SIDE SALAD - Everything crunchy is good.

AAAUGHHH!

Rommie sends this e-mail link to something called The Wilhelm Scream.

As the site explains:

One sound effect that has found a following with many sound editors and observant movie fans is a distinctive scream named Wilhelm.

In 1951, the Warner Brothers film "Distant Drums" directed by Raoul Walsh starred Gary Cooper as Captain Quincy Wyatt, who leads a group of soldiers to stop some Seminole Indians from threatening settlers in early 19th Century Florida. During a scene in which the soldiers are wading through a swamp in the everglades, one of them is bitten and dragged underwater by an alligator.

As is usually the case with the making of a movie, the scream for that character was recorded later. Six short pained screams were recorded in a single take, which was slated "man getting bit by an alligator, and he screams." The fifth scream was used for the soldier - but the 4th, 5th, and 6th screams recorded in the session were also used earlier in the film when three Indians are shot, one after another, during a raid on a fort.

After "Distant Drums," the recording was archived into the studio's sound effects library, and was re-used in many Warner Brothers productions.

In "The Charge at Feather River" (1953), the scream is heard when a soldier named Pvt. Wilhelm (played by Ralph Brooke) gets shot in the leg by an arrow. Originally released in 3-D, the film used the "Distant Drums" scream recording two other times as well.

Up until the mid-70's, the scream recording was used exclusively in Warner Brothers productions, including "Them!" (1954), "Land of the Pharaohs" (1955), "The Sea Chase" (1955), "Sergeant Rutledge" (1960), "PT-109" (1963) and "The Green Berets (1968).

In "A Star is Born" (1954), the scream is heard twice - one of the times because a scene with the scream in "Charge at Feather River" is playing in a screening room.

One person who noticed the same distinctive scream reoccurring in so many movies was sound effects fan Ben Burtt. Ben and his friends in the cinema department at USC, Rick Mitchell and Richard Anderson, noticed that a scream was popping up in a lot of movies. One of the films they made together, a swashbuckler parody "The Scarlet Blade" (1974) included the scream - which they borrowed off another film's audio track.

A few years later, when Ben Burtt was hired to create sound effects for Star Wars (1977), he had an opportunity to do research at the sound departments of several movie studios. While looking for sound elements to use in the space adventure at Warner Brothers, he found the original "Distant Drums" scream - which he named "Wilhelm" after the character that let out the scream in "Charge at Feather River."

Ben adopted the scream as a kind of personal sound signature, and included it in all the "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" films, and many of the other films he has worked on including "More American Graffiti" (1979) and "Willow" (1988).

Ben's friend Richard Anderson also continued the tradition. Both Anderson and Burtt worked on "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), and Richard used the screams in the film's truck chase - one of the sequences he cut sounds for himself.

Rommie writes:

Have you heard of this before? What a great piece of trivia.

I agree. I bumped into this site about a year ago and was disturbed at the fact I actually remembered some of these citations truly disturbs me.

But I love great tidbits of movie trivia like this.

Posted by Jeff at September 8, 2005 08:04 AM | TrackBack