HE'S A PIONEER, VIA A SOUND CAREER MOVE.

Byline: Carol Bidwell Daily News Staff Writer

A Van Nuys man who was a pioneer in sound motion pictures will receive the first technical award ever given by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, a New York-based group that honors filmmakers and others in the movie business.

Edward Bernds, 92, enticed to Hollywood in 1928 to help figure out how to record and project dialogue in the wake of Warner Bros.' groundbreaking talkie ``The Jazz Singer,'' will receive a special award for technical achievement in filmmaking Feb. 9 in New York.

Others scheduled to be honored at the ceremony include directors Milos Forman, Oliver Stone, Peter Bogdanovich and Elia Kazan, and actors Billy Bob Thornton, Gena Rowlands, Isabella Rosellini, Juliette Binoche and Renee Zellweger.

``It's such an honor, and so unexpected,'' said Bernds, 92. ``It's nice that people remember me after so many years.''

He received word of the award just a month short of the 70th anniversary of the debut of the first sound picture.

Bernds was a radio sound technician in Chicago when studio officials sought out all the men they could find familiar with recording and projecting sound. He worked on the first three talkies made at Columbia Pictures, working as a sound technician for 17 years - most of it for famed director Frank Capra.

But Bernds wanted to be a director, and kept daily journals filled with advice and wisdom from the directors he worked with. He eventually achieved his dream, directing more than two dozen Three Stooges films, along with several films in the ``Blondie'' and ``Bowery Boys'' series.

Those daily journals came in handy a few years ago when Bernds, now retired, decided to write an autobiography.

It was the first installment of that manuscript, submitted to a New York publishing house where a board member of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures is an editor, that clinched the group's technical award, said Lois Ballon, chairwoman of the February awards gala.

``The editor brought his manuscript to our attention, and after reading his book, we decided he was the perfect person to receive this new award,'' Ballon said. ``He sort of fell into our lap. We had never heard of him before. We didn't know about his history with the early sound-movie days. And when we decided to give him the technical award, we had no idea that he had been a director, too.''

Writer and film historian Joseph McBride, who wrote a biography of Frank Capra, said Bernds is an important footnote in Hollywood history.

``He's one of the few who remember the coming of sound. Since then, he's been involved in almost every aspect of filmmaking,'' McBride said. ``I think he's one of the great unknown characters of Hollywood. He's been everywhere and he's seen everything. He's a treasure.''

Bernds was 14 when he built his first radio using a tuning coil wound around a Quaker Oats box. He was 23 when he got a call from Howard Campbell, head of sound for United Artists, summoning him to Hollywood at $75 a week. A year later, one of sound's veterans, he moved to Columbia Pictures for a $10-a-week raise.

It was there that he worked with director Frank Capra, from 1930 to 1945 providing sound coverage for some of Capra's most memorable films, including Oscar-winning ``It Happened One Night,'' ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,'' ``Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,'' ``You Can't Take it With You'' and ``It's a Wonderful Life.''

This isn't the first award Bernds has won; in fact, he's an Oscar winner - sort of.

He holds the dubious honor of being half of the only writing team ever to be nominated for an Academy Award by accident.

In 1956, he and partner Elwood Ullman collaborated on the script for ``High Society,'' a raucous Bowery Boys flick that Bernds also directed. Trouble was that Allied Artists also made a movie named ``High Society,'' starring Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, that same year. So, when the Oscar nominations were made, only the movie titles were listed, not the names of the writers. ``High Society'' was nominated - and Bernds and Ullman were notified that they were in the ranks of Hollywood elite. They celebrated briefly, then realized that the academy had meant to nominate the Grace Kelly movie, not the Bowery Boys B-movie.

Variety, the movie industry newspaper, called it ``the biggest boo-boo in academy nomination history.'' The two - embarrassed - bowed out of contention, but Bernds still has a plaque identifying him as an Oscar nominee. (In the end, it didn't matter; neither ``High Society'' copped the writing award that year.)

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) `It's nice that people remember me after so many years.'

Edward Bernds

Tom Mendoza/Daily News

(2) Pictured in the late 1930s with Larry Simms, left, who played Baby Dumpling in the ``Blondie'' film series, Bernds directed several films in the series.