NOISE PROBLEM

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 922, 15 March 1930, Page 24

NOISE PROBLEM

Keeping Sounds Out of Talkies CATS, BROOKS, CRICKETS Hollywood isn’t so much concerned these days with how to get sound in pictures as it is with ways of keeping other sounds out. The cat's “meow’ isn’t what-it used to be. The cricket on the hearth is tahu. An innocent, babbling brook is a menace. The cat menace appeared while Richard Dix was acting in “Seven Keys to Baldpate.” During a love scene this is what the sound man heard from the loud speaker: i “I think Mary meow —is the i sweetest —meow —name in the world—j meow —X love you,” -writes an American studio correspondent. Prop, men subsequently discovered I a black kitten in the rafters, Twenty minutes were lost while they retrieved it. A cricket harassed sound men during filming on “The Case of Sergeant Grischa,” forcing the director, Herbert Brenon, to order a cricket hunt until the offender was overcome. And on location recently Rod La Rocque had his voice drowned out by the rippling of a brook. It was necessary to pack up the microphone and move on a few yards, for the stream recorded, unpoetically, a sound similar to that caused by -water running from a bathtub.