Movie Makers (Jun-Dec 1928)

SIZING UP THE TALKIES ONE night not so very long ago, the motion picture makers of these United States went to bed as sane as motion picture makers ever are. Anyhow, all they had to worry their slumbers was block booking, Federal investigations, high salaries, supervisors, French, German, English, Italian and Spanish "quotas", State Censor Boards and a few little things like that. 1: s. ,..Mm$l "?*^jl -TTfffiW^^^MJ^^^^K "'_.. ■ ':3lftSB • £& 1 : „ ,j^Pf K; --■ fe^' THE PIONEER SOUND FILM A Clipping from a 1913 Film of Eugene Lauste, in which the Sound Track Covered Half the Film, as Contrasted with the Narrow Track of the Modern Photophone Shown on the Right In the morning they woke up stark, staring crazy; babbling about sound and synchronization, about discs and tracks and bitterly regretting that their names were neither Fox nor Warner, the sound pioneers. The movies had gone sound mad overnight, and all because Al Jolson in the Vitaphone production, "The Jazz Singer" was, in the language of the business, "packing 'em in." Even the conservative New York Times has been moved to observe that the talking picture will spread the use of the English language to the furtherest corners of the world, and Fred Niblo (or his press agent), has more or less seriously suggested that the talking pictures be made with some international tongue. "Crazy" is scarcely the word for it. It's worse than that. To hear them talk you might imagine that talking pictures were something new; something very recent, but they're not. Edison had scarcely invented the Kinetoscope when he began to think about the phonograph attachment, and the per 574 By Epes W. Sargent fection of the projection machine was shortly followed by the talking picture. The commercial phonograph records were fitted with appropriate gestures, and the machine was turned at a speed to correspond as closely as possible with the voices on the record. About the same time the Cameraphone came into being. Here the performer "did his stuff" before the camera and came back a few days later to make a phonograph record to match. The records were made to fit the film and not vice versa. About the only man to make money out of either device was C. F. Zittell, ("Zit"), now a publisher, but then a vaudeville critic. He was paid $1,000 for each Cameraphone act. If he paid the act less than that, he kept the difference. THE PHOTOPHONE "FIXED DENSITY" 'SOUND FILM The Sound Track is Shown to the Right of the Pictures The Cameraphone languished, but many exhibitors did their own talking, or rather hired two or three actors to do it for them. These players sat behind the screen and supplied their own dialogue. The idea has been revived to meet the present craze. About 1908 Edison again revived the talking picture, this time following the Cameraphone method of making proper records, but making them at the time the action was recorded. The "perfected" device included a double disc in the projection room, one actuated by the phonograph mechanism and the other by the projection machine. If the projectionist kept the machine turning at a speed which enabled the spot on his dial to travel evenly with the spot on the phonograph dial, the synchronism was more or less exact. But it was just a picture machine and a phonograph, and the craze was expensive and short lived. Meanwhile a Frenchman, Eugene Lauste, who had worked with Edison on the Kinetoscope and later with the Lathams on the Eidoloscope, had taken out patents (in 1906) on a machine for the photographic recording of sound by the varying intensity of an electric current influenced by sound waves from a microphone. When he was only ten years old Lauste had oiled the pictures in his Zoetrope and had projected them through the magic lantern, using his hand for a shutter and getting the crude suggestion of motion. This antedates Huyl and other pioneers, but naturally the ten year old boy was not competent to develop the idea commercially. He made and projected sound-pictures in 1913 but never put the machine on the market. In 1926 Warner Brothers announced their "Vitaphone" sound pictures, and the first of these, "Don Juan", with music and some sound, was presented in August at the Warner theatre in New York. This consisted chiefly of the musical accom THE MOVIETONE "BAND" TYPE OF SOUND FILM The "Band" Can Be Seen Between the Pictures and the Sprockets. The Important Differences Between the "Fixed Density" and "Band" Types is Explained in This Article