Le Cinéma Inventé: "Cinema Finds Its Voice" (Lobster Films, 2021; U.S. version Steamboat Films, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second Le Cinéma Inventé feature TCM showed June 7 was “Cinema Finds Its Voice,” which dealt with the advent of pictures with sound. Once again, the print-the-legend version is that the sensational success of Warner Bros.’ 1927 film The Jazz Singer launched the sound revolution and ended silent films almost overnight. Not surprisingly, this documentary tells a quite different story, in which various experiments were tried to blend sound with film. The most obvious one was the use of live musicians in the theatre playing along with the movie as it ran. At first the live accompaniment was just a piano player, but as films grew in importance, prestige and budgets, often this wasn’t enough. By 1922, as director Allan Dwan recalled in a 1969 book-length interview with Peter Bogdanovich, major movies like Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (which Dwan directed) not only had orchestral scores especially composed for them, directors like Dwan would tour with the film and rehearse the orchestras in the major cities to ensure they got not only the music right but the in-house sound effects in reasonable synchronization with the film. There was also a multi-tiered system for making sure each theatre had a score appropriate for its budget: a full orchestral score for the largest theatres, a theatre organ for the next rung down, a string trio for the subsequent-run neighborhood houses and a piano score for the smallest theatres. (So your experience of a 1920’s movie could depend a great deal on where you saw it and when you saw it during its run.) There were a few films that actually carried their scores on screen, so if you were the accompanist in the theatre all you had to do was either follow the baton in the lower right corner, follow an actual conductor shown on screen in what looked like a prompt box, or actually read the notes from the bottom of the screen.

For years attempts actually to coordinate sound and film so they would be together and not dependent on the happenstance of live accompanists being able (or not) to coordinate with the film fell victim of three technological hurdles. One was synchronization: keeping sound and film in synch with each other, which was considerably more difficult when the film was on a strip of plastic and the soundtrack was on an accompanying record. The next was amplification: making the sound loud enough so everyone in the giant movie theatres of the time could hear it. The third was that recording technology simply wasn’t that good; it depended on people singing or shouting directly into a massive, inefficient recording horn, and not only did that mean the players had to be front and center to reach the horn, they couldn’t modulate their voices while acting because their voices had to be loud to be recorded at all. Like the Cinéma Inventé segment on color, the one on sound gave a disproportionate emphasis on the French contributions, though some of the French techniques were well ahead of their time; an 1896 system by French inventors Clément-Maurice Gratioulet and Henri Lioret used microphones the researchers had developed from telephone technology and made the first electrical recordings, nearly three decades before electrical recording became practical and the industry standard. Unfortunately, Lioret donated the visual prints of his sound films to the Acádemie Française but didn’t include any of the records on which he’d electronically made their soundtracks. In 1902 a far more influential French film pioneer, Léon Gaumont, demonstrated a system which still relied on acoustical recording but made it louder via compressed air, so the sound could fill a theatre and not have either to be played back via ear tubes or at best provide only a faint, scratchy volume of sound. In 1913 Thomas Edison exhibited a system called the Kinematophone, which featured an Edison phonograph in front of the theatre, a film projector in back, and a long cord held by stanchions that was supposed to keep the two in synch.

The key figure in the history of sound films was inventor Lee DeForest, who in 1908 had devised the Audion, which looked like an ordinary light bulb except it had three filaments, so currents that went through one would emerge stronger as they passed through each one in sequence. The Audion made electronic amplification of sound possible and was the amplifying technology used the world over until transistors, invented in the late 1950’s, supplanted it. DeForest then shifted his inventive attentions from radio to motion pictures and formed a company to use the Audion technology and the ability of his devices to convert sound to light, and vice versa, to make the first practical sound films. In 1923 Lee DeForest exhibited some of his test reels, including vaudeville stars of the time like Eddie Cantor, publicly, and put out ads offering a $10,000 reward to anyone in the audience who could detect the use of a record player in the theatre to provide the sound. (Given that 10 years earlier DeForest had been a defendant in a mail-fraud trial accusing him and his backers of having marketed a “useless device” called the Audion – he was acquitted but the top executives of his company were convicted – one can understand his persnicketiness about wanting to make sure no one accused him of ripping people off.) Alas, in 1925 DeForest and his principal assistant, Theodore Case, had a falling-out and Case quit to start his own company. Soon Case had sold the rights to his sound-on-film system to William Fox, founder of the Fox Studios and one of the leading figures in the movie business.

But while all that was going on, Western Electric, the manufacturing division of the Bell Telephone Company, was developing an improved sound-on-disc system called Vitaphone, and in 1926 they sold the rights to this technology to Warner Bros. The legend was that Warner Bros. was on the brink of bankruptcy and Vitaphone was their last-ditch gamble to stay in business, but in The Shattered Silents, his book on the silent-to-sound transition, Alexander Walker pretty much debunked this. He pointed out that Warners already had access to investment banker and venture capitalist Waddill Catchings, who negotiated on Warners’ behalf with Western Electric for the rights to Vitaphone, and a company that was about to go bankrupt would not have been able to attract such an important figure in American capitalism. Be that as it may, Warner Bros. was able in 1926 to launch Vitaphone with a program featuring various short films showcasing mainly classical musicians and popular dance troupes (including The Cansinos, Rita Hayworth’s parents) along with Don Juan, directed by Alan Crosland and starring John Barrymore (though, unlike Douglas Fairbanks, Barrymore was not a trained athlete and was obviously being stunt-doubled through much of this film), shot as a silent but with Vitaphone providing an orchestral accompaniment and sound effects like the clanking of swords heard when Barrymore and the film’s villain, Montagu Love (or, more likely, their stunt doubles) dueled to the death in the climax.

Vitaphone’s most famous film was, of course, The Jazz Singer, based on a sentimental Broadway hit play and starring Al Jolson. Originally the plan had been to have Jolson just do a few songs in an otherwise silent film, but when Jolson spoke on-screen to his accompanist, Louis Silvers, about how he wanted to be accompanied during his song “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” the Warner brothers liked the result so much they had an additional dialogue scene written for Jolson and his mother (Eugenie Besserer) to play in the film. The result was a sensation – though silent films held on for another two years or so and there were quite a few “goat-glanded” films (silents with barely synchronized “wild” sound scenes inserted) or part-talkies with hastily written sound scenes stuck in to otherwise silent films. And as things turned out, the sound system that became movie-industry standard was neither Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone nor the Fox-Case Movietone, but a competing sound-on-film system called Photophone, developed by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and relying on variable-area rather than variable-density to record its sound – thereby avoiding the distortion that had crept into Movietone soundtracks by the graininess of the film stocks then in use.