Last night I was watching the Marx Brothers in * Duck Soup * for the umpteenth time and as usual laughing myself dizzy during the mirror scene. However, I noticed at several times during the film that when Harpo honked his horn, the sound was just a little bit off from the movement of his hand. I chalked it up to some sloppy sound editing, and then had a thought that’s been nagging me ever since. At the time this film was made, the early 1930’s, magnetic tape had either not yet been invented or was not yet widely used. So, if they weren’t using magnetic tape for the sound recording and editing, how were they editing the sound? I would think that it would be extremely difficult to edit a sound track using disks or wire recorders.
So I guess my question is: How did they record and edit sound for movies before the advent of magnetic tape?
I can’t really answer your question but I have a little something to add. The board they “clap” before scenes was originally used to sync up the audio and the subsequent audio track. The editor would simply scroll through the tape looking for the scene and take number then match the clapper on screen with the clap he heard on the audio track.
They had a big portable room for the very noisy cameras to shut out their noise, and they used tricks to deaden the unneeded noise (apparently the mikes were very sensitive). If you watch the Marx Brothers film Cocoanuts, the newspapers, I am told, were soaked with water to keep them from, rustling.
There’s a lot of info on this, and I’m sure that one of the old movie buffs will be along. I saw an old sound movie short from the early 30s explaining how the system worked. In essence, it wasn’t different from today – you record film and sound simultaneously, although you can go back and re-record or add extra noise (like the modern Foley artists). It’s just that everything was a lot more primitive then.
No, magnetic tape was not being used in Hollywood in 1933. Hollywood studios introduced magnetic sound recording in 1950.
Before then, sound was channeled by cable from the sound stages to recording machinery in the studio’s sound department that recorded directly onto variable-width or variable-density soundtracks on film (if you’ve ever seen Fantasia, you’ve seen a playful demonstration of what variable width soundtracks look like). Both types of soundtracks transformed audio signals into variable light emissions. A variable-width track looks like the edges of two sawtooths facing each other; a variable-density track looks like little bars packed either closely or loosely to each other, arrayed perpendicular to the movement of the soundtrack.
The dialogue tracks were later mixed with music tracks and sound effects tracks (either creating the sound effects by hand or using prerecorded sound effects) onto the master sound track (again, on film). The master sound track was then copied (“married”) with the camera negative onto the “interpositive”, from which were made the “internegatives” used to make projection prints.
Just a thought – if the only bad sync you noticed was the horn, not lips, it might have been due to an acoustic characteristic typical of many bulb-type horns. It takes a fraction of a second to get the air moving and reed vibrating when you press the bulb, and it may not “speak” as fast as your hand moves.
It is possible to press a bulb very slowly, and get no sound from the reed at all, to describe an extreme case.
A thought on the “mirror” scene in Duck Soup: Most of the scene was probably recorded silently, with the horn sound effects synched in later by the sound department. To keep a microphone open on the set during a dialogue-free scene would have meant recording a lot of unwanted ambient sound from the set.
As I recall, what distinguishes the mirror sequence from all other Marx Bros. routines is its otherworldly silence – therefore, I believe you must have heard it in another scene.
One little surrealistic touch that I particularly like is that Harpo applies the moustache for his Groucho disguise using greasepaint just as Groucho presumably does. Apparantly nobody thinks this is strange for a head of state.