Nathan Radoszewski - Final Project

Music and Sound

“I don’t think there’ll be a Hollywood as we know it when this generation of film students gets out of college.” Francis Ford Coppola, 1968

The uncertainty of which direction the country was headed during the 1960s and 1970s created a melting pot of ideas and innovations. Amidst this intellectual disarray lived the film industry. The Classical Hollywood era ended in approximately 1960 giving way to the New Hollywood era. The people, music, and overall culture were changing, creating a perfect environment to give rise to New Hollywood. New music was developing and the artists were writing with the emotions they felt for their country. Additionally directors and producers were noticing this wave of change and adopting some of these new themes, feelings, and technologies into their films. It was not only these new themes, feelings, and technologies that revolutionized the New Hollywood era, but the new music and sounds that transformed the movie industry.

In the Classical Hollywood period the studio system dominated. The system was a very streamlined, assembly line way of turning out films. It was relatively fast and efficient but needed to be changed. New Hollywood era came about from a blend of classical Hollywood and European art cinema (made up of experimental and avant-garde films). Classical Hollywood films tended to start by giving the audience an elaborate background to the story; it was very efficient and to a certain extent was “spoon-fed” to the audience. The European art cinema films would not provide much background, mostly just filling the audience with ideas. It was more centered on issues and differed from the Classical Hollywood mold which focused more on the plot. David Cook suggests that Hollywood’s “decline resulted from the American industry’s obstinate refusal to face a single fact: that the composition of the weekly American film audience was changing as rapidly as the culture itself.” (Schatz 189) This is exactly what had happened, the culture was changing and the movie industry had to adapt in order to survive, this is how the New Hollywood era was born.

It is the synthesis of sound and picture that makes a film. The audience must see what is happening, but without sound and music the effects on screen are not fully grasped. “The coming of synchronous sound to the motion picture in 1927 with The Jazz Singer introduced a new aesthetic based on the relationship of the visual picture to the soundtrack” (Monaco 102). This was the first major breakthrough with sound in film. Synchronous sound is when dialogue and sound effects are recorded at the same time as opposed to post-synchronous sound where dialogue is added later in a studio. Karel Reisz says is best: “Synchronous sound was immediately accepted in both popular and critical circles as a natural progression of the motion-picture medium, whereby picture and sound combine to form a new entity that shifts the aesthetic experience of the film viewer from a separated ‘I see’ and ‘I hear’ towards a more complete sensory synthesis that can be described as ‘I feel; I experience” (Monaco 102). The experience is what the audience pays for and without undergoing that full feeling; it is as though the audience has been robbed.

During the emergence of this “new age” of movies, many different sound recording techniques were implemented. At the end of the 1950s the Nagra III system was introduced. It was a reel-to-reel magnetic table recorder cabled to a camera by a sync pulse. This new machine became a preference for many Hollywood feature productions and for much of the documentary film work. It was “state-of-the-art” in 1960. (Monaco 105). Another recording advancement was the Automatic Dialogue Replacement (ADR) technique, essentially a fancy word for the term “looping.” “Looping” meant that if something was not shot correctly the film could “loop” and it could be re-shot without altering any of the tape. Another innovative technique was the use of Foley artists. “Developed by Jack Foley at Universal Picture at the end of the 1940’s, this system found relatively limited use in the 1950’s. At the beginning of the 1960’s, in fact, there were only six Foley artists working regularly in Hollywood. That situation changed radically as filming moved away from the controlled environments of Hollywood studios and backlots”(Monaco 106). The Foley artists were used to create sounds that had not been recorded during the actual filming. “Whether the needed sound was the pounding of horse’s hooves, the layering of crowd noise to make fifty people sound like 50,000, or the pounding of the Malibu surf recorded in the middle of the night matched up to a couple strolling and talking on the beach at midday” (Monaco 106).

Not only were there new developments in sound recording, but movie soundtracks improved as well. They moved from an aesthetic of naturalism to more of an artificial and manipulated sound design. “If the sound was not good enough in a scene, Foley artists could increase the ‘bigness’” (Monaco 106).

The Foley artists were to add to the realism of the film, and make the audience really feel like they were in the scene. While filming Spartacus director Stanley Kubrick pointed out to Frank Warner, the picture’s sound supervisor, how “sound might be shifted and controlled so as to focus the viewer’s attention in the frame somewhere other than as its visual center” (Monaco 107). One perfect example of this is in Tobe Hopper’s 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When Sally walks into Leatherface’s house the viewer does not see any people but can hear the squealing of a pig in the background. The focus is shifted to a different part of the shot, away from the girl, creating a looming feeling of suspense and anticipation.

An additional technique being employed was adding amplified volume to ordinary sound effects. “A terrifying sense of violence was heightened throughout Bonnie and Clyde for example by making the sound of gunshots extra loud” (Monaco 107). Bonnie and Clyde was a film that revolutionized the industry and was one of, if not the, spark to start New Hollywood.

The use of Foley artists and many new techniques made the film what it is. The older generation did not like the film, they thought it was too violent and provocative but the younger audiences ate it up. “Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, made in 1967, infuriated critics and the guardians of culture but became so popular first with kids and later with the general audience that is was reconsidered and given a cover story by Time magazine nearly six months after its release” (Schatz 195-197). This just goes to show that the American people were looking for the edginess of the film.

When the studio system dissipated the former musicians and composers that were employed by the studios lost their jobs. “As the Hollywood studio system collapsed, all the major studios terminated their contracts with their musicians in 1958.” (Monaco 109) The big composers were not the ones being sought after; directors were turning to other means to find their music and in some case their own record collection. “The end of the ‘in-house’ orchestras and of studio contracts with individual composers increased the presence of free-lance work in Hollywood and in importance of directors in making myriad artistic decisions about their films- what kind of music was put to a film, how it was to be used, and where is was places would never again be the same” (Monaco 110). Hollywood in 1970 was franticly searching for its bearings. There was so much change taking place across the country and the film industry was not omitted. A younger generation was emerging and altering the face of the country. “Axel Madsen has pointed out that in 1970, of the one hundred sixteen producer credits on fifty-nine films in production, only eighteen had credits going back more than four years” (Schatz 203).

In the early movies, music was used for helping provide the narrative; it was in place to help give a description of what happening in the scenes. New Hollywood was starting to move away from that and into using music to help add to the overall experience and not just give background. Directors were also moving away from composed scores. The country was transforming and music was leading the charge. “Changes in movie music were linked directly to changes in the tastes of teenage Americans in the 1950’s and 1960’s” (Monaco 113). Movie producers realized that they needed to start marketing to different groups, mainly the younger generations. “This new audience was younger, better educated, more affluent, more politically and socially sophisticated, and more cineliterate than the general mass of viewers” (Schatz 189-190).

“Easy Rider, specifically, presented a compilation of rock songs by different groups and individuals that were central to the entire dramatic dynamic of this “road movie.” The hit album marketed from the songs used in Easy Rider inaugurated a record-oriented trend in movie soundtracks, providing possibilities to the producers of a film for large financial earnings on their investment in the movie and in the music rights they had acquired for it” (Monaco 116).

Easy Rider was one of the first films to implement the songs of the modern generation into the films. “The importance of Folk music in the social protest movements of the 1960’s, along with the identification of rock music with the American counterculture, meant that the growing movie audience of young adults was primed to hear those kinds of music on movie soundtracks”(Monaco 115). Producers started noticing this trend and started marketing the soundtracks of these movies when they realized that even more money could be made, in addition to the revenue from the movie.

Bob Dylan said it best “the times they are a changing.” The 1960s and 1970s were times of great alterations not only in the United States but across the globe. The film industry was not exempt from the cultural changes and was forced to adapt. Classical Hollywood declined and the emergence of New Hollywood was precisely what the country needed. The ideals of the baby boomer generation were drastically different than those of their predecessors. There were new innovations entering the film industry as old technologies faded out. The fusion of new directors/actors, technological innovations, and the overall cultural change in United States in the 1960s and 1970s fueled the transformation if the film industry into the New Hollywood era.

Works Consulted

Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-'N'-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Bonnie and Clyde. Dir. Arthur Penn. Perf. Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway. DVD. 1967.

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 4th ed. New York: W.W, Norton & Company, 2004.

Cook, David. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970-1979. Berkeley: University of California P, 2000.

Dylan, Bob. "The Time's They are a Changin." By Bob Dylan. Rec. 10 Feb. 1964.

Easy Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Perf. Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson. DVD. 1969.

Ellis, Jack C. A History of Film. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice- Hall, 1985.

Friedman, Lester. American Cinema of the 1970's: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2007.

Lobrutto, Vincent. Sound on Film: Interviews with Creaters of Film Sound. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994. 30.

Monaco, Paul. History of the American Cinema: the Sixties. Vol. 8. New York: Charles Scribner_Sons, 2001.

Schatz, Thomas. Old Hollywood/ New Hollywood: Ritual, Art, and Industry. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research P, 1976.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Dir. Tobe Hopper. DVD. Vortex, 1974.

Wood, Robin. Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia UP, 1986