ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due, first and foremost, to Carolyn for her patience, encouragement, and unfailing assistance during a most trying time (involving, among other things, two moves and an oppressively heavy teaching load) while this book was being completed.

A midwestern university library without any special resources for film study was not an ideal place to undertake research into the history of sound movies; therefore I am particularly grateful to Jim Fuhr, Sam Kula, Douglas Moore, and Emily Schenkman for helping me locate or obtain specific source materials.

My indebtedness to several admirable works of scholarship, especially the American Film Institute’s catalog of feature films of 1921–30 (1971), James L. Limbacher’s Four Aspects of the Film (1968), and Raymond Fielding’s A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television (1967), will be abundantly obvious. I was also assisted on many occasions by the New York Times Film Reviews 1913–1931. Acknowledgments to other specific publications will be found in the notes.

Special thanks are due to Mary Peatman for her assistance in preparing the index.