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HOLLYWOOD S INVISIBLE MEN 207
mood, it is sometimes desirable to produce a sound that seems to shimmer in the air like moonlight on a lake. For the same purpose, the production of heavenly music or ghostly music is occasionally necessary. These effects are obtained through highly technical, electrical controls.
There are some sounds virtually no one has ever heard. When the movie, Thunderhead, called for stallions fighting, Moulton describes his predecessor's solution of that problem. "Hansen was unable to find anyone who knew what a stallion fight sounded like. So he wove together a lot of horse stuff he had on hand — neighs, whinnies, snortings," he said. He changed the speed of that stock stuff, and he changed the pitch, and before he was through he had the doggonedest horse sounds you ever heard. He even made those stallions scream.
Back in 1927, when Al Jolson starred in the first part-talking picture, so many technical problems were involved that each scene swarmed with sound technicians. Microphones were hidden in flowerpots, behind pictures, in huge ferns and near every spot where an actor might open his mouth. When, in a deathbed sequence, the action called for Jolson to lean over his dying father and speak a few words to him, there simply wasn't any place to hide the microphone. Finally it was decided to conceal the mike in the dying father's beard, and the mike, tucked away behind his voluminous beaver, recorded what were among the very first words ever spoken in motion pictures.
It is a long trek from those mike-in-a-beard days to the directional microphones and mikes mounted on traveling booms now in use, but according to Moulton, "We ain't heard nothing yet."
"The sound tracks of tomorrow will be sterephonic," Moulton said. "The sounds they pour forth will be third-dimensional, and will seem to come from the exact place they are supposed to come from on the screen. If an actor is on a stepladder, his voice will come from there. If he's on the ground, that's where it will come from. We can't let those guys in the other departments get ahead of us."