Henry Halstead (November 16, 1897 – March 19, 1984) was an American bandleader. His orchestra began in early 1922 and over the next twenty years had regular engagements at hotels in New York and California.
152-548: Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone is the last major analog sound-on-disc system and the only one that was widely used and commercially successful. The soundtrack is not printed on the film, but issued separately on phonograph records . The discs, recorded at 33 + 1 ⁄ 3 rpm (a speed first used for this system) and typically 16 inches (41 cm) in diameter, are played on
304-475: A Pathé -Natan film, it is generally regarded as the initial French feature talkie, though it was shot, like Blackmail , at the Elstree studio , just outside London. The production company had contracted with RCA Photophone and Britain then had the nearest facility with the system. The Braunberger-Richebé talkie La Route est belle ( The Road Is Fine ), also shot at Elstree, followed a few weeks later. Before
456-425: A fader ; an amplifier ; and a loudspeaker system. The projectors operated just as motorized silent projectors did, but at a fixed speed of 24 frames per second and mechanically interlocked with the attached turntables. When each projector was threaded, the projectionist would align a start mark on the film with the film gate , then cue up the corresponding soundtrack disc on the turntable, being careful to place
608-449: A shellac compound rendered lightly abrasive by its major constituent, finely pulverized rock. Such records were played with a very inexpensive, imprecisely mass-produced steel needle with a point that quickly wore to fit the contour of the groove, but then went on to wear out in the course of playing one disc side, after which it was meant to be discarded and replaced. Unlike ordinary records, Vitaphone discs were recorded inside out, so that
760-489: A silent film . The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before sound motion pictures became commercially practical. Reliable synchronization was difficult to achieve with the early sound-on-disc systems, and amplification and recording quality were also inadequate. Innovations in sound-on-film led to the first commercial screening of short motion pictures using
912-444: A "musical." (Griffith's Dream Street had essentially been a "goat gland.") Expectations swiftly changed, and the sound "fad" of 1927 became standard procedure by 1929. In February 1929, sixteen months after The Jazz Singer' s debut, Columbia Pictures became the last of the eight studios that would be known as " majors " during Hollywood's Golden Age to release its first part-talking feature, The Lone Wolf's Daughter . In late May,
1064-640: A 12-or-10-inch (30 or 25 cm) disc when the smaller size sufficed. Warners bought the Vitagraph studio in 1925 and used its Brooklyn, New York facility for working out practical sound-film production techniques and filming musical shorts. The previously nameless Western Electric sound-on-disc system was named Vitaphone, deriving from the Warner-owned Vitagraph name. Although Warners' sound feature films were made in Hollywood, most of
1216-518: A Warner Bros. movie. This second Jolson screen smash demonstrated the movie musical's ability to turn a song into a national hit: inside of nine months, the Jolson number " Sonny Boy " had racked up 2 million record and 1.25 million sheet music sales. September 1928 also saw the release of Paul Terry 's Dinner Time , among the first animated cartoons produced with synchronized sound. Soon after he saw it, Walt Disney released his first sound picture,
1368-464: A Western Electric sound-on-film system. None of these pictures made much impact. The first successful European dramatic talkie was the all-British Blackmail . Directed by twenty-nine-year-old Alfred Hitchcock , the movie had its London debut June 21, 1929. Originally shot as a silent, Blackmail was restaged to include dialogue sequences, along with a score and sound effects, before its premiere. A British International Pictures (BIP) production, it
1520-541: A contract with Warner Brothers and W. J. Rich, a financier, giving them an exclusive license for recording and reproducing sound pictures under the Western Electric system. To exploit this license the Vitaphone Corporation was organized with Samuel L. Warner as its president. Vitaphone , as this system was now called, was publicly introduced on August 6, 1926, with the premiere of Don Juan ;
1672-628: A demonstration of the Western Electric sound-on-disc system and was sufficiently impressed to persuade his brothers to agree to experiment with using this system at New York City's Vitagraph Studios , which they had recently purchased. The tests were convincing to the Warner Brothers, if not to the executives of some other picture companies who witnessed them. Consequently, in April 1926 the Western Electric Company entered into
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#17328019484201824-681: A few songs performed by Richard Tauber . The movie was made with the sound-on-film system controlled by the German-Dutch firm Tobis , corporate heirs to the Tri-Ergon concern. With an eye toward commanding the emerging European market for sound film, Tobis entered into a compact with its chief competitor, Klangfilm, a joint subsidiary of Germany's two leading electrical manufacturers. Early in 1929, Tobis and Klangfilm began comarketing their recording and playback technologies. As ERPI began to wire theaters around Europe, Tobis-Klangfilm claimed that
1976-523: 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 . Late in
2128-456: A generation. The primary issue was synchronization: pictures and sound were recorded and played back by separate devices, which were difficult to start and maintain in tandem. Sufficient playback volume was also hard to achieve. 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 satisfactorily to fill large spaces. Finally, there
2280-413: A gradual transition to sound—allowing the studios to spread out the capital costs of conversion and their directors and technical crews time to become familiar with the new technology. The Mandarin-language Gēnǚ hóng mǔdān ( 歌 女 紅 牡 丹 , Singsong Girl Red Peony ), starring Butterfly Wu, premiered as China's first feature talkie in 1930. By February of that year, production was apparently completed on
2432-635: A grudging admission that its technology had become obsolete, Warner Bros. purported to be doing the entire movie industry a favor. Despite the fact that Warner Bros. still used Vitaphone as a brand name, the soundtrack-disc era was largely over by 1931. Many theater owners, who had invested heavily in Vitaphone equipment only a short time before, were financially unable or unwilling to replace their sound-on-disc-only equipment. Their continuing need for discs compelled most Hollywood studios to prepare sets of soundtrack discs for their new films, made by dubbing from
2584-404: A large bass "woofer", a midrange driver, and a treble "tweeter." Henry Halstead Halstead had from 15 to 20 band members at any given time. His orchestra appeared in numerous short subjects on the screen and made over 100 records, mainly with Victor Records . He appeared in short films released by RKO Radio . After rising to fame on radio and on the west coast, his orchestra was named
2736-462: A large section of the industry still saw the silent as a viable artistic and commercial prospect till about 1935." The situation was particularly acute in the Soviet Union; as of May 1933, fewer than one out of every hundred film projectors in the country was as yet equipped for sound. During the 1920s and 1930s, Japan was one of the world's two largest producers of motion pictures, along with
2888-406: A light valve, a thin ribbon of sensitive metal over a tiny slit. The sound reaching this ribbon would be converted into light by the shivering of the diaphragm, focusing the resulting light waves through the slit, where it would be photographed on the side of the film, on a strip about a tenth of an inch wide. In 1908, Lauste purchased a photographophone from Ruhmer, with the intention of perfecting
3040-684: A major Hollywood studio. The Jazz Singer had its European sound premiere at the Piccadilly Theatre in London on September 27, 1928. According to film historian Rachael Low , "Many in the industry realized at once that a change to sound production was inevitable." On January 16, 1929, the first European feature film with a synchronized vocal performance and recorded score premiered: the German production Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame ( I Kiss Your Hand, Madame ). Dialogueless, it contains only
3192-507: A memorable occasion." Henry Halstead is given credit for making the first Hollywood Vitaphone movie short with Warner Brothers in 1927 called Carnival Night in Paris where Lew Ayres was discovered playing banjo. The three music selections for the Vitaphone production where listed as follows: 1. Volga Boatman, 2. At Sundown, 3. Rosy Cheeks. Halstead was on the cover of Billboard issue of July 27, 1935 at that time known as Henry "Hank" Halstead and His Cocoanut Grove Orchestra playing at
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#17328019484203344-474: A night, six nights a week. His band became the best known organization in the western United States and Hawaii. This band broke up in the late summer of 1925. Halstead decided that he would go out on his own and form a band. The band consisted of Abe Maule, Chuck Moll, Craig Leach, Ernie Reed, Glenn Hopkins, Hal Chanslor, Phil Harris, Ross Dugat, Ted Schilling, and Zebe Mann. When they joined Halstead in Seattle,
3496-405: A notable donor. The Vitaphone Project has been able to help restore films featuring stars such as Rose Marie and Al Jolson . They also worked with Warner Brothers to restore 1929's Why Be Good? , the final silent film made by Colleen Moore . Funding raised by The Vitaphone Project was used to restore 1928's The Beau Brummels , starring vaudeville duo Al Shaw and Sam Lee, which was added to
3648-568: A number of companies were making progress with systems that recorded movie sound on 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,
3800-472: A recording on one side only, each reel of film having its own disc. As the sound-on-disc method was slowly relegated to second-class status, cost-cutting changes were instituted, first by making use of both sides of each disc for non-consecutive reels of film, then by reducing the discs to 14 or 12 inches (36 or 30 cm) in diameter. The use of RCA Victor's new "Vitrolac", a lightweight, flexible and less abrasive vinyl-based compound, made it possible to downsize
3952-485: A screen. The phonograph was connected by an intricate arrangement of pulleys to the film projector, allowing—under ideal conditions—for synchronization. However, conditions were rarely ideal, and the new, improved Kinetophone was retired after little more than a year. By the mid-1910s, the groundswell in commercial sound motion picture exhibition had subsided. Beginning in 1914, The Photo-Drama of Creation , promoting Jehovah's Witnesses ' conception of humankind's genesis,
4104-457: A separate building to completely isolate them from sound stage floor vibrations and other undesirable influences. The audio signal was sent from an on-stage monitoring and control booth to the recording room over a heavy shielded cable. Synchronization was maintained by driving all the cameras and recorders with synchronous electric motors powered from a common source. When music and sound effects were being recorded to accompany existing film footage,
4256-448: A sound version of The Devil's Playground , arguably qualifying it as the first Australian talking motion picture; however, the May press screening of Commonwealth Film Contest prizewinner Fellers is the first verifiable public exhibition of an Australian talkie. In September 1930, a song performed by Indian star Sulochana , excerpted from the silent feature Madhuri (1928), was released as
4408-481: A subsidiary of British Talking Pictures, which purchased the primary Phonofilm assets. By the end of 1930, the Phonofilm business would be liquidated. In Europe, others were also working on the development of sound-on-film. In 1919, the same year that DeForest received his first patents in the field, three German inventors, Josef Engl (1893–1942), Hans Vogt (1890–1979), and Joseph Massolle (1889–1957), patented
4560-576: A synchronized-sound short, the country's first. The following year, Ardeshir Irani directed the first Indian talking feature, the Hindi-Urdu Alam Ara , and produced Kalidas , primarily in Tamil with some Telugu. Nineteen-thirty-one also saw the first Bengali-language film, Jamai Sasthi , and the first movie fully spoken in Telugu, Bhakta Prahlada . In 1932, Ayodhyecha Raja became
4712-559: A system that recorded sound on a separate filmstrip running parallel with the image reel. Gaumont licensed the technology and briefly put it to commercial use under the name Cinéphone. US competition eclipsed Phonofilm. By September 1925, De Forest and Case's working arrangement had fallen through. The following July, Case joined Fox Film , Hollywood's third largest studio , to found the Fox-Case Corporation. The system developed by Case and his assistant, Earl Sponable, given
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4864-501: A talkie (although it had only limited sound sequences) was The Jazz Singer , which premiered on October 6, 1927. A major hit, it was made with Vitaphone , which was at the time the leading brand of sound-on-disc technology. Sound-on-film, however, would soon become the standard for talking pictures. By the early 1930s, the talkies were a global phenomenon. In the United States, they helped secure Hollywood's position as one of
5016-407: A talkie: G'schichten aus der Steiermark ( Stories from Styria ), an Eagle Film–Ottoton Film production. On September 30, the first entirely German-made feature-length dramatic talkie, Das Land ohne Frauen ( Land Without Women ), premiered. A Tobis Filmkunst production, about one-quarter of the movie contained dialogue, which was strictly segregated from the special effects and music. The response
5168-515: A third of all movies produced in Japan were shot without dialogue. The enduring popularity of the silent medium in Japanese cinema owed in great part to the tradition of the benshi , a live narrator who performed as accompaniment to a film screening. As director Akira Kurosawa later described, the benshi "not only recounted the plot of the films, they enhanced the emotional content by performing
5320-509: A turntable physically coupled to the projector motor while the film is projected. Its frequency response is 4300 Hz. Many early talkies , such as The Jazz Singer (1927), used the Vitaphone system. The name "Vitaphone" derived from the Latin and Greek words, respectively, for "living" and "sound". The "Vitaphone" trademark was later associated with cartoons and other short subjects that have optical soundtracks and do not use discs. In
5472-415: A variety of ways. An increasing number of motion picture systems relied on gramophone records —known as sound-on-disc technology. The records themselves were often referred to as "Berliner discs", after one of the primary inventors in the field, German-American Emile Berliner . In 1902, Léon Gaumont demonstrated his sound-on-disc Chronophone, involving an electrical connection he had recently patented, to
5624-689: A young boy, he learned to play violin. After studying the violin for ten years, he turned professional when at 19, playing clubs and hotels. In 1919, he played violin Abe Lyman and Gus Arnheim . They were in a band at the Sunset Inn in Santa Monica, California, with Lyman on drums Gus Arnheim on piano. Roy Fox played the trumpet on occasion with them. In 1923 Halstead, then director of the Palais Royal Orchestra, predicted for
5776-519: Is perfectly balanced, that soft, dreamy effect so necessary in the modern fox trot is lost." The Buescher phone, an unusual instrument for a dance orchestra, is featured in the Palais Royal Orchestra. The early Henry Halstead Orchestra during the early 1920s was enormously successful at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco for about three years. He broadcast on KGO in San Francisco for about an hour
5928-703: The French Photographic Society . Four years later, Gaumont introduced the Elgéphone, a compressed-air amplification system based on the Auxetophone, developed by British inventors Horace Short and Charles Parsons. Despite high expectations, Gaumont's sound innovations had only limited commercial success. Despite some improvements, they still did not satisfactorily address the three basic issues with sound film and were expensive as well. For some years, American inventor E. E. Norton's Cameraphone
6080-566: The Kinetophone in 1895, but individual, cabinet viewing of motion pictures was soon to be outmoded by successes in film projection. In 1899, a projected sound-film system known as Cinemacrophonograph or Phonorama, based primarily on the work of Swiss-born inventor François Dussaud, was exhibited in Paris; similar to the Kinetophone, the system required individual use of earphones. An improved cylinder-based system, Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre,
6232-463: The Mickey Mouse short Steamboat Willie . 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. Paramount, the industry leader, put out its first talkie in late September, Beggars of Life ; though it had just a few lines of dialogue, it demonstrated
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6384-542: The Motion Picture Association of America , all with live-recorded sound. These were the first true sound films exhibited by a Hollywood studio. Warner Bros.' The Better 'Ole , technically similar to Don Juan , followed in October. Sound-on-film would ultimately win out over sound-on-disc because of a number of fundamental technical advantages: Nonetheless, in the early years, sound-on-disc had
6536-602: The National Film Registry in 2016. Warner Bros. was careful to preserve the Vitaphone and Vitagraph brand names, just as it had preserved the First National brand name for its second-echelon feature films. Vitaphone had made its reputation largely for its short subjects, so the Warner live-action shorts and animated cartoons were copyrighted by The Vitaphone Corporation until 1959 and marketed under
6688-579: The Tri-Ergon sound system. On September 17, 1922, the Tri-Ergon group gave a 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. By the end of the decade, Tri-Ergon would be the dominant European sound system. In 1923, two Danish engineers, Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen, patented
6840-419: The 11-minute playing time needed to match the maximum running time of a then-standard 1000 foot (300 meter) reel of film projected at 24 fps , yet the increased diameter preserved the average effective groove velocity, and therefore the sound quality, of a smaller, shorter-playing record rotating at the then-standard speed of about 78 rpm. Like ordinary pre- vinyl records, Vitaphone discs were made of
6992-630: The Favorite Band of Movieland. His fans included Marion Davies , Sylvia Sidney , Fredric March , Claudette Colbert , Kay Francis , Rudolph Valentino , Roscoe Arbuckle , Maurice Chevalier , Clark Gable , Norma Shearer , Greta Garbo , Clive Brook , Gary Cooper , Marian Nixon , Jack Oakie , Buddy Rogers , and Ruth Chatterton . Henry Halstead was born November 16, 1897, in El Paso, Texas, and died on March 19, 1984, in California. As
7144-582: The Gallows ). Several European nations with minor positions in the field also produced their first talking pictures—Belgium (in French), Denmark, Greece, and Romania. The Soviet Union's robust film industry came out with its first sound features in December 1930: Dziga Vertov 's nonfiction Enthusiasm had an experimental, dialogueless soundtrack; Abram Room 's documentary Plan velikikh rabot ( The Plan of
7296-747: The Great Works ) had music and spoken voiceovers. Both were made with locally developed sound-on-film systems, two of the two hundred or so movie sound systems then available somewhere in the world. In June 1931, the Nikolai Ekk drama Putevka v zhizn ( The Road to Life or A Start in Life ), premiered as the Soviet Union's first true talking picture. Throughout much of Europe, conversion of exhibition venues lagged well behind production capacity, requiring talkies to be produced in parallel silent versions or simply shown without sound in many places. While
7448-691: The Hotel-Park Central, New York. Phil Harris played drums and Red Nichols played trumpet as they were members of Henry Halstead's band in the 1920s. Cliff Arquette an actor, comedian, was also a night club pianist, and joined the Henry Halstead Orchestra in 1923. Halstead recorded for Victor Records, and broadcast on all major radio networks, such as Columbia, National, and Mutual Broadcasting Companies. Halstead led his band and played violin. The original Halstead violin still exists and has dozens of band member signatures on
7600-459: The Mouse (31 minutes of dialogue) in May. On July 6, 1928, the first all-talking feature, Lights of New York , premiered. The film cost Warner Bros. only $ 23,000 to produce, but grossed $ 1,252,000, a record rate of return surpassing 5,000%. In September, the studio released another Al Jolson part-talking picture, The Singing Fool , which more than doubled The Jazz Singer' s earnings record for
7752-481: The Navajo Ballroom and entered into a partnership with Etienne Noir in the local airport. While at the airport he met an old Hollywood acquaintance by the name of Andy Devine who was active in making western films and TV shows. Devine had a partnership in a pilot school with a Hollywood stunt pilot by the name of Dick Probert. The three of them entered into a partnership in the airport and a local restaurant by
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#17328019484207904-487: The Paris studios were fully sound-equipped—a process that stretched well into 1930—a number of other early French talkies were shot in Germany. The first all-talking German feature, Atlantik , had premiered in Berlin on October 28. Yet another Elstree-made movie, it was rather less German at heart than Les Trois masques and La Route est belle were French; a BIP production with a British scenarist and German director, it
8056-577: The Phoenix area. The sign for his real estate office was a yellow sign of a music note. Hasltead was color blind and the only color he could easily see was yellow. Halstead was married to blues vocalist Marjorie Whitney Halter, who sang with the King's Jesters . She was born on April 5, 1917. Henry and Marjorie had two children. While they were living in San Bernardino, California, Joan Susan Halstead
8208-533: The Royal Hungarian Patent Court in 1918; the patent award was published four years later. Whether sound was captured on cylinder, disc, or film, none of the available technology was adequate for big-league commercial purposes, and for many years the heads of the major Hollywood film studios saw little benefit in producing sound motion pictures. A number of technological developments contributed to making sound cinema commercially viable by
8360-417: The United States. By 1930, only half of the theaters had been wired for sound. Initially, all ERPI-wired theaters were made Vitaphone-compatible; most were equipped to project Movietone reels as well. However, even with access to both technologies, most of the Hollywood companies remained slow to produce talking features of their own. No studio besides Warner Bros. released even a part-talking feature until
8512-614: The United States. Though the country's film industry was among the first to produce both sound and talking features, the full changeover to sound proceeded much more slowly than in the West. It appears that the first Japanese sound film, Reimai ( Dawn ), was made in 1926 with the De Forest Phonofilm system. Using the sound-on-disc Minatoki system, the leading Nikkatsu studio produced a pair of talkies in 1929: Taii no musume ( The Captain's Daughter ) and Furusato ( Hometown ),
8664-579: The Vitaphone brand name. Vitagraph had ceased operations in 1925. In 1932, producer Leon Schlesinger made a very-low-budget series of six John Wayne western features. These were so very cheap that Warner Bros. elected not to put its own name on them, or even the First National name. They were released under the Vitagraph name, which Warner still owned. Warner Bros. stopped making live-action short subjects in 1956, and The Vitaphone Corporation
8816-404: The Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded audio, relying, like Sunrise and Don Juan , on a score and 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;
8968-635: The Vitaphone/Vitagraph titles had become interchangeable between the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series titles. Vitaphone was among the first 25 inductees into the TECnology Hall of Fame at its establishment in 2004, an honor given to "products and innovations that have had an enduring impact on the development of audio technology." The award notes that Vitaphone, though short-lived, helped in popularizing theater sound and
9120-538: The Warner Theater in New York City, broke box-office records, established Warner Bros. as a major player in Hollywood, and is traditionally credited with single-handedly launching the talkie revolution. At first, the production of Vitaphone shorts and the recording of orchestral scores were strictly a New York phenomenon, taking advantage of the bountiful supply of stage and concert hall talent there, but
9272-522: The Warners soon migrated some of this activity to their more spacious facilities on the West Coast. Dance band leader Henry Halstead is given credit for starring in the first Vitaphone short subject filmed in Hollywood instead of New York. Carnival Night in Paris (1927) featured the Henry Halstead Orchestra and a cast of hundreds of costumed dancers in a Carnival atmosphere. From the perspective of
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#17328019484209424-649: The Western Electric system infringed on the Tri-Ergon patents, stalling the introduction of American technology in many places. Just as RCA had entered the movie business to maximize its recording system's value, Tobis also established its own production operations. During 1929, most of the major European filmmaking countries began joining Hollywood in the changeover to sound. Many of the trend-setting European talkies were shot abroad as production companies leased studios while their own were being converted or as they deliberately targeted markets speaking different languages. One of Europe's first two feature-length dramatic talkies
9576-455: The all-talking Niebezpieczny romans ( Dangerous Love Affair ) in October. In Italy, whose once vibrant film industry had become moribund by the late 1920s, the first talkie, La Canzone dell'amore ( The Song of Love ), also came out in October; within two years, Italian cinema would be enjoying a revival. The first movie spoken in Czech debuted in 1930 as well, Tonka Šibenice ( Tonka of
9728-463: The band was a huge success. In the spring of 1926, the Halstead band went to Los Angeles to play Miller's Lafayette. Red Nichols joined the band for this opening. While Halstead and his family were living in San Bernardino, California, he and his band were playing at some of the local night spots in town. He needed to live close due to his ailing parents. In March 1944 he was making visits to one of
9880-476: The banner of De Forest Phonofilms . The set included the 11-minute short film From far Seville starring Concha Piquer . In 2010, a copy of the tape was found in the U.S. Library of Congress , where it is currently preserved. Critics attending the event praised the novelty but not the sound quality which received negative reviews in general. That June, De Forest entered into an extended legal battle with an employee, Freeman Harrison Owens , for title to one of
10032-417: The camera for particular shots. The necessity of staying within range of still microphones meant that actors also often had to limit their movements unnaturally. Show Girl in Hollywood (1930), from First National Pictures (which Warner Bros. had taken control of thanks to its profitable adventure into sound), gives a behind-the-scenes look at some of the techniques involved in shooting early talkies. Several of
10184-452: The cast and crew on the sound stage, there was little difference between filming with Vitaphone and a sound-on-film system. In the early years of sound, the noisy cameras and their operators were enclosed in soundproofed booths with small windows made of thick glass. Cables suspended the microphones in fixed positions just above camera range, and sometimes they were hidden behind objects in the scene. The recording machines were usually located in
10336-469: The coming year that even though dance steps may change, the tempo and rhythm will remain about the same as in 1922. And jazz, minus the shrieking and wailing, toned down with even a touch more of the classical than the case in the year now coming to a close, will continue to reign supreme in the popularity of dance fans. "Balance of harmony is the secret," Mr. Halstead said. "Careful selection of instruments and musicians are next in importance, but unless harmony
10488-712: The crucial Phonofilm patents. Although 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 . However, phonofilm's stock in trade was not original dramas but celebrity documentaries, popular music acts, and comedy performances. President Calvin Coolidge , opera singer Abbie Mitchell , and vaudeville stars such as Phil Baker , Ben Bernie , Eddie Cantor and Oscar Levant appeared in
10640-480: The deal died after Paramount lost money in the wake of Rudolph Valentino 's death. Harry eventually agreed to accept Sam's demands. Sam then pushed ahead with a new Vitaphone feature starring Al Jolson , the Broadway dynamo who had already scored a big hit with early Vitaphone audiences in A Plantation Act , a musical short released on October 7, 1926. On October 6, 1927, The Jazz Singer premiered at
10792-531: The device into a commercial product. 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 1914, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt was granted German patent 309,536 for his sound-on-film work; that same year, he apparently demonstrated a film made with the process to an audience of scientists in Berlin. Hungarian engineer Denes Mihaly submitted his sound-on-film Projectofon concept to
10944-413: The discs while actually improving their sound quality. There were exceptions to the 16-inch (41 cm) standard size of 1920s Vitaphone discs. In the case of very short films, such as trailers and some of the earliest musical shorts, the recording, still cut at 33 + 1 ⁄ 3 rpm and working outward from a minimum diameter of about 7 + 1 ⁄ 2 inches (19 cm), was pressed on
11096-473: The early 1920s, Western Electric was developing both sound-on-film and sound-on-disc systems, aided by the purchase of Lee De Forest 's Audion amplifier tube in 1913, consequent advances in public address systems, and the first practical condenser microphone , which Western Electric engineer E.C. Wente had created in 1916 and greatly improved in 1922. De Forest debuted his own Phonofilm sound-on-film system in New York City on April 15, 1923, but due to
11248-404: The edge over sound-on-film in two substantial ways: 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: In 1913, Western Electric , the manufacturing division of AT&T, acquired the rights to the de Forest audion , the forerunner of
11400-435: The film "a good gimmick, but that's all it was." Not until May 1928 did the group of four big studios (PDC had dropped out of the alliance), along with United Artists and others, sign with ERPI for conversion of production facilities and theaters for sound film. It was a daunting commitment; revamping a single theater cost as much as $ 15,000 (the equivalent of $ 220,000 in 2019), and there were more than 20,000 movie theaters in
11552-448: The film was projected so that the conductor could synchronize the music with the visual cues and it was the projector, rather than a camera, that was electrically interlocked with the recording machine. Except for the unusual disc size and speed, the physical record-making process was the same one employed by contemporary record companies to make smaller discs for home use. The recording lathe cut an audio-signal-modulated spiral groove into
11704-434: The film's soundtrack consisted of a musical score and sound effects (including, in a couple of crowd scenes, "wild", nonspecific vocals). Then, on October 6, 1927, Warner Bros.' The Jazz Singer premiered. It was a smash box office success for the mid-level studio, earning a total of $ 2.625 million in the United States and abroad, almost a million dollars more than the previous record for a Warner Bros. film. Produced with
11856-545: The firm's pictures. Hollywood remained suspicious, even fearful, of the new technology. As Photoplay editor James Quirk put it in March 1924, "Talking pictures are perfected, says Dr. Lee De Forest. So is castor oil ." De Forest's process continued to be used through 1927 in the United States for dozens of short Phonofilms; in the UK it was employed a few years longer for both shorts and features by British Sound Film Productions,
12008-511: The first all-color, all-talking feature, Warner Bros.' On with the Show! , premiered. Yet most American movie theaters, especially outside of urban areas, were still not equipped for sound: while the number of sound cinemas grew from 100 to 800 between 1928 and 1929, they were still vastly outnumbered by silent theaters, which had actually grown in number as well, from 22,204 to 22,544. The studios, in parallel, were still not entirely convinced of
12160-471: The first commercial motion picture exhibition, he proposed a scheme for sound cinema that would combine his image-casting zoopraxiscope with Edison's recorded-sound technology. No agreement was reached, but within a year Edison commissioned the development of the Kinetoscope , essentially a "peep-show" system, as a visual complement to his cylinder phonograph . The two devices were brought together as
12312-423: The first feature-length movie to employ a synchronized sound system of any type throughout, its soundtrack contained a musical score and added 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
12464-570: The first movie in which Marathi was spoken to be released (though Sant Tukaram was the first to go through the official censorship process); the first Gujarati-language film, Narsimha Mehta , and all-Tamil talkie, Kalava , debuted as well. The next year, Ardeshir Irani produced the first Persian-language talkie, Dukhtar-e-loor . Also in 1933, the first Cantonese-language films were produced in Hong Kong— Sha zai dongfang ( The Idiot's Wedding Night ) and Liang xing ( Conscience ); within two years,
12616-494: The first reported U.S. demonstration of a sound-on-film motion picture to members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers . As with Lauste and Tigerstedt, Tykociner's system would never be taken advantage of commercially; however, De Forest's soon would. On April 15, 1923, at the New York City's Rivoli Theater, the first commercial screening of motion pictures with sound-on-film took place. This would become
12768-531: The front-runners came up with. In May, Warner Bros. sold back its exclusivity rights to ERPI (along with the Fox-Case sublicense) and signed a new royalty contract similar to Fox's for use of Western Electric technology. Fox and Warners pressed forward with sound cinema, moving in different directions both technologically and commercially: Fox moved into newsreels and then scored dramas, while Warners concentrated on talking features. Meanwhile, ERPI sought to corner
12920-420: The fundamental problems caused by the transition to sound were soon solved with new camera casings, known as " blimps ", designed to suppress noise and boom microphones that could be held just out of frame and moved with the actors. In 1931, a major improvement in playback fidelity was introduced: three-way speaker systems in which sound was separated into low, medium, and high frequencies and sent respectively to
13072-411: The future standard. It consisted of a set of short films varying in length and featuring some of the most popular stars of the 1920s (including Eddie Cantor , Harry Richman , Sophie Tucker , and George Jessel among others) doing stage performances such as vaudevilles , musical acts, and speeches which accompanied the screening of the silent feature film Bella Donna . All of them were presented under
13224-431: The groove started near the synchronization arrow scribed in the blank area around the label and proceeded outward. During playback, the needle would therefore be fresh where the groove's undulations were most closely packed and needed the most accurate tracing, and suffering from wear only as the much more widely spaced and easily traced undulations toward the edge of the disc were encountered. Initially, Vitaphone discs had
13376-482: The improvement of the competing sound-on-film systems, Vitaphone's disadvantages led to its retirement early in the sound era. Warner Bros. and First National stopped recording directly to disc and switched to RCA Photophone sound-on-film recording. Warner Bros. had to publicly concede that Vitaphone was being retired, but put a positive spin on it by announcing that Warner films would now be available in both sound-on-film and sound-on-disc versions. Thus, instead of making
13528-476: The late 1920s. Two involved contrasting approaches to synchronized sound reproduction, or playback: In 1919, American inventor Lee De Forest was awarded several patents that would lead to the first optical sound -on-film technology with commercial application. In De Forest's system, the sound track was photographically recorded onto the side of the strip of motion picture film to create a composite, or "married", print. If proper synchronization of sound and picture
13680-456: The latter directed by Kenji Mizoguchi . The rival Shochiku studio began the successful production of sound-on-film talkies in 1931 using a variable-density process called Tsuchibashi. Two years later, however, more than 80 percent of movies made in the country were still silents. Two of the country's leading directors, Mikio Naruse and Yasujirō Ozu , did not make their first sound films until 1935 and 1936, respectively. As late as 1938, over
13832-417: The lightest playback caused some damage to the wax master, so it was customary to employ two recorders and simultaneously record two waxes, one to play and the other to be sent for processing if that "take" of the scene was approved. At the processing plant, the surface of the wax was rendered electrically conductive and electroplated to produce a metal mold or "stamper" with a ridge instead of a groove, and this
13984-540: The lines are of varying width.) By October, the FBO-RCA alliance would lead to the creation of Hollywood's newest major studio, RKO Pictures . Meanwhile, Warner Bros. had released three more talkies, all profitable, if not at the level of The Jazz Singer : In March, Tenderloin appeared; it was billed by Warners as the first feature in which characters spoke their parts, though only 15 of its 88 minutes had dialogue. Glorious Betsy followed in April, and The Lion and
14136-481: The local film industry had fully converted to sound. Korea, where pyonsa (or byun-sa ) held a role and status similar to that of the Japanese benshi, in 1935 became the last country with a significant film industry to produce its first talking picture: Chunhyangjeon ( Korean : 춘향전 ; Hanja : 春香傳 ) is based on the seventeenth-century pansori folktale " Chunhyangga ", of which as many as fifteen film versions have been made through 2009. In
14288-465: The local mountain communities by the name of Big Bear. He enjoyed the area and was losing many of his band members to the draft. He himself was beyond the draft age and did not serve in World War II. It was a time for change and he moved his family to Big Bear Lake where he bought into a partnership on one of the local night spots known as Navajo Ballroom. By May 1946 Halstead sold his interest in
14440-439: The low-budget-oriented Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) premiered The Perfect Crime on June 17, 1928, eight 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
14592-424: The market by signing up the five allied studios. The big sound film sensations of the year all took advantage of preexisting celebrity. On May 20, 1927, at New York City's Roxy Theater , Fox Movietone presented a sound film of the takeoff of Charles Lindbergh 's celebrated flight to Paris, recorded earlier that day. In June, a Fox sound newsreel depicting his return welcomes in New York City and Washington, D.C.,
14744-589: The name Movietone , thus became the first viable sound-on-film technology controlled by a Hollywood 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. In 1927, as well, Fox retained the services of Freeman Owens, who had particular expertise in constructing cameras for synch-sound film. Parallel with improvements in sound-on-film technology,
14896-670: The name of the Sportsman's Tavern. Upon leaving the Big Bear area, Halstead and his family moved to San Francisco, where he booked talent at the St. Francis Hotel for a couple of years. For a short time they were in Los Angeles and then by 1953 he was working at the Westward Ho Talent Booking in Phoenix, Arizona. From February 1955 to November 1958 he was owner and operating broker of a real estate company in
15048-426: The optical soundtracks, and supply them as required. This practice continued, although on an ever-dwindling scale, through 1937. In 1924–1925, when Western Electric established the format of the system which would eventually be named Vitaphone, they settled on a 16-inch (41 cm) diameter disc rotating at 33 + 1 ⁄ 3 rpm as a good practical compromise of disc size and speed. The slow speed permitted
15200-403: The other an exchange between him and his mother. The "natural" sounds of the settings were also audible. Though the success of The Jazz Singer was due largely to Jolson, already established as one of U.S. biggest music stars, 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
15352-525: The pace of conversion was relatively swift in Britain—with over 60 percent of theaters equipped for sound by the end of 1930, similar to the U.S. figure—in France, by contrast, more than half of theaters nationwide were still projecting in silence by late 1932. According to scholar Colin G. Crisp, "Anxiety about resuscitating the flow of silent films was frequently expressed in the [French] industrial press, and
15504-477: The phonograph needle at a point indicated by an arrow scribed on the record's surface. When the projector was started, it rotated the linked turntable and (in theory) automatically kept the record "in sync" (correctly synchronized) with the projected image. The Vitaphone process made several improvements over previous systems: These innovations notwithstanding, the Vitaphone process lost the early format war with sound-on-film processes for many reasons: Vitaphone
15656-449: The polished surface of a thick round slab of wax-like material rotating on a turntable. The wax was much too soft to be played in the usual way, but a specially supported and guided pickup could be used to play it back immediately in order to detect any sound problems that might have gone unnoticed during the filming. If problems were found, the scene could then be re-shot while everything was still in place, minimizing additional expense. Even
15808-418: The premiere of their silent feature Don Juan , which had been retrofitted with a symphonic musical score and sound effects. There was no spoken dialog. The feature was preceded by a program of short subjects with live-recorded sound, nearly all featuring classical instrumentalists and opera stars. The only "pop music" artist was guitarist Roy Smeck and the only actual "talkie" was the short film that opened
15960-615: The program: four minutes of introductory remarks by motion picture industry spokesman Will Hays , ( Introduction of Vitaphone Sound Pictures ). Don Juan was able to draw huge sums of money at the box office, but was not able to recoup the expenses Warner Bros. put into the film's production. After its financial failure, Paramount head Adolph Zukor offered Sam Warner a deal as an executive producer for Paramount if he brought Vitaphone with him. Sam, not wanting to take any more of Harry Warner 's refusal to move forward with using sound in future Warner films, agreed to accept Zukor's offer, but
16112-470: 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
16264-440: The relatively poor sound quality of Phonofilm and the impressive state-of-the-art sound heard in Western Electric's private demonstrations, the Warner Brothers decided to go forward with the industrial giant and the more familiar disc technology. The business was established at Western Electric's Bell Laboratories in New York City and acquired by Warner Bros. in April 1925. Warner Bros. introduced Vitaphone on August 5, 1926, with
16416-704: The restoration labs at the University of California at Los Angeles to create new 35mm preservation prints that combine the original picture and sound elements. The Vitaphone Project also often partners with the Library of Congress and the British Film Institute . As of December 2016, The Vitaphone Project had located about 6,500 soundtrack discs in private collections and helped preserve 125 films, 12 of which were feature-length films. They have also raised $ 400,000 in donations, with Hugh Hefner being
16568-431: The running time of 1000 ft of film at 90 ft/min (24 frames/s). Because of the larger diameter the minimum groove velocity of 70 ft/min (14 inches or 356 mm/s) was only slightly less than that of a standard 10-inch 78 rpm commercial disc. In 1925, the company publicly introduced a greatly improved system of electronic audio, including sensitive condenser microphones and rubber-line recorders (named after
16720-568: The selenium's resistance to electrical currents, which was used to modulate the sound produced in a telephone receiver. He called this invention the photographophone , which he summarized as: "It is truly a wonderful process: sound becomes electricity, becomes light, causes chemical actions, becomes light and electricity again, and finally sound." Ruhmer began a correspondence with the French-born, London-based Eugene Lauste , who had worked at Edison's lab between 1886 and 1892. In 1907, Lauste
16872-1191: The short subjects were made in New York, and Vitaphone shorts became a fixture in movie-theater programs through 1940. Many major names in show business filmed their acts for posterity, and many stars of the future made their screen debuts for Vitaphone. Performers in early Vitaphone shorts filmed at the Flatbush studios include Al Jolson , Humphrey Bogart , Jimmy Stewart , Bob Hope , Adelaide Hall , Spencer Tracy , Jack Benny , Sammy Davis Jr. , Sylvia Sidney , Pat O'Brien , Ruth Etting , Mischa Elman , Frances Langford , Betty Hutton , Burns and Allen , Giovanni Martinelli , Xavier Cugat , Bill Robinson , Lillian Roth , Joan Blondell , Judith Anderson , Ethel Merman , Abbe Lane , Eleanor Powell , Helen Morgan , The Nicholas Brothers , Milton Berle , Leo Carrillo , Harriet Nelson , Brian Donlevy , Jane Froman , Jack Haley , Phil Silvers , Roger Wolfe Kahn , Judy Canova , Nina Mae McKinney , Marjorie Main , Rose Marie , Joe Penner , Ethel Waters , June Allyson , Shemp Howard , Lanny Ross , Lionel Stander , Edgar Bergen , and Cyd Charisse . In 1991, The Vitaphone Project
17024-457: The short term, the introduction of live sound recording caused major difficulties in production. Cameras were noisy, so a soundproofed cabinet was used in many of 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. For a time, multiple-camera shooting was used to compensate for the loss of mobility and innovative studio technicians could often find ways to liberate
17176-693: The sound quality was very poor and no other theaters could show the sound version of the film as no one had the Photokinema sound system installed. On Sunday, May 29, Dream Street opened at the Shubert Crescent Theater in Brooklyn with a program of short films made in Phonokinema. However, business was poor, and the program soon closed. In 1925, Sam Warner of Warner Bros. , then a small Hollywood studio with big ambitions, saw
17328-473: The sound-on-disc system were able to draw on expertise that Western Electric already had in electrical disc recording and were thus able to make faster initial progress. The main change required was to increase the playing time of the disc so that it could match that of a standard 1,000 ft (300 m) reel of 35 mm film. The chosen design used a disc nearly 16 inches (about 40 cm) in diameter rotating at 33 1/3 rpm. This could play for 11 minutes,
17480-467: The studio's recognition of the new medium's power. Interference , Paramount's first all-talker, debuted in November. The process known as "goat glanding" briefly became widespread: soundtracks, sometimes including a smatter of post-dubbed dialogue or song, were added to movies that had been shot, and in some cases released, as silents. A few minutes of singing could qualify such a newly endowed film as
17632-466: The sublicense, both Warners and ERPI received a share of Fox's related revenues. The patents of all three concerns were cross-licensed. 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. In 1929 a "new RCA Photophone portable sound and picture reproducing system"
17784-483: The talkies' universal appeal—until mid-1930, the majority of Hollywood movies were produced in dual versions, silent as well as talking. Though few in the industry predicted it, silent film as a viable commercial medium in the United States would soon be little more than a memory. Points West , a Hoot Gibson Western released by Universal Pictures in August 1929, was the last purely silent mainstream feature put out by
17936-437: 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. Influential gossip columnist Louella Parsons ' reaction to The Jazz Singer was badly off the mark: "I have no fear that the screeching sound film will ever disturb our theaters," while MGM head of production Irving Thalberg called
18088-530: The technology, which took place in 1923. Before sound-on-film technology became viable, soundtracks for films were commonly played live with organs or pianos. The primary steps in the commercialization of sound cinema were taken in the mid-to-late 1920s. At first, the sound films which included synchronized dialogue, known as " talking pictures ", or " talkies ", were exclusively shorts. The earliest feature-length movies with recorded sound included only music and effects. The first feature film originally presented as
18240-407: The transmitting arc-light as varying shades of light and dark bands onto a continuous roll of photographic film. He then determined that he could reverse the process and reproduce the recorded sound from this photographic strip by shining a bright light through the running filmstrip, with the resulting varying light illuminating a selenium cell. The changes in brightness caused a corresponding change to
18392-567: The triode vacuum tube . Over the next few years they developed it into a predictable and reliable device that made electronic amplification possible for the first time. Western Electric then branched-out into developing uses for the vacuum tube including public address systems and an electrical recording system for the recording industry. Beginning in 1922, the research branch of Western Electric began working intensively on recording technology for both sound-on-disc and sound-on film synchronised sound systems for motion-pictures. The engineers working on
18544-415: The use of a rubber damping band for recording with better frequency response onto a wax master disc ). That May, the company licensed entrepreneur Walter J. Rich to exploit the system for commercial motion pictures; he founded Vitagraph, in which Warner Bros. acquired a half interest, just one month later. In April 1926, Warners signed a contract with AT&T for exclusive use of its film sound technology for
18696-421: The voices and sound effects and providing evocative descriptions of events and images on the screen.... The most popular narrators were stars in their own right, solely responsible for the patronage of a particular theatre." Film historian Mariann Lewinsky argues, The end of silent film in the West and in Japan was imposed by the industry and the market, not by any inner need or natural evolution.... Silent cinema
18848-560: The world's most powerful cultural/commercial centers of influence (see Cinema of the United States ). In Europe (and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere), the new development was treated with suspicion by many filmmakers and critics, who worried that a focus on dialogue would subvert the unique aesthetic virtues of silent cinema. In Japan , where the popular film tradition integrated silent movie and live vocal performance ( benshi ), talking pictures were slow to take root. Conversely, in India, sound
19000-478: 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, 1926, Warners granted Fox-Case a sublicense for the use of the Western Electric system; in exchange for
19152-425: Was a highly pleasurable and fully mature form. It didn't lack anything, least in Japan, where there was always the human voice doing the dialogues and the commentary. Sound films were not better, just more economical. As a cinema owner you didn't have to pay the wages of musicians and benshi any more. And a good benshi was a star demanding star payment. By the same token, the viability of the benshi system facilitated
19304-416: Was a variable-area system—a refinement in the way the audio signal was inscribed on film that would ultimately become the standard. (In both sorts of systems, a specially-designed lamp, whose exposure to the film is determined by the audio input, is used to record sound photographically as a series of minuscule lines. In a variable-density process, the lines are of varying darkness; in a variable-area process,
19456-401: Was achieved in recording, it could be absolutely counted on in playback. Over the next four years, he improved his system with the help of equipment and patents licensed from another American inventor in the field, Theodore Case . At the University of Illinois , Polish-born research engineer Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner was working independently on a similar process. On June 9, 1922, he gave
19608-502: Was also shot in English as Atlantic . The entirely German Aafa-Film production It's You I Have Loved ( Dich hab ich geliebt ) opened three and a half weeks later. It was not "Germany's First Talking Film", as the marketing had it, but it was the first to be released in the United States. In 1930, the first Polish talkies premiered, using sound-on-disc systems: Moralność pani Dulskiej ( The Morality of Mrs. Dulska ) in March and
19760-400: Was awarded the first patent for sound-on-film technology, involving the transformation of sound into light waves that are photographically recorded direct onto celluloid . As described by historian Scott Eyman, It was a double system, that is, the sound was on a different piece of film from the picture.... In essence, the sound was captured by a microphone and translated into light waves via
19912-477: Was born in 1943. Hank Jr. was born on April 8, 1946, while the family was living in Big Bear, California. Marjorie and Henry divorced in the 1960s. Marjorie died on December 26, 1996. After the divorce, Henry married Mary Larson on June 20, 1980. After Halstead and Marjorie were divorced, Halstead continued in the real estate business. He worked with Del Webb in creating the Deer Valley section of Phoenix. He
20064-449: Was created in still a different sort of twist on multinational moviemaking: The Crimson Circle was a coproduction between director Friedrich Zelnik 's Efzet-Film company and British Sound Film Productions (BSFP). In 1928, the film had been released as the silent Der Rote Kreis in Germany, where it was shot; English dialogue was apparently dubbed in much later using the De Forest Phonofilm process controlled by BSFP's corporate parent. It
20216-432: Was critical in stimulating the development of the modern sound reinforcement system . Though operating on principles so different as to make it unrecognizable to a Vitaphone engineer, DTS is a sound-on-disc system, the first to gain wide adoption since the abandonment of Vitaphone. Sound film A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to
20368-820: Was described in the industry journal Projection Engineering. In Australia, Hoyts and Gilby Talkies Pty., Ltd were touring talking pictures to country towns. The same year the White Star Line installed talking picture equipment on the s.s. Majestic. The features shown on the first voyage were Show Boat and Broadway . In February 1927, an agreement was signed by five leading Hollywood movie companies: Famous Players–Lasky (soon to be part of Paramount ), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer , Universal , First National , and Cecil B. DeMille 's small but prestigious Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC). The five studios agreed to collectively select just one provider for sound conversion, and then waited to see what sort of results
20520-623: Was developed by Clément-Maurice Gratioulet and Henri Lioret of France, allowing short films of theater, opera, and ballet excerpts to be presented at the Paris Exposition in 1900. These appear to be the first publicly exhibited films with projection of both image and recorded sound. Phonorama and yet another sound-film system—Théâtroscope—were also presented at the Exposition. Three major problems persisted, leading to motion pictures and sound recording largely taking separate paths for
20672-620: Was discovered in the Henry Halstead band in 1927. Ayres said "I was a member of Henry Halstead's orchestra in 1927 at the Mission Beach Ballroom, San Diego, California...summer. My instruments were tenor banjo, long-neck banjo and guitar. After a hiatus, I rejoined Mr. Halstead with a new group, including Phil Harris, on New Years Eve the same year for the opening night of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel...
20824-810: Was featured, so was Myrtle Harwin, Niela Goodelle, Margaret Reed, and Peggy Mann. The orchestra performed at the Blossom Room at Hotel Roosevelt, New York City; the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California; the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco; the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago; and a season at Fatty Arbuckle's "Plantation" in Culver City where such entertainers as Al Jolson , Sophie Tucker , Gus Edwards , and Leatrice Joy were headliners on his shows. Hollywood actor Lew Ayres
20976-520: Was given a British trade screening in March 1929, as was a part-talking film made entirely in the UK: The Clue of the New Pin , a British Lion production using the sound-on-disc British Photophone system. In May, Black Waters , which British and Dominions Film Corporation promoted as the first UK all-talker, received its initial trade screening; it had been shot completely in Hollywood with
21128-519: Was honored by having one of the streets named after him: West Halstead Drive. In the late 1960s Henry moved to California. He lived in San Diego for a short time, and died in Hemet, California. He is buried in San Diego. Many vocalists and entertainers performed with the Henry Halstead Orchestra. Maxine Harding with her deep-dyed blues singing was a soloist with Henry Halstead's Orchestra. Clarence Rand
21280-571: Was officially dissolved at the end of 1959. Warner then used the brand names for various purposes, to keep them active legally. In the 1950s, the Warner Bros. record label boasted "Vitaphonic" high-fidelity recording. In the 1960s, the end titles of Merrie Melodies cartoons (beginning with From Hare to Heir 1960) carried the legend "A Vitaphone Release". Looney Tunes of the same period (beginning with that same year's Hopalong Casualty ) were credited as "A Vitagraph Release". By late 1968,
21432-469: Was recorded on RCA Photophone, General Electric having bought a share of AEG so they could access the Tobis-Klangfilm markets. Blackmail was a substantial hit; critical response was also positive—notorious curmudgeon Hugh Castle, for example, called it "perhaps the most intelligent mixture of sound and silence we have yet seen." On August 23, the modest-sized Austrian film industry came out with
21584-422: 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 re-released, 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. However,
21736-481: Was screened around the United States: eight hours worth of projected visuals involving both slides and live action, synchronized with separately recorded lectures and musical performances played back on phonograph. Meanwhile, innovations continued on another significant front. In 1900, as part of the research he was conducting on the photophone , the German physicist Ernst Ruhmer recorded the fluctuations of
21888-507: Was shown. These were the two most acclaimed sound motion pictures to date. In May, as well, Fox had released the first Hollywood fiction film with synchronized dialogue: the short They're Coming to Get Me , starring comedian Chic Sale . After rereleasing a few silent feature hits, such as Seventh Heaven , with recorded music, Fox came out with its first original Movietone feature on September 23: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans , by acclaimed German director F. W. Murnau . As with Don Juan ,
22040-409: Was started by a group of five vintage record collectors and movie enthusiasts. Since the soundtrack discs and film prints of Vitaphone productions often became separated, The Vitaphone Project searches for original 16-inch soundtrack discs and mute film elements that go with surviving soundtrack discs. The Vitaphone Project borrows or purchases soundtrack discs from private collectors and often works with
22192-420: Was the challenge of 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 (acoustical horns, for the most part), imposing severe limits on the sort of films that could be created with live-recorded sound. Cinematic innovators attempted to cope with the fundamental synchronization problem in
22344-424: Was the market leader in the early days of talking pictures, for two key reasons. First, the new novelty was very popular with the public, with The Jazz Singer being a monster hit. It was in theater owners' best interest to compete as soon as possible. Second, a much more practical reason was the cost. Converting a silent-only theater to sound was much quicker and cheaper with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system than it
22496-673: Was the primary competitor to the Gaumont system (sources differ on whether the Cameraphone was disc- or cylinder-based); it ultimately failed for many of the same reasons that held back the Chronophone. In 1913, Edison introduced a new cylinder-based synch-sound apparatus known, just like his 1895 system, as the Kinetophone. Instead of films being shown to individual viewers in the Kinetoscope cabinet, they were now projected onto
22648-452: Was the transformative element that led to the rapid expansion of the nation's film industry . The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as the concept of cinema itself. On February 27, 1888, a couple of days after photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge gave a lecture not far from the laboratory of Thomas Edison , the two inventors met privately. Muybridge later claimed that on this occasion, six years before
22800-465: Was underwhelming. Sweden's first talkie, Konstgjorda Svensson ( Artificial Svensson ), premiered on October 14. Eight days later, Aubert Franco-Film came out with Le Collier de la reine ( The Queen's Necklace ), shot at the Épinay studio near Paris. Conceived as a silent film, it was given a Tobis-recorded score and a single talking sequence—the first dialogue scene in a French feature. On October 31, Les Trois masques ( The Three Masks ) debuted;
22952-526: Was used to press hard shellac discs from molten "biscuits" of the raw material. Because of the universal desirability of an immediate playback capability, even studios using sound-on-film systems employed a wax disc "playback machine" in tandem with their film recorders, as it was impossible to play an optical recording until it had made the round trip to the film processing laboratory. A Vitaphone-equipped theater had normal projectors which had been furnished with special phonograph turntables and pickups ;
23104-484: Was with the Movietone sound-on-film system. Exhibitors with limited incomes opted for Vitaphone, particularly in smaller towns. The Vitaphone brand name became synonymous with talking pictures in general; as early as 1928, theater organists, thrown out of work when their bosses discontinued silent pictures, placed situation-wanted ads in trade papers with the melancholy phrase "Reason for leaving due to Vitaphone." After
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