Passage III

Hearing Is Believing

The movie scene unfolds, a boy out exploring trudges across the snow and arrives at a boarded-up house. As the lad knocks on the door, it slowly opens. Inside, dim light from a cracked and dusty window reveals an old man descending a staircase. Part of what draws an audience into scenes like this, with that in mind, is the sounds that accompany the images. The crunch, the knock, the squeak, the creak.

In most films, such sounds are recorded after the cameras have stopped rolling, a practice named for Jack Foley, who was working in Hollywood in the late 1920s when “talkies” swept silent movies off the screen. It was Foley whom figured out that squeezing a sock full of cornstarch, a sound like that of footsteps in the snow. He put an old rocking chair to work to create the creaking of stairs. When a scene called for the sound of more than one person walking, Foley grabbed a cane to generate the allusion of many people on foot. Low-budget solutions to big problems that eventually earned him the status of a Hollywood legend. Movies with sound were in their infancy at the time.

The need for “Foley” arises from the sound clutter of real life. The job of the sound technician (whose role is distinct from that of the “Foley artist”) is to record dialogue without capturing all the distracting background noise. An airplane flying overhead. A phone ringing. A door. Then, while viewing the film in a Foley studio: a small room with a screen, a microphone, and countless props—the Foley artist re-creates the sounds of the actors’ actions. It was Jack Foley who pioneered this process.

Directors adored him. To re-create the audible ruckus of Caesar’s army for the movie Spartacus, Foley jangled a set of keys in front of the microphone. That simple act, a Jack Foley classic, cut the movie’s budget by untold thousands of dollars. The director had planned to ship actors and horses, an army’s worth headed to a battlefield overseas to get an authentic sound recording. Instead, they all stayed home, and the audience never knew the difference.(44)