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302 AT LAST— A SOUND-PROOF STUDIO
Things were moving fast with William Fox, but even faster with the Warner brothers.
Already the Vitagraph studio had proved inadequate mainly owing to its bad acoustics, and the experimenters, still groping towards perfect recording, decided that a theatre, preferably an opera-house, would prove the ideal building in which to record sound films. Consequently the " sets " and equipment were packed on lorries and taken from Brooklyn through the heart of New York to the deserted Manhattan Opera House. The stalls of the old theatre were boarded over and batteries of incandescent lights mounted above the stage. It was only a make-shift studio, and there was no monitoring room for the expert who " mixes " the sound, except a room at the back of the topmost circle.
To add to their difficulties, the rooms in the front of the theatre had already been sub-let by the owners as a Masonic Lodge, and the Masons demanded the use of all of them at night. The Warner technicians had to shift out their apparatus in the late afternoon and put it all back again each morning.
Engineers started boring a tunnel under Manhattan, and the delicate recording instruments were completely thrown out of gear by the concussion of the blasting operations going on below ground. There was nothing for it but to go to Hollywood.
On the Warner " lot " in Hollywood the first sound-proof studio designed for the production of talkies came into being.
The technique of disc-synchronised talkies had advanced. Each shot was now made on a separate wax disc and all of them were re-recorded when the film was complete. No longer did the camera have to swerve unceasingly from one set to another.
The first all-sound film programme of shorts was given at the Warner theatre in New York on August 6th, 1926.
It was a hot night, but the usually quiet 51st and 52nd Streets in New York City were swarming with people.
Stage, operatic and social celebrities converged on the Warner Theatre, mounted policemen leaned their horses against solid walls of spectators, struggling fans ripped the wrap off their favourite, Estelle Taylor, and even though her husband was Jack Dempsey, world's heavyweight champion, it took a special squad to rescue her.
Inside the theatre, at 8.30 p.m., Warner Brothers started their first public presentation of Vitaphone before an excited audience.
The programme consisted of seven short vocal and musical