A tenet of the "evening's entertainment" concept of the movies was that the program had to be varied and diverting. Short subjects acted as a buffer, a curtain-raiser to prepare the audience for the feature that followed. Another important function of the one- or two-reel productions of the classic period was to ensure that the program as a whole would appeal to an audience diversified by age, gender, education, and general interest. Some viewers would like sports more than fashion shows, some would prefer travelogues to cartoons. Sound added to the novelty value of shorts, opened up a new world of verbal comedy, and provided filmmakers with a laboratory in which the new technology could be tested and fine-tuned.
Vitaphone maintained the substantial lead it had established for its sound shorts by increasing the frequency of releases to four pictures a week in 1928. The schedule was divided into three categories. The Vitaphone Presentations, which included musical numbers of the sort found on the first Vitaphone programs, were heavy on opera, jazz, and comedy monologues. As the series name implies, these continued the virtual Broadway tradition and substituted for presentation acts.
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