Hearing music, sound effects and dialogue is pretty much taken for granted these days and no one pays attention to the sound unless it’s too quiet or too LOUD or filled with cracks and pops. That wasn’t the case 80 years ago this month when sound film was in its infancy and considered a bad business decision that would certainly lead to failure. The Warner Brothers challenged that notion with “The Jazz Singer” and the movie business hasn’t been the same since. Enhancements to the cinematic art form have taken place since 1927 but no single innovation equals that of the sound movies. “There hasn’t been anything else that once it happened the movies could never go back to the way they were before,” said Leith Adams, co-executive director of the Warner Bros. Studio corporate archive. <!– –> Primarily a silent film, “The Jazz Singer” and its Vitaphone sound system succeeded where previous attempts at sound had failed. While the Vitaphone with its 16-inch phonograph discs synched up to a projector would last only about three years before replaced by the superior sound-on-film technology, the genie was out of the bottle. Sound changed the way films were made, the stories told, the performers on screen, the people behind the cameras, and how theaters operated. While some careers took off after the introduction of sound, others were destroyed. Even theater snacks weren’t safe as the switch from eating peanuts in the shell in a theater coincided with sound movies. “That is how popcorn took off,” said Ron Hutchinson, a film historian who contributes to the new 3-disc DVD set of “The Jazz Singer” released by Warner Home Video to mark its 80th anniversary. While a competitive industry even then, the decision by the Warners to add sound to film was not purely a business decision. Harry Warner saw it as a way to bring culture to even the smallest town in America if there were a symphonic score accompanying a film. “He thought it would bring richness to their lives rather than a piano playing in the background,” Adams said. Sam Warner, however, while in agreement with his sibling envisioned sound as having greater capabilities. And it was Sam who guided the brief dialogue scenes in “The Jazz Singer.” Yet in a cruel irony of fate, Sam Warner would never see the film in theaters. He died two days before its October 1927 premiere. The origins of sound Sound films pre-dated the Warners by more than 20 years. Thomas Edison tried it and failed. D.W. Griffith tried it and failed. Inventor Lee DeForest tried a sound-on-film method called Phonofilm but that failed, too. DeForest was undercapitalized and a lack of speakers and amplifiers in theaters made his films difficult for an audience to hear. A falling out with his business partner Theodore Chase led to Chase taking his expertise to William Fox and bringing about Fox Movietone newsreels. The Warner studio added a musical score and sound effects to its 1926 film “Don Juan” but it was the shorts shown beforehand of vaudeville and opera performers that proved most popular with audiences. The following year, Warner Bros. made “The Jazz Singer” at its then-studios on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Like “Don Juan” the film has sound music numbers and effects but this time included small bits of dialogue spoken by star Al Jolson in a club scene and in an apartment with the actress playing his mother. That latter scene showing the affection between mother and son best exemplified the benefit of sound, said Warner Bros. archivist Adams. One Hollywood story has it Jolson improvised the dialogue. Adams disagrees, saying Sam Warner made sure the spoken word was included as Jolson tells his mother how his success as a singer will get her to a new home in the Bronx. “You couldn’t read that in a title card,” Adams said. “And you couldn’t get Jolson’s inflections and all that.” The pace for “talkies” picked up following the success of “The Jazz Singer.” A second Jolson film “The Singing Fool” came out the following year, as did the first all-talking film, “The Lights of New York.” The other Hollywood studios followed suit, and a struggling transplanted Midwesterner named Walt Disney gave sound and dialogue to his animated mouse in “Steamboat Willie.” While sound movies had a long life ahead of them, the same could not be said about the Vitaphone system. The job of the film projector had to be nerve wracking indeed as a needle had to be dropped onto the disc at the right moment in order to match the film. The sound quality, however, was excellent provided there were no problems, said Hutchinson, a co-founder of the Vitaphone Project, a not for profit that tracks down, preserves and restores films using the disc system. “That had all sorts of problems inherent with it,” added George Feltenstein, senior vice president for marketing for theatrical catalogue at Warner Home Video. “If there were a splice, it would go out of sync.” Additionally, the sound quality of the discs diminished with use. Theaters would check off a box on the disc label with each playing and toss out or return the disc after 20 plays. For the release of “The Jazz Singer” on DVD, Warner Home Video used a nitrate print kept in storage at UCLA as the original negative had been lost. The sound came from unplayed discs owned by a collector. “Prior to the work that we did what the sound people were hearing was something the Warner brothers themselves transferred from Vitaphone discs to optical film in 1935,” Feltenstein said. Warner Bros. switched to the sound-on-film method pioneered by DeForest and Fox in 1930. Smaller theaters kept the disc system for a couple years after that, Hutchinson said, and the Vitaphone name lived on through the 1930s as the Warner Bros. short subject division putting out the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons. Staff Reporter Mark Madler can be reached at (818) 316-3126 or by e-mail at [email protected] .
