LIGHTS OF
NEW YORK
AND SOUNDS
OF HOLLYWOOD

Something of the fragrance and mystery of the screen departed on the echoes of Sonny Boy.

R. F. DELDERFIELD

1928: Hollywood’s year of decision—Hollywood’s year of transition. As it began, across the length and breadth of America there were still only 157, out of some 20,000 theaters, wired to show sound movies. And a mere 55 of them were equipped for sound-on-film. But within a year, no fewer than 1,046 theaters would be showing sound movies, and 1,032 of them would be equipped for both disk and film systems.¹

1928: the brakes were off at Warner Bros. At Stages Three, Four, and Five production was in full swing. The Warner studio would, in fact, provide more than 30 percent of the eighty or so feature-length sound films that were to be made in Hollywood during this crucial year.

Four types of Vitaphone movie were produced for release to the rapidly increasing number of theaters that were wired for sound: silent features with added sound effects and/or musical accompaniments, short subjects, part-talkies, and, eventually, “100% all-talkies”—or “talkers,” as they were sometimes called in 1928-29.

The first of the ten silent features supplied only with Vitaphone sound effects and/or a musical score was Beware of Married Men (premiered January 4, 1928), a farce about infidelity and divorce, directed by Archie L. Mayo and starring Irene Rich, Clyde Cook, Myrna Loy, and Richard Tucker. It was followed by: A Race for Life (January 28), a Rin-Tin-Tin melodrama, directed by D. Ross Lederman and starring (in addition to the celebrated dog star) Bobby Gordon, Carroll Nye, and Virginia Brown Faire; The Little Snob (February 11), a social comedy directed by John G. Adolfi and starring May McAvoy, John Miljan, and Robert Frazier; Across the Atlantic (February 25), a romantic drama about an air pilot—rather obviously exploiting the interest in Lindbergh’s 1927 flight-directed by Howard Bretherton and starring Monte Blue, Edna Murphy, and Burr Mcintosh; Powder My Back (March 10), a comedy-drama about flappers, directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Irene Rich, Audrey Ferris, Carroll Nye, and André Beranger; Domestic Troubles (March 24), a farcical comedy about twins, directed by Ray Enright and starring Clyde Cook, Louise Fazenda, and Betty Blythe; The Crimson City (April 7), a melodrama with a Chinese setting, directed by Archie L. Mayo and starring Myrna Loy, John Miljan, Leila Hyams, Anna May Wong, and Richard Tucker; Rinty of the Desert (April 21), another Rin-Tin-Tin picture, directed by D. Ross Lederman and starring Rinty, Carroll Nye, Paul Panzer (onetime celebrated villain of the Pearl White serials), and Audrey Ferris; Pay as You Enter (May 12), a comedy about a waitress and her boyfriends, directed by Lloyd Bacon and starring Louise Fazenda, Clyde Cook, Myrna Loy, and William Demarest; and, finally, Five-and-Ten-Cent Annie (May 26), a slapstick farce about a salesgirl in love with a garbage collector who has inherited a fortune, directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Louise Fazenda, Clyde Cook, and William Demarest. From this list it can be clearly seen that by 1928 Warner Bros, had established a repertoire of directors and actors specializing in films made for Vitaphone accompaniment.

Meanwhile, the usual variety of Vitaphone shorts—operatic, orchestral, vaudeville—was being produced on a regular schedule. Under Bryan Foy’s supervision, the

making of a one reel “short” was put through just as though it were a ten reel feature. . . . Theatre men had reported from the first that it was the “short,” the thing in which the picture talked, that really gripped the audience. . . . Foy, used to the stage where talk was the first tool of the actor, wanted to use his one-reel shorts for talk. He wanted to make brief sketches, or acts. It was an experiment. They were willing to let him try it. They would try them on the public, mix them in with the regular vaudeville shorts, and see what the public’s reaction to them was. They would be a feeler as to the acceptability of full-length talking pictures. In July 1927 . . . [Foy had] made a one-reel comedy called The Bookworm. In August 1927 he made a one-reel drama called The Lash, written by and featuring Hal Crane. It was an act Crane used in legitimate vaudeville. In October 1927, he made a two-reel drama called Solomon’s Children. The real “Talkie” was expanding. . . . This last two-reeler had just been made when word came for “More Talk.” The Jazz Singer’s premiere had been a sensation. Simultaneously the first of the one-reel talkies was being released to theatres and proving to be a great success. Talk, then, was going to be the order of the day.²

Tenderloin, Glorious Betsy, and The Lion and the Mouse, three of the Vitaphone features in production at Warner Bros. early in 1928, had originally been conceived along the lines of the ten features mentioned above; that is, as vehicles for nothing more ambitious than synchronized music and sound effects. But now, in the wake of public reaction to The Jazz Singer and to Foy’s short talkies, it was hastily decided to supply these three features with recorded dialogue sequences. At this stage there would be no attempt to make a film with all dialogue recorded. After all, the tremendous interest in films that talked might be nothing more than a passing craze. Now that it looked as if Warner Bros. was going to survive the great gamble with Vitaphone, the company was playing a more cautious game.

Tenderloin, the first of the three features to be released, established the interim period of the part-talkie, which had unintentionally been anticipated with The Jazz Singer. A crook melodrama directed by Michael Curtiz, Tenderloin (premiered March 14, 1928 at Warners’ Theatre in New York) starred Dolores Costello, Conrad Nagel, and John Miljan. The film was first shown with four talking sequences, but two of them proved damagingly ludicrous and were removed within the first week of the film’s run. The two that were retained were scarcely any better. Movie critics were undecided whether they were more objectionable for being irrelevant or for being absurd.

After reading the melodramatic phrases in the sub-titles, one is startled by the thundering voice of a sleuth [Fred Kelsey] trying to make our dainty heroine [Rose, played by Dolores Costello] confess that she stole the bag containing $50,000. . . . [Later] one comes to a sequence wherein Rose and the “Professor,” a lame but immensely powerful man, are left alone in a country house. For this episode it was thought that the Vitaphone was necessary and therefore one again hears the blasts from shadows on the screen. . . . Mitchell Lewis is capable as the “Professor,” but words such as he has to utter would destroy the value of any acting. It looks very much as if the title writer had supplied the words to the actors. At any rate the spectators were moved to loud mirth during the spoken episodes of this lurid film.³

Nevertheless, Tenderloin and the next two part-talkies “broke box office records . . . the public loved them and nobody but Warners was making them.”⁴

Glorious Betsy came next, premiering at Warners’ Theatre in New York on April 26, 1928. An historical drama about the love affair of Jerome Bonaparte (brother of Napoleon I) and Elizabeth (Betsy) Patterson, the Belle of Baltimore, this film was Alan Crosland’s first deliberate venture into the part-talkie. Its stars were the same as Tenderloin’s, but this time the reviewers were more receptive. Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times actually preferred Glorious Betsy to Sidney Olcott’s Monsieur Beaucaire (1924), one of Valentino’s most admired films. Although the spoken dialogue scenes did not impress him as significant contributions to the film (“In this instance it is the picture that matters rather than the spoken word”), he praised Dolores Costello’s restrained utterances as “decidedly effective” and singled out another, nondialogue Vitaphone sequence for especially favorable comment. This last was an episode in which André de Segurola, a Metropolitan Opera singer, gave a stirring rendition of “La Marseillaise.” On the debit side, Hall deplored Conrad Nagel’s failing even to attempt a suggestion of French pronunciation in his role as Jerome Bonaparte. It was already clear from the first two part-talkies that the coming of sound would demand radical changes on the part of screenwriters and actors. Nevertheless, the reviewer’s concluding assessment of Glorious Betsy was unusually generous—towards its director. The film was, he maintained, Crosland’s “outstanding pictorial achievement. The narrative flows gently and there is always a measure of suspense. . . . Crosland is to be congratulated on his direction of the film.”⁵

Glorious Betsy was the first sound movie seen by director William C. DeMille (Cecil’s elder brother). A memorable account of the experience was recorded in his book, Hollywood Saga (1939):

In April, 1928 . . . The Warner Brothers were opening their new Hollywood Theater with a picture called Glorious Betsy. . . and, as we had heard that there was some sort of new-fangled sound effect connected with the production, I took [my wife] Clara [Beranger] along to see what it was all about. We knew, of course, that experiments were being made in talking pictures, but that sort of thing had been going on for years. In fact, I myself had lost a few hundred dollars to oblige a friend who had devised a film-phonograph combination which was very scientific and most interesting but which, unfortunately, never worked. . . .

We sat in the darkened theater and watched Glorious Betsy unwind herself. For several reels it was just a regular picture, the plot of which I have forgotten, but I shall never forget the moment when André de Segurola, playing the part of a military officer, stood in the middle of the picture to address the group around him.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said.

He said!

A thrill ran through the house. The screen had spoken at last; an operation had been performed and the man, dumb from infancy, could talk. No one minded, at first, the gentle, crackling noise [amplified surface noise of the recording] which pervaded the scene. It sounded like a grass fire, but it was to turn into a conflagration which swept away the Hollywood we had known and forced us to build a new city on the ruins of the old.

Many in that audience missed the full significance of what was happening. The voice was tinny, tubby and bellowy in turn, but what did that matter? It had spoken to us from the screen; it had said: “Ladies and gentlemen”. . . .

As I realized the future possibilities of what I was seeing and hearing, I felt a nervous quiver run through me. . . . The nervous tension and sense of excitement which I felt on that night of April 26, 1928, was to last all through the first two hectic years of “sound.”⁶

The Lion and the Mouse, directed by Lloyd Bacon and starring Lionel Barrymore and May McAvoy, received its premiere almost two months after Glorious Betsy, on June 15, 1928, at Warners’ Theatre, New York. Based on a melodrama by Charles Klein, about a ruthless financier who tries to ruin an innocent judge by accusing him of taking bribes, it had previously been filmed in 1919 with Alice Joyce as the star. The New York Times review offered a particularly acute critique of this latest, part-talkie version, and also demonstrated a clear understanding of the drastic improvements that would be necessary if Warner Bros. was to venture further into the making of spoken dialogue movies. The review starts out with high praise of Lionel Barrymore.

Mr. Barrymore’s knowledge of diction, linked with his splendid acting, overwhelmed the other players who were evidently handicapped . . . by the fact that they were aware that they had also to be heard. . . . Mr. Barrymore’s work alone . . . demonstrated that with adequate histrionic talent a really laudable picture with speech is not only possible, but virtually on the wing. In each of the three attempts at a speaking picture the Warner Brothers have made strides, but the words spoken in last night’s presentation show that they still need far more careful thought given to the lines. William Collier Jr., May McAvoy and even Alec Francis appear merely to speak their lines so that they can be heard . . . and the consequence is that this trio of performers, in what they say via the Vitaphone, are sadly reminiscent of the old melodrama days. . . . Mr. Barrymore is marvellously natural and in speaking he really enhances his characterization. But it is quite disappointing to hear the trite and ineffectual words of his colleagues. ..it is also a mistake to have silent sequences and then to hear a character who has been silent suddenly boom forth into speech. . . . It is quite obvious from this Vitaphoned picture that the ordinary screen players, who have been noted for their agreeable presence, will find it necessary to go through a course of stage training before they can deliver competent performances in a Vitaphoned feature.⁷

But there was no time for lessons. For Lights of New York, Warner Bros.’ first all-dialogue picture, opened at the Mark Strand Theatre, New York, on July 8, 1928. The age of the talkies had dawned.

Despite its obvious historical importance, Lights of New York is a little-known film today. For every thousand persons who have seen The Jazz Singer it is doubtful if there are more than a handful who have even heard of Lights of New York. Few film societies have shown any interest in reviving it, and few film historians have made any effort to see it or comment upon it from direct experience. Mel Gussow, a recent biographer of movie tycoon Darryl F. Zanuck, observes that Lights of New York was

probably one of the worst pictures ever made. There are still titles, but more hysterical than ever, as if the titlewriter, with the advent of sound, had decided to speak louder himself. [In fact, the film has only three intertitles and none of them is hysterical.] “In the symphony of jazz,” goes a typical title, “there are many blue-notes.” [Actually, this title does not appear in the film at all!] Worst of all is the self-conscious use of sound. The picture is a veritable cacophony of cars screeching, whistles, doors slamming—as if a sound man had run amuck.⁸ [This totally incorrect statement can only have been made by someone who has imagined what the film was like without having seen it.]^*

We have relied too long on inaccurate descriptions of this kind. A more careful look at the picture is long overdue.

Lights of New York was directed by Bryan Foy, photographed by Ed DuPar, and edited by Jack Killifer. The story, scenario, and dialogue of this Prohibition-era melodrama were by Murray Roth and Hugh Herbert. The film’s opening intertitles emphasize both its topicality and the thematic importance of its contrasting small-town and big-city locations:

This is a story of Main Street and Broadway—a story that might have been torn out of last night’s newspaper.

Main Street—forty-five minutes from Broadway—but a thousand miles away.

Two naive barbers, Eddie Morgan (Cullen Landis) and his pal Gene (Eugene Pallette), run their sleepy business in a smalltown hotel owned by Eddie’s mother. Eddie dreams of having a successful career in New York and also of joining his girlfriend, Kitty Lewis (Helene Costello), who has become a nightclub queen in the big city. A golden opportunity seems to present itself when two amiable hotel guests—actually a couple of con-men—offer Eddie and Gene the chance of buying a lucrative barbershop in New York provided they can put up the necessary capital. The two barbers have no money, and Eddie’s mother (Mary Carr) is reluctant to provide it until she is introduced to the con-men and taken in by their apparent honesty.

The scene shifts to New York. Eddie and Gene, now set up in their new barbershop, discover that it is actually a front for a gang of bootleggers. The bootleggers rob a liquor warehouse and kill a cop as they are making their getaway.

In Central Park, Eddie and Kitty talk over their problems. Eddie wants to pull out of the barbershop without losing his mother’s money. Kitty is sick of nightclub life. Eddie gives her a gun to protect herself from unwelcome admirers.

Kitty’s boss, Hawk Miller (Wheeler Oakman), runs a joint called the Night Hawk. He is also head of the bootlegging racket. Hawk gives the brush-off to Molly Thompson (Gladys Brockwell), his former mistress. He is interested in Kitty. But Molly warns him to keep away from her. Hawk assumes that he can get Kitty for himself if her boyfriend is removed, so he plans a frame-up. Eddie is duped into taking possession of the stolen liquor; then Hawk informs the cops when and where they can find it. By chance, Kitty overhears the dastardly scheme and manages to warn Eddie. Hawk arrives at the barbershop expecting to witness the end of his rival, but he is mysteriously shot just before the police arrive. The killer’s identity seems clear when Detective Crosby (Robert Elliott) finds the murder weapon: it is the gun that Eddie had given to Kitty.

The scene shifts to Kitty’s apartment. The young couple are about to be arrested by Detective Crosby when Molly appears and confesses that she had shot the Hawk for deserting her and showing interest in another woman. She also reveals that it was Hawk Miller who had shot the cop during the warehouse robbery. Crosby responds to this confession with comforting words. Molly has saved the young couple, and the law will be kind to her. She will actually get a reward for getting rid of a cop-killer. Turning to the young couple, Crosby advises them to leave the big city as soon as possible and go back where they came from. Eddie and Kitty—needing no further encouragement—take the next train out of New York.

With all its absurdities of motivation, plot, and character, Lights of New York is no worse than the average crook melodrama of the late twenties. The picture has a familiar major theme and several well-worked minor ones. Its strongest emphasis is on the corruptions and dangers of the big city and the implied virtues and safety of small-town life. (This theme had a venerable melodramatic tradition in the theater long before the movies were born.) In Lights of New York it is hammered out with the subtlety of a steamroller. Except for Detective Crosby, the stern, authoritarian opponent of criminal chaos, all the “good guys” are naive, small-town folks. All the “bad guys” are sophisticated city slickers. Eddie’s hometown is slow and unglamorous but peaceful, whereas New York is presented as a place of ever-present danger, whose attractive “lights” glamorize a corrupt world of criminals, con-men, seducers, and fallen women, and tempt the innocent and the unsuspecting into a downward spiral of destruction. At the end of the picture, Crosby turns to Eddie and Kitty and reinforces the movie’s moral: “If you both will take my tip, you’ll get out of this city. Don’t you see how close you’ve been to tragedy? Take a train to the country where there’s trees and flowers and mountains. Leave the roaring Forties to roar without you.”

A lesser melodramatic theme related to the main one concerns the evil consequences of wanting more than one has. The moral is evident in countless movies both before and after Lights of New York: be satisfied or you’ll get your comeuppance. Eddie Morgan’s discontent and his desire to make a big success of himself by turning his back on the place where he belongs lead him into the entrapments of the city. He becomes rather like an unfunny Harold Lloyd–melodrama is, in many respects, a serious variation of farce–living out the disillusions of the American dream, discovering and enduring the unforeseen consequences of ambition, but surviving because he has learned his lesson and is now eager to return to his Garden of Eden in upstate New York. Hawk Miller’s fate typifies the “poetic justice” of much movie melodrama. The consequences of the villain’s attempt to destroy another is to destroy himself. Hawk sets a trap for Eddie, but meets his own death when he tries to spring it. Finally, in a typical melodramatic denouement, justice reasserts itself. Molly, we are assured, will not have to pay the penalty for killing her faithless lover, while Eddie and Kitty will live happily ever after, secure in the haven they should never have left.

It was, of course, the sound and not the story that distinguished Bryan Foy’s picture. And in this respect alone it was truly a remarkable film. Lights of New York ran for a mere fifty-seven minutes, but twenty-two of its twenty-four sequences contained recorded dialogue. These passages were consistently audible, generally very well synchronized, and often lasted for several minutes at a time. Except for the opening intertitle and a later title introducing the Night Hawk club, the movie relied throughout on the spoken—not the written—word. It would have been meaningless if shown as a silent picture.

Film historians have repeatedly maintained that the coming of sound shackled the movie camera. But strictly speaking, that was no longer true by the time Vitaphone pictures were being made in Hollywood. The newly designed camera booths in operation at Stages Three, Four, and Five allowed for much more camera movement than had been possible at the Manhattan Opera House. However, the

complete shifting of camera, microphone, and electrical apparatus [involved a] time-taking procedure . . . for almost every “set-up”. . . . Movies thus shrank to a minimum number of shots, as a stage play is restricted to a limited number of scenes. Synchronization of sound and image was a highly exacting task, curtailing the director’s freedom; and editing itself returned to the rudimentary level of pre-war [World War I] days.⁹

It was the actor who was really shackled. He had become the slave of the microphone. In order to achieve a satisfactorily audible recording of the human voice, it was necessary (just as it had been with the pre-1910 disk systems of Gaumont and Edison) for the performer to be as close as possible to the microphones.¹⁰ His restricted range of movement was scarcely apparent in relatively static scenes from grand opera, but it was a very different matter in an incident-packed melodrama.

There were at most two hidden microphone placements on any given set for Lights of New York, and the actors were directed to keep as near to them as possible whenever they spoke. The results were frequently ludicrous. Characters who were standing up while making long speeches seemed inexplicably rooted to the same spot; characters who were engaged in conversation often seemed to be huddled ridiculously close together. In one scene, a microphone concealed in a headrest explains Eddie’s curious fondness for speaking only when he is standing beside an empty barber chair. In another, the M.C. at the Night Hawk “dances” and sings “Morning Glory” without moving from a fixed spot beneath a bunch of festoons that concealed a microphone. In yet another barbershop scene, Gene crosses the room and stands close to Eddie in order to read the newspaper headlines aloud! When Hawk calls a meeting of his “boys” they go into a huddle around a telephone prominently placed in the foreground. It is, of course, another concealed microphone.¹¹ Unintentionally disconcerting effects are created in several scenes in which there were microphone placements on each side of a room. Actors appearing in these scenes sometimes start out by speaking within earshot of one microphone, then lapse into a silence that lasts until they have crossed the room and are within range of the second microphone. The musical Singin’ in the Rain (1952) amusingly parodies such absurdities of the early dialogue film—though several scenes of Lights of New York are even more hilarious than the parody.

Unnatural movements were not, unfortunately, the only shortcomings of Lights of New York. Some of the actors had little or no idea of how to deliver spoken lines, and they received inadequate direction from Bryan Foy. Also, much of the dialogue was repetitive, and some of it was ridiculous and could not have been made to sound any better by even the most experienced actors. Mary Carr’s delivery was by far the worst. Although she was a talented veteran of the silent screen (she had received critical acclaim for her performances in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, 1919, and Over the Hill, 1920), her misguided notion of rendering lines of spoken dialogue was to say them at a speed equivalent to that of the most painfully slow reader of silent film intertitles. Cullen Landis was scarcely any better. His words trickled out as if he had taken a heavy dose of sleeping pills. Mary Carr soon got the idea of what sound movies required and went on to obtain parts in at least a dozen films during the thirties, as well as to make a late appearance in Friendly Persuasion (1956). But for Cullen Landis, Lights of New York was almost the end of the road. He had appeared in approximately fifty silent movies, but after Lights he went on to make only five more films, including one talkie, The Convict’s Code (1930). Aside from his inability to adapt to the new demands of sound pictures, Landis suffered from the fact that he looked very much like Richard Arlen without possessing any of Arlen’s talent.

The actor with the most sensitivity to the new medium was Wheeler Oakman, who generally knew how to make Hawk Miller’s lines sound natural. Oakman had played various roles in Hollywood movies since the teens, and before acquiring his moustache, had costarred with Bill Farnum in the first version of The Spoilers (1914), but his performance in Lights of New York established him as the ideal heavy for early sound gangster pictures. He was soon to be in great demand and appeared in no fewer than a dozen talkies or part-talkies during 1929. His career continued well into the thirties, and serial addicts still fondly remember the delicious villainy with which he opposed Buster Crabbe in Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (Universal, 1938).

Lights of New York is a rich mine for collectors of movie clichés; here are a few of its choicest gems:

Sequence 11: Kitty’s dressing room at the Night Hawk: Kitty and Eddie.

Kitty: . . . Don’t you ever get bored looking at me, Eddie?

Eddie: Well I get bored looking at anyone but you. . . . You know, someday I’m going to have a night club all of my own with no one in it but you and me . . .

Sequence 24: Kitty’s apartment: Kitty and Eddie, Molly and Crosby–

Molly [having just revealed that she had killed the Hawk]: . . . He was no good—but I loved him. Well, he’s gone now. . . . That’s all. [She turns to Detective Crosby] Come on, let’s get it over with. I’m not afraid. I’ve lived—and I’ve loved—and I’ve lost!

These phrases were, of course, the well-worn language of stage melodrama. Less familiar and more effective was the slangy gangster dialogue already pointing the way to its racier and more skillful treatment in the screenplays of Francis Faragoh (Little Caesar, 1930) and Kubec Glasmon (The Public Enemy, 1931);

Sequence 21: Hawk’s office: the Hawk with two of his “boys.”

Hawk: Now we’d better cover ourselves up. I’ve planted the stuff in Eddie’s shop—

1st crook: Yeah?

Hawk: —and the dicks’ll be there at ten o’clock—

1st crook: Uh-huh.

Hawk: BUT-THEY-MUST-NOT-FIND-EDDIE!

1st crook (Puzzled): What do you want us to do?

Hawk: I want you guys to make him disappear.

1st crook (even more puzzled): Disappear?

Hawk: Certainly. If they don’t find him it will cinch everything for us. Don’t you understand?

1st crook: You mean—?

Hawk: TAKE HIM FOR– –A RIDE!

1st crook (suddenly seeing the light): O– –oh!

Although so much of Lights of New York was undeniably ridiculous, there were a few flashes of intelligence in Foy’s direction of the picture. Realizing that the limited movements of his actors would prevent him from staging a fast-paced warehouse robbery in full view of the cameras, Foy cleverly shot the sequence as an interplay of shadows and relied on music and sound effects to build suspense. Then, as an anonymous review for the New York Times notes, there was also “careful direction . . . in a cabaret scene when a door opens and the music sounds louder . . . when it closes again, the music grows dim.”¹²

Throughout much of the film, the music, while not particularly tasteful or original, was used sensibly and with admirable restraint. It occurs naturally enough when the M.C. sings, when Kitty and her all-girl chorus of Dancing Pirates go through their routines, or when one of the con-men turns on the radio; elsewhere, it provides an ironically optimistic mood at the start of the film (light vaudeville music plays behind the dialogue), serves to introduce the New York sequences (“Give My Regards to Broadway” is played during a montage of street scenes), and intensifies both the robbery sequence and Molly’s confession. But music is absent from certain sequences (such as the episodes in Hawk’s office) in which Foy evidently assumed that it would distract attention from the dialogue.

Shortly after the premiere of Lights of New York an editorial in the Exhibitors’ Herald and Moving Picture World found it

particularly interesting to note in this picture the development of a new technic—one that differs radically from the practices that have characterized the best motion pictures of recent years. With the introduction of dialogue, the closeup is dispensed with and its absence is hardly noticeable because the spoken word easily and more naturally yields the desired emphasis. Also various kinds of scenes—such as cabaret sequences which never previously meant much except for atmospheric purposes—with dialogue and music become high spots in the production.

The same editorial observed that

Lights of New York is a graphic illustration of where the synchronized picture is leading. . . . Without the synchronization . . . [it] would be a picture that would not materially stir the motion picture market. As a film it is not a subject that even nearly ranks with the best efforts of Warner Brothers, but under the magic of the dialogue accompaniment it becomes a thoroughly interesting picture and one that doubtlessly will be a major attraction for the theatres during the coming season.¹³

It was. As another commentator noted,

The first all-talking picture, without even a subtitle, caught the interest of New York. . . . An audience that ranged from Ina Claire to Tammany Young gathered to take a look and a hear. . . . [It] drew unusual crowds to the Strand on Monday afternoon, a blistering hot day. There was a line at the box office and seats were at a premium. At the end of every show the audience broke into spontaneous applause.¹⁴

In a separate article, the same commentator stated:

The synchronized picture, admittedly the most brilliant development of the film industry in recent years, has captured the imagination and the interest of a world intent on motion pictures. Synchronized pictures hold the center of the screen. . . .¹⁵

In the final analysis, there are two important things to be said about Lights of New York. First, it had demonstrated that a feature-length talking picture could be made. But much more significantly, it had revealed to the astonished Warner Bros. and to the disturbed and even more dumbfounded movie industry as a whole that such a film could attract audiences. They looked, they listened, and sometimes they laughed in the wrong places—but they kept on coming. And it was the talk, not the music, that brought them in droves to the Mark Strand Theatre. The movie industry’s reluctant recognition of the film’s importance was anticipated by the New York Times reviewer: “Lights of New York,” he wrote, “is the alpha of what may develop as the new language of the screen. . . . While the picture could not be described as the best of entertainment, it is novel and may, in its halting manner, be pointing the way to the future.”¹⁶

With the success of Lights of New York, Bryan Foy was firmly established at Warner Bros. But his talents were quickly and correctly recognized as those of a producer rather than a director. He was, in fact, to direct only a handful of movies, but went on to become a major producer. During the mid+thirties he headed Warner Bros,’

“B” or program picture unit . . . [and] was assigned to make twenty-six features with a total budget of $5,000,000.00. (The “A” picture, The Life of Emile Zola, cost approximately $1,000,000.00 in 1936.) Foy’s pictures featured inserts (newspaper clips) which advanced the story without using actors. He employed many closeups to keep attention diverted from the sets. About half of Foy’s pictures were remakes of past Warner Brothers films. . . .¹⁷

Later, he would occasionally free-lance. For example, he produced Guadalcanal Diary (1943) for 20th Century-Fox. But most of his big successes were produced for Warner Bros. Among them were I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951); House of Wax (1953), the most successful film of the short-lived 3-D craze; and PT 109 (1963), the movie about John F. Kennedy’s wartime exploits. Like Alan Crosland, Foy’s career is a subject worthy of future research.

Following Lights of New York , Warner Bros. released three all-talkie and seven part-talkie Vitaphone features during 1928.

First came an all-talkie, The Terror, a horror-mystery based on a novel by Edgar Wallace. Directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Edward Everett Horton, May McAvoy, Louise Fazenda, and John Miljan, it was premiered at Warners’ Theatre in New York on August 15, 1928. The New York Times referred to it as a “titleless talking film,” and observed that in this second all-talking Vitaphone production, “it appears to be infra dig. to have the slightest suggestion of the familiar subtitle. Even the main title, the cast of players and the names of those who have contributed to the making of this audible film are announced from the screen by the shadow of a masked man.”¹⁸

The masked man was the Terror, a criminal in a black hood who pursued the heroine through the secret tunnels and passages of an old dark house. There are numerous similarities to Paul Leni’s highly successful The Cat and the Canary (1927), one of the most interesting being the parallel between the comic character Ferdinand Fane (played by Horton) in Del Ruth’s picture and the comic hero Paul Jones (Creighton Hale) in Leni’s film. Neither character turned out to be as foolish as he seemed. Mordaunt Hall considered The Terror to be the best Vitaphone feature he had seen, and praised Del Ruth for shrewdly combining good motion picture ideas with the sound material. Horton and Otto Hoffman (who played Soapy Marks, a criminal) were singled out for their impressive performances. The picture had its shortcomings, but they were chiefly due

to the manner in which the performers speak their lines and not to the Vitaphone device. . . . with most of the [actors] . . . the speech comes forth as if by command and with a tardiness that is hardly natural. It also seems as if Miss McAvoy had somebody else do the screaming for her, as the screams at various junctures are far louder than one would expect from Miss McAvoy after hearing her modest attempts at speech.¹⁹

The Terror quickly eclipsed the appeal of Lights of New York to become Warner Bros.’ most lucrative picture since The Jazz Singer. Its commercial success was immediate on both sides of the Atlantic. Rachel Low notes that The Jazz Singer, which received its British premiere on September 27, 1928, was closely followed by The Terror (October 1928). “These pictures created a sensation, especially when it was heard later that Warner Brothers’ profit for 1928 would be over £ 1,600,000.”²⁰

The next Vitaphone feature was the part-talkie State Street Sadie (Mark Strand Theatre, September 2, 1928). It was yet another crook melodrama, directed by Archie L. Mayo and starring Conrad Nagel and Myrna Loy. The lead performances were well received; one of them, Myrna Loy, was rising to stardom through her appearances in Vitaphone features. The film itself demonstrated no progress in the handling of recorded dialogue and was only a moderate success at the box office.

It was followed, however, by a box-office triumph, The Singing Fool. It was Al Jolson’s second feature, and a part-talkie. Warner Bros. released in advance a fifteen-minute preview titled “Al Jolson in Announcement Trailer for The Singing Fool.” The preview is described as follows in the copyright statement on file in the Library of Congress: “Al Jolson walks on in blackface, to applause offscene. He whistles to stop it and tells his audience of his picture, The Singing Fool. He tells of his airplane trip East, and concludes by urging his hearers to see his new picture and thanking them for having seen his old one.”

The film had originally been named Sonny Boy, after what was to become its best-loved song, but was premiered as The Singing Fool at the Winter Garden in New York, on September 19, 1928. It was transferred to the Sam H. Harris Theatre on March 11, 1929 in order to make way for Michael Curtiz’s Vitaphone (part-talkie) epic, Noah’s Ark. The Singing Fool was directed by Lloyd Bacon and photographed by Byron Haskin. The screenplay was the work of Leslie S. Barrows and C. Graham Baker, and Jolson’s supporting actors were Betty Bronson, Josephine Dunn, Arthur Housman, Robert Emmett O’Connor, and, of course, little Davey Lee, who played Sonny Boy. The brothers Warner, correctly attributing their meteoric surge of prosperity to their association with Jolson and the Vitaphone, had decided to treat this latest golden combination as the opportunity for a gala occasion.

The price for orchestra seats for this first performance was $11. The tickets were of gilded cardboard with a drawing of Mr. Jolson as he is and then in blackface. The men on the doors did not take up these tickets, but permitted the holders to retain them as souvenirs of the occasion. . . . After the film had faded from the screen Mr. Jolson was called to the stage. The first words he said were:

“What can I say?”

To this a thousand voices shouted, “Sing!”

Mr. Jolson talked, however, and said that he thought that The Singing Fool was a better production than his first film, The Jazz Singer. He referred to the fact that he had been eighteen years with the Shuberts and that he was going back on the stage under their management, but would make several more pictures, possibly, before doing so.²¹

In its songs and sentiment and in its Pagliacci-like climax of a heartbroken singer performing in spite of himself, the appeal of The Singing Fool was much the same as that of The Jazz Singer, but it was also touched by the vogue of the gangster melodrama. Jolson plays Al Stone, a singing waiter at Blackie Joe’s café. He writes a song hit, becomes a vaudeville star, and marries Molly Winton (Josephine Dunn). In due course, Molly deserts him for a big-time racketeer (Reed Howes); when she leaves she takes their child, Sonny Boy, along with her. Now that he is desolate, Al’s fortunes take a nose dive. He becomes a bum with nothing to live for, but is eventually saved by Grace (Betty Bronson), a cigarette girl at Blackie Joe’s who encourages him to make a comeback. As Al’s fortunes are taking an upward turn, tragedy strikes. Sonny Boy dies. But the show must go on. Brokenhearted, Al goes on stage and sings his child’s favorite song (“When there are grey skies,/I don’t mind the grey skies,/You make them blue, Sonny Boy. . . ./And the angels grew lonely,/Took you ‘cause they were lonely;/I’m lonely too, Sonny Boy.”) Time passes. Grace’s love helps to relieve Al’s anguish. Finally, when he is able to look life in the face once more, Al goes off to California, taking Grace with him.

Mordaunt Hall spoke for the majority of critics and reviewers who were won over by the magnetism of Jolson.

Mr. Jolson has put a great deal of feeling into both his singing and acting in this new offering, in which there are peculiarly appealing bits of sentiment, especially when Mr. Jolson, as Al Stone, tells bedtime stories and sings to his little boy. . . . It is charming when Al Stone reveals his love for the child and it is wonderfully affective when Sonny Boy’s terse utterances are heard from the screen. A child named David Lee figures as Sonny Boy and he is perhaps more natural in his speech than any of the adults in the film. . . . The chief interest in this production, however, is not in its transparent narrative, but in Mr. Jolson’s inimitable singing.²²

Jolson’s seven songs for this picture were to sweep the world, reaping fabulous royalties in sheet music and record sales.^* Aside from “Sonny Boy” by Lew Brown, B. G. DeSylva, and Ray Henderson, they were “It All Depends on You” and “I’m Sittin’ on Top of the World” (also by Brown, DeSylva, and Henderson); and “There’s a Rainbow Round My Shoulder,” “The Spaniard Who Blighted My Life,” “Golden Gate,” and “Keep Smilin’ at Life” (all by Billy Rose, Al Jolson, and Dave Dreyer). Also, as background and mood music, Lou Silvers, the film’s music director, supplied an arrangement of Leoncavallo’s “Vesti la guibba” from I Pagliacci.

The most popular song, beyond question, was “Sonny Boy.” Al’s brother, Harry, provides an interesting anecdote about its composition.

Warner Brothers rushed Al into another full-length talking picture, The Singing Fool. There was a feature song in it which Al did not like when he heard it at a preview.

He dashed out of the theater, went to a telephone and called Buddy DeSylva who was in Atlantic City. Briefly he stated his woes and demanded a song.

“What is it supposed to be about?” asked DeSylva.

“Well, first I am talking with a boy. Then I sing.”

“How old is the boy supposed to be?” DeSylva countered.

“He is about three, and is standing at my knee.”

“That’s fine,” DeSylva said. “I have two lines ready. ‘Climb upon my knee, sonny boy; although you’re only three, sonny boy.’ Why don’t you take it from there?”

Al took it from there, and “Sonny Boy” was the hit of The Singing Fool. It brought Al a fortune from the sales of sheet music and records.²³

Jolson’s career as a movie star peaked with The Singing Fool. He would go on to star in ten or more sound movies, but none of them aroused the universal excitement generated by his first two Vitaphone features. Through The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool, Jolson and the talkies became identified in the public mind during the first years of the sound era—although, as we have seen, neither of these films was a true, all-talkie. After attending The Singing Fool in October 1928, P. S. Harrison, editor of Harrison’s Reports, expressed what was rapidly becoming an accepted viewpoint both inside and outside the film industry: “I could not help coming to the conclusion that talking pictures are here to stay, that they are a permanent institution, the kind that fires the imagination of the picturegoer.”²⁴

After The Singing Fool, Warner Bros. released another parttalkie, Women They Talk About (premiered at the Strand Theatre, New York, October 14, 1928), a comedy-drama about a career woman whose daughter was a flapper. Directed by Lloyd Bacon, it starred Irene Rich, Audrey Ferris, Claude Gillingwater, and John Miljan. Warner Bros.’ third all-talkie, The Home Towners, came next. Premiered at Warners’ Theatre on October 23, 1928, this picture was directed by Bryan Foy and starred Doris Kenyon, Richard Bennett, Robert Edeson, and John Miljan. The Home Towners was based on a popular play by George M. Cohan and had the added distinction of being the first all-talkie without any song sequences. It was followed by another part-talkie, Roy Del Ruth’s Beware of Bachelors (October 27, 1928). This picture continued a late-twenties vogue of farces of marital infidelity that had begun with Wesley Ruggles’s silent Beware of Widows (Universal Pictures, 1927) and progressed through Archie Mayo’s aforementioned Vitaphone Beware of Married Men and George B. Seitz’s silent Beware of Blondes (Columbia Pictures, July 1928). Del Ruth’s picture starred Audrey Ferris, William Collier, and André Beranger, and it concerned a vamp’s involvements with a quarrelsome couple. Thereafter came another part-talkie gangster melodrama: The Midnight Taxi (premiered at the Mark Strand, October 28, 1928). Directed by John Adolfi, it starred Helene Costello, Antonio Moreno, and Myrna Loy. The program featuring The Midnight Taxi also included a Movietone newsreel that, for the first time, was preceded by a recorded voice announcing what was to become a familiar slogan, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we offer you the news of the world, in sound and pictures. . . .”

Warner Bros.’ fourth all-talkie, On Trial (premiered November 14 at Warners’ Theatre), was based on a courtroom drama by Elmer Rice. Directed by Archie L. Mayo, it starred Pauline Frederick, Lois Wilson, Bert Lytell, Richard Tucker, and Jason Robards. The sound system appears to have been less than satisfactory for this film. At its worst, Vitaphone tended to distort S sounds into a pronounced lisp; with On Trial the distortion was evidently excessive. At any rate, many reviewers complained about it and also about the poor diction of some of the performers. On Trial was followed by the part-talkie Caught in the Fog (premiered December 2 at the Mark Strand), a comedy drama about a gang of burglars and a rich young man trying to pass himself off as a butler. It was directed by Howard Bretherton and starred May McAvoy, Conrad Nagel, and Mack Swain. The New York Times reviewer found the movie “adroitly directed, cleverly acted and nicely photographed,” but noted that the “vocal angle . . . begins with a series of intentional whispers, following which there are mute passages relieved by periodical outbursts of brave dialogue.”²⁵

Warner Bros. wound up its Vitaphone offerings for 1928 with another box-office blockbuster. This time the star was Fanny Brice, queen of the Ziegfeld Follies. The part-talkie My Man (premiered at Warners’ Theatre, December 21, 1928) was her screen debut. It was directed by Archie L. Mayo and had Guinn Williams, Edna Murphy, and Richard Tucker as supporting players. Some of Fanny Brice’s songs for the film were among her best known: “If You Want a Rainbow, You Must Have the Rain” (Billy Rose, Mort Dixon, and Oscar Levant), “I’m an Indian” (Blanche Merrill and Leo Edwards), “I’d Rather Be Blue with You Than Happy with Somebody Else” (Billy Rose and Fred Fisher), and “I Was a Floradora Baby” (Ballard MacDonald and Harry Carroll). There was also, of course, the film’s title song (by Channing Pollock and Maurice Yvain).

“My Man,” a song of ill-fated love, had been the show-stopping number of the sumptuous 1921 Ziegfeld Follies. Florenz Ziegfeld had originally intended it to be sung by French artiste Mistin-guett, but at rehearsals he was dissatisfied with her interpretation. According to Charles Higham

he saw immediately that the song would be ideal for Fanny Brice. It was perfect because Fanny, whom he adored, needed to develop a new image, and her tragic affair with Nicky Arnstein was currently making national headlines. He told her to memorize “My Man” for rehearsal. He was horrified when she walked on stage dressed up like a female impersonator in a grotesque red wig and shawl. Ziegfeld ran up to the stage, ripped off the wig and flung it in the wings. He pulled her shawl off and tore her dress from neck to hem. Then he knelt on the stage, smeared his hands with dust, and covered her arms, legs, and costume with the dirt. Fanny started to cry. “Now sing it!” he cried triumphantly, and with a genuine sob in the voice she delivered the heartbreaking lyrics to perfection. When she sang “My Man” on opening night, the audience was in tears.

As The Jazz Singer had immortalized another audience-heart-breaker, so Warner Bros.’ last big Vitaphone picture for 1928 would preserve for posterity what Ziegfeld considered to be the supreme moment of his career—that “ragged dust-smeared figure on the stage and the audience too overcome with emotion to applaud.”²⁶

Most of Hollywood had different reasons for not applauding the latest Vitaphone film. “In less than a year, the Warners had reversed their circumstances from a deficit of $1,234,412 to a spectacular first place in the industry through sound.”²⁷

If 1928 was, financially, an annus mirabilis for Warner Bros., it was also a year of invaluable experience for everyone associated with the studio. Vitaphone technicians learned how to cope with many of the problems that had plagued them since they had begun making sound pictures. Warner actors, mostly trained in the mimetic traditions of silent cinema, were coming to realize that the sound film imposed new and unfamiliar demands on their art. To survive they would have to learn how to speak for the microphone and how to adjust their acting to the restraints it imposed on their movements. Warner screenwriters had discovered that language appropriate to silent film intertitles was generally unsuitable for spoken dialogue. And Warner directors and producers were now able to assess the relative popularity of part-talkies and talkies and to determine the kind of feature that would prove most attractive with the addition of sound.

Early in 1928, anticipating the great demand for music that would arise from the advent of talkies (and especially from the popularity of movie musicals), Warner Bros. stole another march on its competitors by buying up three music publishing houses—Harms, Remick, and Witmark—whose combined sheet-music copyrights were estimated to be worth some $10 million. In addition, the studio signed a contract with ASCAP whereby for an annual fee of $125,000 it could use any or all works by members of the Society.²⁸

In every important respect Warner Bros. appeared to have far outstripped its competitors. Only one dark cloud crossed the horizon in 1928—but it was to have a gold and silver lining for the rest of the film industry. In 1927, the Fox Film Corporation had been the only studio to follow Warner Bros. into the great gamble with sound. But in the spring of 1928, a crisis developed in the relationship between Warner Bros. and Western Electric which led directly to the involvement of all other, major studios in what had become the sound revolution. There are conflicting explanations of what occurred. One account of the crisis is given by E. S. Gregg:

Western Electric on January 1, 1927, organized a new corporation, entitled Electrical Research Products, Inc.—almost immediately known as ERPI [whose export department was headed by E. S. Gregg]

When [Walter J.] Rich had shared his agreement with Warner Brothers, it seemed ERPI might be able to sit back and collect royalties. It did not work out that way. Warner Brothers were picture producers and theatre owners; they did not know how to sell complicated electric and mechanical equipment. They also lacked access to capital. While studios might find it possible to lay hands on the $100,000 or more to install one recording channel and some associated equipment . . . and every studio . . . needed several recording channels . . . the thousands of individual theatre owners could not easily find the $10,000 to $20,000 to install sound reproducing equipment. They wanted three years to pay for such equipment and were unhappy when they could get only one or two years.

In 1928 ERPI had to renegotiate its contract with Vitaphone and to take back the rights to sell, install and service Western Electric talking picture equipment.²⁹

Gertrude Jobes’s explanation differs sharply from Gregg’s:

Of all the devices, the Western Electric was the most expensive and was constructed to carry only Western Electric recordings. In addition Western Electric was slow in filling orders. The Warners, anxious to have their houses wired, signed up with Pacent, whose apparatus sold for about one tenth the price of Western Electric equipment, and who was in a position to make immediate installations. Western Electric would not tolerate what it considered an infringement, and brought suit against the Warners. The Warners, on their part, claimed Western Electric had promised them a commission on all talkie apparatus sold and were suing for such commissions. [The suit was to drag through the courts until 1935, when at long last the action was settled in favor of Western Electric.³⁰]

Yet another explanation is possible: that Western Electric executives had come to the reasonable conclusion that the time was ripe to make lucrative deals with other studios—provided that ERPI could sever its exclusive relationship with Warner Bros. If that were the case, any basis for disagreement would have served its purpose. Whatever the reason, the immediate outcome was clear. On May 15, 1928, ERPI considered itself free to issue licenses to Paramount, MGM, and United Artists, enabling them to use Western Electric amplifiers and other equipment with Movietone sound-on-film. It was a red-letter day in the history of sound movies: in effect, the true beginning of the sound era, since it signified that the major studios were at last climbing aboard the bandwagon. Gregg’s version of what happened is that J. E. Otterson, president of ERPI, approached the heads of the major studios and convinced them that it was time to sign up with Western Electric and thereby get into the lucrative market for sound movies. Gregg attributes the studios’ prompt acceptance of Otterson’s proposal to his astute psychology: “The President of ERPI . . . told these big Hollywood producers he thought Western Electric equipment and royalties were too expensive for them. To men who wanted ‘nothing but the finest,’ this was too much to take. They signed up for talking pictures, and the stampede was on to get the huge Hollywood studios equipped.”³¹ By May 1928, however, the big studios needed little persuasion to get into the business of making sound movies. Economically speaking, except for Warner Bros., 1927 had been a bad year for Hollywood, and 1928 was beginning to look worse. It was only sound movies that were consistently attracting large audiences.

Along with the momentous announcement of May 15, Otter-son also issued a public statement: “It is my understanding,” he said, “that Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn and United Artists have already begun the installation in their studios of the necessary equipment for introducing sound into their productions. They have placed substantial orders both for the studio equipment thus needed and for reproducing equipment in the theatres owned or controlled by them.” He noted that First National had recently adopted the Western Electric system (this, of course, was after that company’s brief experiment with Firnatone), and that contracts were being drawn up between ERPI and Universal Pictures and Keith-Albee-Orpheum. Otterson anticipated that a thousand theaters in America, including those already using Vitaphone and Movietone equipment, would be wired for sound before the end of 1928.³²

The news of May 15 immediately convulsed Hollywood. Less than two months after that momentous day, Chapin Hall, a columnist for the New York Times, was noting how

In a recent trip through the manufacturing areas in Hollywood and elsewhere I found many corrugated brows. The manufacturers don’t know just how far to go. They realize that the next year or two will see rapid development in the “talkies” and naturally they hesitate to install expensive equipment which may have to be scrapped before the newness has worn off. On the other hand, the public is clamoring for the latest toy, and theatres featuring sound devices are “packing ‘em in” at the expense of less progressive houses. . . . The corrugations in the brows of scenario writers come from the fact that a new type of story must be devised—something that will bridge the gap between action and talk. The present sound films are interesting because of their novelty, but as pictures they are flops, and the abrupt changes of tempo when the words stop and the action resumes is a terrific strain on the credulity of the customers. Most of the performers’ brows are lined with worry make-up because they see their fat contracts slipping away into the hands of actors who can make language behave. The zero hour of the “beautiful but dumb” is about to strike.

The beginning of a new era is recognized by all hands, but no one yet knows what it portends. In the meantime, the whole industry is nervous and inclined to jump whenever anyone says “boo.”³³

Six months later, an editorial in the same paper stated

Something like panic has struck the actor colony of Hollywood since the talking films became popular. If the beautiful blondes could only speak intelligibly and in agreeable voices, they would not be so worried, and some of the more ambitious are frantically at work studying under elocution teachers. . . . Both in New York and in small towns all over the country, figures show that “talkies” are more welcome than silent movies. . . .³⁴

The effects of the sound revolution on the American film industry will be considered in more detail in the next chapter. Here, before taking a closer look at the Babel of sound systems that were contributing mightily to Hollywood’s confusion, we can pause briefly to survey the spectrum of personal reactions to the coming of sound.

Among the relatively few, immediately favorable observations was that of Hal Roach, veteran producer of slapstick comedy:

There may be some speculation as to the ultimate place of sound effects and dialogue for full-length pictures, but I don’t see any questions about the value of sound in the one or two reel film. . . . It’s easy to imagine the variety of humorous and farcical effects possible for a sound comedy. And a good dialogue comedy might be compared to a vaudeville skit, with the extra action that the screen can give. The public has already shown unqualified approval of the short sound pictures, the Movietone news reel and the like.³⁵

Movie star Adolphe Menjou, interviewed in Paris while on his honeymoon (with Kathryn Carver), responded excitedly when asked about the sound revolution:

It is the next forward movement in the entertainment of the universe. . . . Talking movies is [sic] the first invention making possible a successful combination of the best of the stage and screen. Mussolini, with his brain, was the first to see the big possibilities of an invention which permits him to remain at home and also to appear and to be heard by thousands at the same time.³⁶

Mordaunt Hall, touring the studios in July 1928, found MGM’s wonder-boy producer, Irving Thalberg, waxing “enthusiastic about audible pictures” and boasting about the acoustic features and structural immensity of the new sound studios that were under construction on the MGM lot. By contrast, Hall was told by veteran actor Lionel Barrymore that as far as he was concerned, sound movies were still only ten minutes old. When Hall questioned him about the quality of screen voices, Barrymore growled that he believed it was Jefferson who had said that fine voices had killed more good actors than had whiskey.³⁷

A leading spokesman for the “play-it-both-ways” position was Jesse L. Lasky, production chief of Paramount-Famous Players. Admitting, somewhat bewilderedly, that he found the “talking and sound picture” to be a “big subject,” he nevertheless offered his “firm conviction that it is here to stay.” Guardedly, he added, “There will naturally be numerous imperfect productions made in the haste to meet the popular demand. . . . But [there] is not the slightest doubt in my mind but that it will improve. At the same time, I don’t think that the silent picture will disappear from the screen. . . .”³⁸

A rather more intelligent assessment of the situation was offered by independent producer Sam Goldwyn:

The present state of excitement over the sound picture is virtually due to the financial success of The Jazz Singer. . . . What would this picture have been without Mr. Jolson? Certainly it might have made money, but it would never have been the outstanding hit it was all over the country without that stellar performer.

I am by no means opposed to the sound film, but I do think that the hysteria that reigns here at present may mean that so many inadequate talking subjects will be issued that people will eventually long for the peace and quiet to which they have been accustomed with the silent features. They can make all the sound films they want, but I wonder how many pictures will be made with the new medium that will be as beautiful as Chaplin’s Gold Rush. . . . It is also a question as to where producers will get their stories or whether they will be able to find sufficiently good ones to stand up under the test of sound. . . .³⁹

Among the many voices of opposition to the new development were Joseph M. Schenck, president of United Artists, and directors King Vidor and Herbert Brenon. Schenck openly admitted that he disliked talking pictures and that the only reason his company was going ahead with them was “to give the public what it wants.” But, he maintained, “I don’t think people will want talking pictures long. . . . Talking doesn’t belong in pictures. Pictures are on a silent ground.”⁴⁰

King Vidor, on returning from a trip to Europe, remarked to an interviewer,

I came back, and the first thing that was said was, “What do you think of them?” . . . When I went away I was just beginning to put my finger on that something which makes up the screen; and in Europe many persons also said they felt it. . . . Now everyone is thinking of a new development, and rushing to get in on it. I have asked why they want to start something else when they have just learned straight pictures, but it does no good. Talking pictures are of a different school—one dealing with voice delivery—and we will have to begin all over again to learn it.⁴¹

Brenon’s was the most pessimistic and hostile voice:

In my humble opinion the motion picture joined with the cheap novelty of the “talking film,” is about to commit suicide as a popular form of entertainment. . . . The ideal motion picture should tell its story in a completely visual manner. . . . But the exploiters of this new craze have thrown this ideal overboard, have discarded all technique and tradition and begun to pound the drum and shake the cymbals before an exotic sideshow. . . . What will be the result? The movie camera will, in time, come to be subordinate to the talking machine. . . . That will be a sorry day for the movies! . . . Right now “talking films” are a novelty and people want to hear them. But I am hoping the novelty will wear off, and I think it will. . . . It has no place in the dramatic art of the screen. Leave that art alone! . . . These voices and noises . . . will merely kill it.⁴²

They almost killed Brenon’s career instead. However, both he and King Vidor rose above their initial antipathy to sound pictures and were soon directing their first talkies. Brenon’s best work already lay behind him, in the silent era, while some of Vidor’s finest films (aside from The Crowd, 1928) were yet to be made.

But in July 1928, while King Vidor was still asking why Hollywood was starting something else when they had just learned straight pictures, no one in the film industry had time to answer him. In that month alone Western Electric installed 400 of their sound projector systems leased through ERPI, and the major studios were working, at white heat, on the production of sound pictures.

On July 14, 1928, the Exhibitors’ Herald provided the following line-up of film companies involved in the transition to sound:

Western Electric, licensing both film and disk methods:

1 Warners, with Vitaphone, disk

2 Fox-Case, with Movietone, film

3 Paramount, Movietone, by arrangement with Fox, which may be made either on film or disk.

4 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Movietone, by arrangement with Fox, film or disk.

5 United Artists, Movietone, by arrangement with Fox, film or disk.

6 Hal Roach Comedies, expected to use [Movietone] film.

7 Christie Comedies, mostly Movietone, film.

Columbia Pictures and the Tiffany-Stahl film corporation were also on the verge of making a decision to sign up with Western Electric, while Universal, with two of its films (Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Man Who Laughs) already under contract to be synchronized by Movietone, announced that it would have sound added to sixteen more of its pictures before the end of the year. No one doubted that Universal, too, would shortly be joining the procession to Western Electric.

At the same time, several other systems were attracting Hollywood companies. The most important was Photophone, a sound-on-film recording and reproducing system almost identical to Movietone. It was developed by a research team from General Electric Company working under the supervision of Dr. C. A. Hoxie,⁴³ and was promoted by RCA Photophone, Inc., a subsidiary of the RCA Company established in 1928

to carry on the commercial exploitation of the sound-on-film system. Carl Dreher (later with RKO) was its first chief engineer, followed in 1929 by Max C. Batsel from the Westinghouse Co. A laboratory was established in New York to which a number of engineers were transferred from the Technical and Test Dept. of RCA. . . . The first commercial soundhead [the device for adapting existing silent projectors into sound machines] to be offered by the RCA group . . . was of Westinghouse design, but the manufacturing was carried out by both companies. . . . Although the RCA group was convinced of the inherent advantages of sound-on-film for motion picture sound, disk equipment was wanted in all of the earlier theatre installations, and accordingly, combined sound-on-film and synchronous disk equipment was designed and built by the G. E. and Westinghouse companies and supplied by RCA Photophone, Inc.⁴⁴

The promoters of Photophone claimed that its sound reproduction was superior to that of any other system since it was not affected by underdeveloping or overdeveloping of the film or by jumping needles or warped disks. Several years later, further research by RCA, Western Electric, and General Electric would result in Photophone’s becoming the first widely used system employing a variable area sound track. Maurice Zouary described that development as “the first true breakaway from the De Forest method of optical photography in the density method and pattern.”⁴⁵

In July 1928, four Hollywood studios—Mack Sennett, Pathe Exchange, Tiffany Stahl, and Educational Pictures—contracted to use Photophone after their studio heads attended demonstrations organized by RCA at the Gaiety and Biltmore theaters in New York. Arrangements were made to supply them promptly with the necessary equipment to begin production of sound pictures. Pathe quickly re-released Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) with a synchronized score by Hugo Riesenfeld, and started production of Pathe Newsreels in competition with Fox’s Movietone Newsreels. As we shall see later, in more detail, Photophone was also to be used by FBO (Film Booking Offices) when that company was taken over by RCA early in the summer of 1928.

Photophone, Movietone, De Forest’s Phonofilm, Cinephone (which we shall be considering shortly), and the European Tri-Ergon system promoted by the Tonbild Syndicate (Tobis) were all basically interchangeable with little or no modification—as Tobis was to point out, rather belatedly, in March 1929. Compatibility would have been forced on Hollywood sooner or later, but in fact, with the major exception of Warner Bros., it was there almost from the outset. There were, of course, incompatible systems apart from Vitaphone.

We can review only briefly the more prominent systems other than Vitaphone that were being actively promoted in that decisive, transitional year. Edward W. Kellogg notes that by 1930 there were “234 different types of theater sound equipment including the large number which were designed for disk only.”⁴⁶ All of them, including Vitaphone, were to be swept aside by the dominance of Western Electric Movietone and RCA Photo-phone and by the rising demand for compatibility of sound systems that became irresistible by the early thirties. It should be noted that in mid-1928, the crucial moment of the transition to sound, the De Forest organization had suspended promotion of its Phonofilm system. The Exhibitors’ Herald announced: “This company is at present formulating a policy pending legal actions already under way. De Forest, one of the first to present sound-on-film, claims basic patents and contemplates an entry into this competition from the door that leads to the law courts.”⁴⁷

The other systems that were being seriously considered by Hollywood companies in 1928 included:

Firnatone. A disk device similar to Vitaphone that could also be used with Western Electric apparatus. It was used briefly by First National (hence the name FIRst NAtional TONE) before that company adopted the Vitaphone system.

Vocafilm. A disk system with an amplifying horn placed in front of the screen. As noted in the previous chapter, it was first publicly demonstrated in July 1927, when it provided synchronized sound for a baseball picture, Babe [Ruth] Comes Home. A columnist for the Exhibitors’ Herald noted that Vocafilm had been “demonstrated with success in New York . . . if one will overlook a bad first day. The advantage of this system, it is claimed, is that it promises to be quite inexpensive as compared with some disk machines.”⁴⁸

Bristolphone. Another disk system. This one was produced and promoted by the William H. Bristol Manufacturing Company of Waterbury, Connecticut. The apparatus incorporated a device enabling the sound to be stopped or started without losing synchronization with the picture—an obvious advantage whenever the film broke. The Dictaphone Sales Corporation of Bridgeport, Connecticut, sponsored the first public demonstration of Bristolphone on May 14, 1928, at the Belmont Hotel in New York. The system was presented on that occasion as the most portable of sound systems and a “new method of advertising through eye and ear.”⁴⁹

Remaphone. A disk system invented by Robert E. Machat (R.E.M.), who first demonstrated it publicly in October 1927 at the Wardman Park Theatre in Washington, D. C. Remaphone enabled ordinary stock records to be used in approximate synchronization with the film. According to Film Daily Yearbook, the apparatus consisted of a “Victor ‘Cadenza’ Electrola working on five tubes, with two tuning tables connected by a shaft to the projection machine.”⁵⁰ The stock records were used together with a mat, devised by Machat, for covering the unwanted segments of the disks.

Han-A-Phone and Kaleidophone. Disk systems about which little is known except that they were cheap to install.

Madalatone. A groove-on-film system developed by Ferdinand von Madaler, onetime technical expert for the Columbia Phonograph Co. (It is discussed in chap. 3.) Madalatone apparatus sold for about $1,000 per unit.⁵¹

Cortellaphone. A combination system using both disk and film. The sound scoring was provided by a hairline on the film between the photographic image and the sprocket holes. Among the advantages claimed for Cortellaphone were its relative in-expensiveness (less than $500 per unit) and its prompt and easy installation.

The Canton System. Invented by Allen Canton. This system was based on “the photography of air waves.” It employed a microphone that picked up sound and changed it into electrical impulses; it also utilized a new kind of loudspeaker operating from an air blast. For a short time in 1927 Universal Studios considered investing in the system.

Titanifrone. Invented by Marcus C. Hopkins. Originally demonstrated on October 3, 1928 at the Eltinge Theatre in New York. Titanifrone was not an entire sound system but a device for improving the sound quality of other systems. Basically, it discarded the usual horn speaker in favor of a cone loudspeaker on a large vibrating board. Hopkins maintained that Titanifrone gave “music and the human voice a quality of reality which the Movietone and the Vitaphone and other talking pictures have lacked.” He claimed that it could be used equally effectively to enhance the sound quality of radio, the phonograph, and the talkies.⁵²

The McDonnell Process. An ingenious but curiously retrogressive system described in some detail in Film Daily Yearbook for 1927.

At a time when talking pictures were seen as an imminent reality, or in late August [1927] to be approximate, the U. S. Patent Office awarded rights to George P. McDonnell of St. Louis on a system of synchronizing the voice to movement on the screen. The in ventor’s method of achieving this coordination is by providing every frame of film with a film strip containing cues for concealed orators or actors, who recite the appropriate lines to suit the action. . . . The words on the film strip are projected through . . . [a] slit [at the top of the main screen] and reflected on a [second, smaller] screen back of the main screen. An orator is positioned between the two screens and repeats the words as they appear, consonant with the action.⁵³

Cinephone. Last, but far from least, there was Cinephone, a system developed by R. R. Halpenny and William Garity and promoted by Patrick A. Powers, onetime distributor for Universal Pictures. It was based on De Forest’s Phonofilm system, was relatively inexpensive to install, and provided fine tone quality. But its primary importance was that it was the system Walt Disney was to use in making his transition to sound. It was to play a major role in establishing his reputation and in building his studio into the world’s main producer of animated cartoons. And more than any single factor it was to lead directly to the acceptance of Mickey Mouse as one of the cinema’s few universal and presumably immortal character creations.

In Harrison’s Reports for October 27, 1928, P. S. Harrison presented his conclusions and made several generalizations about sound-on-disk and sound-on-film after sampling all the current, publicly demonstrated sound systems. He found that sound-on-disk systems possessed up to seven serious disadvantages. First, they could not record sounds below 120 cycles or above 3,500 cycles, whereas sound-on-film systems could record sound as low as 60 cycles and provided satisfactory results as high as 5,000 cycles. Harrison concluded that there was “a loss in the disk system[s] of as much as one full octave in the bass note end of the musical scale and one octave in the high note end.” He maintained that disk systems could not satisfactorily record orchestral music and that recorded sounds of shooting came out of the loudspeakers sounding like wind puffs.

The second disadvantage of sound-on-disk, according to Harrison, arose from the obvious fact that the inner grooves of the disks were of smaller circumference than the outer ones. This produced an unequal tone quality that became progressively worse as the needle approached the center of the record. Harrison maintained that the inner grooves did not record as many overtones as the outer grooves. The third shortcoming of the disk systems was the likelihood of the needle’s jumping and entering another groove—thus creating a loss of synchronization. Harrison observed: “I have been reliably informed that while The Jazz Singer was shown in this city [New York], the operator one evening had to change fifteen records. The needle either jumped or broke the wall of the groove and entered another groove while it was on the spot of the record.”

The fourth problem was caused by the movement of the pickup arm. As it moved during the playing of the record it inevitably changed its angle in relation to the disk, and, according to Harrison, that was detrimental to the sound quality. Fifth, the disks lasted only a short time and had to be replaced after five or six uses. The sixth limitation mentioned by Harrison was that the “solution” of using blank strips of film to preserve synchronization when part of the movie was torn or otherwise damaged was not working too well. “If the film is patched in several places and the part cut off is not put back from new stock, the action and words are thrown out of synchronism. This will necessitate replacing of prints, making the cost of film to the smaller exhibitor almost prohibitive.” Finally, Harrison noted that disks were likely to break in transit and that mixups in shipments could lead to the wrong disks being sent with the films.

Turning to sound-on-film, Harrison divided the systems into those using variable density sound tracks and those using variable width (or area) sound tracks. In the former, used in Movietone, the sound track moved along the film in bands of varying density; in the latter, used in Photophone, the sound track moved along the film in a wavy shape. Harrison noted that the sound quality was adversely affected (there was ground noise) when there was any defect in the emulsion of films with variable density sound tracks. Ground noise had been evident in almost every Fox Movietone sound film he had experienced. However, ground noise seldom if ever occurred in films with variable width sound tracks because their variations of sound did not depend on “shadings” of the emulsion. Harrison concluded that the variable density system of sound recording “if not dropped, is going to cost the producers millions of dollars a year in retakes and in discarded old prints. . . . The producers should adopt the Photophone system because it gives the best results.” He added with prophetic accuracy, that “even though the Warners are just now ahead of every other talking picture producer, the disk system cannot endure; it is wrong in principle.”

Regardless of who was going to be proved right or wrong, in principle or in practice, every company that could afford to climb onto the sound bandwagon was feverishly engaged in the production of sound pictures. A roundup of the studios in 1928 would have looked like this: