backgrounders

Assistant Editor’s bench. Photo courtesy of Josie Nericcio

Each of the movies we’ve been analyzing for sound content existed in its time and cultural context as the product of the Hollywood studio system.

Some were manufactured by one of the seven or eight big studio “factories”, and some were the product of independent productions, with distribution help from the Big Boys. Regardless, they all used many of the same factory techniques to divide and subdivide the labor of specialists and the technical equipment with which they worked their magic.

Here are the categories of specialists we attempt to define, but if we have the volume of information out of balance on a given movie between, say, actors and writers, that does not infer anything about their importance to the project.

Production & Release
Sound Dep’t. Credits
Production Co.
Producers
Writers
Directors
Art Director
Special FX (Visual)
Cinematographer
Film Editor
Music Supervisor
Composer
Actors

One compelling fact came to light in the process of studying these movies: Notice that most of the workers we discuss were members of the very first generation of movie people.

So many were born at the start of the 20th Century, like cinema itself, and came to their professional maturity in the 1930’s, the decade when Hollywood was attempting to refine techniques for talking pictures, maybe even aspiring to raise movie sound to an art form of its own.

We draw heavily for information from the IMDB and from Wikipedia. But readers will quickly discover that credits for work in some specialties have not always been part of a movie’s release. They would not be seen on video and digital “prints” of old movies. Some credits we have from IMDB may be modern documentations, intended to fill the gaps in credit history. Today, (thanks to the efforts of their trade unions) big movies credit thousands of individuals in many hundreds of technical specialized crafts, but it was never that way in the days of the studio system. There will soon be an article in the Personal Blog section about the difficulty of discerning the details about any credited sound crew in the classic Hollywood period.