Electric Affinities Often the best way to understand a new technology is to compare it to an older one already understood. Frequently when writers in the late 1920s introduced the talkies, the simile of choice was the automobile. George Klee used the...

Taming the Talkies, 1929-1930 Cinematographers now do everything they did in silent drama dares in Hollywood. JOHN SEITZ, Cinematographic Annual 1930 The obvious question to ask John Seitz is, Why was adapting sound fihmmaking to "silent" practice...

Virtual Broadway, Virtual Orchestra: De Forest and Vitaphone Talking pictures are perfected, says Dr. Lee De Forest. So is castor oil. JAMES QUIRK, Photoplay, MARCH 1924 Once a new technology enters public usage, it is susceptible to being co-opted for...

Enticing the Audience: Warner Bros. and Vitaphone The decision to add Movietone and Vitaphone to the product lines of Fox and Warners in 1927 was viewed as a curio (like color and stereoscopy) which might boost a program. Synchronized sound could also...

Exhibition: Talkies Change the Bjou Prologue is dead! On with THE SHOW OF SHOWS. FROM THE FILM "PROLOGUE" TO THE SHOW OF SHOWS, 1929 For exhibitors and for audiences, the coming of sound and the coming of hard times after 1930 caused permanent changes...

Vitaphone was a sound film process used on features and nearly 2,000 short subjects produced by Warner Brothers and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1930. Vitaphone was the last, but most successful, of the sound-on-disc processes. The...