Show Girl in Hollywood (1930), dir. Mervyn Leroy. Cameras shot simultaneously from sound proof booths to muffle camera noise. In the Vitaphone disc sound track, Belle Man, whose voice you hear in a song from Show Girl (1928) , sang in both Show Girl movies in place of actress Alice White. Singin' In the Rain (1952) recreates moments like this.

On-set musicians passed sound cues to actors throughout the silent era. But competing sound-on-film and sound-on-disc recording systems vied to supplant them in the 1920s. Seeking a second term as US president, "Silent Cal" Coolidge explains his path to continued national prosperity in this 1924 Photophone sound-on-film newsreel.

Girl acts from Broadway (like the Brox Sisters) buzzed towards Hollywood. But numerous stars eloquent in silents faltered in talkies. Notoriously, John Gilbert faltered. Others, like Charles Farrell—Zeus with a tin whistle voice—miraculously survived.

The Brox Sisters: Busy Bees in Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue of 1924.
"I long to be lazy," Berlin's lyrics have them say on Broadway.

Crews were already recording syncrhonous sound on location in Africa by 1930. But the crew and actors in the production still above from Show Girl in Hollywood above would have commuted from home. Warner Bros./First National shot the movie at the original Warner Bros. studio at 5800 Sunset Boulevard. Warner Bros. shot The Jazz Singer there. Behind actresses Alice White and Blanche Sweet, the doorway leads to Cutting Room 19.

"Hear the wonderful music made by a symphony of 110 pieces—the chorus singing the jazzy songs—the applause of the audience—the dancing of the chorus and every sound effect of a music comedy," advertising copy said about the film's precursor, Show Girl.

Synchronous Sound

Learn it. Read it. Do it.

You Did It Then: Try synchronizing the picture track of The Jazz Singer to the sound track recorded on a Vitaphone disc and you’ll see why, in part, exhibitors and filmmakers gravitated to the rival sound-on-film systems. Trim off the “academy leader” from a pair of shots from The Jazz Singer stripped of their sound track. Then synchronize the “Vitaphone” recording of synchronized dialogue track to Jolson’s lips as he delivers the lines, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet.” Adjust volume and “fix” the skipping Vitaphone 33 rpm record. Then degrade the fidelity of a contemporary recorded song down to late 1920s quality by introducing noise and clipping. Step-by-step instructions and the files you can use are in the button below.

Silent Fox News and Kinetogram newsreels, here combined, show Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic May 20-21, 1927. The original Fox and Kinetogram newsreel titles above are restored.

"While you were flying high in the sky,
You flew into the heart of the world..."
(Vaugh De Leath, "The Radio Girl," May 25, 1927)

Lindbergh mania then erupted. On May 29th, Lindbergh told reporters in London, "I have not yet accepted any offer to go into the movies, and I won't until I return to the United States." When Lindbergh did return, radio stations broadcast the speech he delivered. Warner Bros.'s first part-synchronous sound feature, The Jazz Singer, was then five months from release.

What the Jazz Singer suggested, Sonny Boy (1928) proved: synchronous sound—and "tear jerkers"—made box office magic. Al Jolson sings "Sonny Boy"here.

You Do It Now: Return to the silent movie you shot for Chapter Nine (Intertitles). Now, using the original actors or new ones, dub the dialogue back into the movie.

The Jazz Age: November 10, 1928

Arnold Rothstein and Inez Norton

Violin by WKL Dickson with Kineto” was an obscure broken wax cylinder at the Edison

National Historical Site in West Orange, New Jersey until a Library of Congress curator obtained it in 1998. Once repaired and re-recorded, it became, after a century, audible again. What it was became clear again when sound editor Walter Murch synchronized the cylinder’s sound to the William Dickson film of men dancing in 1894. A century late, Dickson’s experiment ultimately succeeded.