Mark Mangini has spent fifty years making the sounds you hear in movies — Dune, Blade Runner 2049, Mad Max: Fury Road. His memoir comes with the sounds themselves. Scan a code as you read, and you hear the one he is describing.
George Lucas once said that sound is half the movie-going experience. This is a book about that half — why a sound is there at all, what it tells you before anyone speaks, and how it was actually made. Three hundred of them are printed as codes you can scan while you read.
These three are open to anyone. The rest come with the book.
Can you see him? Up at the top, dangling a microphone down toward the traffic. In the process of climbing over a protective fence to arrive at that point, Ezra stepped on a rusty nail, necessitating (only once we had finished our work) a trip to the hospital for a tetanus shot. We had no permits nor permission to be there.
One key layer came from recordings I made in the Mojave Desert, burying microphones just beneath the surface and then “tunneling” through the sand so that the grains brushed directly across the microphone head. The result captured the gritty friction and shifting weight of sand in motion — an intimate, physical texture that helped suggest something colossal moving just out of sight beneath the desert floor.
The Wilhelm is a stock sound effect, a canned library sound effect of a man screaming, created for the Warner Bros. 1951 film Distant Drums. It was voiced (we believe) by Sheb Wooley for a man being eaten by an alligator. Here’s the original master, including outtakes — the classic Wilhelm is the fourth one, at around twenty seconds in.
Numbered, and printed beside the passage it belongs to.
The ordinary camera app will do it. No scanner app needed.
It opens straight in your browser — nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.
Several dozen films, two Academy Awards — for Mad Max: Fury Road and Dune — and a subject he calls cinema’s non-verbal narrative: not which sounds a film uses, but why you hear them, and why you hear them the way you do.
It’s all beautiful noise, simply organized differently.