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CHANGE COMES TO HOLLYWOOD
The Talkies
The first sound film was one of three films produced by Warner Brothers.
It may have been Don Juan (1926), starring John Barrymore, distributed
with synchronized music and sound effects. Or perhaps Warner’s more
famous The Jazz Singer (1927) starring Al Jolson, which had several
sound and speaking scenes (354 words in all) but was largely silent. Or it
may have been the 1928 all-sound Lights of New York. Historians
disagree because they cannot decide what constitutes a sound film.
There is no confusion, however, about the impact of sound on the movies
and their audiences. First sound made possible new genres – musicals,
for example. Second, as actors and actresses now had to really act,
performance aesthetics improved. Third, sound made film production a
much more complicated and expensive proposition. As a result, many
smaller filmmakers went out of business, solidifying the hold of the big
studios over the industry. In 1933, 60% of all U.S. films came from
Hollywood’s eight largest studios. By 1940, they were producing 76% of
all U. S. movies and collecting 86% of the total box office. In 1926, the
year of Don Juan’s release, 50 million people went to the movies each
week. In 1929, at the onset of the great depression, the number had risen
to 80 million. By 1930, when sound was firmly entrenched, the number of
weekly moviegoers had risen to 90 million.
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A Very Short History of the Transition from Silent to Sound Movies
by Emily Thompson
In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and for the first time
ever, people could record sound, save it, then listen to it later at another
time and place. To make a recording, a person spoke or sang into a big
horn. This horn collected the sound energy and sent it to a needle, which
wiggled up and down as if it were being tickled by the sound. As the
needle wiggled, it cut a long wavy groove into a record made of soft wax,
which was spun in a circle underneath the needle. After the recording was
made, you could play the record back by placing the needle back at the
start of the groove and spinning the record in circles again. This time, the
needle rode the wavy groove like a roller coaster. As it moved up and
down, it recreated the sounds that had been recorded earlier, and it sent
them out of the horn for people to hear again. It seemed almost magical to
hear a person's voice coming, not from their own mouth, but from the horn
of a machine that remembered exactly what they said and that sounded
just like they did.
In the 1890s, Edison invented moving pictures, or movies. A long strip of
tiny photographs was captured on film by a special camera, so that each
picture was just a little bit different from the ones before and after it. The
strip of film was later run through another machine, a projector that would
blend the different pictures together to create the illusion of motion and
project the movie onto a large screen in a theater. Edison thought that, if
he could unite the sound of his phonograph with his moving pictures, he
could create the illusion of life itself—a picture of a person that could move
and speak, as if it were alive.
Unfortunately, these two inventions didn't want to work with each other in
the way that Edison desired. It was very difficult to synchronize, or "sync,"
the different machines—to make them work precisely together—so that
the recorded sounds of a person's voice would match the movements of
their lips seen in the moving pictures. Also, the sound recordings were not
very loud, so it was difficult for more than just a few people at a time to
hear them.
Still, each invention became successful on its own. People were now able
to go the store and buy records of music to bring home and play on their
phonographs. They no longer had to sing or play a musical instrument
themselves, but could instead just choose a record and let the machine
make the music for them. They also began to go out to new movie
theaters, where dramatic stories told through the silent moving pictures
became very popular. Since there was no recorded sound to accompany
the movies, the words that the characters spoke would appear on screen,
in special pictures called "titles" that moviegoers read like in a book. Most
of the time, though, the actors conveyed their thoughts and moods
through their facial expressions and their actions, without speaking a
word.
One of the most famous movie actors was a man named Charlie Chaplin.
Chaplin always played a character called The Little Tramp, a poor but
elegant man who often got into trouble even though he had a good heart.
The Little Tramp never spoke, but audiences could tell what he was
thinking and feeling just by looking at his face and the ways that he moved
his body, and people all over the world loved his films.
Since moving pictures like Charlie Chaplin's were silent, theaters hired
musicians to play music during the films so that people would have
something to hear. The musicians sat in a pit below the screen and played
music that fit the mood of what was happening in the movie: sad music
when the baby was sick, scary music when the monster approached, and
happy music when the lovers got married. For those who could hear it, the
music made the movie more enjoyable. But people who couldn't hear, like
the character of Rose in Wonderstruck, were still able to follow the story
on screen by watching the actors and by reading the titles. By the 1920s,
many people—hearing and deaf—went out to the movies several times a
week to enjoy the show.
At this time, another group of inventors tried to accomplish what Thomas
Edison had not been able to do—to bring together movies and recorded
sound. They now had a new tool: they could use electricity to make and
play their sounds, just like the telephone and radio did. In fact, these
inventors worked for the telephone company. They used small
microphones instead of big horns to collect the sounds, and they had
devices called amplifiers that could make those sounds louder. With
electricity, they could make recordings that were loud enough for
everyone in a large movie theater to hear. Electricity also made it easier to
keep the sound in sync with the image. They took their invention to
Hollywood—where most movies were made—but none of the movie men
there wanted to use it. "Who needs sound?" they argued. "Everyone loves
silent movies."
One studio, however, felt differently. The Warner brothers—Harry, Al,
Sam, and Jack—had opened their first movie theater in Pennsylvania in
1903, showing movies that other people had made. It was a success and
over the years they built many more theaters across the United States.
The brothers also began to make movies themselves, to show in these
theaters, but most of the movies they made weren't very successful. In
1925, they were looking for a way to make their movies more popular, and
Sam suggested that they give sound a try.
Sam Warner liked to listen to the radio as much as he liked making
movies. He had studied how radio worked, and had even built a radio
station to advertise the Warner Bros. movies. So when the telephone
inventors came to Hollywood and showed him their new sound movie
system, he was very interested in what he saw and heard. Sam knew that
you could use the phonograph to record voices and that you could make
movies where the actors talked to each other. But he and his brothers, like
everyone else in Hollywood, thought that no one would want to hear
actors talk. They decided to keep making silent movies, but to use the
new invention to record music to accompany the silent pictures. The
record would replace the live musicians in the theater. Many small town
theaters could only afford to hire a single piano-player to accompany their
movies, but with these new sound movies, a recording of a full orchestra
could be played, and the Warner brothers thought that people would like
this better. It also meant that the brothers got to choose for themselves
what kind of music was heard alongside their movies, rather than each
individual theater musician deciding what to play. Everyone who went to a
Warner Bros. movie—no matter where they lived, big city or small town—
would now hear the same music, just as they all saw the same moving
pictures on the screen.
The new sound movies were called Vitaphone movies, which means "the
sound of life." The first Vitaphone movie, called Don Juan, was a romantic
adventure about a famous swordfighter and the many women he loved. A
recording of an orchestra accompanied the action on screen, and the
record also included some sound effects, like clashing swords and ringing
bells, that were synchronized perfectly with the action on screen. Don
Juan was a big success and Thomas Edison's dream of combining the
phonograph and the movies finally came true. The Warner brothers
celebrated their success and planned to make additional Vitaphone
movies. Meanwhile, the other movie-makers in Hollywood shook their
heads and said, "It's just a fad."
But it wasn't just a fad, and as the Warner brothers made more and more
Vitaphone movies, sound movies became even more popular. There were
silent adventure stories with recorded orchestral music like Don Juan, and
there were also short films where famous singers and comedians sang
songs and told jokes. Moviegoers lined up to see them all. In 1927 the
Warner brothers made a movie starring a famous singer named Al Jolson.
In this movie, The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson's character sang songs and in
one scene he also talked and kidded with the woman who played his
mother. Audiences really liked this scene, and the Warner brothers
realized that people did indeed want to hear the actors talk.
The rest of Hollywood, too, finally realized that this was not just a fad, and
they all now rushed into making sound movies themselves. But it was
hard to catch up. In order to make sound movies, you had to buy a lot of
expensive new equipment for recording sound, and you had to find and
hire people who knew how to use it. If your studio was in a noisy location,
near traffic or with airplanes flying overhead, you had to construct a
special new building that would keep out all that noise. Some actors had
funny-sounding voices or heavy accents that made them hard to
understand. Their voices would not work for sound movies, so new actors
with good voices had to be found and turned into movie stars. Actors now
had to memorize their lines ahead of time and stand still when they spoke,
to ensure that the microphones would catch the sounds of their voices.
And directors could no longer shout out instructions to the actors while the
cameras were rolling. The microphones were very sensitive and could
even pick up the whirring noise of the cameras. To keep that noise off the
recording, the cameras—and cameramen—were put inside special boxes
that muffled the sounds. Cameramen sweated inside these boxes like
turkeys being roasted in an oven, and they also complained that they
weren't able to move their cameras around any more since that, too,
made unwanted noises. Everyone who worked to make movies had to
learn a whole new way to do their job when sound movies were made.
Workers in the theaters also had to re-learn their jobs. Projectionists
worked in a tiny booth way up high at the back of theater, running the films
through the projection machines that brought the films to life on screen.
These men now had to operate phonographs as well as projectors, so
their job became twice as difficult. Sometimes when a record was played,
the needle would skip, or jump around, in the groove and the
synchronization between the sound and the picture would be lost. If the
sound no longer matched the picture, audiences would angrily boo and
stamp their feet until the projectionist fixed the problem. But if the
projectionist's job became much harder, at least he still had a job. Theater
musicians were not so lucky. When a theater installed a sound movie
system, it no longer needed the live musicians to perform from the pit
each night, so all those men and women lost their jobs. A few lucky
musicians in Hollywood, who performed in the studios where the
recordings were made, were now heard by moviegoers across the nation.
All the other musicians had to find a new way to make a living.
Audiences too, had to change and adapt to sound movies. They had to sit
quietly, in order to be able to hear the voices of the actors on screen. And
people who were deaf or hard of hearing now struggled to understand the
stories. Some theaters had special headphone sets, to make the
recording louder for people who couldn't hear well. Thomas Edison
himself was very hard of hearing, so he might have used one of these
devices. But most theaters didn't have them, and if a person were fully
deaf these headphones were of no help anyway. A deaf person might
have been able to read the lips of the characters on screen if the actors
had faced the camera while they spoke. But if the actor had turned away
from the camera, there were no clues about what was being said, as there
were no longer any titles to read. There wasn't as much body language to
read either, since the actors had to stand still when they spoke. Sound
movies had much less movement and action than silent movies, and since
they were mainly filled with scenes of actors talking, people began to call
the new movies "talkies." It was much harder for people who couldn't hear
well to enjoy the talkies.
Within a few years, however, things got better and by 1930 sound movies
were as action-packed as the silent films had been. New, quiet cameras
meant that cameramen could come out of those hot boxes and move their
cameras around again, and microphones were modified to make it easier
for the actors to move around while they talked. A new kind of film was
invented where the sound recording was printed right onto the film itself,
instead of being on a separate phonograph record. The sound was
recorded as a squiggly pattern of light and dark, and it ran right alongside
the pictures on the film. Audiences couldn't see the "soundtrack" on
screen, but it now was easier for projectionists to keep the sound and
picture in sync.
Even when sound movies got much better, however, one famous actor
still chose never to speak in his movies. Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp
remained silent, expressing his feelings not through his voice, but through
his eyes, face, body, and movement. For this reason, his stories continued
to speak to the whole world, including people who were unable to hear, as
he spoke in a language that everyone could understand.