The Talk of Hollywood (Prudence Pictures, Sono-Art World-Wide Pictures, Mark Sandrich Productions, RCA Photophone Studios, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Sunday, October 12, the night my husband Charles and I got back from the Unity Fellowship Convocation in Riverside, California, we watched an intriguing movie on YouTube: The Talk of Hollywood, a 1929 film directed by Mark Sandrich (whose key claim to fame is directing five of the 10 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies) and shot at the RKO Photophone Studios in New York. The Talk of Hollywood was basically a vehicle for Jewish dialect comedian Nat Carr, whom we’d previously encountered only in a 1930 short called Two Plus Fours, shot in Hollywood and with a minor part for The Rhythm Boys, featuring the young Bing Crosby. The Talk of Hollywood casts Carr as J. Pierpont Ginsburg, a Jewish movie producer whose studio is about to go out of business because he sunk a lot of money into a slate of silent pictures just as the talkie transition happened. (In real life a lot of producers with that problem solved it, more or less, by spackling talking or sound sequences into already completed silent films, where they generally stood out like the proverbial sore thumbs.) Ginsburg is raising Ruth (Hope Sutherland), his daughter by his late wife whom he still mourns and even hallucinates that she’s in the same room with him. Ginsburg’s attorney, young John Applegate (Sherling Oliver, whose first name is misspelled “Sherline” in the credits), is in love with Ruth and also has enough money invested that when the budget on Ginsburg’s first talkie is blown because a whole day’s shooting was lost because the sound recording equipment malfunctioned, he’s able to raise the money Ginsburg needs to reshoot the sequence.

The film-within-the-film stars “Adoré Renée,” a character name writers Sandrich, Carr, and Darby Anderson obviously intended as a spoof of real-life star Renée Adorée (born Jeanne de la Fonte in France in 1898; I’d always assumed that ridiculous name was a Hollywood pseudonym, but it turned out she concocted it herself out of the French words for “reborn” and “adored”). She’s played by a New York-born actress named Fay Marbé, who’s given an introductory credit announcing that this was her first talking picture. It was also her last picture, talking or otherwise; she’d made four silents, including an uncredited bit as a dancer in D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm (1921) and the lead in a German film called Dorine und der Zufall (“Dorine and Chance,” 1928), but she never made another movie even though she lived until 1986. She also got her brother, Gilbert Marbé, a small role in the film. The scenes showing Marbé and a chorus line of dancers (played by the Leonidoff ballet troupe even though the dances they do have little in common with ballet) performing on a cabaret set are easily the most entertaining in the film. It’s obvious the scenes were still being shot live, with picture and sound recorded at the same time, and Al Goodman’s orchestra (advertised by connection with their stage hit, a golfing musical called Follow Thru) had to accompany Marbé and the Leonidoff dancers as best they could. Thanks to Applegate’s $10,000 last-minute investment, the film is completed, but the initial screening goes haywire because the arrogant projectionist (Tom O’Brien) accidentally breaks the record containing the soundtrack to reel one. (I wondered why a movie shot with the RCA Photophone sound-on-film process had, as a major plot point, that the film-within-the-film was shot with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process.)

The projectionist plays the record for reel two while showing the film of reel one, and so on, until the screening limps to a close and the audience proclaim it the worst film ever made. Ginsburg needed the audience to like it because they were comprised of film buyers for theatre chains, so his entire financial future was riding on them liking the film enough to pay good money to screen it. He’s bailed out by one film buyer who loves the (unintentional) comedy of the movie and hires Ginsburg to produce six more like it (shades of the ending to another Hollywood spoof, Once In a Lifetime, made three years later!). Applegate and Ruth get married and Ginsburg’s studio is saved. The Talk of Hollywood isn’t much as a movie; Charles said he’d run across a mention of it online that had said it would have been much better as a short, and the online writer probably meant releasing the cabaret scene without the rest of it might have been more entertaining. Fay Marbé’s act anticipates Fifi D’Orsay’s but is a good deal less oppressive, and Nat Carr for the most part delivers Jewish schtick humor but gets a few lines in that are actually funny. Where The Talk of Hollywood doesn’t deliver is anything that innovative; one would hardly think from this movie that within four years Mark Sandrich would make a film as dazzlingly inventive as Melody Cruise, an hour-long musical with Phil Harris and Charlie Ruggles that anticipated the Astaire-Rogers musicals and got Sandrich his assignments to direct them. The actors mostly play in the horrible early-talkie style in which they speak … very … slowly and pause … between hearing their … cue line and … delivering their own. There is a nice on-screen dance between Marbé and her partner that could be said to anticipate the Astaire-Rogers classics, though you’d have to know that Sandrich directed them five times to make the connection.