Originally posted by <cinehead w/ no password>:
In the film/commercial world or production MOS means without sound. The term came from a German director that could say it correctly, so it came out "mit out sound".
That is a myth that is incorrect. MOS in film stands for "miked off stage." That story about German directors never happened. Time for a history lesson.
In the days of silent films there were several European beauties working as Hollywood actors who had never had to worry about the fact that they spoke very poor English, since the audience didn't hear them. When talkies came along, the studios wanted to continue using their established starlets, but the strong accents were a problem. Some of them spoke almost no English, and those who did spoke with such heavy accents that it was believed the audiences wouldn't be able to understand them.
As a solution, the studios brought in American actresses to stand at microphones just off set and read the lines while the starlets silently mouthed the words on camera. They called this technique "miked off stage," or MOS for short. As you can imagine, it didn't match up very well and made the actresses' performances stiff. You can see the effect yourself in Hitchcock's 1929 version of
Blackmail, in which Joan Barry voiced the part of Alice White MOS, which was mimed on screen by German Anny Ondra.
Blackmail is a perfect example of early MOS production.
At the time motion picture technicians hadn't yet figured out a way to record the audio later and mix it back into the audio track; they were still recording film and sound at the same time, with the camera and sound recorder linked by a sync cable. When they figured out how to separate them, they were initially still primarily interested in re-recorded dialogue instead of adding sound effects, so they still referred to the dialogue recording as "miked off stage." As they developed their recording and mixing skills to include sound effects and ambient noise, the name MOS stuck. Over time the meaning shifted from shooting with sound, but with the intention of replacing or adding to that sound, to shooting without sound at all, with the intention of building an entire soundtrack in post.
Thus, if you think about it, the "mit out sound" myth makes no sense, because the first shoots labelled MOS DID have sound. It was recorded off stage. The "German director" myth has stuck not because there's any truth to it, but because it's a funny story to tell. Somewhere along the way it got into a film textbook, and people actually believed it.
Also, when you hear this story it is usually attributed to "a German director." It's always been a mystery exactly
who that German director was supposed to have been. You'll occasionally see it attributed to Erich von Stroheim (simply because he's the most well-known German speaking director from the time), but no one was ever actually able to find someone who knew him who could verify that he did. Furthermore, the German word for
without is
ohne, so it would make no sense for a German speaker like von Stroheim to say "mit out" to mean
without. The myth has also been attributed to Michael Curtiz, who directed
Casablanca and was known for his notoriously bad English; but Curtiz was Hungarian, not German, so that story makes no sense because those languages are quite different.
Of course, there are a few who now insist that MOS stands for "mixer outside smoking."