Okay For Sound - How The Screen Found Its Voice

Sound . . . How the Screen Found Its Voice Edited by FREDERIC THRASHER An Eagle Book DUELL, SLOAN AND PEARCE NEW YORK Introduction The motion picture has the distinction of being the only great art form to be born in mod ern times. Its beginnings and its development are well within the purview of living men and women its history is being preserved and studied by an increasing number of organizations and college courses which have become devoted to it. It is fitting, therefore, that this volume deal ing with the application of sound to this vibrant new art be written now while many of the great pioneers in sound film development are still living and while we are able to record the recollec tions fresh in their minds of the difficulties and problems they have encountered and have so in geniously overcome. The amazing story of the motion picture during the short period of 50 years since April 23,1 896, when the first projected film was shown commercially in America at Koster and Dials Music Hall in New York City, is as exciting as it is kaleidoscopic. During this half - century from 1 896 to 1 946, creative and destructive in so many aspects of the worlds culture, the motion picture has made superb progress. It has served the American people magnificently both in peace and in war. It has provided entertainment for about 100,000,000 people in America, and to millions more throughout the world, and incidentally, through the theater-shown film has become one of the greatest educational forces in modern times. The rapid, indeed phenomenal, technical advance of the motion picture is a monument to the inventive genius and engineering skill of the pioneers and later specialists who have broughtthe motion picture camera, the projector and the other innumerable technical devices necessary to smooth production and projection to such a high pitch of perfection. In addition to the miracle that projected pictures on a screen should move at all, the greatest moments in motion picture history so far as the public is concerned are the appearance of sound and color emanating from the screen. The present volume represents the first attempt to deal specifically and pictorially with the application of sound to the moving film and is in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of that momentous development, with which the names of Harry M., Jack L, Albert W., and especially the late Sam Warner will always be so significantly linked. It was due to the imagina tion, indeed the vision, of these pioneers and their associates that the ultimate development and perfection of sound motion pictures was made possible. And so, it is eminently fitting and proper that this volume be dedicated not only to the Warners contribution to the introduction and devel opment of sound motion pictures but to recording the whole story of sound communication and the far-reaching artistic and social implications which have been brought about by the perfec tion of sound reproduction as an integral part of the motion picture. FREDERIC M. THRASHER, PH. D. Professor of Education, New York University Contents PAGE INTRODUCTION V Part I - FINDING A VOICE CHAPTER 1. Out of the Laboratory 1 CHAPTER 2. Four Men With Faith 41 CHAPTER 3. Artistic Revolution 75 Part II - LEARNING TO TALK CHAPTER 4. The New Screen Drama 103 CHAPTER 5. The Screen Speaks Out 131 CHAPTER 6. Shakespeare to Main Street 169 CHAPTER 7 Eye, Ear and Brain193 Part HI - SOUNDING THE FUTURE CHAPTER 8. Juicers, Grips and Dollies . CHAPTER 9. You Aint Heard Nothin CHAPTER 10. Free Speech and Free Screen 227 255 281 VII Okay for Sound Part I - FINDING A VOICE CHAPTER ONE Out of the Laboratory THOMAS EDISON was annoyed. Seated in his West Orange laboratory on October 6, 1889, his ears glued to the listening tubes of the phonograph which he had invented twelve years before, he skeptically awaited the worlds first demonstration of sound motion pictures...