Sound Expert Recalls Early Days : Santa Anan Played Role in Giving Movie Stars a Voice

In 1928, John Hilliard was working on radio station WCCO in Minneapolis as a sound engineer. He had just earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota and was thinking about working for Bell Telephone Laboratories.

But then a friend told him that the eight major movie studios in Hollywood were looking for people who knew about sound. He said he was interested. Hilliard was hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by telegram, without an interview, and at a salary three times what he had expected to make at Bell.

“They needed help and were willing to pay for it,” he said. In 1927, Hollywood was excited about the release of the first moving picture with sound, “The Jazz Singer,” Hilliard said.

“They couldn’t install the sound systems in the theaters fast enough in 1928,” he said. “They were pessimistic with this thing (sound) to begin with, but ‘The Jazz Singer’ was so spectacular and the crowds (to see it) were so great.”

Here to Stay

Many people in Hollywood “thought that sound would ruin the pictures. It was something new and different and they were afraid of it,” he said. But Hilliard never thought he was taking chances with his career and was “quite confident” that sound was here to stay, he said.

Hilliard, 84, has lived in Santa Ana for 27 years and just retired from his acoustics engineering consulting firm this month. His wife of 57 years, Jessamine, died of cancer last March at the age of 78. She was a noted endocrinologist, an emeritus research anatomist at UCLA and a member of the UCLA Brain Research Institute.

Hilliard has written numerous articles for technical magazines on acoustics and helped design a theater sound system that won MGM a special award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1936, according to Dan Ross, administrator of scientific and technical awards.

The two-way horn system that MGM invented was one of the most important achievements in “what would be called modern theatrical sound,” Ross said. “The sound that people heard in the theaters for many years, in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s” used the two-horn system, Ross said.

“He was one of the real pioneer types in sound recording in the motion picture industry,” said Herb Farmer, associate director of the USC School of Cinema-Television. “There was very, very, good work going on at MGM. The theater sound system (today) is based on the work they did.”

Hilliard said one of his jobs at MGM was to “keep the rest of the sound department in a position where we could use the new technology” that was emerging at the time. But when other companies didn’t develop equipment that the movie industry needed, the individual studio sound departments did, he said.

One of the reasons MGM wanted a new theater loudspeaker system is because the company owned more than 100 theaters nationwide, some with more than 5,000 seats, Hilliard said.

Also, the old system “did not reproduce the very high frequency sounds or the bass tones,” he said. Drums, cello and many sound effects were lost as well as violins and the higher-pitched instruments, he said. The movie “San Francisco,” about the 1906 earthquake, was greatly enhanced by the new system, he said. On the old system “it sounded tinny, whereas on the new system you could hear the rumble,” he said.

Hilliard worked on such movies as “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz” and with movie stars that included Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, the Marx Brothers and his favorites, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, he said.

He first met Eddy and MacDonald in 1935 when they were working on “Naughty Marietta,” he said. “Nelson Eddy was trained as an opera singer and had a very loud voice. Jeanette MacDonald had a very weak voice,” he said. “We had the problem of how to get the proper balance.”

Around this time a company in Germany had developed one of the first directional microphones, he said. MGM only had one of the new microphones and “we were going to put the microphone on her since she had the weaker voice.”

But when Eddy heard the description of the new contraption, he wanted one and said he would not go on without one, Hilliard said.

Star Given Replica

“What we did was take the German microphone down to the prop department and make an exact replica of the case.” The next morning, Hilliard said, Eddy sang into a regular microphone with the new case, Hilliard said. “He never found out.”

Hilliard told another story of how a star was born at MGM because of a mix-up.

“One day two girls were sent over to the sound department for a voice test, and we were to record their singing and advise management on which had a better singing voice,” he said. The one with the better voice would be hired, he said.

“The two girls were Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland,” Hilliard said.

“Our committee voted that Deanna Durbin had the best voice,” he said. “And she did,” he added with a smile. But somehow, “our report got mixed up and it was taken to mean that Judy Garland had the best voice.”

‘Fortunate for MGM’

“Of course, this mix-up was extremely fortunate for MGM,” he said.

Hilliard said he is fascinated by the development of the compact disc, which uses a laser beam in place of a record needle. He has a compact disc player in his home that plays his favorite music over a speaker system he designed that is much like the systems used in theater.

“The advantage of the CD is in the softer passages (of music). You can get all the detail,” he said. “They’re selling them faster than they can make them at the present time. It’s a revolution.”

Another revolution.