From Silent to Talkie
That same year William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation and General Electric released their own system, known as the Movietone system. In this system, the sound was directly incorporated on the film itself, making picture-sound coordination much more effective. In 1927 Fox released Sunrise, complete with its own soundtrack. They also rereleased What Price Glory?, this time with a soundtrack and sound effects. Other early uses included a newsreel showing Charles Lindbergh’s takeoff in his plane and a five-minute short film titled They’re Coming to Get Me.
The Jazz Singer The first full-length talking film was The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson and produced by Warner Bros. It cost $500,000 to produce this film, which contained significant lengths of silence—but also included six songs and approximately 350 words. Warner had taken a significant risk with this film, financially and reputation-wise; their decision was clearly the correct one, as a $3.5-million profit was made, and Warner Bros. became one of the most powerful film studios of this era and beyond. Author Paula Marantz Cohen points out how Warner Bros. did not entirely abandon the notion of silent film in this groundbreaking release. According to Cohen, ‘‘It begins as a silent film, then moves into speech and song, then moves back into silence, and so on, recreating again and again its position on the cusp of two worlds.’’2 The combination of silence and sound were used in a psychologically effective way; when the Jolson character was still at home, expected to become a Jewish cantor, most of that section of the film is silent. After the character runs away to become a jazz singer on the vaudeville circuit, the film becomes startling rich with sound.
Talking Movies, Post–Jazz Singer The success of The Jazz Singer was so significant that the other major studios quickly realized that they also needed cutting-edge sound technology in order to compete with Warner Bros. In 1928 the major
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