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Vitaphone
Souvenir program cover for The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson.

The late 1920s saw the birth of a new performing art, musical film. Although popular, the earliest Hollywood musicals were clumsy, and it would be several years before filmmakers recognized this new genre's unique artistic needs and possibilities.

Technologically primitive "talkies" were introduced as a vaudeville filler in 1907, but audiences were not impressed. Early sound technology was plagued by poor reproduction and weak amplification. Few in Hollywood believed that sound would ever be used in feature films. After all, silent films used a wordless language of image and gesture that the whole world responded to. Who needed or wanted to ruin that by adding dialogue?

By the mid-1920s, several studios were experimenting with different sound systems. Warner Brothers Studio began using Vitaphone, a system which coordinated filmed images with sound recorded on large phonograph disks. It also used an innovative speaker system that could fill large theatres with sound. The executives at Warners were not interested in making films talk – they were intrigued by the musical possibilities. Harry Warner said, "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? The music – that's the big plus about this."

Don Juan (1926) starring John Barrymore was the first feature film released with a full-length recorded background score (performed by the New York Philharmonic) and sound effects, but no dialogue. It was shown with several Vitaphone short subjects starring opera and vaudeville stars. The premiere at Warner's Theatre in New York City on August 6, 1927 drew raves, particularly for tenor Giovanni Martinelli's rendition of Pagliacci's "Vesti la giubba." The Warner brothers decided to use prerecorded background scores for all their future feature films -- dialogue and songs were not in the plan. As the Vitaphone Don Juan program toured to other cities (there were too few technicians to enable a general release), audiences responded with the same sense of awe.

Fox Studios started using sound in its popular newsreels, including Vitaphone appearances by politicians and celebrities. With change knocking at the door, most of Hollywood decided to stonewall. In A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film (NY: Oxford, 1995), film historian Richard Barrios tells us that most of the major studios (including MGM, Paramount and Universal) secretly agreed that "the threat of sound should be officially ignored. abrogated, or at least forestalled as long as possible." Even the studios that accepted sound were convinced silent features would remain the norm. 

All of Hollywood's denials and objections were swept aside by a tidal wave of audience demand -- a wave provoked by a Broadway legend in black face minstrel make-up.

The Jazz Singer
Warner Brothers' The Jazz Singer (Warner Bros. - 1927) was the first full-length feature to use recorded song and dialogue. Original plans were to film it with vaudeville comic George Jessel, who had starred in the 1925 Broadway production. When Jessel increased his salary demands, the studio heads realized that they would be better off investing in a major star -- Al Jolson. With "the world's greatest entertainer" heading the cast, they also decided to insert a few songs. 

Viewers today are often surprised to find this landmark sound film is mostly silent -- and mostly awful. Only Jolson's sound sequences vibrate with life. Although no dialogue had been planned, Jolson began ad-libbing around his songs. At one point, he shouted his familiar stage motto, "You ain't heard nothin' yet!" This impromptu moment was so vivid that more dialogue was added. Because of the scarcity of equipment and technicians, all of the sound scenes had to be filmed during the last nine days of a month long shooting schedule.

Sarah Rabinowitz (Eugenie Besserer) kvells as her beloved son (Al Jolson) serenades her with Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" in The Jazz Singer.

The Jazz Singer involves an Orthodox Jewish cantor's son who must choose between following his father's tradition or pursuing success on Broadway. In a climactic scene, Jolson chats with his doting mother before treating her to a jazzy rendition of "Blue Skies," igniting his father's outrage. Accounts differ on whether Jolson's banter was scripted. Although the piano accompaniment (a studio musician played while Jolson fingered a silent keyboard) was well rehearsed, co-star Eugenie Besserer is so visibly uncertain in her responses that it is reasonable to assume that Jolson was not slavishly following a script. Most likely he was engaging in the same kind of improvisation that marked his stage performances.

"You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet"
The film premiered at Warner's Theatre in New York City on Sept. 23, 1927. Audiences showed tremendous enthusiasm, but so few theatres were wired for sound that much of America saw it as a silent film, with the neighborhood pianist banging out accompaniment. That did not prevent the film from raking in major profits. Produced for approximately $422,000, The Jazz Singer grossed $2.6 million. Although no record setter, it bulldozed a trail towards serious change.

Aside from the executives at Warners and Fox, everyone else in the film business denied that The Jazz Singer proved anything other than Al Jolson's amazing popularity.  Industry publications like Variety downplayed or ignored sound film altogether, and insiders derided it all as a fad. Only a few dozen theatres were wired for sound, and the systems were too expensive for most small theatres. Vitaphone technology was fragile -- the sound disks had to be replaced after every ten uses, and it was easy for the picture and discs to fall out of synch.

But The Jazz Singer played to packed houses in city after city, and professionals who attended the Hollywood premiere in December 1927 were shaken --

As the film ended and applause grew with the houselights, Sam Goldwyn's wife Frances looked around at the celebrities in the crowd. She saw "terror in all their faces," she said, as if they knew that "the game they had been playing for years was finally over."
- Scott Eyman, The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 160).

More Vitaphone shorts and features with musical soundtracks appeared, each new entry stoking the public's appetite. By the time The Singing Fool (1928) was released, Warners had equipped a nationwide chain of theatres with Vitaphone systems. The Singing Fool is a maudlin, partially silent melodrama about a performer who loses the young son he loves. But few complained. For the first time, the commercial impact of sound became evident. Jolson's tear-stained rendition of "Sonny Boy" packed theatres, and the film (which cost $388,000) grossed $5.6 million worldwide -- a figure that would not be surpassed until Gone With the Wind came along a decade later.

Change was no longer knocking at Hollywood's studio doors -- it was blowing those doors off their hinges.

Next: Film 1927-30 - Part II