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55 Q2 2019 / CINEMONTAGE about the control that theatre owners and musicians had in the "final mix" of sounds heard by audiences. An example of his extensive and admirable research is inclusion of an account by conductor Orville Mayhood entitled "Dramatic Music and the Big Picture," and found in a 1916 issue of the Motography, an early movie industry magazine. Mayhood describes his work conducting composer Joseph Breil's score for D.W. Griffith's three-and-a-half hour Birth of a Nation (1915), although both he and Larkin ignore Breil's contribution by crediting the score to Griffith. Mayhood, who apparently conducted at over 600 screenings of the opus, writes that for New York City screenings of the film, he would quiet the orchestra at the film's end to engender applause, while for Chicago showings he would raise it to a crescendo to achieve the same reaction. That is indeed a level of control; imagine John Williams asking that the volume be turned up or down in a theatre in response to the screening location. Larkin goes on to bring in Cecil B. De Mille, who is quoted in the same publication as stating, "Better to Have None at all than to Murder Good Pictures Killed with Trashy Music" (capitalization in original). Independent research is a strength in Post- Production and the Invisible Revolution of Filmmaking. Larkin scoured the resources of the Pacific Film Archive, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Paramount Archives and others. Of note is the author's acknowledgement of assistance from the Motion Picture Editors Guild and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). It is to the latter that he owes the most thanks. (SMPTE was SMPE during this period, founded in 1916 before the medium of television existed.) The Journal of the of the Society of Motion Pictures Engineers and the Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers are the most often cited sources among the book's plethora of footnoted publications. Within SMPTE's long history as the arbiter of all things technical in the moving image industries, the recommendation of standards during the shift from silent to sound films remains key among its achievements. The author draws on a variety of facts and opinions discussed by SMPE authors. Larkin, among other film historians, finds that SMPE publications "reveal that for early film technicians, there was a growing sense of aesthetic considerations for artistic purposes in their engineering work, all based upon the medium as a living one, a biological entity." In defense of this argument, he offers a 1924 diagram conceived by CUT / PRINT FOX STUDIOS POST PRODUCTION SERVICES 10201 W. Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064 310-FOX-INFO | foxinfo@fox.com | www.foxstudios.com FOX STUDIOS POST PRODUCTION SERVICES (ATMOS & IMA X) SOUND EDITORIAL