Interview of George Groves

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 5, 1962

GROVES

We'll start from the beginning with the beginning. First of all, of course, my name is George Groves. I was born in England in a manufacturing town about twelve miles from Liverpool called Saint Helens, which is famous mainly for being the home of Beechams Pills. When I was a small boy, the father of the great conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, was the Mayor of Saint Helens. As a small boy, I had a pretty fair musical education. My father was a musician. He was interested in brass bands, of which they have quite a lot in England. At a very early age, as my parents told me, I tried to play the trumpet, and later, the French horn, I think this is of some interest, because in later years it controlled the work that I finally went into.

I got a scholarship to a grammar school called Cowley School, which is equivalent to an American high school. While I was there, I used to take my trumpet to school and learned, for instance, to transpose B-flat trumpet to play with the piano for singing lessons which you know, is quite an advanced thing for a young boy to do.

Before I completed the number of years I was supposed to be at this grammar school, it happened (and a lot of these things just happened) that the trumpet player in the local theater got sick. Now I had played with amateur orchestras and bands as a youngster, and in desperation I suppose, they called my dad and said, "Can young George play the show tonight?" And I played the show in the local theater, which had a vaudeville house and a very "hard grind" place--two shows a night and a matinee on Monday and so on. I played the show and stayed. They kept me on as first trumpet in this theater.

They had a matinee every Monday, so I had to skip school every Monday afternoon. This was accepted for awhile until finally the Headmaster of the school objected. So I quit school and had a private tutor. Eventually I entered into competition with other boys for scholarships to the University. I competed with the boys in school and did pretty well. I won an engineering scholarship to Liverpool University. Now, here again, accidental things happened. My scholarship was called an open scholarship: I could actually choose the subject that I would take. It was a question whether I should take Medicine or Engineering. Like most young kids, I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I don't think one child in a hundred or a thousand actually knows what he wants to do. If they did, and worked towards that goal, they would be great successes. Oh, I visualized myself some day building bridges or doing some big engineering something or other, I don't know what. I chose to take Engineering and specialized (or majored) in Communications Engineering. I don't know how it is in school here, but in England you enter school and the first year you take an over-all course--in Engineering School it's a lot of mathematics, and physics. As you go through each year, you gradually funnel down to the thing you are going to specialize in. I finally got down to Communications Engineering. In the meantime, during summer vacations, to help pay expenses, I played the trumpet and also the French horn in theaters in Liverpool, Saint Helens, and other towns where I was called upon to play. Now, in Liverpool University it was common, as in most universities in England, that, if a man had a degree in Engineering or Physics or one of the sciences, they would endeavor to place him in some form of employment. He didn't have to go out and fend for himself. I came out with what is known as an Honors Degree--a Bachelor of Engineering Degree with first class honors. This means that I got high grades in the school examinations. I was finally located by the University in the Peal-Connor Telephone Company in Coventry.

I had specialized in transmission engineering. Now this is the transmission of intelligence, not power engineering. A transmission engineer in our terminology is a man who is an engineer in speech circuits, you see. The power engineer is concerned with the transmission of power for lighting, the operation of machinery, and so on. Transmission is generally accepted as the engineering concerned with the transmission of intelligence--speech--and this is a form of study that I specialized in at school. As a result of that, I went to a telephone factory, where they manufactured telephone equipment, radio equipment, and equipment that transmits intelligence. This was the Peal-Connor Telephone Company in Coventry, a branch of General Electric Company.

Now, I had a desire to come to the United States because, to my young mind (and I think I was probably correct), the United States was the foremost country in the world in the development of the telephone, and broadcasting, and the transmission of intelligence by speech in one form or another.

I wrote to the Western Electric Company, the General Electric Company, and Westinghouse, and received replies back from them to the effect that, since I was an alien on foreign soil, they could not offer me employment. However, from the Western Electric Company, I received a letter telling me that their Director of Research was in England at the time, and would be very pleased to talk to me if I would take the time to visit him in Manchester. I did; I talked to him, and he told me that they couldn't offer me employment, but if I every showed up in the United States they would be very happy to do what they could in the way of advancing my education and training.

Primarily I wanted to get to the States and go to work for some research organization like the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, and I eventually succeeded in doing this.

And after some interviews with the personnel people and the various department heads in the Bell Labs, they asked me what I would like to do. I was still pretty indefinite, so I was placed in the Research Service Department. This was a department that was concerned with budgeting of various scientific projects in the labs, the design and construction of transatlantic telephone cables and other big things, plus the research work that was going on in the business of making phonograph records and reproducing them through amplifiers and loud-speakers. It was practically a natural thing that I should drift into it. It was not by design. I just happened to be there. I had no idea that they were going to make talking pictures when I went into the Bell Labs at all. I never dreamed of it any more than anybody else in the world did, outside of a few engineers in the Bell Labs. So I just happened to fall into it, and, as I say, my training and background, one way or another, made me quite well-suited for it.

This also turned out to be a very good location for me because it gave me an opportunity to tour around the labs and observe the operation of a lot of departments. I had a job putting in some demonstration equipment In the science building in Washington, and so I got an over-all look at Bell Labs.

While I was there, research on the telephone was progressing--improved transmission characteristics of the telephone, improved transmission and reception of speech, and the development of loud speakers. As a by-product of all this, and of studies on speech and hearing, came the system of electrical recording of records, called the Orthophonic Phonograph, which was adopted by the Victor Company. This new method replaced the old acoustic method just using speech waves to drive some actuating device which would record grooves in a record, like Edison did. Previous to this development, phonograph records were made by talking into a horn--it was an acoustically-powered recording system like the old Edison Phonograph system, a little more refined than that, but nevertheless the whole recording system was actuated by voice power, just by sound waves.

It so happened that, while I was working in the Bell Labs (I was there for two years), I met people who were interested in music, and I played with quite a few orchestras in New York. One was an orchestra at the Germania Club that met in the Academy of Music Building in Brooklyn. These were all German businessmen, wonderful musicians, who would get together an orchestra of about fifty or sixty pieces, and I played with them. I played with a group of men who used to meet at their various homes and play chamber music. And I played with the American Orchestral Society which met every Sunday morning, I believe. I played with an Orchestral combination at City College in New York which met in the middle of the week under the direction of a man named Christian Kriens. That was an orchestra of over one hundred pieces. So I was quite involved in music in New York, not professionally, but just for fun. Eventually, I organized a small orchestra amongst the employees in the Bell Labs and conducted it--we had a lot of fun.

This was in 1925. I was in the Bell Labs from 1923 to 1925. I had just received my two-years-service certificate from the Bell Labs when I was transferred to Warner Brothers. The engineers in the Bell Labs put on a demonstration of the synchronized motion picture and a synchronized disc (phonograph record) for various motion picture executives, and finally it was demonstrated to Mr. Sam Warner, one of the Warner Brothers, who died some years ago. Sam came to New York and saw this demonstration of synchronized sound and picture in the Bell Labs. He thought it was a wonderful thing, and a contract was drawn between Warner Brothers and the Bell System to go into the exploitation and the making of talking pictures. It was a very simple demonstration of synchronized sound and picture--somebody dropping something on a table and making a noise so that you could see distinctly that the sound and picture were synchronized.

I was transferred from the Bell Labs and to the Warner organization, virtually as part of the equipment that went along. It was a "package deal" so to speak. They provided Warners with the original wax-recording machine and the microphones and motors to drive the camera and the recording machine together, and keep them in synchronism. It was all pretty crude by our present standards, but nevertheless it worked. A Chief Engineer named Mr. Watkins, who also happened to be an Englishman, was in charge of the project. We were all, as I say, "the package," more or less, turned over to Warner Brothers to get this thing going. The first efforts at making synchronized sound pictures took place in the old Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn. Warner Brothers owned those particular Studios. Out we went to the old Vitagraph Studios and installed the first equipment that was used to try and make some kind of a commercial product of synchronized picture and sound.

This was pretty much a shell of a studio and in our own rather crude way we tried to acoustically treat the place so that we would get some semblance of decent recording. We got carpets and felts and hung them around these very "live" stage walls to cut down reverberation and echo and proceeded to make some experimental short subjects.

The recording machine was a wax recording machine, typical of the equipment used in the phonograph industry by Victor Company and others. The camera was an open camera, very noisy, and driven by a motor, instead of by a hand crank, through a flexible drive shaft. The camera motor was electrically interlocked with the motor that drove the recording machine, and in this way, we started with the first efforts of recording sound and picture.

There were a lot of things that made it very difficult. First of all, the microphones that we used in the Bell Labs had just recently been invented (by recently I mean 1925 or '26). It was called a condenser-microphone, as differentiated from the old carbon-button type microphone. A very sensitive microphone, but by the very nature of its construction and electrical properties, it had to be connected closely to the first amplifier in the recording chain. This first amplifier was called a condenser-transmitter-amplifier, a C.T.A. It was in a wooden box, quite heavy, with a vacuum tube in it that was typical of what you'd find in a telephone transmission circuit. It was not developed specifically for sound recording. If you touched that box, knocked it slightly, or moved it slightly, you'd hear a bong out of the vacuum tube. In other words the tube itself was very microphonic; it couldn't be moved. There was no way of moving the microphone and its associated microphone amplifier. This meant that when a microphone was located In a set, it could not be moved. In other words, you couldn't follow people around with it. So it had to be tied up with ropes, in a certain position, and anybody who talked or said or did anything had to go to the microphone. The actor went to the microphone, not the microphone to the actor, as they do it now.

DIXON

This must have stilted the acting a great deal.

GROVES

Oh, it did. That's why, for a long time, you didn't see anything that resembled a stage movement in the early Vitaphone shorts. However, to see sound and pictures synchronized was a tremendous novelty. Quite a number of experimental short subjects were made.

I think the first actor was Rin Tin Tin, the dog, and Lee Duncan, his trainer. I think Lee Duncan was under contract to Warners at the time, and he put the dog through his paces; gave him commands; and they photographed him as he performed. We had a microphone in front of Duncan and heard him talk. This was never released--it was a very crude experimental thing.

The first short that was actually ever put out in the theater was called The Volga Boatman. For it, they had a mock-up of the front end, the bow of a boat, with some Russians hauling on ropes and singing the Volga Boatman's song. They didn't have to move very much--the microphone was right in front of them--they just pulled and sang, and it came out very well. I think it was eventually released.

This kind of work continued for some time. To get into serious work, we had to do something about the camera, so you couldn't hear it grinding. The cameras weren't silent, they were noisy. And the microphone couldn't be moved. Elevated trains ran pretty close to the Vitagraph Studio in Brooklyn--it was never intended to be a sound studio. So it all became a pretty....well, it was quite experimental--let's put it that way. However, when they became convinced that there was something to this "talkie" business, Warner Brothers leased the Manhattan Opera House, on 35th Street and 7th Avenue in New York City, and converted it into a movie studio, and this was the start of big things.

They had decided to score some pictures with a big orchestra and to make Vitaphone Short Subjects with famous talent. Next came the business of equipping the Opera House. The stage was extended out over the auditorium; the seats were all taken out; amplifiers and recording machines were installed in the boxes; dressing rooms became equipment rooms. And a lot of draperies were hung around for acoustic treatment. The only place that they could find that was at all suitable for a monitor room, to listen to the recordings and do all the mixing, was a big Masonic Shrine room on the sixth floor of the Opera House, in the front of the building. They ran microphone lines from the microphones on the stages, through their amplifiers, up through the ventilating system to the Shrine room, brought them out through a big metal grill in the wall, and mounted the mixer panel right there. This is where I spent a lot of my time because I mixed all these first programs.

The first big job we did was to score Don Juan, which had been shot as a silent picture with John Barrymore. They used the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to play the score. The score was written by Dr. Billy Akst, and was conducted in part by David Mendoza. If I had to change the recording set up, I had to come down the elevator six floors, run down to the stage, and run back up to the sixth floor. Every night we had to remove all this equipment from the Shrine Room for meetings--everything had to be taken out.

One other big event that took place in this period was the development of a loud-speaker with power enough to fill a theater. Loud-speakers had all been of the small type. The Western Electric loud-speakers available at that time looked like double cones and were called cone loud-speakers. But they had a very limited amount of power, like a home-radio listening device. In the Bell Labs they had designed large, exponential horns, and units to drive these horns that would provide enough power to fill a theater-size auditorium. So out of the electrical system of recording, the system of synchronizing, the powerful loud-speakers and the more powerful amplifiers to drive all this equipment came the theater system, to play the recordings to the audience.

A few interesting things happened there in shooting the short subjects. First of all, it was necessary to silence the camera, so the camera was put in to a big soundproof booth. The cameras were very noisy because they hadn't been designed to run silently. In order to get coverage on a particular scene, one camera would shoot a long shot, and another would shoot a medium shot. Maybe you'd have three or four cameras, usually three, in these big booths located so that there was coverage on the scene. They would shoot as long as a full reel would take, actually, so it was about a ten-minute sequence each time, because there was no possible way of cutting the sound at that time; they could cut the picture, but the sound had to be a continuous record. There was no such thing as dubbing sound or editing sound at all. So for a long, long time (for several years, as a matter of fact) any time they shot anything, it had to be a full reel-length of continuous shooting, because they had to record a ten-minute record.

There was one other very interesting thing at this time. The standard speed on phonograph records was seventy-eight rpm. The Vitaphone record was designed to run at thirty-three and one third which is the standard speed for LP's today. The thirty-three and one third speed was primarily chosen to get ten minutes of running time on a reasonable size record. It was a sixteen-inch record, as a matter of fact, and it was designed to run thirty-three and one third rpm. Instead of running from the outside in, it ran from the inside out. Now there is a good reason for that. On the inside of a record, the peripheral speed of the grooves is slower than it is on the outside. You have the same number of revolutions per minute, but in the time of one revolution, you just go a short distance inside and you go a large distance on the outside. Now the first phonograph records had an abrasive material in them to wear the needle point down to the shape of the groove. In ten minutes running time, the needle got too much wear, so that it became a little bit overworn on the outside grooves: on the inside, where the speed was slow, the needle point was sharpest and it would track the high frequencies better; and as the needle got worn and wouldn't track the high frequencies so well, the speed was higher, so the modulations were stretched out and it was easier for the needle to track. Consequently, you got a better response across the record. If you had done it the reverse and started with the fresh needle on the outside, by the time the needle got down to the inside of that ten-minute record, you'd have very poor quality. So that's why they reversed it to the inside out. It is quite interesting, I think, that the established speed of thirty-three and one third rpm, for a phonograph record has stayed and is standard now for all LP recordings.

DIXON

Had they added more than one mike to the set at this time?

GROVES

No, another technique was evolved at this time. And that was multiple microphone pickup on an orchestra. As a matter of fact, we had a test recording between ourselves and the Victor Company on the recording of an overture, the Tannhäuser overture and Mignon. The Victor engineers suspended one microphone in the middle of the orchestra and maintained they could get a cleaner recording than we could. We did what is practically standard practice nowadays in phonograph recording: we placed a microphone over each section of the orchestra, microphones on the violins, woodwinds, brass, percussion all the various sections, and we went so far as to put isolating flats or baffles between each section so that we got each section properly balanced on each microphone, and then blended the six microphones together. We succeeded in making superior recordings, I think this was quite an innovation at that time. And, as I say, this is standard practice now in phonograph recording. A microphone for almost every instrument is now used in some cases. I think it is now overdone to a large extent. As you know, the original Vitaphone program was put on in New York, let's see the exact date, I want to quote this exactly for you. August 6, 1926, is when they put on the first show with the recorded score by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for Don Juan and short subjects of such people as Efrem Zimbalist, Harold Baur, and Giovanni Martinelli doing his famous arias from Pagliacci and Aida. Anna Case was also on the program. Will Hays, who was the head of the Motion Picture Producers Association at the time, made an introductory speech to the audience for this Vitaphone Program.

I'll never forget, at least one line, when he said, "The art of the theater is ephemeral; it lasts but for the moment. But now, with the Vitaphone and the recording of the performances of these great artists they can be preserved for posterity." That was quite a famous speech. I think it's still preserved in the archives someplace.

That was the start, and it was a great success. After that we recorded a lot of famous artists, including Al Jolson, who came to New York and recorded a song in blackface. We recorded musical scores for a number of other pictures including a Barrymore show called, When a Man Loves, and The Better 'Ole, and quite a few pictures which had been shot silent.

Another picture we scored was called Old San Francisco. It was a story of the San Francisco earthquake. After the picture had been scored, it was decided to make some picture cuts and to add the sound effects of the earthquake which couldn't be done while the big symphony orchestra was playing. Here was the first attempt at re-recording. We took the original recording and, by taking two or three pressings of that particular part of the score and playing down to a certain part of one and picking up a certain part of another, we made a music cut to conform to the picture cut, and at the same time piped in the sound effects of the earthquake. Synthetic sound effects were used--we didn't have the real sounds of earthquakes, but at least we had the sound effects to simulate it. I think that was probably the first attempt at dubbing and re-recording.

While working in the Opera House, there were a few things to contend with. As I remember, they started to build a new subway line, and they were blasting underneath Manhattan, which frequently caused the needle to jump off the grooves.

Another thing that was developed at that time, was a playback reproducer. The grooves were engraved in a round wax disc about an inch thick that was later electroplated. (This is standard practice now.) The electroplated surface is stripped from the wax base to provide a reverse copy, known as a metal stamp which is used to stamp out final phonograph pressing or disc records. It became very desirable to play back the soft wax disc recording to see if everything was satisfactory before it went to the pressing plant to be plated. If a normal phonograph reproducing needle was used, it would cut into the soft wax and destroy the modulated grooves. We developed a very lightweight playback equipment that could play back a soft disc without damaging it. This again, was a tremendous innovation.

These initial programs were exhibited, more were made, and more theaters were equipped. With regard to equipping theaters, Warner Brothers had an exclusive license with Western Electric Company to manufacture and equip theaters all over the world to present Vitaphone. After these initial programs, and particularly after the showing of The Jazz Singer, which came a little later [October, 1927], the demand for theater systems became so great that Warner Brothers couldn't handle it financially, and they had to revert part of their agreement back to the Western Electric Company to manufacture, equip, and service the theaters. You see it meant a tremendous engineering organization to install theaters all over the world and to maintain a service organization. It was completely out of the realm of a motion picture company to do this, and they finally reverted all this theater equipment business back to Western Electric Company.

It is common knowledge now that the first shows were a tremendous success, but still the other Hollywood producers were not completely convinced that talking pictures were here to stay--they thought they were a novelty. Now Warner Brothers, in 1926 and '27 had made a picture called The Jazz Singer, shot silent with Al Jolson. As a result of the tremendous success of the musical scores and the short subjects that they had already made, they decided to insert singing sequences--for some reason, they never thought of talking sequences, in The Jazz Singer. Everything they had done to date was a vaudeville act, an opera singer, a famous musician, an excerpt from opera, a recorded orchestral score, and, although people sang, I don't remember that they talked particularly; they were always singing. It seems to me now that nobody ever thought of talking, speaking lines. I came to Hollywood from New York to record Jolson in The Jazz Singer. They had already shot the picture and decided to make singing excerpts. The boy who played the part of Jolson as a child had to sing a number In a cafe where his father objected to his singing. Jolson, as a young man, sang in Coffee Dan's restaurant, and Cantor Rosenblatt sang in the Synagogue, and Jolson saw him and wished he was a great cantor, and later Jolson sang the famous songs that were associated with him. It was only planned that he should sing.

In one sequence, he came into the set to sit down and play for his mother, and purely ad lib. He said, "Mother, you ain't heard nothin' yet!"

A famous line. It was so prophetic of the whole business.

"My gosh, he even talked!"

It seemed to be a tremendous surprise, somehow or other. Of course, it was just fantastic when Jolson talked! It was done completely ad lib, without rehearsal. Everybody held their breath. It just took everybody by storm that he just came out with spoken words. From then on the Warners started to put talking sequences in pictures, and a lot of early pictures like Glorious Betsy, and The Lion and The Mouse, with Lionel Barrymore--a lot of these old shows were made that way.

Finally, Mr. Warner said, "Let's make an all talking picture," and this was The Lights of New York [July, 1928]. That was the first 100% talkie. They talked all the way through it. It caused a tremendous sensation. The industry said, "This is it. We all have to go to sound." And gradually all the studios converted to one form or another of recording.

DIXON

Did the engineers that you had worked with then go out to the other studios, or did they build their own staff?

GROVES

No, concurrent with the Western Electric development of recording equipment, other developments going on, an engineer named Earl Sponable had developed a system of recording that didn't involve phonograph records at all. It was a system of recording on film with a flashing light, called the aeolight system. This was the method used by the first Fox Movietone Newsreels. The Fox Case corporation developed this particular system of recording. They had to join up with the Western Electric Company in order to use their theater reproducing systems. Westinghouse, General Electric, and later RCA, were all working on systems of recording. They finally came out with a galvinometer-type recording on film.

The Western Electric Company was developing, almost simultaneously with the disc recording, a system of recording on film using a light valve. A light valve consists of two very fine wires stretched and separated by a very small space. These wires, or metal ribbons, are mounted between two magnetic pole pieces. When you pass current through them, they will vibrate. A light shining through them, as a result of the vibration of these ribbons, varies in intensity. When that varying light is focused on a piece of photographic emulsion, the exposure results in a sound track of variable density. This is the Western Electric system of variable density recording.

The RCA system records a photographic sound track, not by varying the intensity of the light, but by varying the amount of area on a piece of film that is covered by a light of constant intensity. This gives a variable area soundtrack. When any of these photograph sound tracks travel past a fixed light which is shining on to a photoelectric cell, the resultant varying light intensity generates an electrical current with equivalent variations. The light can be made to vary in intensity, either by a variable density or variable area sound track.

Various companies were working on these different processes of film recording, while the disc recording system was still in use. Here at Warner Brothers, we persevered with the disc system of recording for quite a few years until it became a terribly complicated operation to edit the sound records to match the film. During the course of shooting, many types of productions from small talking sequences to completely talking pictures, varying camera angles and varying shots became more and more necessary. You just couldn't shoot ten minutes of film in one continuous sequence. It was necessary to move from one set to another and move around, so it became essential to have some way of editing the sound track the way the picture was edited. The first attempt at doing this was very cumbersome. Bear in mind, we were still cutting phonograph discs, sixteen-inch records. The first attempt at trying to edit from one record to another was here in Hollywood at the old Sunset Studios.. We had four turntables, all mechanically coupled together. On one turntable was a counting record, which counted once every revolution for ten minutes. This was used as a timing device which determined the moment at which the other records were started and stopped to attained synchronization with the appropriate picture sequence. These records were started and stopped by hand. Synchronism was only approximately correct, and the film would have to be re-edited and adjusted to the final record to obtain accurate sync again. As time went on, and shooting got more and more complex, we got to the problem of combining fifty or a hundred records in a ten-minute reel, and this became a major problem. We finally had to design automatic machinery that would start and stop the records, and we had a large number of turntables that were started and stopped automatically on different pre-set cues of so many feet and frames from the start of a particular reel. It was like a telephone dialing system. A system of relays and selector switches was used that would release the turntables and they would start to spin on preset cues. If there were more records to be dubbed than available turntables, a crew of men would stand there with the next records in a rack, select the next record in sequence, take the old one off, and reset the footage counter so that each turntable operated at the right time. It required considerable skill, but it was doing a job the hard way. Eventually, we had to do what everybody else finally did--record the sound on film. The sound editing could then be done with a pair of scissors. Just as the picture film was handled.

I think I'll backtrack a little bit here. I talked about The Lights of New York being the first all-talkie that was made, and I think it might be well to specify a date. It opened in New York, July 6, 1928, and Film Daily predicted, "It will clean up as the first 100% all talkie." It did.

So that was the beginning of the end of silent pictures, and, as I say, everybody converted to talking. The big problems then, and I'll repeat a little bit here, were the problems of editing sound to match picture and getting more flexibility with the cameras and with the microphone. Up to this time, everything had been very static. Cameras had to be in big soundproof booths; the microphone couldn't be moved; people had to walk to the microphone, or the microphone had to be hidden where people would be located. For conversation like ours, for instance, sitting at a desk, there would be a microphone maybe hidden in the old standard telephone, or hidden behind a flower pot, or behind any piece of furniture. In order not to see microphones in the set, we used to hand them down from ropes, and then the prop men or the set dressers had to get paper, or whatever material was used to cover the walls and cover the microphones with it, so that they blended into the background. All kinds of devices for masking out and hiding microphones were used.

To get away from all these handicaps, the first and most important thing to do was to get the camera out of the booth, so that it could be moved. A big house could not be pushed around the set with a camera in it. It was a terrible thing for cameramen even to sit in one of these things for any length of time because it was soundproof and airtight; there was no ventilation in them. They shot through a double glass partition-window. It had to be double glass for sound proofing reasons, and this deteriorated the photography quite a bit. You know, several plates of glass destroy the definition of the picture. So one of the first things that was attempted was to take the camera out of the booth and silence it. The first thing that was tried was the obvious thing, put a box around the camera. A lot of experimental work was done, building "camera blimps," as they were called. Soundproof blimps were made out of all kinds of materials, and they worked reasonably well, but the controls to the camera were hard to get to. It was hard to locate the finder so you could see through it, and loading the camera was a difficult job because all this box arrangement had to be unfastened. It's a strange thing, but the Technicolor cameras are still this way; they are heavy and cumbersome and have blimps on them. But the general camera that is used for shooting now is the Mitchell BNC. That is a silent camera. The camera housing, the camera itself, which contains the film-moving mechanisms, is a soundproof device. It is made out of heavy solid castings treated on the inside with sound deadening material. The film-moving mechanism in the camera has been so precision built and maintained that it runs silently and smoothly. Of course, when this happened, the camera could be put on a dolly and pushed around, and you got camera movement.

The next thing was, of course, to get equivalent microphone movement. During the course of these years, improved vacuum tubes were made that weren't so microphonic. The first thing that happened was that instead of having the microphone attached to a square box with

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO
SEPTEMBER 5, 1962

GROVES

a microphonic tube in it, the amplifier that is associated with the microphone was built into a cylindrical tube type of housing. They could be clamped to the end of a pole, suspended from one rope, and pushed around with the pole. The next move was to get rid of the rope and put the microphone on the end of a boom. This required a lot of engineering, a lot of experimental work, to get a boom that was silent so that you didn't hear the boom rumble as it was moved in and out. Now, when you had a microphone with an amplifier attached to it, this was too much weight on the end of a boom. No matter how good the boom was, the minute you got it stretched out ten or fifteen feet, the whole thing would droop down and it would just swing around; it was too flexible for that weight. The microphone itself had to be reduced in weight. And the microphone had to be designed so that it didn't have to have an amplifier right at the microphone. So now they developed so-called dynamic microphones, ribbon microphones, all of reasonable weight, that could be operated remote from their amplifiers. The amplifier could be down at the base of the boom. With a cord running out to the microphone, and nothing but the microphone hanging on to the end of the boom, a lightweight device on a lightweight boom which can move around.

This succeeded in relieving the actor from any restriction imposed by the mechanics of the system. If anything, I think the actor is now restricted more by the camera than he is by the microphone, because he has to get into spots in playing a scene where the cameraman has pre-set lights for him. If he wants to look well photographed, he can't just walk in and out of the lights willy-nilly. The cameraman has to know where an actor is going to be in order to maintain focus. As far as the microphone is concerned, the main objective is to obtain the correct sound perspective to match the picture--close when it's a close-up and far away when for long shots. You must be sure the microphone doesn't get in the picture. There is a little more to it than that, but that is the basic restriction.

I would like to go back to one little thought that occurs to me about individuals. I made a lot of shows with Al Jolson; he was a fabulous entertainer. I don't think he was as great an entertainer on the screen as he was in person. He was at his best when he was talking to a group of people, when he wasn't even trying to be an entertainer. This was when he was most fascinating. One very wonderful thing that I saw happen, occurred when I was the mixer on the show, Sonny Boy. During the course of the picture, they had a hospital scene, where some supposedly sick children were part of the scene. One little boy had a diseased hip bone--he really was crippled. I saw Jolson take this little boy's mother to one side and ask her what was the matter with him.

When she told him, he said, "Well you call my doctor (and he mentioned the doctor's name) and have anything you want done for this little boy at my expense."

Now this was all done on the sidelines, no publicity, no hurrah about it. It was just because he liked the little fellow and his mother was a lady. I thought it was a very very fine thing to do. I just happened to be sitting there and he was standing close enough when he said it so that I overheard it. So, you see, he was a very wonderful fellow in many respects. Tremendous personality, and tremendous entertainer, but not a particularly good actor. When he started to act and play a part, he never ceased to be Jolson. You were always aware of the fact that he was Al Jolson on the screen. When he was performing and singing in his famous manner, he was just fabulous. If he had a group standing around, he told a story or related an anecdote of some kind, and everybody just stood there; they were just spellbound by him.

Another interesting character to work with was John Barryraore. He was a real character, and a man who couldn't remember lines at all. It was fantastic. Many, many shows, I've seen him play with the words written on a blackboard outside of the camera. He probably was the first talking picture actor to use a teleprompter system. That's what it amounted to. He had to have the lines written for him. His brother Lionel was just the reverse; he never faltered in reading lines.

Conrad Nagel gained the reputation of being the "voice of Vitaphone" because he had quite a resonant and good talking voice. I don't think in those early days that he was particularly great because he read lines so well, but because he sounded good. He just had a voice that seemed to record well with the system as it existed in those days. A lot of actors failed because they couldn't read lines or because they didn't sound the way they looked. John Gilbert was the famous example--he had a high tenor voice. Douglas Fairbanks was a very virile man, but he had a kind of a high tenor voice, and he didn't sound robust the way he looked. So talkies hurt a lot of people. Conversely it helped a lot. And, of course, it has been a tremendous means of preserving great performances which otherwise would have been lost forever. When you consider the great number of conversions in the recording process from one type of energy to another that take place from the thought of a spoken word, to its reproduction out of a loud speaker, it is quite fantastic that fidelity can be maintained. You take a thought, just as we are sitting here, and thinking of what to say, and saying it. The thought is somehow stimulated in your brain; electrical impulses are generated in the brain, and stimulate your vocal cords into action. Simultaneously, you expel air from your lungs, and you've got mechanical vibration of your vocal cords, resonant cavities formed by moving the muscles of your face, produce sounds of a certain character. With the mechanical vibration of vocal cords and as air is expelled from the mouth, air waves are generated. This is mechanical movement of air particles moving back and forth like waves in water. These air vibrations move along through space until they encounter some recording device such as a microphone. When they impinge upon the microphone the varying air pressure moves a mechanical diaphragm in it. Here you have acoustical energy, or movement of air, transformed into mechanical vibration of a diaphragm. That diaphragm is suspended in a magnetic field. The fact that it moves in that magnetic field generates a minute varying electrical current. So here now we have a conversion from mechanical energy to electrical energy. That electrical energy is then amplified many, many times, a million times, to give it enough power to operate some kind of recording device.

Consider a disc recording system. The amplified electrical vibrations cause the recording stylus to move from side to side, thus engraving sound modulations in the virgin wax disc. The wax disc has now become a memory system as storage devise containing all the information generated in the artist's brain. When you play it back, a needle travels through that groove. It is forced to move mechanically by the little wiggles in the groove. While it is vibrating mechanically, it is vibrating in a magnetic field again, which in turn makes it generate minute electrical currents, which are amplified and fed to a loud-speaker. They go through a coil in the loud-speaker and create a varying magnetic field, which makes the diaphragm of the loud-speaker move. Now we are back to mechanical vibration again--mechanical vibration of the diaphragm which pushes the air in contact with it generating air waves which return to your ear, move your eardrum, giving you the sensation of sound.

When we realize that during these transformations of energy to the final storage device, whether it is a tape recorder, disc recorder or optical recorder, and that through the reconversion back to the reproduction of audible sound we can preserve a high degree of fidelity, we must agree that a fantastic piece of engineering has been accomplished. It's really a miracle that it can be done.

Of course, there are several kinds of storage devices. The optical recorder, where the light has to shine on a photo cell to create electrical vibrations. Or a tape recorder, where the electrical energy generated in a microphone magnetizes the iron oxide coating on a piece of film or tape and information is stored there as a varying magnetic field.

In the early days of motion pictures, everything was lit with arc lights. This was necessary, because the films were slow, and powerful incandescent lights were not yet invented. The arc lights existed, and were readily available. The man who used to be in charge of the Electrical Department of Warner Brothers, Frank Murphy, was basically responsible for having the General Electric Company and Westinghouse Company develop incandescent lights of sufficient power to light a motion picture set and Warner Brothers were first to use them. Incandescent lighting became a necessity on sound recording stages because the noise emitted by arc lights could not be tolerated. The use of incandescent lights accelerated the development of fast panchromatic film to replace the slower color blind film.

At the same time, the Eastman Kodak Company improved the films that we used. The speed of the films was increased and finer grain film was developed so that you could get a bigger picture on the screen.

Finer print stocks, finer negative stocks, and, of course, eventually color. The first color talking picture was On With the Show, May 28, 1928. The first sound film in color. After that came a lot of color shows, like The Gold Diggers of Broadway, The Show of Shows, and all The Gold Digger series. Musicals started to come out in color. In shooting the first color films, the films were so slow that in order to get any depth of focus at all, they had to pour tremendous amount of light into the set. I've seen actors stand there with their hair smoking. If they had a little grease on their hair, it actually would start to smoke from the heat. It was just terrible--almost impossible to stand. There again, the film companies had to increase the speed of the films in order to cut down the intensity of light on the set; so the people could work; so the make-up would stay as make-up. Then, of course, with improved films, improved negative stock and print stock, comes the presentation of larger pictures on the screen. Now you can preserve definition and put on a spectacular show.

The first real advancement there was the invention of the cinemascope picture. That was developed by 20th Century-Fox with the introduction of the anamorphic lens which squeezes down the picture in a horizontal direction. The vertical dimension of the picture is not affected, but in order to get a wide angle of view and still keep it in the thirty-five mm. strip of film, the lens compresses the picture in a horizontal direction. Now in projecting it in the theater, a lens is used that does the reverse and restores it to its original dimension. And that's what Cinemascope is. The lens is called an anamorphic lens; it anamorphizes the picture, squeezes it down, and then a special lens goes on the projection machine which restores it back, and that's how you get the wide aspect ratio of a Cinemascope picture.

In a further effort to improve picture definition and go to bigger pictures, they are now shooting pictures on seventy mm. films instead of thirty-five. This is the famous Todd AO system. The larger negative and print area produces improved quality, of course, and definition in the projected picture. This permits the projection of larger pictures.

The standard picture has an aspect ratio of three to four or one point thirty-three to one. In a Cinemascope type picture, by virtue of the squeezing down in photography and widening out in projection, the aspect ratio is changed to about two to one. In other words, more width for the same height is obtained. Because of this big wide expansive view, it is necessary to avoid the illusion that the sound is all coming out of a hole in the center of the picture. Stereophonic sound is the answer to this problem--the sound is spread across the whole screen. In the standard Cinemascope type picture, there are three loud-speakers at the screen--one in the center and one on either side--so that the sound comes out of three speakers simultaneously. And a fourth sound track is sometimes used to put sound around the house. Just to enhance the sound. This is for standard Cinemascope pictures. Now, when you go into a shot with seventy mm. film, and you go into large picture sizes like Ben Hur or Westside Story, or My Fair Lady, these big shows require huge screens and take more than three speakers to cover them. Six-track stereophonic sound is used--five sound tracks, operating five loud-speakers at the screen and one for surrounds. The ultimate now in sound is six-track stereophonic.

With a stereophonic sound system, either three-track or four-track for Cinemascope, or six-track for the seventy mm. productions, the sound track is all magnetic. The picture is printed and developed by Technicolor, or whoever makes the color print. Then thin stripes of magnetic oxide are stripped down either side of the picture, some outside the sprocket holes, and some between the sprocket holes and the picture. And the sound is then recorded onto those magnetic stripes. Optical tracks are not used for that type of sound reproduction. And also the magnetic system gives you a more hi-fi sound than the optical does. It has extended-frequency range and the background noise is very low. You take a piece of optical track, and as the film goes through the projection machine, it gets a certain amount of scratches on it, it's impossible to avoid. Since an optical track is part clear-film and part exposed film, when it gets scratched, it comes out in the form of noise. Now on a piece of magnetic track, this problem doesn't exist. You can scratch magnetic tape and you don't hear noise like you do from a phonograph record or from a piece of optical film. It stays quiet, which is a great virtue as far as theatrical reproduction is concerned, because it has to be constantly running through the projection machine and through apertures which scratch the surface of the film, but it doesn't reproduce as noise in a magnetic system.

DIXON

I was going to ask if they have to demagnetize the equipment that's close to a magnetic recording.

GROVES

Yes, anything that has to do with a magnetic recording system, for instance the film splicers and the film gates, everything has to be carefully demagnetized.

DIXON

Is the sound in outdoor scenes dubbed on later?

GROVES

Oh no, not necessarily. For outdoor recording, we have the same equipment that we have indoors, except it's mounted either on a location truck or in a portable suitcase unit or something that can be moved around. The recording machine is identical, it may vary in size and weight, depending on the job you are going to do, but basically ifs the same type of recording apparatus. It all depends what you are recording and where you are recording. For instance, if we are shooting a Western, a TV show, and a lot of it has to be shot outside on the back lot, on our Western streets, we cannot afford to stop shooting to wait for airplanes to go by. And you can't stop all the traffic going down the freeway, so a lot of material has background noises in it that are false to the scene. If they belong in the scene, we don't care particularly, as long as they don't detract from the scene. But if you take a period picture or a cowboy picture or something of that nature, you don't want the sound of airplanes going through. When that happens, we have to resort to post-synchronizing, or lip syncing, or dubbing, or whatever phrase is used. To do that, we get a print of the sound track and usually a print of the picture that goes with it. We break it down into small lengths so the actor only has to do a phrase at a time, actually, because it becomes very difficult to get perfect sync, if you have too much to do. So we break it down into short lengths and make a continuous loop of the picture and the corresponding sound. We put it in the projection machine and it just goes around and around and around, keeps repeating. There is a cue track, and the actor can hear what he did and see what he did. He proceeds from there to try and talk the lines in perfect sync and make a new sound track for that particular scene. Once you've got that, you have to put a certain amount of sounds in back of it. You always have to put in something, unless somebody is sitting in an absolutely dead quiet room, otherwise they become shadows moving around. You have to put the footsteps back in and whatever would naturally be heard in the scene. This is quite a job, putting all those sound effects back in. We have a whole crew that does that kind of work, and they have become very proficient at it.

With regard to musical numbers, the reverse is done. In the olden days, we used to record everything as it was shot, standard recording it's called. Nowadays, it's very very seldom that a musical number is recorded at the time it's shot. There are several good reasons for this. Primarily, most singers don't look particularly photogenic when they are singing--some do, but some don't. And the next reason is, it's not economical to do it. It may take a day or two, or a week or two, to photograph a big musical number that can be recorded, say, in a day on the scoring stage. Now, if you held the orchestra during all the shooting of the different camera angles and had to record every camera angle, this would become a very expensive proposition. Also, it would mean that the sound track would be shot in pieces, and for every change of camera angle, you'd get a different pickup of the voice relative to the orchestra. It would be almost impossible to wind up with it sounding like a continuous performance. There would be something different with each different setup because, by the very nature of the shooting of the thing, you'd have to move the orchestra. In one position, you may be shooting across this way down a big set, and the next time you shoot over here, and they all have to move around so the conductor can see, and so the location of the orchestra on the set becomes different. And you have to move them out of the way because of the lights and the camera, so it becomes a terribly complicated and expensive thing to do. Whereas, if you go on a scoring stage, you concentrate purely on getting a good performance sound wise. Then that recording is played back on the set and they mouth to it. Of course, they have to not only mouth, but they sing at the same time. You have got to see some throat action as though the people are actually singing, but they don't have to perform as well.

Another thing, for a singer, it would be very difficult to get a first-class performance every time they change the camera angle. They'd just wear out, they just couldn't do it, you see, for a number which was complicated to shoot. So there are an awful lot of factors that come into the business of pre-scoring musical numbers and playing them back on the set. Also, you can do all the photographic effects you want; you can light any way you want; there are no microphones around; and nothing to bother anybody. A lot of TV shows are done this way. Some of them are done live, simple setups, but the big spectaculars are pre-scored ahead of time, and played back. They have to for economic reasons, particularly on the air--you can't take a chance on a bad performance or a breakdown or a blowup of some kind.

DIXON

What impact did TV have on the movie business? Were there any new developments in sound as a result of television?

GROVES

I wouldn't say there were any particular innovations except for means of communication. For instance, if you notice on the television stage set, everybody wears headphones. The cameraman can hear directions from the director, and everybody is in communication with everybody else. They're not on a motion picture set. They have to do it on a television show because the show is continuous, you see, and you can't say, "Well, you missed. Come back and do it again." They don't have time to rehearse a complicated show to the point where everybody knows exactly what to do without being told. If they could shoot it in sections like a motion picture. It would be much simpler.

DIXON

I wanted to ask you, too, about sound in cartoons.

GROVES

Well, that's a special job all its own. The dialogue and the music are recorded for a cartoon before the cartoon is drawn. The animators work to the sound track. We get the characters over on our scoring stage, like Mel Blanc, the famous Bugs Bunny. The whole thing is plotted out in script form, and he knows exactly what he's going to say, and what he's going to do. We record that dialogue, then the animators animate to fit the syllables, and to fit the sound.

The music is also recorded before the cartoon is drawn and it's all recorded to specific tempo. This is done by taking what we call a click record, which establishes a tempo. It's a record that goes click, click, click, click like a metronome. We have a library of these click records, where the click is so many frames per beat, and the cartoonist who is responsible for the drawing or the story plot or for the making of the cartoon, will specify with the musical director that a certain sequence will be made at a certain tempo such as ten frames per beat. The conductor and the band hear the clicks through headphones, and this is the tempo at which they play. Another piece may go twice that fast, for a chase or something. It varies all through the cartoon; it's not necessarily the same tempo all the way through. But every piece that is recorded is to a specific tempo. Now the cartoonist knows that if it's a piece of music for Bugs Bunny to walk to and he takes a step every certain number of frames, the music will be exactly on his footsteps because he knows that the tempo is so many frames per beat. So it's all pre-plotted, pre-planned, and pre-recorded.

Then, when the cartoon is all drawn, it comes over to the Sound Department and a special group does all the funny sound effect, again to the same tempo records. Footsteps, or chomping on his carrot, or whatever he does, is all specified, so many frames per beat, and to make those sound effects, they listen to it and make all the sounds in tempo; they are all edited in the proper places with the music and the dialogue, and they all fit together.

DIXON

I had no idea; I thought that they made the cartoon and then the music, the voice and everything.

GROVES

No, it's the other way. They have to have the dialogue ahead of time, actually, so the animator can determine the number of syllables for a mouth closing. Otherwise he'd have to keep doing it himself, looking in a mirror, I suppose, to find out how it worked. He couldn't determine how fast somebody was doing it, you know, because the dialogue is not done to tempo. When Bugs Bunny talks, he is just talking. Of course. it's recorded at a standard speed; then, to make it sound like Bugs Bunny their speed it up a little bit. So all this is done ahead of time. The animators just listen to it and draw to it.

DIXON

I would also like to know if you had any part in the union difficulties that came along.

GROVES

Yes, we have all had part in those things. But only to the point of waiting until it was settled actually. I've only had one disagreeable incident. At one time this whole place was picketed. It got very violent, and you took your life in your hands to come through the gate.

Oh, I'm a member of the Soundmens Union, and have been ever since it was organized. The reason I keep up my membership is because in case I want to go back into production some day, I could operate equipment; otherwise, I couldn't. But as a department head and supervisor, I carry what they call now an "inactive" card--I have no voting rights and don't get embroiled in union meetings. I wouldn't be allowed to attend one because I'm part of management.

The only really disagreeable incident that I can recall right now during the big strike had to do with one of the boys who was out on strike. He invited me to come over and talk to the boys at the union meeting, have a get-together. He wanted to settle it. You know, "Get them all together, and you come over and tell them what is happening." And I did. They weren't abusive to me, particularly. One fellow, who was a very good friend of mine, got a little hot under the collar, and was a little abusive verbally, but they tamed him down. But I was never subjected to any particular violence. I did what I was doing in good faith. They realized that I couldn't walk out of this place as a head of a department. I had to stay here and try to keep the plant ready to operate again. Actually, it was just a matter of sitting back and waiting for the negotiators to come to some agreement on these things.

I wasn't actually in charge of the department when the big strike was in effect. I was assistant to the man who was in charge. I don't know that he did very much either, except just sit and wait until the labor relations men got together and settled it, you know. There is nothing you can do.

DIXON

It's never been really settled has it?

GROVES

Oh, yes. There are very good relationships between all the unions and the producers right now.

DIXON

What I mean is that there was never any real settlement that said, "This union has jurisdiction."

GROVES

Oh, sure. We have too many unions in this plant as a result of that kind of thing. In the Sound Department I have--let's see, there is Local 695, the Sound Union that all the production personnel have to belong to. Some of the 695 soundmen can maintain sound equipment up to a point, but when it comes to installing equipment, then we have to go to the IBEW, the electricians local. It's a fine dividing line, where one starts and the other stops, but we usually manage to keep it pretty clean. Then we have the Sound Editors, another local; the Projectionists, another outfit; and the Office Workers Guild, that's another outfit. So there are quite a few unions involved. But as of now everything is very peaceful and happy. There is very little disagreement.

Some phases of union operation, that I prefer not to discuss, actually make operation a little difficult. The main thing is, I'll state it right here and now, the seniority clause. A man who has been in the union a long time has preference over a younger man. This makes it very difficult to train young men. If a young man comes out of school and has gone through the motion picture course in a university, he may be very capable; he may be a great recording engineer, a great transmission engineer, a very clever all-around man, but all I can do is hire him on the lowest rung of the ladder, because he is the last man into the union. He stays in Group Three, and as long as there are Group Twos and Group Ones available, I've got to hire them. And the first man to be laid off is the Group Three man. This is terribly unjust, I think, and tends to stagnate the whole business. There is no real apprenticeship system that you can put into effect. I have had men in this department who, when we are busy, have worked five years learning how we do things. When things get slow, as they'll do every once in awhile, if they are not in the highest group in seniority, they have to be laid off, although they may be ten times as good as the men I have to keep. And they may be out of work three or four months before I can bring them back. I may never be able to bring them back if they don't find employment for all the Group Ones and Group Twos. Years of training have gone for nought. This is bad.

I get a lot of letters from boys in school inquiring about the possibility of employment in our Sound Department, and two things impress me about them. Generally, the thing that impresses me, out of high school and sometimes out of college, is the atrocious English, the poor spelling, and the complete inability to express themselves on papers. It's absolutely ghastly.

They write and ask me, "How do you get into the motion picture business?" The boy may be very good at what he wants to do. "I've operated a projection machine in the school auditorium; I've studied physics and I've studied electricity, and I want to do this and that."

In some cases you'll find boys who have gone to college and taken a course in Electrical Engineering, and even there, you'll find that penmanship and English and spelling are certainly not what you would expect from a college graduate. I usually advise them, particularly high school kids, "First of all, if you have any ambition at all of becoming an electrical engineer or a scientist, or whatever you think is involved in recording for motion pictures or any other kind of recording, go to college first. Don't quit high school. Go to college and complete your education and then come back and talk to me." Occasionally, you'll find one that is really bright; then I'll ask him to come in here, and I talk to him and tell him what the prospects are.

I'll say, "If you like it, fine, but to be honest with you, here is what it is. It's a spasmodic employment, because the demand goes up and down. It's not steady. We are reasonably secure in this studio, more so than in others, because we have a fair television load to help smooth out the ups and downs of theatrical production.

Fortunately, the television load is reasonably smooth. You have a certain amount of hours of air time to meet and they have to be done, and you have to prepare for them, and get them ready before you go on the air, so it makes a good leveling influence on the production load. But even so, it has its ups and downs. Part of the season we'll have maybe seventeen or eighteen units shooting on the stages; another time there will be two or three. It goes up and down to that extent."

The poor boy who is a beginner is in and out. He just doesn't have any security at all. It's a very sad state of affairs, and there is nothing you can do about it. It distresses me terribly when I think about it.

The next thing that distresses me in many respects is the American system of education, particularly, at the elementary school levels. I think there is much too much choice of subject matter. I never got this in England, I had to do what I was told, and I had a certain amount of homework that I had to do every night, and it was not of my choosing. I think it's much too soft, much too much individual choice. They call it Progressive Education. I guess this is in the nature of Progressive Education to think it develops the child's initiative to choose for himself. But you can't train an animal of any kind, whether it's got four legs or two, to go on the right path without a

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: 2, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 19, 1962

GROVES

certain amount of direction and training.

You cannot say of a puppy dog, "I'm not going to whip this puppy if he does something in the house he should be doing outside, because he will grow up and learn better."

He never will. He's got to be taught; he's got to be told. It's human nature to go the easy way. I think these youngsters have got to be driven and not told to go their own free way. I think that's what is wrong with them.

Now the question comes up as to whether I had any specific part in any specific piece of development work. As far as my own particular contribution at that time is concerned, I was what is known now as a music mixer. It was my responsibility in those days to pick up the New York Philharmonic Orchestra with a number of microphones, which was the start of multiple microphone pick-up of orchestras, versus one microphone and let the sound come as it may. Because I knew music, I did all this with a music score in front of me. During rehearsals I balanced the orchestra to the best of my ability on these various microphones, indicated how the settings on these controls should be on the score, and when they were ready for a take, I was ready for a take and proceeded to mix it according to what my ear told me was correct. I also had to observe certain engineering principles and the control of levels in order not to over-cut the recording mechanism. This was my first training as a music mixer which later developed into the recording of all the big musicals that Warner Brothers made. So my contribution actually was not as an inventor, per se, but as a combination musician-engineer to get the best sound on a record that I was capable of doing. I had no competition from anybody because nobody else had the combination of training that I had at the time. It was a wonderful experience for me because I got to know a lot of great artists very well. I remember quite distinctly having a very interesting conversation with Henry Hadley, who wrote the score for a picture originally called When Man Loves, with John Barrymore and Dolores Costello. It had quite a bit of sea music in it, and I said, "Now how do you get all these notes down on music to make it sound like this? What makes a composer's mind tick?"

He explained to me, "Well, I have musical figures in the low instruments that sound like the motion of waves, wave motion in the orchestra. Superimposed on that is the theme or themes of the people involved in the scene."

This technique started out very early with Hadley and those people who wrote the first scores, and it still goes on today. It's the same technique that Wagner had when he wrote his great operas--they write a theme associated with an individual in the play. If you take a Wagnerian score and eliminate the voice and play the orchestral score, you can. If you know the opera at all, visualize the action and the people on stage by his use of the theme associated with the people and the treatment of those themes. Now the same technique goes on today. A composer looks at the picture and decides on the themes for each individual character. It may be a jolly theme, or a sad theme, or the same theme treated in different ways, and a combination of those themes.

This was first drawn to my attention by Hadley. He not only played the themes for the people in the scene, but the background in which they were playing, which was the sea. And it all becomes a very clear thing when it's explained. It's very clever and takes a great deal of musical talent to do. This conversation with Hadley has stayed with me ever since.

This, I repeat again was, and has been my main contribution. Not so much in the invention of equipment--we have possibly invented methods as we went along, but equipment development and manufacture has been, in the main, the province of the equipment supplier. The Western Electric Company, which developed the first recording system, developed the microphone and the loud-speaker out of telephone research. As a result of Lee De Forest's invention of the vacuum tube, they developed amplifiers that would drive these loudspeakers with sufficient power to be heard in an auditorium. So all we did, actually, was to take these components and apply them to a new phase of work. A new industry was born. During all the ensuing years, improvements have been made and new requirements have had to be satisfied as a result of demands made by men like myself, but motion picture producing companies are not research organizations except on a very small scale.

In some cases very important advances have been made, however, as a result of studio engineering. Now, let's take a look at a few of these things. One of the big objections to the original system of recording sound on a record along with the picture, was that you couldn't edit the record. It was a very difficult, complicated process with thirty or forty records starting and stopping on cue and so on. So the demand, was made, not by me, but by the motion picture industry, of which I was one small part, for a method of recording that could be edited like the picture. So the Bell Laboratories and RCA and Westinghouse, came up with a method of recording sound photographically on film. The optical sound track could then be cut identically with the picture. The sound editor just took a pair of scissors and cut the picture film and the sound film to match and spliced the ends together to give a full reel. It simplified the whole process tremendously.

Even when we had film recording, the level of the background noise was objectionably high, due to the grain in the film. So a big demand went up for some way of reducing background noise on film. The Bell Laboratories and RCA developed what they call a noise reduction system. So that if the modulation is low on the film, the part of the film that's not being scanned at all is masked out by shutters or some such device eo that you don't hear film hiss from light passing through an unmodulated or an unexposed piece of film. Actually, the ground noise that you hear is emulsion grain passing through a light piece of film. If the film is black (very highly exposed), and no light passes through, you don't hear any noise. If it's just lightly exposed and it's a gray or light gray piece of film, you hear the noise of the film grains, because enough light goes through it to actuate the photo cell in back. So they devised a system of noise reduction which masks out this unexposed part of the film, and was a tremendous advancement. They finally came up with a sound track that was reasonably quiet. This completely killed any thought of using disc recording. You cannot do this with a disc; you can't mask-it out. So, we finally got quiet film recording.

Another extremely important step was the establishment of standards, so that a piece of film made in the United States could be played on any projection machine in the world. This was a tremendously important step. The thing had to be standardized--film speed, the position of the sound track--so that everywhere you went you knew when it was scanned it was being scanned in the proper position. The width of the sound track, the size of the picture, and all these factors had to be standardized and established as international standards. This work was finally accomplished by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. You can now go from here to Tokyo or Hong Kong or London or Paris, or any place in the world with a piece of film made here and it plays the same wherever you go. This was a tremendous piece of work.

So when it comes down to talking about individual contributions, they are pretty hard to put your finger on. It's the result of a really combined community effort, that all these things have been done. There are one or two things that have taken place in recent years that can be tied down specifically to one organization or another. For instance, the presentation of Cinemascope pictures is the result of the efforts of the Fox Studio organization. If it hadn't been for the engineers at Fox, Earl Sponatle in New York, and the backing from the Board of Directors of the Fox organization, we may not have had Cinemascope.

Here at Warner Brothers there are a lot of things that can be tied down to the Warner organization. The requirement which was presented to the General Electric Company for incandescent lights was developed at Warner Brothers. We were the first in the talkie business, and arc lamps are very noisy, due to the frying noise of the burning carbons and the rotating of the motors that feed the carbons. The lamp housings themselves would get cool between takes and expand and crack and pop and make noises as they warmed up during a take. That still goes on with incandescent lights too, but the primary noise of the arc itself, focused on a person with a microphone in front of him had to be eliminated. So the demand was made on the General Electric Company for incandescent light that would provide enough light to photograph on the type of film we had; and the demand was made on the Eastman Kodak Company to provide a panchromatic type film that would photograph a suitable image with incandescent light. Previously it had all been done with a pure white arc light.

Now, incandescent light has a lot of red and yellow in it, so it had to be a film that was responsive in the red end of the spectrum. They came out with panchromatic films, and, as time went on, the demand for faster films was made and the film manu- In any event, this was the first moviola that was made. And this was made for the picture The Lights of New York. It was an all-talking picture, and a lot of records had to be combined to make a complete motion picture.

As you go along there are various things that come up--small ornaments on a Christmas tree, so to speak, that make the job a little easier, a little more professional. But the big basic things are not done in the studios, they are done by the equipment suppliers. This is the way it's been all along. For instance, another example: magnetic recording, the most tremendous advancement as far as sound is concerned. In it we now have a medium of virtually unlimited frequency range. At least it will go from ten or twenty cycles to fifteen or twenty thousand, which is more than adequate for ear response. And all the volume range that your ear could require, with no background noise.

Now this was not a studio development. First of all, in Germany they had developed magnetic recording to the point where it was very commercial.

DIXON

Didn't they develop the wire recording first?

GROVES

Yes. And then some brilliant German scientist came along with the application of a magnetic oxide on a film base. Since then it's been in use as a motion picture and general sound recording medium, and now has been further developed as an information storage device for computers and space craft, even to the preservation of a television picture on a video tape recording. This medium has been improved and improved and improved. You just don't stand still. But this is done by the tape manufacturing companies.

I have been concerned with getting the sound on to whatever medium was available and getting it off into the theater to present to the public all the various sounds that we record in the form of a high-quality dramatic show. A scene that is recorded on the stage has to be well done; it has to be recorded well.

Then we get composers of all types to compose the music with the highest quality and high quality means a lot of things. It has to have the proper balance of the orchestra; it has to have the proper dynamics of the orchestra; if you have a vocalist. It has to be properly balanced between the vocalist and the orchestra; and the whole performance has to satisfy a lot of people. And then comes the problem of combining it into a show. The background music has to be properly modulated with the speech, so that it enhances the scene and doesn't detract from it. And when music has to take over for dramatic impact, it has to be done judiciously. All of this takes a lot of training, a lot of judgment, and the ability to satisfy a lot of people. It has been my observation, generally speaking. that when we have a show in our dubbing room where all these things are combined, each individual has a tendency to listen to his own contribution. The musician will sit and complain (unless he is an exception) that he doesn't hear enough music. The next man, say, the director-producer, will say, "I can't hear the dialogue for the music." It becomes a pretty delicate balance.

DIXON

Warner Brothers was first in sound. Now when other studios came along and wanted to get into sound, did you have trained people that went to them from here?

GROVES

No, they did something like this: we had a small nucleus of trained people from radio (there was no television then) and from the telephone company. The telephone company personnel were men who could operate and maintain the equipment; the radio personnel were men who could pick up the sound and see that it was recorded correctly. The studios had to train their own personnel as they got into this thing. A certain number of engineers were available to the other companies from the Western Electric Company. When we went into the business we didn't take every capable engineer out of Bell Labs, or out of Western Electric Company, or out of the General Electric Company. All these organizations had groups of men who were involved in equipment development and manufacture. All we had here were a few key men, and we drew from radio and from the telephone company and wherever we could find likely personnel to train ourselves.

They formed the nucleus for training of the personnel when they could draw them from whatever sources were available. I think that's generally the way everybody started out--by taking engineers from the equipment supply, either Western Electric Company or RCA.

We have men from all different types of beginnings here. Most of our older men either worked in radio stations or were radio hams in their younger days. And some of them came in here and worked from the ground up.

We demand improvements in equipment, in methods, in operational procedures, in organization--all kinds of channels where improvements can take place to keep the quality of the product the highest. And this is where, in an executive capacity, you feel you are contributing to the company. To be successful at that, you have got to have good personnel that can satisfy your desires in this regard.

Here at Warners we have about 150 men and women, and a large group of these boys are on production. I say "about" because the number goes up and down, depending upon the load we have, the number of productions going.

There are four men that constitute a production crew. There's a mixer, who is responsible for the operation of the crew and for the quality of sound that is recorded.

Then comes the recorder, who operates the recording machine and is usually the maintenance engineer. He has to keep the equipment running. The most expensive thing on a motion picture company is time, and equipment failure cannot be tolerated. So we try, and we succeed pretty well, in operating without holdups. Very rarely can they mark down even a ten-minute holdup to the Sound Department. This is because we have good maintenance of our equipment; it runs and runs and runs.

The next man who has a responsible job is the microphone boom operator. He has to have the microphone in the right position at the right time. He's got to be very skillful and highly trained. A lot of our boom operators have been around here ten, fifteen, twenty years. Not only does he have to know how to get the microphone in the right position, but also how to move it to face the person talking at all times. He has to memorize the dialogue in every scene. If he moves from one position to another in a set to cover people not directly opposite each other, all moves of the microphone have to be made so that they don't cast shadows on the scenery or on the people. So he has to rehearse and cooperate with the electrical crew and the cameramen and the lighting crew to make sure that whenever he has to move a microphone it's not only not seen in the camera but there are no shadows of those microphones seen on the walls or on any piece of furniture or scenery. This is quite a trick. So he has a very responsible job, because the sound is only as good as the proper location of the microphone.

The fourth member of the crew is the cableman. He's the boy who pulls the equipment around, hooks up the cables, connects the camera, and generally sees that the equipment is in the right place at the right time. We have as many of these crews operating as we have shooting companies.

Now, we have to have a certain number of men who keep the plant running. And these are our transmission maintenance engineers.

Apart from production, we get to the re-recording process, where all of the sound tracks are put together. On a big show, there may be three or four mixers working all at one time on one big elaborate panel. They have to be very skilled. They may have to combine twenty, thirty, or forty sound tracks to get a scene to sound the way it looks and to give the audience the emotional reaction that they expect from the scene. Putting all this stuff together so that the sounds are all improper perspective of each other; the music score getting its full value without intruding, giving you the impact when you need

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: 2, SIDE TWO
SEPTEMBER 19, 1962

GROVES

it; the speeches all being intelligible and clear; the dramatic readings preserved; and the production completed with a high degree of perfection, is a very responsible job.

The maintenance of the equipment that does this is a big responsibility and there is an awful lot of it. We must have well over a million dollars worth of equipment in the building that does this job. It's quite complicated.

We manufacture our own magnetic film. We get used prints back from the theater exchanges, send them out and have the emulsion cleaned off, and we apply the magnetic oxide to the clear film base and make a magnetic film which is used for making copies of sound tracks for editing purposes.

We have been talking about sound recording, sound departments, and what makes these things operate more or less. Maybe we should talk a little bit about some of the artistic aspects of this job. One of the most important of these is the business of recording music. As I mentioned previously, the first recorded scores for motion pictures were done by Warner Brothers for the picture Don Juan; Bruce Burns' father's The Better 'Ole; the John Barrymore picture. When a Man Loves; Old San Francisco; and a few of these famous old pictures which were shot as silent pictures and had recorded scores made for them. They were recorded in the Manhattan Opera House in New York, using the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, a fine orchestra. Now, all those recordings were done as plain orchestral scores, without any thought of their being background music or anything but the type of music that the orchestra was used to playing in the pit for a silent picture. When the movie started to talk, the business of scoring became a different proposition. The music had to go behind the dialogue; it had to be incidental music, largely to enhance the value of the scene.

We wound up with two types of music scoring. One is called pre-scoring and the other is called post-scoring. Pre-scoring, as we know it now, is the recording of musical numbers--songs, dances, and the like--where the sound is recorded and then the picture is shot at a later date. We do this for several good reasons. One is that it's much easier on the artist to go on a recording stage and give one good performance of a song or a dance with a good orchestral accompaniment, free from any considerations of make-up, costume, lights, cameras, or anything else, rather than have to go on the shooting stage and do a good performance for every setup of the camera. This is a terrible ordeal, for a singer particularly. You can't shoot all camera angles at once and obtain optimum photography. Many big musical numbers couldn't possibly be done all at once. They are too involved, and it would mean that a singer would have to give a good performance every time they appeared before a camera. Also, by the very virtue of the setups on the shooting stages--the lights, cameras, and so on--the orchestra has to be in some off-stage position, relative to the singer. The orchestra would have to move every time all the lights and the cameras were moved, so you would get a little different sound for every recording that you made. Finally, when all the camera film is edited and put together, and the sound track is edited and put together, it doesn't necessarily turn out to be a smooth continuous job as though it was shot at one time. So, by prerecording it and getting a good recording, you solve all these difficulties. And next, very importantly, it may take two or three days or a week or more to shoot a big musical number, and it takes maybe a half a day to record it. You save an awful lot of recording time with the orchestra, you see. So it's economically advantageous.

When the music is recorded ahead of time, a record is made of the recording and is played back to the artist on the set when they are photographing, and the artist mouths, or dances, in absolute synchronism with the playback of the record.

The other type of scoring is post-scoring, and this is the music that is recorded for the picture after the picture is completely shot and edited and all put together. This is the dramatic scoring of the picture. Now the way this is handled is that the picture is photographed, edited, and finally arrives at the final edited stage, where it's approved by the studio head, Mr. Warner, and the producer. A composer is assigned to write the music score before the picture is finished or even before they have started to shoot in some cases. The composer reviews the whole picture as it stands at that time. If he has been associated with the picture prior to viewing it at this time, he probably has in his mind certain basic themes that he will use.

The final decision as to where the music goes in the picture, is decided upon when they view the completed picture. This is generally done along with the producer of the picture and the head of the Music Department. There has to be a main title written for it, which presents the main theme of the score, usually. And then there is the play itself, to decide what dramatic scenes would be more dramatic if they had a musical scoring; what scenes are better left alone, because they play so powerfully that anything else would intrude; and it requires a very careful choice, not only of material but of where to start and stop.

The composer can have quite a few aids in writing the score. First of all, a member of the Music Department will be assigned to him who will provide him with a complete list of every picture cut, every major piece of action, almost every dramatic look that occurs in the picture, measured from the start of a reel to the point where it occurs in the reel, and indicated in time, in seconds, and also in feet and frames from the start. The composer can take this home with him. He looks at Reel One, and he looks at the cue sheet on Reel One. He's seen the picture, but he can't remember every look in every cut and exactly where it came. He knows that in Reel One certain things happen, but from this cue sheet he can see specifically just what happened, where, and when.

In the scoring of dramatic sequences in which no rhythmical pattern has been set and in which it is desired to accurately synchronize musical effects with pictorial action, the playback tempo record can still be used to good effect although the method of establishing the necessary tempo is somewhat more complicated. It may be of interest to digress for a moment to describe in detail how this type of scoring is done. This can best be done by following the mechanics of scoring a typical example.

A cue sheet similar to Figure I is prepared. We shall use as the example a sequence from the Warner Bros. production, Cheyenne, as scored and composed by [Figures I-IV are contained in pocket at back of book.] Mr. Max Steiner. Each picture sequence designated for scoring is carefully measured by a member of the music department. As indicated at the top left of Figure I, the music we are considering starts at 39 feet and three frames from the start of the reel. From this point on, each cut, each significant piece of action, any significant sounds and the beginning and end of each line of dialogue is listed in sequence and given a cue number. In Figure I we have forty-nine cues to the end of the sequence, which runs a total length of 171 feet. To the right of the cue sheet are three columns. Column I carries the time in seconds from the start of the sequence to each cue. Column III carries the corresponding distance in feet and frames from the start of the sequence to each cue. Column II we shall explain in a moment. The cue sheet (less the information in Column II) is then delivered: to the composer. From the information contained therein, he decides on the general form of his composition and the approximate tempo in which it will be played. In this particular sample, Mr. Stelner decided that twelve frame tempo would be suitable--that is, a tempo in which a beat occurs every twelve frames. To assist the composer in establishing tempo, he is supplied with a complete set of tempo records carrying a range of tempos from fifteen to twenty-five frames per beat at one-fourth frame intervals. When the composer has decided upon the required tempo, the exact beat or fraction of a beat at which each of the cues will occur is listed in Column II (Figure I). To save the tedious computations necessary to determine the values in Column II, a set of charts has been compiled which lists the distance in feet and frames from a start mark of any number of beats from tempi of 7, 7-1/8, 7-1/4, 7-3/8, 7-1/2, 7-5/8, 7-3/4, 7-7/8, 8, 8-1/8--up to 25 frames per beat. A sample of the 12 frame tempo conversion chart is shown in Figure II. As the next step in the scoring operation, the information tabulated in Column II, Figure I, is transferred to sheets of manuscript as shown in Figure III. On these sheets each number printed under the staff lines corresponds to a beat and each beat or fraction of a beat that corresponds to a cue is marked and numbered with the corresponding cue number appearing on the cue sheet. With the cue sheet and the cued manuscript sheets, the composer can now proceed with the actual composition. He subdivides his manuscript sheets into bars, allowing any number of beats per bar to suit his composition and so designing the music that any musical effects he may wish to use to accentuate the action and synchronize with it, will fall on the beats previously indicated. Figure IV shows the completed score. It will be observed that not all the cues on the cue sheet are necessarily incorporated in the score. In our example, the first cue to be scored is No. 5, which occurs on the third beat of the second bar, or the seventh beat from the start. The next cue is No. 6 which occurs on the first beat of the fourth bar or the twelfth beat from the start. And so on, throughout the score, cue No. 16 on beat fifty-nine, cue eighteen on beat sixty-four, etc. It will be noticed that by judicial changing of beats per bar and by the use of varying rhythmic patterns in the accompanying instruments, Mr. Steiner has skillfully avoided any metronomic character from appearing in the final sound of the composition.

In the preparation of the playback tick tempo record, it is customary to allow a maximum of eight additional ticks ahead of the music start. These ticks are in the prescribed tempo and serve as a warning to the conductor and orchestra of the exact moment of the first down beat. It is also necessary that a certain amount of leader or blank record grooves be placed ahead of the warning ticks to permit the projection, recording and playback equipment to come up to speed before the first note of music is played. The usual length of this leader is fifteen feet. In our particular example, therefore, we find that the threading start mark on the picture occurs at eighteen feet and three frames from the start of the reel, computed as follows:

• Distance of music start from start of reel = 39 ft. 3 frames
• Length of leader on tick record = 15 feet
• Length of 8 beats at 12 frame tempo = 6 feet
• Total distance from start of tick record to first note = 21 feet 21 ft. 0 frames
• Therefore, distance start of tick record from start of reel or distance of threading start mark from start of reel = 18 ft. 3 frames

A record is kept of the distance in feet and frames from the start of the reel, of the threading start mark of each musical sequence in the reel, and a corresponding start mark is made on the film in the recording machine at the time the sequences are recorded. This information allows the film editor to accurately assemble the music recording into reels for dubbing purposes.

In the recording of music scored in this manner, the tempi ticks are played back to the conductor and the rhythmic instrumentalists in the orchestra through headphones. It can be seen that with such an arrangement, synchronism between picture and music is absolutely assured at all times. Long and tedious rehearsals are no longer necessary for purpose of timing and the accuracy with which musical and pictorial effects can be synchronized greatly enhances the value of the musical score in pointing up dramatic moments.

For the scoring of sequences of obvious fixed tempo such as marching, dancing, cartoons, etc., a stock library of tempo records is maintained. For sequences requiring a definite number of ticks, or ticks of varying tempo, special tick records must be made. These records are usually first made on film and are later re-recorded to disc records for ease and speed of handling on the scoring stage.

At the Warner Bros. Studios we are now equipped with an electronic tick machine which can produce tempo clicks which can be varied in 1/8th frame steps.

You see, before all these devices were developed, the conductor would stand and look at the picture being projected on the screen. At a certain cue, he would start to play music, and he might be a little bit fast or a little bit slow, but we hoped somehow or other, that when the shot came up, he'd be there in time to synchronize the music and action. And it was very lucky if he came out absolutely accurate.

But all of this took a lot of rehearsal time. He would rehearse it once, maybe, with a stop watch or something, and find he was a couple of seconds too slow. The next time he'd go along and be a second and a half too fast, and he had to keep trying until he hit it on the nose. With the tempo aids that we now have, he can come out right on the frame for a synchronized cue.

You might ask, "If they play a piece of music to an established tick, tick, tick, doesn't it sound like it was made to a metronome and sound mechanical?" Now a clever composer, a man like Max Steiner, for instance, will disguise the metronomic character of his music by varying the number of beats per bar. He can take a piece of music and play a number of bars in 3/4 time, three beats to the bar. Then he may insert a 5/4 bar, then go to 4/4, so that in the middle of it, he has extended a note by one beat, and it completely disguises the fact that, actually, he is conducting to a metronome. He just varies the number of beats per bar. It's very clever the way they do it.

Finally, the conductor arrives at a completed score. We call the orchestra and they come in for a recording session. He looks at the film while he conducts the orchestra. We don't start from the beginning of the reel and run a whole reel through while he does all the music. If the first music occurs at fifty feet in the reel or a hundred and fifty feet in the reel, the reel is run down to that point, and that's where it starts. In order for him to start accurately on a given cue, there is usually a certain amount of film ahead of his cue presented on the screen, with flash marks on the screen in the tempo in which he is going to play, you see. So he stands there poised the film Is going through, the orchestra is all silent, ready for the downbeat, and he will see flashes on the screen: one, two, three, downbeat you see, so his tempo is established, is his cue on the downbeat, and it's absolutely accurate.

So there are all these cueing devices that accelerate the speed with which the job is done, improve the accuracy with which it is done, cut down the amount of rehearsal time and the problem of the musicians and the conductor becoming exhausted. When they score for eight or nine hours a day, they become stale and dull if they have to do a thing over too many times. It stands to reason. So, eventually, we wind up with a lot of pieces of music, that may run a minute, a minute and a half, five minutes, six minutes, depending on the length of the sequence to be scored. These recordings are all then taken and compiled by a music editor into a continuous roll, with spacing film in between. Then we take it to the re-recording room, where that roll of music film is lined up from the start mark, along with the picture film, and all the sound effects and the speech tracks. They all roll together in synchronism. Then, at the proper place, at fifty or one-hundred and fifty feet, or whatever it's supposed to be, the music comes in correctly, right on the proper cue. So it's no problem to get the music to start and stop correctly. We have all that solved.

The business of recording background music has to be specially handled to a certain extent. First of all, the music at no time should detract from the picture. If it does that, it's a bad score. It can detract for one of two reasons. One, it interferes with the scene, it doesn't embellish the scene; it interferes with the dialogue and doesn't improve the scene that is being played. Or, two, it can be recorded wrong, generally by giving the instruments too much presence, so that the sound of the orchestra competes with the sound on the screen. This is something we are very careful about. If the background music should sound a little bit back-screen so that the voices have better presence, they sound more forward when reproduced in the theater, than the accompanying background music. This is determined by microphone placement, by the acoustics of the hall in which you record, and by the amount of reverberation that you have in the music. All can be controlled to keep the music a little bit backstage so to speak. In certain cases, if the scene calls for it, you want it very forward. For instance, a musical montage, where there is no dialogue and the total sound impact of the scene relies on music, then the music should have good presence.

In pre-scoring of vocal recordings, we usually try to keep the orchestra and the voice, on separate recording channels. Not on separate tapes necessarily, but recorded on separate tracks on the same piece of tape. Now there are two or three good reasons for this. By the very fact that the song is pre-scored, you don't know how the picture is going to look because it hasn't been shot yet. So you don't know whether this person singing is going to be in a long shot, in a close-up, or in what kind of a shot. If we have the voice laid down on a separate track from the orchestra, then we can control the balance. Later, in dubbing, the balance between the orchestra and the voice is controlled and also by the addition of reverberation, you can control the acoustic perspective of the voice. Another reason why we try to keep the two separated is that, quite frequently, when the picture is finished there will be a foreign version made, and sometimes we have to put in a foreign language voice. If the voice and orchestra were not separated, you would have to call the orchestra back to make a clean accompaniment minus voice. But when the orchestra is kept clean, then you just get another voice in; you don't have to call the musicians back. Separation between voice and orchestra is obtained by putting the vocalist in a vocal booth, a complete enclosure, on the scoring stage. The orchestra is on the stage, the vocalist is in an enclosed room with a glass window like a monitor booth so he can see the conductor and hear the orchestra over the headphones. Conversely, the conductor hears the vocalist over headphones, so that they can each hear what the other one is doing. We thus obtain two separate tracks, the voice and the orchestra, acoustically isolated, separated from each other. So we can do whatever we want to with regard to balance, quality, acoustics, perspective, and foreign language.

DIXON

Each of these things has developed through necessity.

GROVES

That's right. Whether we were the first to isolate vocalists, I don't know exactly. It's so long ago. I wouldn't be surprised, but what we were.

I think we were one of the first to apply reverberation into recording to create a correct illusion in a picture--by putting the sounds through a reverberation chamber. This was done a long, long time ago.

As a matter of fact, we made a picture called Viennese Nights which used the first pre-scored recording. We pre-scored a symphony and later shot to It, photographed it. And also we used reverberation for dramatic effect in a musical recording.

I have been active in music recording for a good many years, and I did all of the recordings, both music and production, for many early shows. I told you about The Jazz Singer. That's why I came out here from New York--to record Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. In later years, I had the privilege of recording the music for all the big musicals for which Warner Brothers are famous, The Gold Diggers of Broadway, Forty-second Street, and all the big musicals that Busby Berkeley staged--very elaborate, big musical shows. I was the music man around here for a long time. Did nothing else but. Finally I was told to train someone else, which I did, and came into the office here and helped supervise the whole job.

Now let's see, as far as personalities in the music business. I've met a lot of them. We have already mentioned Henry Hadley, the first man that I recall, a composer in New York. I described how he wrote this sea epic. He was quite a talented man. But since those days, we have had a number of very famous composers around here, and they are all different. Max Steiner, who has received many awards all over the world for his scores. Franz Waxman, Dmitri Tiomkin, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Elmer Bernstein, Henry Mancini, and practically everybody who has been of any repute has been here recording scores for our pictures.

I don't know whether I should draw comparisons between these men or not. They are all tremendously different in temperament. All very talented, but all have their own individual styles. Max Steiner is probably the daddy of all these men, I think, when it comes to writing a score for a motion picture--he writes what people think and not necessarily what they do in a picture. He is so clever at this, that he doesn't just score the action or the words, but he scores the meaning behind what the people say. He scores what they intended to say or what thoughts prompted them to say things. And he is so very, very clever. For a good many years he has been almost blind, to the point that it's a wonder he can see the score of the picture at all. The sweetest man that was ever born, personally, but suffering all the time. He walks in on the scoring stage and invariably apologizes to the musicians for the terrible music they are going to have to play. Then he gets down to work and just makes them play like angels, you know. It's amazing how he always does this. He always comes in: oh, gosh, he's been working day and night on this stuff; it's just awful, it's the worst thing he did; and then he starts in, and he just pounds it out of them. But a wonderful, wonderful man.

Korngold is another fellow--Viennese, and incidentally Max Steiner was of Viennese descent, I believe. Korngold was a boy genius--he wrote an opera when he was twelve years old, I think. A tremendous talent, wonderful musician. Great sense of humor. Here's another man, again, who was greatly loved by all the musicians. The first job he did here was to score the Warner Brothers version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Did a beautiful job of it. Of course, it wasn't all Korngold, it was part Mendelssohn, which had to be. He did seafaring stories, such as Captain Blood, one of the great scores that he did. He scored a lot of the romantic, swashbuckling things that Errol Flynn was in. He did wonderful work. He is now gone. Died.

Franz Waxman is a totally different type of man. Very nice fellow, but (if you'll pardon the expression) a real long-hair. I'm a little bit surprised that he will condescend to write scores for motion pictures, but he does, and does them very well. He wrote the score for the Nun's Story, incidentally, a beautiful score; he did a wonderful job. And he did Sayonara, for which we got an Oscar. So Franz has done a lot of beautiful work and he goes into concert work more than a lot of these other fellows do. He is not like Max Stelner--apologetic for his efforts. He knows it's good when he's done it, and he's proud of it all the time.

Dmitri Tiomkin is another completely different type of man. Tremendous talent. He records usually with large orchestras and writes great scores, and gets lots of Academy Awards. I'm very fond of Dimi, and he is very sweet to me. He is always inquiring after my wife and family. So we get along very well. But he is a driver. When he sets up a piece of music, he doesn't apologize for what Tiomkin wrote, and he makes the boys rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, until they are just perfect. So he comes out with fine results, and that's why his scores sound great.

The next one I have down here is Henry Mancini. He composed and conducted the score for Days of Wine and Roses. Now, Days of Wine and Roses was a television show which received some awards and was finally made into a motion picture by Warner Brothers. It's a Lost Weekend type of story--the story of a man who is an alcoholic and marries a girl who doesn't know she is an alcoholic until he persuades her to take a drink and then she becomes one also. He finally doesn't cure himself, but rehabilitates himself. And she can't. She becomes more of a lost cause then he is. Now this is a very downbeat sounding thing, but it has its humorous moments because Jack Lemmon plays the alcoholic. He does a tremendous job; I'm sure it's Academy Award material, and Lee Remick, who plays his wife, also gives a tremendous performance. Mancini wrote the score. Now, what kind of a score do you write for that kind of a picture? He did a wonderful thing. He doesn't play up either the boy or the girl. There is no boy or girl theme. There is no father theme, although the father enters into it. There is no baby theme, as such, although they have a baby who suffers as a result of the alcoholism. He wrote a beautiful song called "Days of Wine and Roses." It's a beautiful theme. And he plays that theme Elmer Bernstein is going to score a picture for us. He has a very imaginative approach to scoring pictures, plus the use of unusual types of orchestration. He will use all brass, but you are not conscious that it's a brass band. Very peculiar combinations of instruments. And we did a whole war picture here, and he never used strings at all, but you never thought it was a brass band playing. Very odd combinations. Like in that particular case. I haven't heard too many of his scores, but he always seems to have quite a style, a unique style, and a lot of imagination.

So there you have my impression of a few of these various composers. The different styles, the different ways in which they tackle the job of scoring the picture. Max Steiner, who scores the motivation of a scene as much as the scene itself. Komgold, who glorifies the settings for a scene as much as anything else. He could write a beautiful love theme or a beautiful piece of dramatic action, but he made you conscious of the scenery somehow; it was very clever the way he did that. Waxman, who is quite talented, but a little Germanic in his treatment; a little bit heavy-handed most of the time. Tiomkin, who will tackle anything. I think, for a Russian, he has probably written some of the best cowboy scores.

DIXON

Yes, "High Noon" always stands out.

GROVES

That's right. And one thing that all of these boys have in mind, of course: they are all commercial, all looking for money. They all have in mind a hit theme song that will eventually go out on records. And this is good, not only for the composer, but for the picture. You get a thing like High Noon--a lot of people would never have seen High Noon if it hadn't been for the song, but people heard it and wanted to see the picture. So in many cases, a song can give a great deal of very good publicity for a picture if it is out early. I venture to say that "Seventy-six Trombones" has done a lot for Music Man.

DIXON

And "Buttons and Bows" for the Bob Hope picture.

GROVES

That's right. If they get to be known, people enjoy them more when they go to see the movie, because they are familiar with it, and they can whistle along with the person on the screen. I think that goes for almost anything. An opera is enjoyable the second time through, when you know what it is all about.

And as far as directors are concerned, I don't know whether we should comment on directors at all. Some of them are pretty tough to get along with. I can mention two or three anyway. One famous director who was around here for a long time was Mike Curtiz. He made many pictures here. A tremendous vitality, and the worst English you ever heard. He never learned, in all the years he was here, to speak intelligible English. He always had a thick accent and a complete mix-up of words all the time. I think a lot of this was put on for effect. But a very talented man; made a lot of great pictures, and, as I say, a tremendous worker. He recently died of cancer.

DIXON

Was he easy to work with?

GROVES

No, he was pretty tough to work with until recent years. He mellowed as he got older. He really did. When he was younger, he was a tiger, because he was such a dynamo. A man of tremendous vitality.

We mentioned George Cukor. George is a wonderful fellow; great talent; very artistic man; but as far as the Sound Department is concerned, we get good sound in spite of him. He does not help, and I think this is inexcusable because we are not trying to get good sound to get Academy Awards, or to have golden stars painted on our doors, or to get more money; we are trying to get good sound to make a good contribution to the show, and all we are concerned with is that the great American public, when they pay their admission to the theater, can understand what is being said, primarily. We want to turn out a picture of good intelligibility. If people speak lines, they should be understood. Otherwise they might as well not speak them. Make a silent picture; go back to silent days. So I think it's very shortsighted and very childish in many respects for a director to make fun, literally, make fun of the efforts of the Sound Department to get good sound. I still like him anyway.

George Stevens is another man of tremendous ego; spends great amounts of money on his pictures; will take no advice and no criticism. And is not always right. He has made some great successes. One that he made here, called Giant, was a great success. An extremely difficult man to work with as a result of his egotistical self-willed insistence upon the way the show should go out sound wise. That is the one and only picture on which we had worldwide complaints on the sound. If not world-wide, at least United States-wide. We got complaints from all over the country for one reason--excessive volume range. He has scenes with people whispering so you couldn't understand them, and he said, "I don't want them to understand what they are talking about." And in the next moment, there would be something that would just raise you out of your seat. He thought this was giving the people a dramatic impact of some kind or other. But it was excessive and we got complaints, and we objected to doing it this way. But George Stevens was the king and he could do no wrong. He is now embarking on The Greatest Story Ever Told. I just hope he doesn't make the same mistake. This is a big, big project. I don't know whether he will or not, but if he wants to make it loud, he will. A loud picture is not necessarily a good one. He was reasonably sound-conscious in the shooting of the picture, but didn't show good judgment in the final putting together of it as far as I was concerned. Sound wise. It was a great picture, and everybody said, "Well, this thing made millions." It was one of the greatest money-making pictures we've ever made. Maybe George Stevens was right and I was wrong. This is quite possible, but all I can do is pull out the files of complaints. Somebody is wrong, and I don't think it is me.

Now, another man we have here, a very interesting fellow, is Morton Da Costa, who has directed two pictures for us, one was Auntie Mame, and the other was Music Man. He is a most wonderful fellow to work with. Dearly loved by everybody. Every member of the crew would lay down his life for Morton Da Costa, and give him anything he wants. The result is he always gets the finest work done. Wonderful to work with as far as sound is concerned. Very sound-conscious, and just a delight.

Music Man was as much fun making as it is to sit and look at. I think this is probably one reason why the audience enjoys it so. You can't help but sense that the people on the screen are having fun. They just had a glorious time making it. Mainly on account of this man. They just loved every minute of it. And the hours spent on the scoring stage pre-recording all the numbers were fun. Everybody had a good time, and it comes out in the product. You can see it, and, although you may not actually realize it, you sense it, and the audience senses it; you can see it in the audience when they come out. It's not because it's a happy show--there have been lots of happy shows made. Music Man is a pretty corny show, actually. It's Iowa com; it's good corn, it's well-cooked corn, and it's well-done. It's just the atmosphere that pervades the whole show, of people having fun. The audience has as much fun watching it as the people did making it. That's the only way I can analyze it. And Auntie Mame was the same way.

If Morton Da Costa ever directed a dramatic show, I don't know what would come out of it because he is not a funny man. He is not a comic; he's not particularly witty. I've never heard him say anything witty. He's just a heck of a nice fellow, and he is sympathetic to everybody's efforts. He understands everybody's problems, and he listens with a sympathetic ear. And if you are right, even though you disagree with him, he'll say so. "You were right, I was wrong--he'll admit it. A fine fellow to work with. It's completely different than a lot of these other big, great directors that are so egotistical, so domineering, they can do no wrong. That's my opinion of those characters.