Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1279181
42 I M PS E . O R G RLA: Yeah. Our attitude was, just as an actor would perform differently in each scene, we need to perform the sound effects differently. We would try to record a whole set of the door—slams, quiet, jiggling the doorknob—we would get the whole set if we could because we might need it for later. But certainly you would try to get a whole wide variety. It isn't just a door, opens and closes. SL: But there are some e›ects we would reuse just to make ourselves smile. RLA: The Wilhelm was that way. It started off as an inside joke just between Ben and I… (See sidebar) SL: Goonies. Lot's of Rube Goldberg stu› in that… RLA: Right. We called it 'pirate tech.' Because it was supposed that all these booby traps were set by One- Eyed-Willie and his crew, you know, 200 years earlier. Now, the fact that something would still be working— it's the same thing for the temple in Raiders! If you have some modern technology, when it gets about six months' old—it stops working! But this booby trap that was set 200 years before, still works perfectly! But, yeah—everything had to be wood or metal, we couldn't have anything obviously electronic. So I remember we did things like rolling cannon balls and a lot of recording physical objects. A Brief History of the Wilhelm Scream P robably one of the most notorious sound effects is a scream—or rather series of screams—called Wilhelm. Six screams, in fact, were recorded for a moment in the film Distant Drums (1951) where a soldier is bitten and dragged underwater by an alligator. They were believed to have been performed by Sheb Wooley—who would later gain fame for recording the novelty pop song "Purple People Eater." Sheb had a small role in the film, and he and a few other actors were summoned to a soundstage at Warner Bros. to perform incidental vocals needed to complete the film. Afterward, the screams were then archived into the Warner Bros. sound effects library ... and were reused in many other films and TV shows thereafter. When Richard Anderson was attending college at USC, he and future Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt became friends. With another friend, Rick Mitchell, they shared a love of film sound—including old Hollywood sound effects. Ben was probably more attuned than the others, having just "listened" to many films. "He would drive between where he lived in Upstate New York and Los Angeles," Richard recalled to me. "Instead of listening to music or the radio like a lot of people—he had recordings of movies. He'd listen to these things, and he would hear the sound effects." I, too, recorded the audio of many movies off the television to listen to, and I started recognizing some of the same sounds being reused. Both Ben and I independently discovered that there was one particular scream that kept showing up again and again. I was particularly amused hearing it multiple times for multiple victims of the giant ants in the WB movie Them! (1954). But after hearing Ben use it in Star Wars, I reached out to him and we compared notes. He had named it "Wilhelm" after a character in the film The Charge at Feather River (1953) that he had erroneously believed at the time was the first use of the scream. In the late '80s, I began working with Ben's friends, Richard and Rick ... and all of us were using this scream as an in-joke in the films we worked on. Along the way, we shared it with other filmmakers, including Joe Dante, Quentin Tarantino, and Peter Jackson—who all enjoyed having it in their films. I shared the history of the scream on the internet in the early '90s, along with a list I had been compiling of over 200 films it had been in … and that's when the dam collapsed. EVERYONE wanted in on the joke. Wilhelm was everywhere. It was even being used in candy bar commercials. I'll continue this story in the next issue. Keep listening... –Steve Lee (In our upcoming fall issue of Wavelength, Steve will share the definitive story of the Wilhelm scream.) SL: Beetlejuice … which was around the time I started. I loved the transition sounds for in and out of the spirit world—a whoosh up or down with a comic tube doink at the end. RLA: Right. The film was so cartoony, you could get away with effects like that. SL: I remember the backward typing in the o•ce. The sound e›ect was backward, but you reversed the reverb. RLA: I know Alan Howarth had done some of that for Carol Anne's screams in Poltergeist where he did both forward and backward reverb. I thought that was very effective. SL: It was a conventional typewriter, which was very real … but with backward, pre-reverb, which made it very eerie. RLA: It wasn't like really heavy reverb, but just enough, and it made it seem kind of creepy and weird. There was still a typewriter, but it went 'rrrick!' instead of 'tick.' SL: Did you enjoy working with Tim Burton? We did several films with him. RLA: I loved working with Tim. Tim, on one hand, could be picky about some stuff, but sometimes I don't think even he knew what he wanted.