`TALKIES' MORE THAN A FAD; SERIES OF PROBLEMS ACCOMPANIED EARLY SOUND INTO CINEMA HOUSES.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Daily News Film Writer

``Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet.''

Al Jolson's words, the first spoken by a performer in a feature fiction movie, turned out to be prophetic. They weren't the first sounds heard by movie audiences, but Jolson's words in the 1927 hit ``The Jazz Singer'' were music to people's ears and convinced moviegoers - and studio executives - that recorded sound could be more than simply a passing fancy.

It wasn't always an easy sell. Harry Warner, who founded the Warner Bros. studio with his siblings Jack, Albert and Sam, quipped in 1925, ``Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?'' Yet it was Warner Bros., along with Fox Film Corp., that ushered in the era of sound despite the general reluctance and disdain of Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the largest studios in Hollywood at the time. The success of ``The Jazz Singer'' and subsequent films like ``Lights of New York'' forced them to reconsider their position.

Movies hadn't been entirely silent before ``The Jazz Singer.'' Most theaters employed a piano or organ player to provide musical punctuation to images on the screen. Narrators and sound effects artists were also often on hand and, at the best houses, symphony orchestras would sometimes perform original compositions inspired by the films. In fact, it was Harry Warner's concern for the theaters that couldn't afford ``an orchestra . . . or even a good piano player'' that initially prompted him to experiment with sound.

The technology

The technological advances were spearheaded by telecommunications companies like American Telephone and Telegraph, General Electric and Westinghouse, all of which were interested in exploiting the burgeoning sound technology. Initially the Vitaphone system, utilizing a disc recorder and camera powered by the same motor, was used to make the movies, while exhibitors used a projector and turntable operated by one motor along with loudspeakers for heightening the sound.

But the system was a headache for exhibitors. The discs often broke and projectionists had problems synchronizing the sound with what was happening on screen. By 1930, Warner Bros. shifted to sound-on-film, cementing the conversion from silent movies to talkies. At the beginning of 1928, fewer than 200 theaters could show sound films. Two years later, some 9,000 theaters had the equipment. In those two intervening years studios were frantically arranging to add sound to the silent movies already in production.

The conversion actually set back the overall quality of movies (albeit temporarily) and probably delayed the development of new screen formats and color technology. But, for the studios, the timing couldn't have been better. The novelty of talkies shielded Hollywood from the effects of the 1929 stock market crash. And had the studios waited (as they would have if not for the efforts of Warners and Fox), the money needed to convert theaters wouldn't have been available because of the hard times.

Sounding off

That's not to say everyone was happy with the new technology. Many silent filmmakers had perfected the art of visual filmmaking by the mid-1920s with movies like ``Metropolis,'' ``Napoleon,'' ``The Passion of Joan of Arc'' and, particularly, Sergei Eisenstein's revolutionary ``Battleship Potemkin'' and viewed sound as a hindrance to their art.

And for a couple of years, it certainly was. Early talkies were constrained by stationary microphones and an immobile camera that had to be housed in a sound-tight box so the noise of its motors couldn't be heard. Directors had nightmares trying to eliminate incidental noises. Essentially, movies became a poor version of staged plays with the actors having little or no freedom to move.

``Shooting your first sound picture was an etude in chaos,'' director Frank Capra recalled in his memoirs, ``The Name Above the Title.'' ``First of all, no one was used to being quiet. Shooting of silent scenes had gone on with hammering and sawing on an adjacent set, the director yelling at actors through a megaphone, cameramen shouting `Dim the overheads! Slower on the dolly!' while everybody howled if the scene was funny.''

``Suddenly, with sound we had to work in the silence of a tomb,'' Capra continues. ``When the red lights went on, everyone froze in his position - a cough or a belch would wreck the scene. It was like a quick switch from a bleacher seat at Ebbets Field to a box seat at a Wimbledon tennis match.''

In his autobiography ``Harpo Speaks!'' Harpo Marx remembered that director Robert Flory had to be enclosed inside a soundproof booth because he couldn't keep from laughing during the brothers' funnier scenes. Meanwhile, if a fly buzzed on the set, Marx Brothers screenwriter Morrie Ryskind said it ``sounded like an airplane.''

Actors adjust

The sounds coming from the actors' mouths caused their share of problems, too. As ``Singing in the Rain'' so memorably detailed, not every silent film star had the tone or the talent to make it in talkies. Actors with theatrical experience - Ronald Colman, Claudette Colbert, William Powell, John and Lionel Barrymore, George Bancroft and Marie Dressler, among others - fared the best. Some lost their careers.

Writes Capra: ``To the nervous snit of nonstage silent actors - over having to memorize lines for the first time - the (set's) funereal hush added to the willies. They shook with stage fright.''

But nerves weren't always to blame. John Gilbert, one of the biggest stars of the early '20s, never made the transition. Gilbert's prim, high-pitched voice didn't endear him to audiences, but then, too, his swashbuckling, romantic character type was also falling into disfavor with the public. Leading men with rugged, natural features (think Clark Gable) were the new rage. Gilbert made his last movie in 1933. He died three years later at the age of 41, having drunk himself to death.

Eventually, engineers developed sound-insulated cameras with quieter motors, which were then mounted on battery-operated dollies with rubber tires. Directors again had the freedom to move their cameras. Boom microphones were created and also put on dollies, giving actors the ability to move around. By the early 1930s, talented directors - many of whom had decried the coming of sound - were now using the technology to their advantage.

Even a young Alfred Hitchcock, who once told Francois Truffaut that ``silent pictures were the purest form of cinema,'' realized the benefits of the sound revolution. Working in England, he shot his first movie, ``Blackmail,'' a silent film. When he heard of the impact of talkies in America, he remade most of it - brilliantly and inventively - with sound for release in 1929.

``When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise,'' Hitchcock told Truffaut. ``I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between. It seems unfortunate that with the arrival of sound, the motion picture, overnight, assumed a theatrical form.''

Hitchcock and other master directors such as Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg went beyond that form, building on the visual artistry of the silent era to usher in a golden age of movies. And in subsequent years when audiences heard Fred Astaire's heels hit the hard floors and Bacall asking Bogie whether he knew how to whistle, they could think back to Jolson's words and nod in agreement. Movies have never been the same.

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Photo

PHOTO Al Jolsen starred in the 1927 hit ``The Jazz Singer,'' the first commercial film to incorporate vocal sound.

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