Driver’s Education: “What’s The Big Hurry?” circa 1974 Sid Davis; Music by Louis Barron
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Footage of demolished cars at a junk yard, with the sound of driver’s last words before an accident. The electronic music soundtrack is by Louis Barron, who, with his wife Bebe, also did the soundtrack for “Forbidden Planet.”
Public domain film from the Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Bebe Barron (16 June 1925 — 20 April 2008) and Louis Barron (23 April 1920 — 1 November 1989) were two American pioneers in the field of electronic music. They are credited with writing the first electronic music for magnetic tape, and the first entirely electronic film score for the MGM movie Forbidden Planet (1956)…
Early works
The couple married in 1947 and moved to New York City. Louis’ cousin, who was an executive at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M), gave the newlyweds their first tape recorder as a wedding gift. Using their newly acquired equipment, the couple delved into the study of musique concrète.
The first electronic music for magnetic tape composed in America was completed by Louis and Bebe in 1950 and was titled Heavenly Menagerie. Electronic music composition and production were one and the same, and were slow and laborious. Tape had to be physically cut and pasted together to edit finished sounds and compositions.
Method
The 1948 book Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, by mathematician Norbert Wiener from MIT played an important role in the development of the Barrons’ composition. The science of cybernetics proposes that certain natural laws of behavior apply to both animals and more complex electronic machines.
By following the equations presented in the book, Louis was able to build electronic circuits which he manipulated to generate sounds. Most of the tonalities were generated with a circuit called a ring modulator…
A wrecking yard (Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian English), scrapyard (British English) or junkyard (American English) is the location of a business in dismantling where wrecked or decommissioned vehicles are brought, their usable parts are sold for use in operating vehicles, while the unusable metal parts, known as scrap metal parts, are sold to metal-recycling companies. Other terms include wreck yard, wrecker’s yard, salvage yard, breakers yard, dismantler and scrapheap. In the United Kingdom, car salvage yards are known as car breakers, while motorcycle salvage yards are known as bike breakers…
Sidney “Sid” Davis (April 1, 1916 – October 16, 2006) was an American director and producer who specialized in social guidance films…
In November 1949 Linda Joyce Glucoft, a six-year-old girl in Los Angeles, California, was molested and murdered by a man named Fred Stroble. The story was front-page news in the Los Angeles Times for a week as police and the FBI searched for Stroble. The story was picked up by Time Magazine and other national media, and led to a flurry of reported rapes and attempted rapes. Some media began to speculate that the supposed epidemic of rape was simply media manipulation of public perception…
Davis stated that the tragedy particularly disturbed him because his then-six-year-old daughter Jill did not seem to pay attention to his warnings about strangers. Davis talked to John Wayne saying that a film about this should be made, and Wayne suggested that Davis make the film. Wayne gave Davis $1,000 ($9648.95 when adjusted for inflation) and used the money to make his first film, The Dangerous Stranger, a film he would remake at least twice over the next 30 years. The film tells the story of several young children—some of the children are kidnapped and eventually saved, others are kidnapped and never seen again. Davis used schoolchildren and police officers instead of professional actors. Peter L. Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle said “[t]he film was a success among schools and police departments”.
Davis sold copies of the film to schools and police departments, reaping a $250,000 profit. He used the money to make more than 150 films over the next few decades. Davis’ films are typically 10 to 30 minutes long; he prided himself on making each one for $1,000, a minuscule film budget even at that time. Due to the films, people referred to him as the “King of Calamity”…
