BANJO rhythms, screams, screeching tires, shattering glass and the rattle of machine-gun bursts were among the strange and terrifying sounds that occasionally drowned out the soft clatter of typewriter keys in our New York editorial offices last week. Had someone run amuck? No, the uproar came from the tumultuous sound track of the movie Bonnie and Clyde, which Cinema Writer Stefan Kanfer was using as ''Music to Write a TIME Cover Story By." As the tape recorder next to his typewriter spun out its violent cues, Kanfer worked on, at times pulling on a rubber exerciser, occasionally gnawing on a sandwich, and frequently pawing through piles of books, magazines, cables and research papers that blanketed his desk, floor and windowsill.

Day after day, the clutter grew worse, mute testimony to the voluminous reports filed by TIME correspondents and Researcher Betty Suyker. During one of his rare escapes from the expanding mass of material he was trying to reduce to cover-story length, Kanfer spent a long, valuable hour walking around Central Park with Producer-Star Warren Beatty.

An impassioned moviegoer for most of his 34 years, Kanfer now averages five shows a week, and the count sometimes rises to an eye-blurring three a day in his largely successful effort to see every film that appears. Next to watching new movies and catching his old favorites on the TV late shows, nothing pleases him more than writing about them. "As the Rothschilds turn to banking, and the Barkers turned to crime, the Kanfers turn to writing," he says. His grandmother's cookbook, Jewish Cookery, is now in its 17th printing; his father is a poet and his mother is a TV and radio scriptwriter.

As Kanfer assembled his story, Artist Robert Rauschenberg was observing footage from 35-mm. reels of the movie as it was cranked through a moviola machine. Single frames were chosen, blown up into black-and-white prints, and then transferred to silkscreens; he treated the final image with colored inks and paints, including splotches of bloodlike watercolor. Altogether, he made nine montages before the editors made their final choice. Though such characters as Bonnie and Clyde are not familiar images in Rauschenberg's art, his technique on TIME'S cover is. It will be immediately identified as a "Rauschenberg" by those who know his work from museums and art galleries around the world.

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