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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