We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
39° MOTION PICTURES I922-I945
I want to pay my tribute to Sam Warner, the first producer to act on the reports coming out of the Western Electric Company's Bell Laboratories. Others waited to see. But to Sam, sound with pictures made an instant appeal. He had always liked mechanical devices. To the Bell Laboratories he came, saw, and was conquered by the new synchronized talking device. He went to work on his brothers. It was not easy, because sad stories were told about producers who had dabbled in sound. But he succeeded in persuading Harry, the president of their company, to attend a demonstration. That did it. Convinced, Harry was ready to put all their resources behind the improved talking device, staking everything on one high throw. In April of 1926 the Western Electric Company licensed Warner Brothers to produce talking pictures under its patents. Of the two available methods, disk and sound track, the Warners chose the disk, giving it the name "Vitaphone," and making their first experiments in the old Vitagraph Studio in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
About this time Harry telephoned me concerning plans for the premiere to be held at their own theatre at Broadway and Fifty-second Street in New York City, the only theatre in the world then equipped for Vitaphone. As the feature they were to present John Barrymore's latest picture, Don Juan, which they were just completing. Though not a "talking picture," the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Henry Hadley, had made a synchronized musical accompaniment. In addition, Harry told me, they had decided to present half a dozen Vitaphone short subjects as a prelude to the feature picture, and he wanted me to speak from the screen on behalf of the industry. A few days later I went with Mr. Warner to the Manhattan Opera House, where recording equipment was set up. Because it was not only my first experience but the first speech ever recorded for talking pictures, I remember every detail.
My 325-word speech was ready by afternoon and sent over for okay. At dinnertime I rehearsed it. Wanting to guard against any possible slip-up, I telephoned Kirk Russell of our own staff and asked him if within two hours he could copy the speech in inch-high letters on big cards so that it could stand on two easels where I could see it while speaking. This he did. In the recording room that evening I stood in front of a microphone and camera and said my piece— with gestures. Just twenty years later, in 1946, that same record was replayed in Warner Brothers' theatres as a reminder of the talkies' birth!
The Vitaphone premiere passed off without accident, but it didn't set the world on fire. I went over to the theatre with Walter Gifford of Western Electric, who was as concerned as I because, as president of the A.T. & T., he had approved putting money into the venture.
The invited guests included, among numerous others, Otto Kahn, the first financier to recognize movies as a safe field of investment; Mme.