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204 HOLLYWOOD WITHOUT MAKEUP
efforts to trap the sound an elevated train makes while rushing along its steel trestle. "But the real elevated-train sounds were always gummed up by other noises until they were sonic mud," Moulton said. "The best elevated sound we had was made by using a metal disk with notches filed into it, over which roller skates rolled as a hand crank was turned. This gave the click of elevated wheels on rail joints. The roar of wheels came from other roller skates moving over a wooden drum eighteen inches in diameter. The two sounds combined were usable, but not perfect."
Not long ago, the studio's search for the real thing was rewarded. A crew of sound technicians were sent to New York and arrangements were made to rent a part of an elevated train for a few hours and to shuttle it in and out of an L station on a deserted spur of track. The shuttling was done in the early-morning hours when other city noises were at a minimum.
Sounds of guns, cannons and machine guns are obtained by actually recording those weapons being fired, but, because of the delicate structure of a microphone, care is taken to see to it that at least fifty feet separate the mike from the explosion. Thought is also given to protecting the eardrums of the audiences who listen to such sounds. In battle movies, the noises of war are deliberately soft-pedaled. Medium-caliber gunfire is reproduced at a tenth or a twentieth of its actual intensity. And the explosion of a heavy bomb may be only a thousandth as loud in the theater as it is while shredding a Jap munition plant. It is a good thing for movie-goers that this is done. It would be possible to build theater equipment to reproduce the actual volume of sound made by gunfire and explosions, but the result would be theaters full of sound-shocked spectators rushing madly for the open spaces.
Despite the ingenuity of men like Moulton, some sounds still continue to record better when counterfeited. Still another kind of sound, starting out naturally enough, must be given a boost to help it fill the bill. Some of this boosting is done with a device a former head of Twentieth Century's sound department, named Hansen, helped develop. A space two feet square and six feet high, enclosed