Why did old american movies sound so different?
Whenever I watch old movies the characters always have a different tone than they have now. It seems to have changed somewhere from the 2000s. Is it just me or did something change?
tl;dr: Because of technological advancements in recording equipment.
Maybe this Helps: Why we all need subtitles now
Here I am thinking I was the only one with this problem. I'm at the office and can't watch the video itself, but I definitely will tonight. Thank you for sharing!
Anakin Padme meme.jpg:
I’ve invented new mic tech!
You’re going to use that to make audio more intelligible right?
…
Right?!
This was awesome, thank you
If you’re talking about speech, I think you’re talking about the “mid-Atlantic” accent, although that fell off earlier than 2000. It was a fake upper-class accent actors were trained in. I don’t know much more than that about it.
Also politicians like Kennedy did it. And so did jerry springer when he was a politician (he did away with it for his show). It’s kind of funny really
Kennedy’s was just a Massachusetts accent, AFAIK.
It sounded real forced. We had a movie made in our country with some shots in US. Throughout these scenes all Americans had this uniform accent, even the black american actors. Glad they decided to ditch this
The accent? It's the Mid-Atlantic accent that a lot of old actors were trained to speak with. In more modern times, people have just started using their natural accent or an accent that better fits the character they are portraying.
It's similar to the Received Pronunciation you'd hear older British people using (eg how the Queen used to talk).
Aside from the Mid-Atlantic accent, it's also just microphones and recording technology has gotten much better.
I know Robert Altman revolutionized a lot of how dialogue in movies is recorded, out of necessity for how he was setting up some of his shots (multi-tracking because people are talking over each other, etc.)
Can you give an example? Done you mean the dialogue, soundtrack, foley…?
I'm not OP but I notice it too. It's really obvious in the way people talk, not the quality of the audio but the style of speech. Really obvious if you go watch some black and white Holywood movie ( some Humphrey Bogart movie for example). It's less and less obvious the closer in time it gets, for me it disappears around the 80s.
I never know if people really talked like that or if it is stylised acting. It's not just the choice of words which obviously changes with the times, but also the tone and accent. Very hard to explain, I'm not good at this.
There used to be a stylized “Mid Atlantic” accent that many actors developed and the news at the time would use the same accent. With more modern movies, there was a move to actors with regional accents of their own, as well as a change in the way acting stopped emphasizing “projecting” their voices so the people in the back of the theater could hear them. Since movie audio is all recorded and mixed digitally, any lines that didn’t record well just get ADRed.
I know exactly what you mean, for example the production quality between What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) and Liar Liar (1995) is significant. Although I didn't notice it at the time, a lot of late 90s or early 2000s movies had this same sort of production style that looks like it was filmed in 1983 but with 2000s clothes like the American Pie series, IKWYDLS, and Old School. But Bring It On had the newer aesthetic.
I have two rough metrics of grainy and dusty that I use for this. Grainier movies are usually film and poor quality at that. Like Ferris Buellers Day Off is film but advanced production quality for its time and thus not so grainy. Dusty movies are more about the degree of western/prairie motifs like wood shacks, dirt roads, unkempt grasslands and dilapidated fences. Both grainy and dusty movies tend to have muffled audio and very formal speech, ie The Sound of Music.
Something that some of the other replies have missed is that older movies were often shot (and a lot of actors were trained) from the perspective of a “stage play for the silver screen.” Stage plays have to work for large audiences, and so they tend to feature more exaggerated voice / body movements. These tricks were used on movies for a long time, but have faded as visual effects and sound recording have gotten better