The salvage yard at M.Maselli & Sons, in Petaluma, California, is made up of six acres of angle irons, block pulleys, doorplates, digging tools, motors, fencing, tubing, reels, spools, and rusted machinery. To the untrained eye, the place is a testament to the enduring power of American detritus, but to Foley artists—craftspeople who create custom sound effects for film, television, and video games—it’s a trove of potential props. On a recent morning, Shelley Roden and John Roesch, Foley artists who work at Skywalker Sound, the postproduction audio division of Lucasfilm, stood in the parking lot, considering the sonic properties of an enormous industrial hopper. “I’m looking for a resonator, and I need more ka-chunkers,” Roden, who is blond and in her late forties, said. A lazy Susan was also on the checklist—something to produce a smooth, swivelling sound. Roesch, a puffer-clad sexagenarian with white hair, had brought his truck, in the event of a large haul. The pair was joined by Scott Curtis, their Foley mixer, a bearded fiftysomething. Curtis was inthe market for a squeaky hinge. “There was a door at the Paramount stage that had the best creak,” he said. “The funny thing was, the cleaning crew discovered this hinge squeak, and they lubricated the squeak—the hinge. It was never the same.”
Petaluma is a historically agricultural town, and that afternoon was the thirty-ninth annual Butter and Egg Days Parade; the air smelled of lavender and barbecued meat. Inside the yard, Curtis immediately gravitated toward a pile of what looked like millstones, or sanding wheels. He began rotating one against another, producing a gritty, high-pitched ring, like an elementary-school fire alarm. “The texture is great,” Roden said. She suggested that one of the wheels could be used as a sweetener—a sound that is subtly layered over another sound, to add dimension—for a high-tech roll-up door, or perhaps one made of stone. “It’s kinda chimey,” she said, wavering. “It has potential.” A few yards away, Curtis had moved on to a shelf of metal filing-cabinet drawers, freckled with rust. “We have so many metal boxes,” Roden said, and walked away.
“It’s kinda the squeak I was looking for,” Curtis said softly.
“Hey, guys, remember the ‘Black Panther’ area?” Roden called out. “Wanna explore?” She led the group past a rack of hanging chains, also rusted; Curtis lightly palmed a few in sequence, producing the pleasant rings of a tintinnabulum. Roden pointed to the spot where she had found a curved crowbar to create the sound of Vibranium—a fictional rare metal unique to the Marvel universe—before zeroing in on a rack of thimbles, clamps, nuts, bolts, and washers. The trio began knocking and tapping hardware together, producing a series of chimes, tinks, and clunks. Roesch, who calls himself an “audile”—someone who processes information in a primarily auditory manner, rather than in a visual or a material one—had unearthed a sceptre-like industrial tool with a moving part, and was rapidly sliding it back and forth. “Robot,” he said.
The bulk of the sound in film is typically added in postproduction. “I always say there’s sound effects, like footsteps, and then there’s music,” the director David Lynch, whose films are famous for their inventive, evocative sound design, said. “And then there’s sound effects that are like music.... They conjure a feeling.” Traditionally, “hard effects” cover ambient noises such as traffic or rain, or the more mechanical, combustive sounds of explosions and gunfire; they are usually pulled from libraries, or electronically produced. Foley effects are custom to a film, and are synchronized to characters’ movements. They might include the sound of someone walking across a room, rolling over in bed, stirring a pot, typing, fighting, dancing, eating, falling, or kissing. The line between the two kinds of effect is thin: Foley artists record the sound of a hand twisting a doorknob, but not the sound of the mechanism turning within. Foley is subtle but suggestive, capturing offstage bedsprings, or the shuffle of a clumsy intruder. In the past hundred years, technology has changed the process of recording, editing, and engineering sounds, but the techniques of Foley have remained stubbornly analog. Behind any given Foley effect, no matter how complex, are one or two people contorting their bodies in a soundproof room.
Foley artists have historically worked in pairs. (Certain sounds are so complex that they require the labor of four hands.) Roden and Roesch are two of the masters in their field. David Fincher, the director of movies including “The Social Network,” “Gone Girl,” and “Mank,” told me that Foley is “a very strange calling,” and “a dark art” foundational to filmmaking. “You’re trying to make beautiful sounds that make their point once and get the hell out of Dodge,” Fincher said. “The people who do it really, really well are few and far between.”
The group continued walking through the salvage yard, clanking poles together, pushing buttons, tapping metal surfaces, flapping doors, turning cranks. Roesch pulled a handle on the front of an electrical cabinet, and it made a satisfying fnnp. “Those are sha-shonkers, for sure,” Roden said approvingly. She flipped a large metal clasp back and forth. “It’s lovely.” The group headed to a rack of hinges. Roden tested one; it made a seesawing squeal. She retrieved another and flapped it back and forth. “Screaming puppy,” she said, shaking her head. She looked up at me. “Did you lose a filling?”
For an audile, the yard seemed like a potentially overstimulating environment. I imagined the old mattress springs and racks of hardware bursting to life, “Fantasia”-like, jangling and clunking in a private cacophony. I relayed this to Roden, who shook her head. “No, no, no, not at all—it’s potential creativity,” she said. “You know what’s overstimulating? Sitting in a movie theatre.”
Sound effects emerged in the late nineteenth century, as the motion-picture industry experimented with accompaniment to silent films. Theatres brought in live bands, orchestras, lecturers, and hidden actors who stomped and clattered in conjunction with movies; they tested strategically placed phonographs and the Kinetophone, a contraption introduced by Thomas Edison, which attempted to synch sound to movement. Enterprising inventors created effects “traps,” small machines meant to imitate everyday sounds such as a baby crying or a nose being blown. In a recent paper for the academic journal Film History, Stephen Bottomore, a historian of early cinema, cited a 1911 article that griped about the maximalism such devices facilitated: “It is often the case that a youth with no imagination, and with very limited brain power, combined with a spirit of mischief, ‘lets himself go,’ when presiding over the sound machine.”
In 1926, Warner Bros., then a small outfit best known for a movie about a German shepherd named Rin Tin Tin, débuted the Vitaphone, which allowed for synchronized recorded sound. That year, the studio released “Don Juan,” a silent film with a recorded musical score and a handful of sound effects: tepid clicks to accompany swords in combat; clangs and chimes to add weight to wedding bells. Initially, it was impractical for production teams to edit recordings, and dialogue, music, and sound effects had to be recorded in real time, on set. “In a lot of cases, those recordings were still the sounds that musicians used to perform in the theatres,” Emily Thompson, a historian of technology at Princeton, told me. “You’ll hear drummers instead of machine guns, or saxophones when ducks go by onscreen.”
Foley takes its name from Jack Foley, a stuntman, prop handler, and assistant director at Universal Pictures in the late twenties. His breakout was “Show Boat,” which was initially intended to be a silent film; facing competition from Warner Bros., Universal added a soundtrack, which included dialogue, during postproduction. Jack Foley provided sound effects: handclaps, footsteps. He built a small crew, and their workspace became known as “Foley’s room”; other studios eventually developed their own “Foley stages.” Later, a technique known as sound-on-film—in which recorded sound is converted to light waves printed directly onto film strips—made it possible to work with effects separately, something that allowed for more artistic freedom. In the thirties, sound technicians sought “wild” recordings—a literalism that prioritized the grinding rush of an actual train over the smoother, more controllable sound of roller skates cruising over a wood floor. But some directors used sound effects for their suggestive qualities, such as the growing thunder of encroaching shells in “A Farewell to Arms,” or the sinister whistling of the serial killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s “M.”
In the decades that followed, sound work continued to evolve, both technologically and aesthetically. Studios assembled robust catalogues of sound effects. (Certain stock sound effects became famous, such as the “Wilhelm scream,” which was reproduced in dozens of movies.) Multitrack recording enabled effects artists to create more complex soundscapes. But it wasn’t until the mid-seventies, with the innovation of Dolby Stereo—a sound system with four channels, rather than the usual two—that filmmakers began to truly embrace the possibilities of stereo sound.
Roesch studied film at N.Y.U. and at the American Film Institute, and entered the industry in 1978. Soon after he moved to Los Angeles, Joan Rowe, who collected rent for Roesch’s landlord, and who was freelancing as a Foley artist, brought Roesch into the studio where she worked. “He was absolutely amazing,” she told me. “There was a character that came running across the stage, and jumped up, and spun around, and flipped over—I just can’t tell you the number of intricate steps that this character had—and John just went loobaloobaloobaloo.” She made a kind of cartoonish spiral sound to imitate his movements.
Roesch and Rowe became Foley partners. One of their first projects together was “The Black Stallion,” from 1979. (To simulate the clatter of horses’ hooves, they stuffed toilet plungers with fabric, among other techniques.) Roesch worked on the footsteps for Michael Jackson’s dance moves in “Thriller.” He and Rowe were hired by Steven Spielberg to do the Foley for “E.T.” That film, Rowe told me, was “the Foley artist’s dream, the Foley artist’s joy.” Spielberg had a distinct idea of how he wanted E.T. to sound: liquidy and alien, but funny, and not scary. Most crucially, it was important that the wide-eyed, wrinkled, freaky extraterrestrial be lovable. To make the sounds of E.T.’s movements, Rowe and Roesch landed on raw liver, which slid about in its package, and jello wrapped in a damp T-shirt. For the character’s body falls, Rowe recalls using a novelty-sized bag of popcorn; Roesch remembers using a pillowcase filled with rice and cereal.
There are certain well-worn tricks of the trade. Vegetables are old standbys: snapped celery for broken bones, hammered cabbage for a punch. (According to the Web site Atlas Obscura, during the climax of “Titanic,” in which Kate Winslet floats, shivering, on a piece of debris, Foley artists peeled back layers of frozen lettuce to add texture to the sound of her crisping hair.) Paper clips or nails, taped to the tips of a glove, are useful for the clicking footsteps of a house pet. Wet pieces of chamois leather, the sort that is used for cleaning cars, are highly versatile. “They sound just like mud,” Rowe said. “Also, they’re excellent for blood. If you want to stab somebody in the chest, and you want to hear the sound of the knife going in”—here she made a gushing, kuschhy sound—“get that chamois out and just squish it. I found this big plastic cup, and when you put a chamois in it, when it’s wet, when you rub it up and down”—she emitted another guttural gush—“it makes this incredible sound.”
