Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1930)

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Just fill in the coupon below and we will send you this test together with our book, "A Road To Bigger Things," without obligation. FEDERALSCHOOL OF ILLUSTRATING 3100 Federal Schools Bldg., Minneapolis, Minn. Federal School of Illustrating 3tOoFederal Schools Building Minneapolis, Minnesota Please send me free book, "A Road To Bigger Things," and Standard Art Test. NameAge Occupation Address Photoplay Magazine for March, 1930 almost clown and out. It had started with the "Warner Classics of the Screen" but for reasons too long to go into here, most of those hadn't clicked. When people have little to lose and much to gain, they often gamble. The Warner Brothers gambled. They looked and listened to Western Electric's findings and they liked what they heard and saw. They bought the rights to the first sound recording device — which they called the Vitaphone. They bought not only reproduction rights but selling rights, and in 1926 put out the first picture with sound synchronization. That was Barrymore's "Don Juan." Looking back, you would have thought that sound synchronization would have caused a furor in the movie business. The truth is that it didn't cause a ripple. After "Don Juan" passed into whatever heaven old films visit when they die, Warners released a bunch of short subjects. Martinelli and Marion Talley sang from the screen. Orchestras, jazz and classic, played. Still nobody in the industry paid any attention. EVEN two years later, in July, 1928, when "Lights of New York," the first All Talkie was released, the film industry still laughed. What a wow, those talking pictures, they said. Quaint producers, those Warners, thinking they had a marvelous thing with their fool Vitaphone. It was all a joke — until the box office statements began coming in. The box office statements showed that the public adored sound pictures; that it absorbed every bit of them it could get. Scratch a boxoffice and you find a producer's heart. That's nature. Suddenly every producer and every theater was in a mad scramble — the producers for sound recording devices and the theaters for wiring equipment. There was all sorts of work at the double crossroads. Fox outsmarted everyone else by working with an inventor called Case to perfect a process it called Movietone. This differed from Vitaphone in that it recorded sound directly on the film instead of on a disc. Case sold his patents to Western Electric so that Movietone became a Western Electric Product. That was all on the up and up, of course, but there were funny tricks like the classic case of a certain company borrowing a sound truck, supposedly to test a voice, and holding it long enough to slap a couple of terrible talkers together. Everybody began sticking sound in films by every possible means and twenty thousand theater owners throughout the country went mad trying to get equipment. Western Electric was just as snowed under as every one else. It was physically capable of handling several hundreds of installations year!}' — but orders were reaching it by the tens of thousands. Right in the midst of this mess Al Jolson made "The Jazz Singer" and forthwith the old silent screen expired with a sigh. It was like the horse in the presence of the first automobile, or of the oil lamp beside the first electric bulb. You could be sentimental about it, but with half an eye you could see that one put the other completely out of business. It was the old process of evolution. There wasn't any possible basis of comparison between the two. FOR the next year the whole movie world was a nightmare. Sound films, good, bad and indifferent— but most of them bad — poured forth. Warners held their lead for a while. Fox made a big step forward by putting sound into the newsreels. Paramount turned over and went to work, making " The Doctor's Secret " and other films, that had quality as well as noise. Elocution teachers flooded Hollywood and stars gargled sibilant syllables. By the summer of 1928 Western Electric announced the completion of one thousand theater installations in America and promised new ones at the rate of two hundred fifty a month. By April of 1929 there were 1,680 Western Electric installations in America and nearly a thousand abroad. England and Australia were the largest users, but installation Every advertisement in PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE is suaranteed. crews were working feverishly in such far-flung corners as the Argentine, Brazil, Columbia, Cuba, New Zealand, France, Germany, India, Japan and Alaska. Naturally in a gold mine like that, you were bound to find the racketeers. Theaters flimflammed by putting old phonographs behind the screen and using other devices. Mushroom electrical companies without the necessary research background, engineering facilities or financial resources to assure their permanent place in the industry, tried bootlegging equipment to exhibitors driven desperate by seeing the trade move to the house that was wired. Patent infringements popped forth. And right about this time Mr. and Mrs. Public, aftet the habit they have, got choosey about what was served them and refused to go see any old thing that was offered them as a talkie. Mr. and Mrs. Public began demanding quality, good acting, convincing stories, better voices, finer projection and generally better everything. •"THUS Western Electric, which had meant all *■ the time to stay outside and remain purely scientific, had to get into the movie business itself. It didn't like its equipment being sold along with films. It wanted it to go by itself. It did want to see that projection and sound reproduction improved in the theaters and it did want to keep out the bootleggers. The result of all this is a completely new deal on all the movie lots. With the characteristic of the scientific mind, the electric company has been looking into everything. Take a mere detail like the screens themselves. The reason the first talkies seemed to be lighted so badly wasn't alone due to the fact that Kleigs weren't used. Some of it was due to the actual material of the screen, which had to be changed in order to let the sound get through. They started projecting talkies against a kind of dull, meshed material. The result was awful. Now, after much research, they have evolved a screen made of something that looks very much like a ritzy porous plaster made of oilcloth. It is fireproof, sound conducting, and also highlighted to make the pictures appear more brilliant. It is just such things as this that make the union of this scientific mind with the emotional, romantic Hollywood mind promise such grand things. No less an authority than Arthur Bodansky, the distinguished, reserved conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, has said, " All of a .sudden, out of these sound movies, will grow something very great." And now to answer the questions about Jack Gilbert's voice and such. That's all science, too, and mighty wonderful. Science can prove, forever and always, that light travels at the rate of 186,000 miles a second. Sound travels at the rate of a mere 1,000 miles per second. Synchronizing them, then, becomes a ■ mere problem in arithmetic. Yet it remained for the human mind to do this. Nature is just sloppy about it and doesn't care a hang. She creates the clap of thunder at exactly the same second she shows the flash of lightning. Yet we see lightning exactly 186 times faster than we hear the thunder. Simple? SCIENCE can also prove the vibrations, not only of the human voice, but of every musical instrument and of every sound the ear can hear and a lot it can't. And it knows the average female voice is just an octave — that is, eight notes — above the male voice. It knows, likewise, that the bass voice has the greatest auditory range; the tenor next; then the contralto; then the soprano. This makes male voices easier to reproduce than female voices and bass voices better than tenors and contraltos better than sopranos. Yet, just to be contrary, the greatest personality voices are those of tenors and sopranos. Similarly, anything that is contrary to nature seems funny to us. And that, exactly, is why Jack Gilbert's voice, which is several tones higher than most men's, sounds not heroic but humorous when we hear it. So there you have it. It's pretty tough on the Gilbert but it's all for the love of the Mike.