It took nine tailors (1948)

24: Came the Revolution ^^^^ALKING pictures created panic in Hollywood. The big SI companies weren't ready for them and neither were the ^L actors. In a few short months Warner Brothers became the leader in the industry because it was first to make films talk. And overnight the biggest stars were suddenly has-beens because they couldn't talk. All over town the frightening question was: Can you talk? Nobody knew for certain. Only that little microphone could give the answer. For the first time movie actors were conscious of their vocal cords. What did they sound like? The only way they could find out was by a voice test. That was when the sound technicians took over the town. They were czars for a while. They ruled the roost and everybody salaamed when one walked by. Then the stage actors and the stage directors and the playwrights began to arrive from New York. The studio heads rushed to New York and put anybody under contract who made a living with words instead of gestures. Talking became a very mysterious thing in Hollywood. You'd have thought that nobody out here had ever talked. The sound technicians locked the doors of the stages and conducted their strange rites in great secrecy. If you did happen to get on a stage where you could watch them, they frightened you to death by standing in front of the microphone and muttering "Mississippi— Mississippi—Mississippi" to a fellow in a sound booth who would listen and then shake his head glumly. After that the Mississippi man would move the microphone, have the stage crew hang up velvet curtains on the other side of the stage, and then once more start muttering incantations into the mike. This mysterious procedure 189