Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1316380
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 61 when he's throttled by a giant ant. And then, in 1977, Star Wars exploded onto the world ... a film that inspired me and many others to pursue a career in Hollywood. And there was that scream again! As I continued my own personal research into film sound, I found a particularly lengthy interview with Ben Burtt, the sound designer on Star Wars, in the film magazine Cinefantastique where he detailed a lot of his work on the film … including tracking down that scream. I wrote Ben a letter—which started a correspondence that I'm lucky to say continues to this day. We compared notes, and quickly discovered we had both paid meticulous attention to a lot of the same film soundtracks growing up. Ben confirmed that this scream was indeed a Warner Bros. sound effect that he was a fan of as well. Ben recorded movies on tape and listened to them over-and- over while he was growing up as well. During his college years, when he drove between where he lived in Upstate New York and Los Angeles, he would listen to his collection of movies. One he'd often listen to, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), had one of our mutual favorite sound effects—the *ZING* THE WILHELM SCREAM of the arrows as they flew through the air. Ben attended college at USC, where he met Richard Anderson and Rick Mitchell. They shared his fascination with these movie