[100 years
ago this week, the brothers
Harry and Sam Warner struck a deal with Bell Labs to use their
innovative Vitaphone
technology in the production of the first sound films for Warner Brothers.
So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for talking pictures!]
On three other
historic moments that help contextualize the one we’re commemorating this week.
1)
De Forest’s Alternative: I first learned about
the groundbreaking scientist and inventor Lee de
Forest when I made him the Memory Day
Nominee for August 26th (his birthday, in 1873). De Forest’s
inventions (and one in particular, the
audion) helped shape virtually every significant 20th century communications
and media technology, from the telephone to radio to television to, yes, sound films.
But while the audion did play an important role in the development of
Vitaphone, over those same years de Forest would also create his own
sound-on-film system, Phonofilm,
which he debuted in April 1923. Unfortunately for him, its sound quality was apparently
not the greatest, and so the brothers Warner decided to make their June 1925
deal with Western Electric’s Bell Laboratories instead.
2)
Don
Juan (1926): Just over a year after they signed that deal, Warner Brothers
formally introduced the new technology with the August 5th, 1926
premiere of their silent
film Don Juan, starring John Barrymore as the Latin lothario. There
was no spoken dialogue (that would come about a year later, with the famous
moment I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post), but the film did feature both a symphonic
score and sound effects. Perhaps even more important as a demonstration of the
technology were the series
of shorts that preceded the film, most of which featured live-recorded
music and one of which also qualified as a “talkie,” as it included an “Introduction of Vitaphone
Sound Pictures” from studio spokesperson Will Hays. Don Juan made a
substantial haul at the box office (nearly $1.7 million), yet not enough to
recoup the new technology’s costs—both telling details, I’d say.
3)
Carnival
Night in Paris (1927): For the first year (and beyond), both
shorts and feature film scores utilizing Vitaphone were filmed in New York
City, where the technology had been invented and where a sizeable number of musicians
and recording studios could be found. But it was inevitable that the technology,
like every aspect of the film
industry in the 1920s, would migrate to Hollywood, and Vitaphone did so
first with the 1927 short Carnival Night in Paris. Filmed in Hollywood
and featuring the Henry
Halstead Orchestra and hundreds of background dancers, this short was on
its own terms eminently inconsequential—yet, as with every significant moment
in the development of this technology, it helped change everything for film and
America in the years to come.
Next film
sound studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Examples of sound in film you’d highlight?
