Hollywood land
1941 - Hollywood
A time of prosperity for most sectors of the U.S. economy, including movies, which not only flourished at home, but came to dominate abroad as well.
4,000 picture palaces open in the US between 1920 and 1929.
The legend of Hollywood as an evil, god-less place filled with morally corrupt individuals, was born from lavish parties, extravagant production budgets, obscene star salaries, sexual promiscuity, alcohol abuse, drug abuse and of course, scandal.
Fatty Arbuckle - Virginia Rappe
In addition to the many scandals, the films coming out of Hollywood after WWI depicted the fast times of the loose and reckless Jazz era, focusing on crime, alcohol, wild parties, & adultery, all presented as if was fun and frivolous.
Conservative groups, who had been calling for censorship since Edison's peep shows, began to grow concerned about Hollywood and the films it was producing.
So, to keep the government from creating a state-run censorship board, the studios formed a trade organization in 1922 to self-regulate.
Though the Hays Office adopted a list of Don'ts and Be Carefuls - there was no enforcement mechanism - which was intentional - because its primary purpose was to hold off censorship by giving the impression of self-regulation.
However, nothing could be further from the truth.
Between 1913 and 1935, Sennett, director of Keystone, made thousands of comic shorts, along with hundreds of features film comedies.
A slapstick was used by stage comedians to create a noise to accompany a slap or fall.
Keystone comedies focused on violent, chaotic physical comedy with fast-paced editing and frantic action.
He starts performing onstage at age nine to support himself and his younger brother, and quickly becomes a star in the London music hall scene and tours the world with the Karno Troupe.
In 1913, he is discovered by Mack Sennett while on tour in North America.
In 1916, Chaplin signs with Mutual for $10,000 a week plus a signing bonus of $150,000. His short films of this period contain a great deal of social satire at the expense of the rich.
In the 1920s, Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, and starred in a series of films featuring the Little Tramp, making him the most recognizable figure in the world.
Chaplin fought the arrival of sound and continued to make silent features well after the rest of Hollywood moved to talkies.
Like Chaplin, Keaton spent his childhood on stage, working with his family in vaudeville. When the act broke up in 1917, he was already a star, and entered Hollywood working beside Fatty Arbuckle in a series of two-reel comedies.
In 1919, he and Joseph Schenk formed Keaton Productions. Schenk handled financing and Keaton had complete creative control and freedom of his films. Keaton believed comedy should be funny without being ridiculous, and for this reason he took great pains to make his films credible in dramatic and comic terms.
Roger Ebert in 2002 said:
“In an extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929, Keaton worked without interruption on a series of films that make him, arguably, the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies.”
With the coming of sound, Keaton's company was absorbed into MGM, but he found it difficult to work within the confines of the studio structure.
Harold Lloyd and Hal Roach start their film careers together, working as extras in 1914. Roach inherited money from a relative and started making movies with Lloyd. Lloyd became a major star, and Roach became one of the top producers of his generation.
Harold Lloyd is considered the master of the comedy of thrills.
Director Clarence Brown with Greta Garbo
1924’s The Iron Horse was the first big budget, epic western with stars in the lead roles.
Edison approached the motion picture project with the notion of providing a visual accompaniment for his phonograph - and W.K.L. Dickson achieved synchronization of the two machines as early as 1889 with the Kinetophone.
Around the same time, other inventors attempted to create sound films by employing a sound-on-disc system.
But all the sound-on-disc systems experienced the same problems:
In 1918 three German inventors come up a new approach: Sound-on-film.
This fixed the sync issue, and the brevity of the recording medium issue.
Lee de Forest solved amplification.
In 1907, to improve radio reception, he had patented the Audion Tube, which amplified sound and drove it into a speaker allowing it to be heard by large numbers of people. The Audion Tube became essential to all sound systems requiring amplification.
In 1922, he patented his own sound-on-film technology. He called his process Phonofilm and founded The De Forest Phonofilm Company.
De Forest made hundreds of shorts to promote his system in hopes it would be adopted by the studios. He even had 34 theaters on the east coast of the US wired for Phonofilm sound. But the big movie studios were not interested in the expensive conversion necessary to switch the entire industry over to sound films. They feared disrupting overseas markets, throwing the star system into chaos and hurting the value of their back catalog of films.
Western Electric Developed a better version of the early sound-on-disc systems using a phonograph.
The sound was improved, and the system addressed the brevity of the recording medium issue that prevented the early sound-on-disc systems from catching on. But Hollywood still believed they had a good thing going with silent film, and refused to go "all in" on this new technology.
Warner Bros initially thought they could use the system to provide music for silent films eliminating the need for those 26,000 musicians.
Warner established the Vitaphone Company and leased the system for $800,000 with exclusive rights to sublease to other studios.
August 6, 1926
Critics described the sound as:
Engineers Theodore Case and Earl Sponable devise an improved photoelectric cell. This reduced the scratch and hiss that plagued Lee De Forest’s early Phonofilm system.
William Fox buys the system and renames it Movietone.
The Big Five Contract goes to Western Electric sound system. In just two years, the entire film
industry was re-tooled for sound from production to exhibition.
A musical, made with color film, Gold Diggers broke box office records and remained the highest grossing film ever produced until 1939.
Studios quickly realized that audiences would no longer pay to see silent films. Critics of sound feared dialogue heavy scenes would eliminate the camera movement and editing that made the silent era great. And they were right.
Microphones had limited range so actors had to speak directly into them rendering the actor motionless within the frame.
And camera motors were loud, which forced them to be hidden away in soundproof booths called iceboxes.
It was hard to mix sound. So, all the sound for a scene had to be recorded at the same time, on the set, so if you wanted music, you had to bring on the band.
Which also meant you had to shoot scenes with multiple cameras rather than shoot a scene from different angles, and edit them together.
The impact on editing was the biggest hurdle. In the silent era editing was
unrestricted, but with sound, editing became functional instead of expressive, used
solely to change from one scene to the next.
Most importantly, they needed actors who could speak naturally, with good sounding
voices and clear articulation.
Many silent stars lost their careers due to accents, the inability to speak clearly, or the fact that the sound of their voices did not match their screen persona.
Reshoot the entire film with a new director, crew and cast who speak different languages.
Buster Keaton: Man of Multilinguals
Eventually, the acceptance of subtitles, along with improving technology, especially
the development of sound mixing in post-production, helped solve the issue.
Post-synch sound was first used by director King Vidor for his first talking picture Hallelujah! which is also regarded as the first major film of the sound era.