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CHAPTER 27
Sound Arrives {August 6, igz6-]une 6, 1930)
I N the span of just a little over three years the motion picture felt the impact of two major revolutions: the coming of sound in 1926 and the Great Depression in 1929. Well-nigh punch-drunk by this smashing "one-two," the industry began to find its balance in the NRA codes of 1930, weathered the lean years, cleared its head through its own Production Code Administration set up in 1934, and went on to unparalleled achievement. I had been elected the industry's number-one "trouble-shooter/' and for troubles per day, this period took the prize.
The spring of 1926 found the American motion picture industry happily absorbed in its world mission of entertainment and mass education. Its films, though silent, were full of action, humor, appeal. Then came the world-shaking discovery: motion pictures could also speak, if equipped with the newfangled electrical mechanisms. It was like a ship in need of drastic overhauling which could not take even one day off to go into port; it must stay at sea, on active duty, yet somehow install a new set of engines and an entirely new communication system while keeping under full steam. It was an almost impossible prospect.
Worst of all, there were no blueprints for the overhauling and no guarantee of results. How could anyone be sure that the public would permanently prefer the "talkie" to the "silent":3 Some of the most experienced men, such as Edison, did not believe people would like the new product as well as they evidently liked the old. Silent motion pictures had reached an unchallenged peak in popularity. A hundred million people each week crowded into twenty thousand American theatres. Eight hundred feature pictures a year were being produced for a public that seemed insatiable.
On the warm summer night of August 6, 1926, when the screen first spoke to a public audience, all marveled; but we were still unsure. The four Warner brothers, who had brought this new wonder to the screen, were holding their breaths. And I knew that for the electric companies which had spent heavily on experimentation, even facing stockholders' suits because of it, this night was a showdown too. Earlier attempts had fizzled. Had a new art form finally come into being?