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Lost & Found Sound

Home Movie Day

The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, compile audio comments about Saturday's planned celebration of home movies. The event honors pre-camcorder America, when friends and family were captured on 8 mm and 16 mm celluloid. Promoters of the event say home movies give us a look at the past that newsreel and old TV broadcasts can't. Some are very private statements about how the camera operator viewed the world; others show new perspectives. For example, an African-American family's home movies show segregated life from their point of view. Other films are unintentional "art."

Lost & Found Sound

Lost and Found Sound

In our latest installment of our occasional Lost and Found Sound series, producer Yair Reiner presents Jack Foley: Feet to the Stars. Jack Foley is a Hollywood legend---he did his job best by not letting anyone know he existed. But Foley's legacy lives on in every film and television program we watch---it's there in the footsteps of the star walking down a street, in the rustle of a dress, in the pounding of horse-hoofs. Foley made these sounds and many more on his stage at Universal studios. Foley was there on the studio's maiden voyage into sound pictures. At first, he and his team of sound men had only one chance to get all the sound right. Foley figured out that by projecting the film and recording the sound effects in sync, he would get the best effect---and he would do each effect one at a time, till the various sounds were all put together with the film--a method today called Foley. Foley's stage looked more like a garage than a recording studio---dirt, gravel, and lots of junk everywhere. These were the tools of his trade. Foley's voice was never recorded and there are no pictures of him at his work---but he is remembered by those who worked with him.

Lost & Found Sound

LOST AND FOUND SOUND: Mental Hygiene Films

The years just after the Second World War saw the advent of a new genre of classroom films: "social guidance" or "attitude enhancement" films -- we'll call them "mental hygiene" films. Young people in schools across America saw films with titles like "Dating Dos and Don'ts," "Mind Your Manners," "Are You Popular?" and, "Narcotics: Pit of Despair." Topics included table manners, etiquette, fitting in, posture, dating, highway safety, substance abuse, and juvenile delinquency. They were tools of social engineering, made to shape the values and attitudes of an entire generation of American kids. More than three-thousand of these films were made over nearly three decades. Now, fewer than half of them survive. Ken Smith has written a new book called "Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films, 1945-1970". He'll be our tour guide through this Lost and Found Sound report on this funny, fascinating, and largely forgotten genre of American filmmaking.

Lost & Found Sound

Lost & Found Sound: The Sounds of Silents

Today in our continuing series, "Lost and Found Sound," we have two stories about the era of silent movies. Jay Allison, the curator of our Quest for Sound phone line introduces us to listener Bob Borgen, who has discovered tape of silent film star Buster Keaton at a party in 1962. The tape originally belonged to Keaton's wife. Keaton was a child star of Vaudeville with his family--on the tape Keaton sings songs and tells stories from those days. Our second story comes from our movie reviewer Bob Mondello, who pays tribute to the "silence" of early films. He remembers the time when movies were a purely visual medium---the introduction of sound took away some of the grace of what was taken place on the screen--this was most true for the silent film comedy stars.

Lost & Found Sound

Lost & Found Sound: Portrait of an Artist Through an Answering Machine

Our year-long Friday series listens to the voices of one mans answering machine, painting a picture of him as mirrored in the voices of his friends and acquaintances. We hear pleas from friends for help, offers from agents, and messages from mom. In a century of recording advances, phone mail now is one of the most direct records of how we lead our lives - in this case how a professional performer leads his life in Los Angeles.