 Hello and welcome to the drum history podcast. I'm your host Bart Vandersie and today it's just me and we are going to be talking about how and why the world famous director and master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock used a drummer on the set of the 1963 film The Birds. So once I heard about this mysterious drummer who was used on the set, I started doing more and more research and it became even more interesting and led to a bunch of different discoveries that I think you guys are going to like. So in case anyone isn't familiar with this classic 1963 Hitchcock film, let me read what the summary is on IMDb. It says a wealthy San Francisco socialite pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town called Bodega Bay that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack the people. It stars Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner and Tippi Hedron as Melanie Daniels. Alright, so let's start with how and why Hitchcock used a drummer on the set of the birds. So there's a scene in the movie where Tippi Hedron, who again is the young woman who follows this guy to Bodega Bay, Mitch Brenner, and then the whole town goes nuts, birds start to go crazy and start dive bombing and hurting people. The Brenner family and Tippi Hedron, Melanie in the movie are in the Brenner household. All the windows are boarded up. The doors boarded up. Everything is basically just kind of like sealed up outside. There's like 10,000 birds starting to like attack the house and you hear the flapping of the wings and you hear everything going crazy. So the actors on the set have to react to what's going on. Now, I think most of you know this, but when you shoot a movie, a lot of the stuff is done in post production. And in this case, all the sound effects were done in post because as great of a director, Hitchcock was he couldn't control thousands of birds to get them to react when he wanted to and flap against the side of this house that our characters are in. So that is all added in post production, the sound of the birds in this movie, which is actually done with like a synthesizer kind of instrument, which is really cool, because Hitchcock needed these actors to kind of uniformly react to what is happening outside, which would be again birds flapping all over, busting through like windows and boarded up doors and all this stuff. He needed them to sort of in unison kind of like get more intense and be more scared as it goes on. That's really difficult for four different actors to do without any, you know, kind of exterior sound with just a silent film set acting scared and looking around shocked. So how did Hitchcock address this situation? This is where our drummer comes in. And this is why we're talking about it on drum history podcast, because a drummer made that possible. So let's hear Hitchcock himself talking about this drummer who was used on the set and he'll do a great job of explaining it. This interview was Hitchcock being interviewed by Francois Truffaut in 1962. You'll hear a little bit of like French translation as it happens, just kind of ignore it and listen to Hitch talking about this drummer. Interesting side, I don't know whether I told you before, but when I was shooting the scene in order to help the actors respond to the fact that there was an external sound of wings and cries and so forth, I had a drummer on the set with a side drum and I had a microphone put close to it and then had it put on a loud speaker. So every time the actors played their scene, there was this loud side drum. I use one of those, they're called side drums, not a big drum, a small. Like that for every shot. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't know what else to do because to ask him to react to nothing was too much. He calls it a side drum. I guess that's more of like a UK kind of nomenclature that I looked up just to make sure it wasn't some specific, you know, a little thread to pull to find out more info here. I think it's pretty amazing to hear Hitchcock himself talking about this one kind of small aspect of the film, the production, using the drummer. This process of using musicians on set while filming actually goes way back in movie history back to the silent film era, but we will talk about that more a little bit later on. First, let's now hear Tippi Hedrin, who again is the main character in the movie. Let's hear her talking about her reaction to the use of a drummer on set and its effectiveness. Well, in order to help us all have the same degree of emotion, Hitch had a drummer come in and he started a drum roll very, very softly, you know, that we would hear and then it got louder and louder and louder. In fact, all of us were almost saying, stop it, stop it, you know, just hearing the drum roll, which was very effective. So pretty cool to hear her talk about it. She had a very checkered kind of past with Alfred Hitchcock. So for her to even compliment him and say this was effective and worked is really cool. And it sounds like it was a huge success and made it all possible, although she did say it was kind of maddening to hear it, but I thought that was really cool. So again, just to quickly recap what we're talking about here, Hitchcock used a drummer on the set of the film, potentially just for this one scene. They could have used it in other scenes in the movies where birds are attacking, but it just wasn't documented. Everything I've seen talks about being in this living room where you can't see things, you can't react to birds, actual birds, it's all outside added in post production, but they could have had a drummer later in the film. It just that is not clear in anything I've seen. I think Hitchcock using a drummer in this capacity is super cool, worked very effectively and clearly the actors liked it and it helped them achieve what they wanted. If it was used more than just this scene, we do not know. I cannot find that anywhere else. Next, let's take a look at the history of using drummers and other musicians on film sets that goes way back and is a part of Hitchcock's film history. And then we can try to figure out who this mystery drummer was. But first, a word from this week's sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Pocket Percussion in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Pocket Percussion is excited to announce they will be at Delaware Drum Show on February 25th, 2024. So if you're going to be there, be sure to go check them out and see all the awesome stuff they have with them. And if you're in the Pennsylvania area, head to their shop to check out their brand new rehearsal space and lesson space, which has made their already cool drum store even better. Pocket Percussion is a drum store for everyone, all skill levels, beginners to experts. They have something for everyone. They carry all kinds of used gear, vintage gear, new stuff, symbols, heads, sticks, everything you could imagine. In addition to buying, selling, and taking in trades, they also do great repairs and re-heading. So it is a one-stop shop for all drummers. Check them out online at pocket-percussion.com and find them on social media at Pocket Percussion. Thanks to Pocket Percussion for sponsoring this episode. So I first heard about this on a really, really cool podcast that I listened to all the time called What Went Wrong? It's all about movies and the craziness on set, and there's tons of good episodes. But one of the hosts, Lizzie, did a really interesting episode on the birds. She mentioned this drummer thing. And of course, I think this should be an episode of the podcast. So it started me down this rabbit hole. Next thing I did is I asked a question on Reddit on a Hitchcock Reddit page, which did not really get the answer I was looking for, but it did get a bit of interesting information that leads to the history of this. So I asked again, does anyone know about this drummer? And user Zorro Means Fox said, having on-set musicians to establish tone and cadence for the actors and choreographed crew was pretty common during the silent film era in which Hitchcock developed his visual language. So in the past, on this podcast with Nick White and Kelly Ray Tubbs, we've talked a lot about silent film era drummers and how they performed in the theaters while the finished product, the actual movie was being played because there was no sound for the picture. The sound was done in the theater in the orchestra pit with a drummer and a couple of other musicians. But what this is talking about, which I had no idea about, which I love to keep learning stuff about these topics, is drummers and musicians were actually used during the filming of these movies. Because again, remember, nothing's being recorded, there is no sound. So no sound is being captured. So you can have a tuba playing, you know, a foot away from the camera does not matter. It doesn't affect it at all. So when I saw that Reddit message, I did some more digging on the topic of on-set musicians during filming. And I found a 1995 article by Charles Berg called Music on the Set, which has a bunch of information in it. So I'm going to read a bit of this article to you guys now. I'm summarizing it and sort of picking and choosing because it's about a six page article and only a couple paragraphs apply to us. So again, I'm going to read this to you now. In addition to neutralizing distractions in the studio, music became valued as a means of creating the atmosphere necessary for actors to successfully render the emotional states called for by either the script or director. Although the origins of this practice are unclear, the practice of a tune for a tear had become standard by the 20s. Music in the studio was usually provided by a small ensemble of musicians situated just out of the camera's view. For the Fox kiddies performed in Alibaba 1918, a snare drum, cymbal, bass drum and piano produced exotic oral combinations that seemed to typify the music. Music on the set had become standard practice during the last decade of the silent film era. Musicians just out of the camera's range helped mask distractions, stimulate emotions, provide continuity and coordinate complex actions. Musicians also helped build a sense of esprit by warming up the rather cold atmosphere of a barn-like studio and secluded locations. But in the late 20s, a new technology, the synchronized sound film, was introduced. For the studio musicians, the transition to synchronized sound brought an end to the institution of live music on the set and, with it, dismissal from the studio's payroll. Kevin Brownland quotes Ben Lyon, a popular leading man of the 20s. He summed up the switch to sound as saying, everything was silent. The camera was sealed in a soundproofed booth and everybody kept absolutely quiet until the end of the take. In this complete silence, we were a complete loss. First, I think it's amazing information, just because we've had multiple episodes about this and the silent movie drummers and their career and how 1927 it just ended. I think it's so cool. And this just adds a whole new element to it. More on topic with what we're talking about today, Alfred Hitchcock, born in 1899, came up in the silent film industry in England and worked on multiple different roles on the film set. So he would have seen this technique used first hand and had it kind of in his toolbox of something to use later. So that's kind of the why Hitchcock used the drummer on set technique. But now the big question is, who is this mysterious drummer? I have been doing research on this now for two weeks and I've gone through all kinds of behind the scenes footage. I've listened to interviews. I've tried to read through behind the scenes books. And beyond those two brief clips that I played for you before, that's it. That's all the information that I can find out about this. The film does not have credits at the end. There is an opening credit sequence where it's not very long and there's not that many names. I mean, it has the key people involved in the film. But beyond that, it doesn't say off camera drummer blank, this guy. So it is not officially known who this drummer is at all. I don't know. I'm a firm believer that this information has to be out there. Like there's a lot of times where I'll look for a video for social media or for Facebook or something or an episode that I want to include a video on YouTube. If you look long and hard enough, a lot of times you can find it. I really do think the name of this drummer and who it was is out there. After researching this for the last few weeks, what I'm leaning towards is that Hitchcock had someone on his production team, possibly the production manager, Norman Deming find a local drummer in either Bodega Bay where the film took place or maybe in San Francisco, because of course, there's lots of great musicians in San Francisco, then had them come to the set for this and play the drum roll on set next to the camera, loudspeaker, microphone, like we heard about before. I did some research on, did the birds use local talent in the surrounding area? And they said, yes, they used a ton of people from the Bodega Bay area to be in the movie as extras, which is really common in a lot of films. Maybe that just means that they'd found a drummer and Hitchcock said, is there a drummer here? Can you play a drum roll? Guy said, yes. And that could be it. There's no way of knowing at this point until someone comes forward and says, hey, my grandpa was that guy, which could very well happen. And I hope it does happen. For all we know though, this could be, and let's just talk totally hypothetical, it could be a famous drummer like Buddy Rich or Art Blakey or someone who's gigging and touring around the country. They're in San Francisco, people know people in the industry, production, you know, designer, someone's assistant says, Hey, we need a drummer. They look up a famous drummer on tour. It could be someone really cool like that. We don't know. There's no pictures. I've looked at production pictures and kind of tried to see the corner of a snare drum near, you know, when filming, but I can't find any shots of inside that one house where they were filming that that one doesn't seem to have any production shots. But anyway, so long story short, we don't know who the drummer was. This mystery drummer remains a mystery, but I hope we find out. I hope someone comes forward and says, you know, oh, I know who that was or some sort of Hitchcock fanatic knows everything because I have tried to find people who would know, but I can't seem to do it. So as of now, the trail has gone cold. But I still think it's amazing to know that Hitchcock used his silent film background to employ a drummer on the set and use that technique that he learned so many years before in the 20s. And then it happened 40-ish years later on the making of the birds in 1963. So if you guys have any information about this, then let me know because I've certainly looked a lot, but you can do your own research and let me know if I missed something. So that's it for now. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode with just me a little bit different than normal, but we'll be back next week with a cool episode about the tragic life of Jim Gordon, which I think you guys are going to like. Anyway, thanks for checking it out and I will see you next week.