Ken Mogg writes: >Leo, on the recent DVD of ROPE, screenwriter Arthur Laurents says that >Granger merely pretended to play the piece, which 'was, of course, a >dub'! Having looked at my 16mm print again, I can see that in all but one shot, Granger is shown in front of the piano from behind it - i.e. you can't see his hands. But there is one 20-second point where you can, and the sync still looks totally convincing to my eyes. Furthermore, the dubbing must have been very difficult, because 1948 was just before the introduction of magnetic sound recording into the Hollywood studios. Presumably the final mix track neg, sans piano, of the entire reel (given that the reel had been taken without cuts) containing the playing must have been rerecorded as the pianist simultaneously played into a separate channel, which was then mixed into the signal going into the sound camera which was recording the dupe neg. If the take were aborted, the entire reel would have had to be done again. Just recording the piano 'offline' and then attempting to post-sync it in would surely have been impossible because of the extra layers of generational fading this would have caused in the final track. Quite an achievement, for anyone's money! This strikes me as a very similar procedure to the dubbing by Jean Barry of Anny Ondra's voice in the sound version of 'Blackmail'. This was recorded using RCA single-system (i.e. the optical soundtrack is exposed in the same camera as the picture) sound on film cameras, NOT Vitaphone as has been stated in several books and articles. Post-syncing in 'Blackmail' was impossible because the sound cameras necessary for re-recording had not arrived in Britain by that time. On 'Rope' it was made extraordinarily difficult by the long takes - i.e. even if you only alter a few seconds, you've got to re-record the whole reel. But the techniques used for getting round the problem seem to have been remarkably similar. I wonder who the pianist who did the dubbing is? His style sounds much softer and less staccato-ish than that many concert pianists of that generation (e.g. Horowitz, Rubeinstein, Janis or Graffman). L ------------------------------------ Dr. Leo Enticknap Director, Northern Region Film and Television Archive School of Law, Arts and Humanities Room M616, Middlesbrough Tower University of Teesside Middlesbrough TS1 3BA United Kingdom Tel. 01642 384022 Brainfryer: 07710 417383 ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]