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>'oIuine XXXV
NEW YORK CITY, MAY 20, 1927
No. 20
An Editor in Hollywood
Final Article of a Series on the Production Centre
By William A. Johnston
Hollywood, April 30.
THERE'S a considerable air of excitement at the Warner Bros. Studio. A new stage is going up ; changes are being made in some of the projection rooms; and many odd looking boxes never seen before around Hollywood studios are arriving daily on the lot.
All this is in anticipation of the arrival from the East of George Jessel, at w^hich time "The Jazz Singer" will be put into production.
And "The Jazz Singer" — now comes forth the secret — will be made throughout with Vitaphone accompaniment; all possible enhancing and interpretative effects of instrumental melody, vocal and other sound effects. Rehearsals of these are already going an and without delving in detail I can say that as much care, ingenuity and talent are to go into the Vitaphone part of the production as enters ordinarily into the best of Hollywood pictures.
The trade will watch the results of this enterprise with intense interest.
It is, it seems to me, the most significant piece of development work now going on out here.
We have been discussing the Vitaphone, back East, in connection with its presentation specialties and orchestration of the picture. Very little, certainly very little in an imaginative way, has been said of the picture production possibilities.
I don't know, of course, how Warner Brothers are going to turn this trick; it is
a good deal of an undertaking. But one can readily enough sense the splendid pcjssibilities. And I can safely say this, that, if the studio work turns out as it should, it will have a mighty big effect upon picture entertainment.
Watch it!
T DID not add, by the way, in speaking of A "Wings" that out at the Paramount lot, and under cover, a good deal of experimental work is going on with sound effects. The droning of the aeroplanes will be reproduced — the varying makes of machines, and at \ arying distances. Also there are to be some brand new and startling projection tricks.
Don't minimize the importance of these mechanical developments — by any means.
We have been admirably progressive with the camera, but pretty deficient with projection. And while musical and stage accompaniment has been highly developed, almost over-developed, we have not as yet put the interpretative effects — and how important they are! — into the picture itself.
DOES anyone recall the Regent Theatre in New York, in 1913. when Roxv first made there his bow to the New York public; back-of-the-screen-shout when the columns crashed^ down in "The Last Davs of Pompeii?"
Not a great advance, surely, from then to 1927 and the reproduction of the weird noise of an aeroplane.
The motion picture is now in the greatest