Engineering and Pop Culture

Amplifiers in the Movies

by Frederik Nebeker

John Pierce, the Bell Labs engineer who pioneered communications satellites, once wrote that amplification was the heart of electronics. Most of the time this heart remains out of sight, but not always. Many moviemakers have displayed amplifiers prominently in their films.

Electric guitars and their amplifiers come to mind first, as seen in countless movies, including the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night" (1964), "Wayne's World" (1992), and Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam" (1999). They are also featured in the mock documentary "This is Spinal Tap" (1984), about a heavy metal band. This movie shows us an amplifier that is innovative in that its controls go to '11' rather than to '10,' the rationale being that "most blokes, you know, will be playing on 10, and where can you go from there?" We can also enjoy an impressive variety of equalizers and mixing boards in many movies, such as "Saturday Night Fever" (1977) and "Back to the Future" (1985).

Public address systems and bullhorns also put amplifiers on the big screen. The simplest handheld voice amplifier is that appurtenance used by cheerleaders: the non-electronic megaphone. A memorable scene in "From Here to Eternity" (1953) features a megaphone: Private Robert E. Lee Prewett (Montgomery Clift) plays "Taps" through a large megaphone, in memory of his friend Private Angelo Maggio (Frank Sinatra). And in "A Bug's Life" (1998), a megaphone public address system sounds like an electrical system.

In the movies, police often use bullhorns. You may recall the appropriate scenes from "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955), "The French Connection" (1971), and "Me, Myself & Irene" (2000).

In public address (P.A.) systems, amplification confers power —  or at least impressiveness. It is part of the aura and ostentation of the wizard in "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), and it is used by Mussolini's regime in "The Garden of the Finzi-Contini" (1970). In "The Wedding Singer" (1998), the power of amplified voice is explicit: a disgruntled wedding guest complains, "We're paying you to sing, not share your thoughts on life!" to which the wedding singer replies, "Well I have a microphone and you don't ... so you will listen to every word I have to say!" And people fight over the cables to and from amplifiers in "Strictly Ballroom" (1992), where a P.A. system at a dance competition is interrupted and restored, and in "Forrest Gump" (1994), where the same thing happens at a 1960s political rally.

Electronic amplification came to the Bell system at the time of World War I; before that, long-distance telephone service was limited. For example, in the Vincente Minnelli movie "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944), where the action occurs in 1903 and 1904, a call is placed from New York to St. Louis, and the people almost need to shout to be understood. But in the Alfred Hitchcock movie "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943), where the action occurs contemporaneously, an older woman shouts while talking into the phone and her daughter comments, "She makes no allowance for science."

The feedback howl that amplifiers can produce is a staple of moviemaking. For example, in the Woody Allen movie "Annie Hall" (1977), when Annie begins to sing at a nightclub, there is feedback on the sound system. Roger Ebert's Bigger Little Movie Glossary mentions the "Feedback Rule:" whenever someone uses a microphone in a movie, there is feedback. In the detective movie "Insomnia" (2002), a police bullhorn gets turned on accidentally and produces a feedback howl, which alerts a criminal to the presence of police and allows him to escape. A creative use of feedback also occurs in "Funny Girl" (1968), when Fanny Brice (Barbra Streisand) is talking with Florenz Ziegfeld on the telephone; she puts the speaker of the telephone to the mouthpiece in order to cause howling and stop him from talking.

If you have a favorite movie-scene that features an amplifier, let us know about it. Send them to f.nebeker@ieee.org.

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Frederik Nebeker is Senior Research Historian at the IEEE History Center at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Visit the IEEE History Center's Web page at: www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/.