The moving pictures are such a mixture of secret manoeuvres and false
publicity that right before your eyes an event slips into a legend out of
which is it hard to disengage a germ of truth.
GILBERT SELVES, Movies for the Millions, 1937
The film that emblematizes the birth of the talkies is TIE JAZZ SINGER. Jolson's blackened face, tear-jerking performance, and unabashed vocal gusto are understood to signal the end of Hollywood's silence. The 1927 film enjoys this stature not only in popular opinion but in academic discourse. An insightful article about TIE JAZZ SINGER, for example, has described the musical "as a summation of those various elements which came to distinguish the musical genre." The film was an event (in Foucault's use of the term), "since it firmly established a new and promising direction in which movie narrative might turn." This scholar follows most sources in assuming that TIE JAZZ SINGER was an enormous Broadway hit and that movie producers, having been burned by promoters of sound systems too often, were skeptical of its success and slow to convert to sound "despite the testimony of its box office returns."1 But how do we know how overwhelming its profits were or what its effect on Hollywood was? Why did audiences respond with such fervor?
The research detailed in this book should make us question claims about a single film or "event" being responsible for any major change in Hollywood.
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