The Race to Save the Films We Love
…To help with the sound for “Cock of the Air,” the preservationists looked to John Polito, an engineer and the owner of Audio Mechanics. Together they worked on the sound using assorted elements they had gathered. After years of vainly searching for prints with the censored dialogue intact, they took the unusual step of hiring actors like Hamish Linklater to record the excised lines, using an onscreen icon to indicate what had been censored. (Mr. Polito played some piano music that had gone missing in a butchered seduction scene.) The results are probably close to what viewers saw and heard when they caught a show in 1932 at the Rialto in New York. Read the whole article here.
