The story of film from its beginnings to the end of the studio system.
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet !
(Innovations in the Movies)
Sound
Attempts to add sound to the flickering images of the cinema go back as far as Edison. The Kinetoscope was in fact originally conceived as an extension of the phonograph. Early attempts by Edison to marry sight and sound were hampered by problems with amplification and synchronisation.
The Paris Exhibition of 1900 included sound films haphazardly synchronised on a cylinder. Edison made another attempt at sound films in 1913. The problem was projectionists had to continually change the speed of the film to keep the sound in synchronisation.
The Europeans made better progress. The Germans developed the excellent Tri-Ergon system which was later used by Fox in collaboration with an American company Case. Lee DeForest's silenium tube offered one solution to the problem of amplification and his phonofilm of 1923 showed how light waves could synchronize sound and image. DeForest went as far as opening a studio to make sound films but encountered opposition from everyone.
The public had little interest in sound in novelty musical shorts. They were more interested in the latest films of great silent stars like Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford, Swanson and Valentino.
Warner Brothers who owned a Los Angeles radio station collaborated with Bell Telephone in creating the sound-on-disc system Vitaphone. In 1926 at a gala premiere for Vitaphone they presented a series of musical shorts showcasing the major operatic and vaudeville stars of the time and a silent feature film with a syncronised musical score : Don Juan starring John Barrymore and Mary Astor. In April 1927 Fox Movietone News,a sound news weekly began. None of this really excited the public because sound was still perceived as a novelty.
That perception was changed forever on the night of October 6th 1927 and the premiere of The Jazz Singer. Al Jolson's inspired ad-libbing changed sound from a mere novelty into a permanent part of cinema. He talked like a real human being and addressed the audience directly.
Colour
When early films were shown in 1896 colour films were exhibited too. They were coloured by hand frame by frame : a slow and intricate process. The increasing length of films and the demand for prints soon made this impractical.
The Pathecolor stencil process originated in 1905 had long been in use for colouring postcards. It used a series of prints one for each colour in the film. Many films were bathed in dye to provide a general wash of colour. This helped promote a general mood : blue for night, red for fire, green for landscapes.
George Albert Smith an English pioneer developed the Kinemacolor process in 1906 which used red and green filters on a rotating disc in front of the film.
In 1915 the Technicolor company was founded by Herbert Kalmus, D.F.Comstock and W.Westcott. Films either completely or partly in the two colour Technicolor process included The Ten Commandments (1923), Ben Hur (1925), Douglas Fairbanks' The Black Pirate (1926)
and the early sound musicals : The Broadway Melody, On with the Show and
GoldDiggers of Broadway (all 1929).
David O' Selznick who produced The Garden of Allah (1936) hit back with two classic colour films : A Star Is Born (1937) and Nothing Sacred (1937). Warner Brothers first big Technicolor picture was The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), despite being a superb film with plenty of swashbuckling action it failed to recoup its substantial cost of $1.5 million.
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The Wizard of Oz (1939) was MGM's most expensive film up to that time and wasn't a commercial success on its original release. This didn't encourage the biggest studio in Hollywood to change its attitude that "if our films make more money in black and white what do we need colour for?" even though the monetary bonanza of Gone with the Wind (1939)
was just around the corner.
Widescreen
The idea of creating a panoramic image filling most of the visual field of the observer is older than the cinema. Paintings of panoramic views were popular in the Victorian era and magic lantern shows were able to project a 360 degree picture on a cylindrical screen in the 1890s.
In 1900 at the Paris Exposition films shot from a balloon's basket while it drifted over Paris were shown on a screen encircling the audience. Apart from a few more special shows there were no significant developments in widescreen cinema until the 1920s.
The French director Abel Gance made very effective use of the widescreen in his superb historical epic Napoleon (1927). For the final sequence of the picture where the Emperor prepared to march on Italy three projectors were used which either projected a triptych of images or a single panoramic image. The same principle was the basis of the
Cinerama process in the 1950s and 60s.
The letter box screen or Cinemascope was based on a lens designed by Henri Chretien in 1927. 20th Century Fox threw Cinemascope into the battle against Television in 1953 with The Robe a biblical epic starring Richard Burton. It was popular enough to be taken up by the other major studios but it had the unfortunate effect of discouraging activity on the screen. The ponderous epics which resulted brought us back to the techniques of the worst of the silents. The best guarantees for a successful film are a good script and fine acting not a huge screen but the most desperate innovation to lure the public back to the cinema was 3D.
Warner Brothers began the 3D false dawn with two forgettable films : Bwana Devil (1952) and House of Wax (1953) but filmgoers soon tired of having to wear silly glasses to get the full effect of their movies. Films made in 3D like the musical Kiss Me Kate (1953) and Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954) were more often seen without the glasses.
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Written content of the Golden Age of Hollywood Website (except where indicated) copyright Derek McLellan, 2007.