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206 HOLLYWOOD WITHOUT MAKEUP
Twentieth Century-Fox was awarded an Oscar for the breaking dam and for the earthquake in the movie, The Rains Came. For the earthquake stuff, it merely slowed down its thunder sound track and ran it backward. "It felt just like an earthquake," said Hansen. "I've been through a couple, and I ought to know. When our earthquake came out of the amplifier, some people actually got up and started to leave the theater."
Children's voices or a baby's cries are among the hardest things to transfer to film. A group of children five to eight years old can break a sound man's heart. The frequency of their sound waves is too high and their shrill, piping voices simply won't come through naturally on a sound track. One of the ways out of the baby-voice bottleneck is to employ an adult baby-talk specialist to produce childish prattle and cries. The pitch of an adult voice is recordable, even when lifted to a Baby Snooks treble.
Footsteps often don't record well and are re-recorded on dancing mats, and a sock on the jaw sounds unreal when it is inserted on a sound track — no matter how big a lump it may raise on the one socked — so a sound man punches a leather pillow with his fist to get the desired impact. For some reason, jaws and skulls are made of acoustically different material. Once, Hansen needed the sound of a man being struck over the head with a lead pipe. To obtain it, he tried striking every kind of object, among others a cantaloupe. The cantaloupe effect was nearly right, but nearly right was not good enough. In desperation, someone suggested falling back on belaboring a real head. The result was perfection itself. The victim received a stunt man's pay for his contribution to screen realism.
"Radio sound technicians don't have the same headaches a movie sound man has," said Hansen. "On the radio, if you put in a sour sound by mistake, you hear it once and that's all. It isn't heard over and over thousands of times a day in theaters all over the country, as a movie sound boner is heard." Movie sound people, however, have one problem in common with radiomen. There are times when both movie and radio technicians strive to obtain sound effects that are deliberately untrue. To further a ghostly or supernatural