SOUND FILM

A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound (that is, sound technologically coupled to image), as opposed to a silent film. The first commercial exhibition of movies with fully synchronized sound took place in the United States in April 1923. In the early years after the introduction of sound, such films that incorporated live-recorded dialogue and singing were known as "talking pictures," or "talkies." The first feature-length movie originally conceived and shot as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927.

History

Early steps

The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as the concept of cinema itself. On February 27, 1888, Thomas Edison met with Eadweard Muybridge, who proposed a scheme for sound film, well before motion pictures had been introduced to the general public. Muybridge suggested combining Edison's recorded-sound technology with his own zoopraxiscope as an image-casting accompaniment. No agreement was reached, but later that year, Edison commissioned the development of the kinetoscope as a visual complement to his cylinder phonograph. In the late 1890s, sound film systems involving gramophone records—known as sound-on-disc technology—were developed in France by the Pathé film company (with so-called Berliner discs) and in Germany by Oskar Messter. Soon after, an improved system was developed by France's Gaumont Films, allowing short films of theater, opera, and ballet excerpts to be presented at the Paris Exposition in 1900.

Three major problems persisted however, leading to motion pictures and sound recording largely taking separate paths for a generation:

1. Synchronization – The pictures and sound were recorded and played back by separate devices, which were difficult to start and maintain in synchronization.
2. Playback volume – While motion picture projectors soon allowed film to be shown to large theater audiences, audio technology before the development of electric amplification could not project to satisfactorily fill large spaces.
3. Recording fidelity – The primitive systems of the era produced sound of very low quality unless the performers were stationed directly in front of the cumbersome recording devices—obviously imposing severe limits on the sort of films that could be created with live-recorded sound.

A variety of attempts were made to get around the synchronization problem, in particular. In August 1906, French-born, London-based Eugene Lauste—who had worked at Edison's lab between 1887 and 1892—applied for the first patent for sound-on-film technology, involving the encoding of sound and its inscription directly onto image-bearing celluloid; in 1910, the patent was awarded. Though sound-on-film would eventually become the universal standard for synchronized sound cinema, Lauste never successfully exploited his innovations, which came to an effective dead end. In 1913, Edison introduced an improved version of a cylinder-based synch-sound system called Kinetophone whose essential design dated to 1895. It was unsuccessful, although Edison released eight short films using the system.

Most proto–sound films made before the 1920s were actually of performers lip-synching to previously made sound recordings, created—in that era preceding the invention of the electronic microphone—by enunciating into large acoustical recording horns. The technology was far from adequate to big-league commercial purposes, and for many years the heads of the major Hollywood film studios saw little benefit in producing sound motion pictures. Thus such films were relegated, along with color movies, to the status of novelty.

Crucial innovations

A number of technological developments contributed to making sound cinema commercially viable by the late 1920s. Two involved contrasting approaches to synchronized sound reproduction, or playback:

Advanced sound-on-film – In 1919, American inventor Lee De Forest was awarded several patents that would lead to the first sound-on-film technology with commercial application. In De Forest's system, the sound track was photographically recorded and printed on to the side of the strip of motion picture film, making it almost impossible for the sound and picture to go out of synchronization. Over the next four years, he improved his system with the help of equipment and patents licensed from another American inventor, Theodore Case, also working in the field.^[1] On April 15, 1923, at New York City's Rivoli Theater, came the first commercial screening of motion pictures with sound-on-film, the future standard: a set of shorts under the banner of De Forest Phonofilms, accompanying a silent feature.^[2] That June, De Forest entered into an extended legal battle with an employee, Freeman Harrison Owens, for title to one of the crucial Phonofilm patents; though De Forest ultimately won the case in the courts, Owens is today recognized as a central innovator in the field. The following year, De Forest's studio released the first commercial dramatic film shot as a talking picture—the two-reeler Love's Old Sweet Song, directed by J. Searle Dawley and featuring Una Merkel.^[3] Phonofilms' stock in trade, however, was not original dramas but celebrity documentaries and popular-music and comedy performances: President Calvin Coolidge and many of the top vaudeville acts of the day appeared in the dozens of short Phonofilms released through 1927.

In Europe, others were also working on the development of sound-on-film. The same year that De Forest received his first patents in the field, three German inventors patented the Tri-Ergon sound system. On September 17, 1922, they gave the first public screening of sound-on-film productions (including a dramatic talkie, Der Brandstifter [The Arsonist]) before an invited audience at the Alhambra Kino in Berlin. But it was domestic competition that would lead to Phonofilms' eclipse. By September 1925, De Forest and Case's working arrangement had fallen through. The following July, Case joined with Fox Pictures, then in the middle ranks of the Hollywood studio system, to found the Fox-Case Corporation. The system developed by Case and his assistant, Earl Sponable, was given the name Movietone, the first viable sound-on-film technology controlled by an important movie studio. The following year, Fox purchased the North American rights to the Tri-Ergon system, though the company found it inferior to Movietone and virtually impossible to integrate the two different systems to advantage.^[4] In 1927, as well, Fox retained the services of Freeman Owens, who had particular expertise in constructing cameras for synch-sound film.^[5]

Advanced sound-on-disc – Parallel with improvements in sound-on-film technology, a number of companies were making progress with systems in which movie sound was recorded onto phonograph discs. In sound-on-disc technology from the era, a phonograph turntable is connected by a mechanical interlock to a specially modified film projector, allowing for synchronization. In 1921, the Photokinema sound-on-disc system developed by Orlando Kellum was employed to add synchronized sound sequences to D. W. Griffith's failed silent film Dream Street. A love song, performed by star Ralph Graves, was recorded, as was a sequence of live vocal effects. Apparently, dialogue scenes were also recorded, but the results were unsatisfactory and the film was never publicly screened incorporating them. On May 1, 1921, Dream Street was rereleased, with love song added, at New York City's Town Hall theater, qualifying it—however haphazardly—as the first feature-length film with a live-recorded vocal sequence. There would be no others for more than six years.

In 1925, the then-midsized Hollywood studio Warner Bros. began experimenting with sound-on-disc systems at New York's Vitagraph Studios, which it had recently purchased. The Warner Bros. technology, named Vitaphone, was publicly introduced on August 6, 1926, with the premiere of the nearly three-hour-long Don Juan; the first feature-length movie to employ a synchronized sound system of any type throughout, its soundtrack contained a musical score and sound effects, but no recorded dialogue—in other words, it had been staged and shot as a silent film. Accompanying Don Juan, however, were eight shorts of musical performances, mostly classical, as well as a four-minute filmed introduction by Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, all with live-recorded sound; these were the first true sound films exhibited by a Hollywood studio.^[6] Don Juan would not go into general release until the following February, making the technically similar The Better 'Ole, put out by Warner Bros. in October 1926, the first feature film with synchronized playback throughout to show to a broad audience.

Sound-on-film would ultimately win out over sound-on-disc because of a number of fundamental technical advantages:

• Synchronization: no interlock system was completely reliable, and sound could fall out of synch due to disc skipping or minute changes in film speed, requiring constant supervision and frequent manual adjustment
• Editing: discs could not be directly edited, severely limiting the ability to make alterations in their accompanying films
• Distribution: phonograph discs added extra expense and complication to film distribution
• Wear and tear: the physical process of playing the discs degraded them, requiring their replacement after approximately twenty screenings

Nonetheless, in the early years, sound-on-disc had the edge over sound-on-film in two substantial ways:

• Production and capital cost: it was generally less expensive to record sound onto disc than onto film and the central exhibition systems—turntable/interlock/projector—were cheaper to manufacture than the complex image-and-audio-pattern-reading projectors required by sound-on-film
• Audio quality: gramophone discs, Vitaphone's in particular, had superior dynamic range to most sound-on-film processes of the day, at least during the first few playings—while sound-on-film tended to have better frequency response, this was outweighed by greater distortion and noise

As sound-on-film technology improved, both of these disadvantages were overcome.

The third crucial set of innovations marked a major step forward in both the live recording of sound and its effective playback:

Fidelity electronic recording and amplification – Beginning in 1922, the research branch of AT&T's Western Electric manufacturing division began working intensively on recording technology for both sound-on-disc and sound-on film. In 1925, the company publicly introduced a greatly improved system of electronic audio, including sensitive condenser microphones and rubber-line recorders. That May, the company licensed entrepreneur Walter J. Rich to exploit the system for commercial motion pictures; he founded Vitagraph, which Warner Bros. acquired a half interest in just one month later. In April 1926, Warners signed a contract with AT&T for exclusive use of its film sound technology for the redubbed Vitaphone operation, leading to the production of Don Juan and its accompanying shorts over the following months. During the period when Vitaphone had exclusive access to the patents, the fidelity of recordings made for Warners films was markedly superior to those made for the company's sound-on-film competitors. Meanwhile, Bell Labs—the new name for the AT&T research operation—was working at a furious pace on sophisticated sound amplification technology that would allow recordings to be played back over loudspeakers at theater-filling volume. The new moving-coil speaker system was installed in New York's Warners Theatre at the end of July and its patent submission, for what Western Electric called the No. 555 Receiver, was filed on August 4, just two days before the premiere of Don Juan.^[7]

Late in the year, AT&T/Western Electric created a licensing division, Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI), to handle rights to the company's film-related audio technology. Vitaphone still had legal exclusivity, but having lapsed in its royalty payments, effective control of the rights was in ERPI's hands. On December 31, Warners granted Fox-Case a sublicense for the use of the Western Electric system in exchange for a share of revenues that would go directly to ERPI.^[8] Superior recording and amplification technology was now available to two Hollywood studios, pursuing two very different methods of sound reproduction. The new year would finally see the emergence of sound cinema as a significant commercial medium.

Triumph of the "talkies"

On October 6, 1927, The Jazz Singer premiered. The success of the Warner Bros. musical did much to change the industry's perception of talking pictures. Produced with the Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded sound; the soundtrack relies, much like a silent movie, on a musical score and sound effects. When the movie's star, Al Jolson, sings, however, the film shifts to sound recorded on the set, including both his musical performances and two scenes with ad-libbed speech—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), addressing a cabaret audience; the other an exchange between him and his mother. Though the success of The Jazz Singer was due largely to Jolson, already established as a popular attraction, and its limited use of synchronized sound hardly qualified it as an innovative sound film (let alone the "first"), the movie's profits were proof enough to the industry that the technology was worth investing in.

The development of commercial sound cinema had proceeded in fits and starts before The Jazz Singer, and the film's success did not change things overnight. With Warners' exclusive contract having run its course, the major Hollywood studios signed up with ERPI to handle sound conversion, but they were initially slow to produce talking features of their own. No studio beside Warner Bros. released even a part-talking feature until the small Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) put out Perfect Crime in August 1928, ten months after The Jazz Singer. FBO had come under the effective control of a Western Electric competitor, General Electric's RCA division, which was looking to market its new sound-on-film system, Photophone. Unlike Fox-Case's Movietone and De Forest's Phonofilm, which were variable-density systems, Photophone was a variable-area system—a refinement in the way the audio signal was inscribed on film that would ultimately become the rule. By October, the FBO-RCA alliance would lead to the creation of Hollywood's newest major studio, RKO Pictures.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros. released the first all-talking feature, Lights of New York, in July 1928. The film cost only $75,000 to produce, but grossed over $2,000,000. In September, the studio released another Al Jolson part-talking picture, The Singing Fool, which made even more money than The Jazz Singer. This second Jolson screen success demonstrated the movie musical's ability to turn a song into a national hit: by the following summer, the Jolson number "Sonny Boy" had racked up 2 million record and 1.25 million sheet music sales.^[9] September 1928 also saw the release of Paul Terry's Dinner Time, among the first animated cartoons produced with synchronized sound. After seeing it, Walt Disney decided to make one of his Mickey Mouse shorts, Steamboat Willie, with sound as well.

Over the course of 1928, as Warner Bros. began to rake in huge profits due to the popularity of its sound films, the other studios quickened the pace of their conversion to the new technology. Expectations swiftly changed, and the "fad" of 1927 had become standard procedure by 1929, leading many movie reviewers to deride silent films as passé. In January 1929, fifteen months after The Jazz Singer's debut, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, then Hollywood's second most profitable studio behind Paramount, became the last of the majors to release its first part-talking feature, Alias Jimmy Valentine. Soon, silent film would be little more than a memory. The final silent feature put out by a major Hollywood studio was the Hoot Gibson oater Points West, released by Universal Pictures in August 1929.^[10] One month earlier, the first all-color, all-talking feature had gone into general release: Warner Bros.' On with the Show!

Consequences

Production

The phenomenon of the "talkies" is viewed as the final industry-wide development resulting in the domination of the Hollywood studio system over the global film business; at the same time, the introduction of synchronized sound caused immense difficulties in production. Cameras were noisy, so a soundproofed camera booth was used in the earliest talkies to isolate the loud equipment from the actors, at the expense of a drastic reduction in the ability to move the camera. The necessity to place microphones just so meant that actors often had to limit their movements unnaturally. In addition, some silent-era actors simply did not have attractive voices. These kinds of problems—famously spoofed in the 1952 film Singin' in the Rain—were soon solved with camera casings modified to suppress noise, boom microphones (essentially microphones on long poles to be held just above the photographed scene but out of the frame), and post-production sound recording techniques that facilitated, among other things, the dubbing of vocal performances. Show Girl in Hollywood (1930), from First National Pictures (which Warner Bros. had taken control of thanks to its profitable adventure into sound), provides a good behind-the-scenes look at some of the techniques involved in shooting early sound films.

Labor

While the introduction of sound led to a boom in the motion picture industry, it had an adverse effect on the employability of a host of Hollywood actors of the time; as suggested above, particularly those whose heavy accents or unpleasant speaking voices had previously been concealed. The careers of major silent stars Norma Talmadge and Clara Bow effectively came to an end in this way. The celebrated Swiss actor Emil Jannings returned to Europe. John Gilbert's voice was fine, but audiences found it an awkward match with his swashbuckling persona, and his star faded as well. Not only was silent film out-moded as a medium, audiences seemed to perceive many stars associated with it as old-fashioned, even those who had the talent to succeed in the sound era. Lillian Gish departed, back to the stage, and other leading figures soon left acting entirely: Colleen Moore, Gloria Swanson, and Hollywood's most famous performing couple, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Many of their most successful replacements came from vaudeville and the musical theater, where performers such as Jolson, Eddie Cantor, W. C. Fields, Jeanette MacDonald, Dick Powell, Mae West, and the Marx Brothers were accustomed to the demands of dialogue and song. James Cagney and Joan Blondell, who had teamed on Broadway, were brought west together by Warner Bros in 1930. A very few actors were major stars during both the silent and the sound eras: Richard Barthelmess, Clive Brook, Norma Shearer, the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and the incomparable Charlie Chaplin, whose City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) employed sound almost exclusively for music and effects. Joan Crawford became a top star with the synch-sound but dialogueless Our Dancing Daughters (1928). Greta Garbo was the one non-native-English-speaker to achieve Hollywood stardom on either side of the great sound divide.

As talking pictures emerged, with their prerecorded musical tracks, an increasing number of moviehouse orchestra musicians found themselves out of work.^[11] The American Federation of Musicians took out newspaper advertisements protesting the replacement of live musicians with mechanical playing devices. One 1929 ad that appeared in the Pittsburgh Press features an image of a can labeled "Canned Music / Big Noise Brand / Guaranteed to Produce No Intellectual or Emotional Reaction Whatever" and reads in part:

Canned Music on Trial
This is the case of Art vs. Mechanical Music in theatres. The defendant stands accused in front of the American people of attempted corruption of musical appreciation and discouragement of musical education. Theatres in many cities are offering synchronised mechanical music as a substitute for Real Music. If the theatre-going public accepts this vitiation of its entertainment program a deplorable decline in the Art of Music is inevitable. Musical authorities know that the soul of the Art is lost in mechanisation. It cannot be otherwise because the quality of music is dependent on the mood of the artist, upon the human contact, without which the essence of intellectual stimulation and emotional rapture is lost.^[12]

See also

• History of film
• Silent film
• Sound stage
• Film soundtrack
• Category:Film sound production for articles concerning the development of cinematic sound recording

Notes

Sources

• Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (1985). The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231060548
• Bradley, Edwin M. (2005). The First Hollywood Sound Shorts, 1926-1931. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0786410302
• Crafton, Donald (1997). The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0684195852
• Finler, Joel W. (1988). The Hollywood Story. New York: Crown. ISBN 0-517-56576-5
• Gomery, Douglas (2005). The Coming of Sound: A History. New York and Oxon, UK: Routledge. ISBN 041596900X
• Hijiya, James A. (1992). Lee De Forest and the Fatherhood of Radio. Cranbury, N.J., and London: Associated University Presses. ISBN 0934223238
• Liebman, Roy (2003). Vitaphone Films: A Catalogue of the Features and Shorts. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0786412798
• Robertson, Patrick (2001). Film Facts. New York: Billboard Books. ISBN 0823079430
• Sponable, E. I. (1947). "Historical Development of Sound Films," Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, vol. 48, nos. 4–5, April/May (available online).
• Utterson, Andrew (2005). Technology and Culture—The Film Reader. Oxford and New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0415319846

External links

• Dickson Experimental Sound Film discussion by restoration editor Walter Murch and clips of 1895 Edison sound film
• Edison: The Marriage of Sight and Sound brief essay on Edison's experiments; part of the Library of Congress/Inventing Entertainment website
• Film Sound History well-organized bibliography of online articles and resources; part of the FilmSound website
• "Madam, Will You Talk?" article on the history of Bell Laboratories' early research into sound film, by Stanley Watkins, Western Electric engineer
• Progressive Silent Film List (PSFL)/Early Sound Films comprehensive and detailed listing of first generation of sound films from around the world; part of the Silent Era website
• Recording Technology History extensive chronology of developments, including subsites, by Steven E. Schoenherr
• Sound-on-Film brief essay accompanied by Quicktime version of 1930s Bell Labs cartoon describing the process, with available transcript; part of the IEEE Virtual Museum website
• Sound Stage—The History of Motion Picture Sound informative illustrated survey; part of the American WideScreen Museum website