Films, radio, and tv use SFX as an initialism for sound effects, artificially created imitative sounds that are neither speech nor music. They’re background sounds that are added to make the movies we watch seem more real. Sort of the audio version of verisimilitude, those things that give the appearance of being real.
Who Was Jack Foley?
Operators (stagehands before they became sound specialists) had boxes full of gadgets they used to simulate dozens of noises that added realism to live radio broadcasts. Adding sound effects was much easier with films, because engineers recorded all the sounds and noises they needed and plugged them in after the film had been shot, developed, and edited.
In 1951, screams were added to a Western film called Distant Drums
In one scene, the character of Private Wilhelm screamed. It was such a good scream that it was tagged as Wilhelm’s scream. It was the first sound effect to go viral and was used more than 400 times in action scenes when characters were shot, blown up, or fell from great heights.
In the first Star Wars film, Luke Skywalker shot a storm trooper who screamed as he fell off a ledge
The trooper that fell was a stunt man, and the scream was Wilhelm’s. I read that it was used in Lord of the Rings, Transformers, Gremlin, Anchorman, the Green Berets, and all the Indiana Jones movies. Click here for a 3-second audio clip of the world’s most used but least famous scream.
The screamer was Sheb Wooley, a singer and writer of novelty songs
Wooley also acted on TV and in films, most notably on Hee Haw and in his finest role, as Hickory High School’s principal in Hoosiers. Sheb’s most famous song was the 2-minute long Purple People Eater. The link is to his performance on the Ed Sullivan Show after his nonsense hillbilly sci-fi song reached #1 on U.S. pop charts.
Sounds make up more of films’ sound tracks than actors’ dialogue
Films include lots of everyday sounds such as whooshing, creaking, rattling, burning, screeching, squishing, cracking, thudding, and everything you can think of. Don’t forget leaf blowers that sound like a thousand angry wasps, a murder of crows cawing, the wind soughing through the trees, and all the rest.
Today’s sound effects studios have lots of adjustable controls
They’re just like the ones in recording studios. Engineers mix and match thousands of sounds in a nearly infinite number of ways. All are run by computers and the unions are fighting these pesky boxes filled with non-natural intelligence.But in the beginning there were boxes full of things they used to make the noise the script is calling for.
So who was Jack Foley?
The most well-known Jack Foley is the charming bank robber played by George Clooney in Out of Sight. Foley gets romantically involved with U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco, played by Jennifer Lopez, after they get locked together in the trunk of a car during his prison break. Her Chanel suit was ruined. Dennis Farina is great as her father, especially the scene where he messes with Michael Keaton’s Ray Nicolette.
The non-fiction Jack Foley was a Universal Studios employee who developed dozens of ways to make and use sound effects
Born next door to Coney Island in 1891, Foley went to school with James Cagney, Bert Lahr, and Arthur Murray, who later became Kathryn’s husbandYM
He got into filmmaking when it was an infant industry. Some say he was a sound man on The Phantom of the Opera and The Jazz Singer. Wikipedia says the film Tarzan’s warbling ah-ee-yah-ee-yah yodels (later named Tarzan’s Jungle Call), were made by Foley himself and added later. Johnny Weismuller says the recorded yell was his because he had won a yodeling contest as a boy. Here’s Weismuller’s 12-second Tarzan Call.
I found claims that the signature yell was sweetened by adding camel, hyena, and dog noises
My favorite one is from members of the tinfoil hat brigade who insist they have insider knowledge of how Tarzan’s Jungle Call was created by a violin and a shout that was played backwards. Perhaps this is where the lads got the idea for “Paul is dead.”YM
Foley’s technique was to record all the sound effects at one time
He set the film industry standard for sound effects, which is why his name is still attached to so many people and things in the SFX world: Foley artists, Foley sheets, Foley stages, -editors, -reels, and -walkers, and of course, Foley footsteps.
Footsteps are a favorite
Next time you see actors walking, listen to their footsteps. Dollars to doughnuts they were added later. Keen observers notice the sights and sounds are not always synchronized. They also observe footstep sounds don’t always match the shoes the actors are wearing or the surfaces they’re walking on with those shoes, especially when the scene includes several actors walking along together.
A virtuoso Foley artist is said to add the sound of the shoe’s heel first and the toe second, or is it the other way around? Wait, no, that’s moonwalking, isn’t it?
No longer is one set of generic footsteps enough
Steel-toed boots, cowboy boots, moccasins, sandals, waders, slippers, bare feet, and stiletto heels each make different sounds and Foley artists need to faithfully replicate them all. In time, Foley artists accumulate more and more objects to make more realistic sounds to add to their inventories.
Foley himself said “Women are the toughest to imitate because their steps are quicker and closer together. I get winded doing leading ladies. Jean SimmonsYM is almost, not quite, the fastest on her screen feet in all of Hollywood. She’s topped only by June Allyson.YM I weigh 250 pounds and can’t keep up with her at all.”
Who’s Ben Burtt?
He’s the much-admired inventor of the distinctive buzzy/humming sounds made by the light sabers in Star Wars. Burtt said he created the sounds by combining the hum of a film projectorYM when it’s turned on with the buzzing sound that came from the back of his television’s picture tube.YM
Here’s a 1-minute YouTube with the projectionist inventor demonstrating how he created the sound that established what lightsabers were supposed to sound like
Burtt explains how he had an assistant swing around a microphone on a cord in front of a large speaker. That’s how he created the lightsaber’s Doppler Effect, the name for why a train’s horn changes pitch as it speeds by.
What does Walter Brennan have to do with Jack Foley?
The generally agreed-upon story says Foley asked Brennan to put a rock in his shoe and walk back and forth so he, Foley, could record the footsteps of a limping man for his sound library. The idea is that experiment with the rock (I’d bet it was a pebble) was Brennan’s inspiration for his herky-jerky hitch-and-limp. Then again, I also read how his limp was the result of a childhood injury, a piece of heavy machinery falling on him, and an injury he suffered in World War I.
Someone once described Walter Brennan’s limp as his trademark affectation
I quit rummaging through the rubble after I found someone merging two explanations by claiming Brennan had a natural limp and exaggerated it. I like to think he had a natural limp and exaggerated it by putting a rock in his shoe after a piece of heavy machinery fell on him in WWI.
Walter Brennan acted in either 191 or 230 films
There are conflicting versions of how Brennan acquired his distinctive voice, too. I first read it was the result of losing all his teeth after being gassed in the trenches (also in WWI).
Next, I read that Walter lost most his teeth on a movie set
He was an extra and a stuntman on set. An actor kicked him in the face while they were shooting a fight scene. The gag was Brennan would always ask the director if he should wear his full dentures or go without.
Those 200 or so words about Walter Brennan’s films, limp, voice, and the nature of his relationship with Jack Foley are great examples of how many inaccuracies there are out there in the ether, repeated willy-nilly by hundreds of retellers and forwarders
Only some are believable, but they all confidently present themselves as the one with the correct answer.
I offer them to you as no more credible than Hollywood fan magazine gossip
“Was you ever bit by a dead bee?” -Eddie, the old rummy first mate to Humphrey Bogart’s antihero charter boat captain, Steve, in To Have and Have Not. Slim (Lauren Bacall) goes dizzy for Steve, who resists until he doesn’t.
A Brief Dictionary for Young ModernsYM
Young Moderns. I don’t care for the practice of creating arbitrary “generations” for marketing purposes, especially when they’re mostly gerrymandered by SnapFace or that other one. For the most part, Young Moderns don’t value the past, leaving them vulnerable to not understanding references shared by people in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. You know, their bosses and their bosses’ bosses.
“Paul is dead.” This 1960s conspiracy theory went viral with the influencers and the wannabees. People who live in basements tell of Paul McCartney being killed in a car wreck but no one knows, because he was “secretly replaced by his exact twin.” This sounds a lot like the Elvis Aron and Jesse Garon thing.
Jean Simmons and June Allyson. Both were leading ladies of Hollywood films in the 1940s and 1950s.
Arthur and Kathryn. Since 1912, they operated the Arthur Murray Dance Studios, growing to more than 300 franchises worldwide. They accept Groupons.
Mike. The phonetic sound of the abbreviation for microphone was mike <sic> for many years until someone decided mic was better, but that’s pronounced mick, like Mickey. Not mike, as in microphone.
Projector. A noisy machine with wheels and sprockets, made to unspool long strips of celluloid from one reel and wrap them around another after passing them in front of a bright light. Real film you can touch, not pixels and bits and bytes.
TVs. Long before flat screens, tvs were bulky glass cathode ray tubes with a screen at the front and a ray gun on the back that fired electrons at it. Surrounding them were lots of connectors, switches, wires, and all the little bits that go with them.
Hidden away inside a wooden cabinet were all the fixins needed to build a tv
When something went wrong, the repairman came, removed the particle board panel from the back of the console, tested all your tubes, and replaced the bad ones.
Heathkit guys went to Radio Shack to test their own tubes on the in-store console. I’m told by those who were there that the vast majority of tv owners called the repairman.
Not knowing for sure if particle board was the right term, I returned to Search
<did+old+tv+sets+use+particle+board+for+the+backs+of+the+wooden+consoles>
As I pressed Enter, I looked away for a few seconds. When I turned back, one of four browsers I was using had switched over to its robot, the shortcut for those lacking curiosity. Something calling itself Search Assist spat out only two sentences:
“Yes, older TV sets often used particle board for the backs of wooden consoles, especially in models produced after the invention of particle board in 1950. This material provided a cost-effective and lightweight option for manufacturers.”
Keen observers know about cognitive dissonance, sort of a mental upset stomach
If you were the teacher, what grade would you assign to a student who concluded that particle board was used more often after it was invented than before?
Now I wanted to read about how the automated non-humans came up with a time machine so they could count all the particle board used for the backs of wooden consoles before it was invented. Here it is, set in smaller type:
"Auto-generated based on listed sources. May contain inaccuracies."
Only two sources are listed: Houzz and Wikipedia
The name Houzz was unfamiliar to me, so that’s where I went first. I found a your-comment-here site where the first contributor asked nearly the same question I did, adding nothing. The Houzz Featured Answer said particle board was invented in 1950 as a less-expensive alternative to plywood, then never mentioned particle board again. I quit reading when I saw the discussion abruptly left plywood for the world of molded plastic parts and never looked back.
One needs not to be a purist like me (guilty) to question the standards of an algorithm that uses only two sources
Those who are inclined to give the algorithm a pass should hear that this 3-person “discussion” occurred 19 years ago. Oh, the things we find when we take a closer look, huh?
The only other source, Wikipedia, took me to its page labeled “television set”
A 2-second search revealed the article they sent me listed 95 references, none of which mentioned particle board. Add to that how on my own, I found Wikipedia has a page titled “Particle board.” What level of intelligence overlooked that site as a resource? Why wasn’t I directed there?
While noodling around some more, I found a recording of a different Tarzan with a different yell
This one was a 56-second clip from the popular tv show, You Asked For It. Art Barker, costumed safari-like, opens the segment by introducing Elmo Lincoln as the original Tarzan. On cue, a very large man comes swinging in on a rope that’s supposed to look like a jungle vine.
When asked to “give forth with that original blood-curdling jungle call,” Elmo gave his Tarzan yell
After all, that’s why he was there. Lincoln tilted his head as far back as coyotes do when howling at the moon and began to scream like a man who just stepped into one of those steel traps with big sharp teeth, all the while beating his barrel chest.
“Oh, brother!” faked the show’s host, “That gave me goose pimples right there!”
I’m no sound man, but if that was the original Tarzan, no wonder they went with the Weissmuller recording, no matter whose voice it was. Curious because I don’t know the names of all the actors who played Tarzan in films, I poked around. It turns out the emcee pulled a fast one by not mentioning that all three of Elmo Lincoln’s Tarzan films were filmed in the days before sound.
Are Foleys and sound effects the same thing?
They’re closely related, but accurately speaking, Foley is the technique used to create sounds. Sound effects are the result.
Bonus
If you read Who Invented the Laugh Track? from March 2022, you know that canned laughter first appeared on Bing Crosby’s radio show in the 1940s. Sound engineers were able to add it later because the shows were pre-recorded, not done live.
And this, added after publication
I wrote this to Steve McVoy of info@earlytelevision.org
We’re trying to remember what the thin, lightweight back on CRT console tvs was made of. The one the tv repairman removed to get to the tubes. We’re sure it’s a wood product like pegboard or particle board or some such. We think the color was medium to dark brown. It might have had holes that allowed heat to escape. You know more than we do – can you help us with names, materials, etc?
Thanks in advance,
-dav
Mr. McVoy’s reply: “The backs of old tvs were made of a wooden pressboard about 3/16 inches thick.” Thanks, Steve. Udaman.
