Club Obi Wan

"We sold off a lot of good stuff," Syd said. "Mel Gibson's guns from Payback and Lethal Weapon, that shiny .45 from Titanic, Harrison Ford's ray gun from Star Wars and his revolver from Raiders of the Lost Ark

"I remember the sounds those guns made in Raiders as well as I remember anything about it," I said. "It was the first time I noticed gun sounds had gotten good in movies."

Syd brightened. "I worked on that! I flew up to Skywalker Ranch with Ben Burtt, who did all the sound for that show. I had a Thompson up there, and we fired it next to a cement wall. Not at the wall, but next to it, so you'd get the noise off the wall. That's how we got that big sound. And the scene in the bar, the big shoot-out? What they wanted was to re-create a Warner Bros. 1930 ricochet. Ben always said that Warner had the best ricochet sound. He didn't know how they did it. So we're out there trying to re-create it. We get out on a dirt road, a straight road. We put up hay bales with a slot down the middle, an alley, and we set up microphones all along the way. I'm inside the slot with a Smith & Wesson 76 submachine gun, firing single-shot at the road, trying to glance bullets off the ground at the right angle to get that whine."

Charybdis wrote:I am always amazed at how they come up with some of these sounds...very creative and inventive minds...