huge orchestra sessions in both L.A. and London. He also runs the studio’s boutique record label, WaterTower Music.

From the grand cinematic spectacles of Christopher Nolan to the banger-heavy soundtrack for Barbie, Broucek has had a hand—and an ear—on some of the most important pop culture events of the past 16 years. (Nolan paid him a cheeky compliment by naming a fake business in The Dark Knight Rises “Broucek Cement Company,” its logo emblazoned on cement trucks in a key plot point.) He has worked on many significant projects with some of the most celebrated composers—including Michel Legrand, Jan A. P. Kaczmarek, Alexandre Desplat, James Horner, James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer (Dune, The Dark Knight), Ludwig Göransson, Hildur Guðnadóttir (Joker), Mychael Danna, Harry Gregson Williams, Steven Price (Gravity), and Mark Isham. He also worked with Billie Eilish & Finneas on their Oscar-winning song, “What Was I Made For?” for Barbie.

Through it all, Paul Broucek has breathed music and some truly rarified air, making incredible memories and meeting numerous heroes along this unlikely, unplanned path. But he has always lived by an important motto, which he picked up from his wife: “When you approach somebody that you’re a huge fan of, never say you’re a fan. Talk about the work. I can be an internal fan, but I’m comfortable around people. As my dad used to say, ‘Everybody puts their pants on one leg at a time—unless they’re a fireman.’”