You would have to be of a certain age to understand the full subliminal
effect of the sound design for The Notorious Bettie
Page. Set in the late 1950s and 1960s, the film — the tale
of the once-innocent pin-up girl from Tennessee who would come to be
regarded as the dark doppelganger of Marilyn Monroe — revels in the
WeeGee-like seediness of New York’s nascent porn industry. It was Sound
One mixer Peter Waggoner's job to make it sound as spendidly sordid as
it looks.

“There are people working in the business who have never used a [vinyl]
record, or know what an optical soundtrack sounds like when it gets
dirty,” says Waggoner, who is old enough to have earned an EMMY Award
for mixing Joni Mitchell's PBS special. “You can ask a 20-something
sound designer for street sounds from the 1960s, but unless you were
there, you won’t know exactly what it sounded like.”

That’s what Waggoner wanted to achieve for director Mary Harron’s
Bettie Page. Among the highly specific sound effects
in the film are the shutter noises made by period-piece cameras that
supervising sound editor Ben Cheah ferreted out at a vintage camera
specialty shop. (That’s one of the benefits of working in an eclectic
city like New York, where much of Page’s life was lived and where the
film was shot and posted.)

Page made many films, though not the sort that would win Oscars.
Rather, they would elicit obscenity charges and land her in court.
That’s where a critical scene takes place, in which a judge and
spectators view one of Page’s “spicy loops,” as they were called. “The
film just seemed too sterile-sounding to be right,” says Waggoner. He
resorted to those prehistoric vinyl records, pulling pops and clicks
off of them that could emulate the sound made when an optical reader
encounters a film's dusty, dirt-pocked sound track. Authenticating it
further, Waggoner rolled off the highs at around 5 kHz and attenuated
the low frequencies below 400 Hz, pulling them back as much as 24 dB on
the Neve DFC console at Sound One. “Back in those days, film sound
didn’t reproduce beyond those points,” he explains. “A 16mm film
optical track was limited to between about 120 Hz and 12 kHz. This
tweak really accentuates the frequencies that were reproducible back
then.”

In fact, creating the sound for Bettie Page posed a
challenge that was the opposite of what many mixers and sound editors
have faced over the last decade. Instead of removing or attenuating
noise artifacts, the sound team actively sought them out and added them
when they couldn’t find enough. (Waggoner calls this process “noising”
the track.) Take the grit in the film’s street sounds. The Manhattan of
the mid-20th century sounded much different than today. Waggoner
searched out vintage car horn sounds and made sure that the ambulance
and police sirens were not of the “whoop-whoop” variety but rather had
the built-in Doppler effect of an air siren. Car and truck engine
sounds, pulled from libraries, were also vetted for their asperity,
with the midrange edge of their rough sounds boosted slightly.

A similarly common problem with production sound on period pieces was
handled deftly. When an outdoor park scene got a visit from a jetliner
overhead, intertwining with dialog that Harron wanted to keep, Waggoner
first gently weeded some of the offending frequencies with a high-pass
filter – just enough so that the overall ambience wasn’t significantly
affected. He added in the sound of a propeller aircraft to mask what
was left, ensuring the integrity of the era illusion.

Music is a key piece of the puzzle in establishing a time period.
Waggoner took that one step further by adding artifacts to the sound to
simulate the effects of it emanating from car and home radios. He used
the onboard console EQ and compression to limit the music’s dynamic and
frequency ranges to correspond to the quality of the era’s playback
capabilities. “A lot of it is rolling off the low end, because speakers
simply couldn’t reproduce bass back then, especially in cars,” he says.

The Notorious Bettie Page's audio has a noir quality
that would complement much of Bettie Page’s own work, whcih was shot in
black and white. “This kind of sound is its own kind of color,” says
Waggoner.