Picture-Play Magazine (Sep 1928 - Feb 1929)

94 Continued from page 17 tors in a large building, handily adapted to the duty of getting the players into action. ' The whir of the camera is meanwhile suppressed by being inclosed in a glass booth. People have often remarked that the performances in sound pictures seem stilted. This was particularly true of the earlier ones. In the closeups, when two characters were shown talking, they remained absolutely stationary. The fact that they could not seem to go through any motions suited to their talk was at times noted. Naturally, the explanation of this i£, that they had to be close to the microphone when they spoke, so that the words might be recorded distinctly. The newer pictures manifest more fluency. Instead of one microphone, several are placed in various parts of the set, in strategic positions ; one at the door of a room, for instance ; another in the middle of the room, and a third, say, at a piano, where one of the characters is pounding the keys. A player entering the room will have a chance to speak a few words into the "mike" in the door's vicinity. He will stop in the middle of the room, and say a few more into the second "mike." Then eventually he will reach the piano, and converse at close range with the other character. Microphones are also being concealed under lamp shades, in dark corners of a room, or even camouflaged as part of the bric-a-brac and furnishings. An actress told me that it was getting so that one had to carry a map of a set to know their various locations, so cleverly are they often hidden. Too, they may be moved about, nowadays, with considerable freedom. Many people believe that this is only a passing phase of talkie development, and that soon, perhaps, an apparatus will be evolved that will pick up voices from all parts of the set, freely and easily. The stage itself may become a huge, acoustical shell in time, something like a theater auditorium, with a single, powerful microphone to capture all the goings-on everywhere. The principle by which moviesound recording is accomplished is in part radio, and in part phonographic. However, there are various methods. In some cases the sound is engraved on a wax record with a sharp-pointed needle, later to be transposed to a permanent guttaperchalike record. In others, like Movietone, it is photographed right on the film. In Movietone the variation in the intensity of the light waves coming through this film is what produces the tones, and for a time considerable difficulty was encountered, kn Infant Learns Its Sellable: when such films were tinted, as for, night scenes. Tf a certain color was put on them, a contralto voice would suddenly become a high soprano; whereas, another shade might turn it into an amazing basso. This' is now being remedied. In some cases, the solution arrived at is the use of two separate films ; one for sound, and another for the picture. It can be gathered from this that talkies, as a fine art, are in their babyhood. They can hardly walk freely, as yet, let alone run about, nor are they as articulate as they will be in the future. They will, doubtlessly, go through many progressions before they come of age. A year from now audiences will laugh at pictures they are seeing and hearing, and maybe enjoying, to-day, as they would at the first feeble attempts at making silent movies. "The Singing Fool" is aurally considered leagues ahead, for instance, of "The Jazz Singer," made only a year ago. Talkies are not in a position, therefore, to be judged too drastically. Charlie Chaplin is one person in Hollywood who does not enthusiastically view their artistic future. I talked with him about them not long ago, while he was visiting the Fairbanks studio. He regards the silent form of entertainment as still allsufficient aesthetically, though with possibly some regard for sound effects, but not dialogue. Chaplin's viewpoint can readily be understood. He is essentially the pantomimist. One cannot but feel that his art uniquely belongs to the silent screen, and that he is assured of a perfect response in this medium. Even some of the wannest devotees of talkies do not believe they will completely replace the silentscreen play. The roots of that are too deep in popularity. Certain types of stories, like costume plays, or epic dramas of "The Covered Wagon" genre, may for many years be better made in the soundless form. Talking pictures and silent will both proceed on their separate courses and both will be successful. Mary Pickford, among others, is taking cognizance of a dual appeal, for she will make "Coquette" both as a talking and a silent picture. A similar program will be pursued with "Nightstick" and "Lummox," two other United Artists features. Cecil DeMille is to undertake the same thing with his first production for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Douglas Fairbanks has a novel idea — proof again of his creative intuition. He is going to use the spoken word in "The Iron Mask," but in a way not hitherto employed. He will invoke it poetically, to lend charm and romance to this mystic-adventure tale of seventeenth-century France. As D'Ariqgncm, he will speak a sort of prologue in language akin to that used by Bulwer-Lytton in the stage play of "Richelieu." There will be several other excerpts for the voice so included, assigned to Richelieu, De Rochefort, and other characters in the drama. There will be no dialogue as such, however, between characters. Doug himself describes the idea as bearing a resemblance to the Greek chorus. Discussions have taken place, recently, 'at several studios regarding breaking up the film into the equivalent of acts in a stage play, with intermissions. The aim, in this instance, would be to let the dramatic climaxes sink in on the audience. The abruptness with which the tempo changes in talking pictures is sometimes considered detrimental. Chaplin, I know, regards this as a decided deficiency. The technique of sound pictures will have to be individual, it is contended. Imitation of the stage would be a boomerang. Consequently, the intermission will probably be "out," along with various other impractical suggestions. The classifying of players' voices is receiving a lot of attention, and some of the terms used are very amusing. According to a recent tabulation made by Metro-Goldwyn, a voice that blasts, or goes loud intermittently in recording, is called a "bloop" ; one that makes an "s" sound through the teeth is referred to as a "sizzler," and a deep, booming, guttural voice is called a "growler." A voice that is weak, and needs much amplification with electric current, is called a "juice sucker," and one that wavers constantly, a "corduroy" voice. An interesting fact about the talkies, where music and dialogue are used together, is that the music is often put on the record afterward. This is made possible by a process called re-recording, too complicated to explain here, however. Snatches of talk may also be re-recorded in similar fashion. The virtue of this is that it permits short scenes to be photographed and microphoned without any regard for their sequence in the picture. In other words, the old movie game of the last close-up in the picture being taken to-day, and the first long-shot to-morrow, may go on as it formerly did, and the entire celluloid "epic," no matter how jumbled in the making, may later be brought together in proper order. In the beginning, talking pictures were much less flexible. So, you see, they are, in this and many other ways, progressing.