Roaring Twenties

The Transition to Talkies: How Sound Changed Movies Forever

The introduction of synchronized sound was the most disruptive technical event in the history of cinema. Between 1927 and 1930, the American film industry was converted, in a single three-year burst, from a silent medium to a sound medium. The conversion transformed the studios that made the films, the theaters that showed them, the stars who appeared in them, the languages in which they were distributed, and the place of American film in the world market. By 1930, silent film production in the United States had effectively ended, and the American film industry had become the film industry of the world.

For the wider context, see the parent Golden Age of Hollywood cluster page and the 1920s Arts and Entertainment pillar overview. For the history of the industry, For the directors who worked in the silent era,

The 1927 Watershed: The Jazz Singer

The watershed event was the release, on October 6, 1927, of The Jazz Singer, a Warner Bros. feature starring Al Jolson as the son of a Jewish cantor. The film was not technically a full talkie; it was a silent feature with a synchronized musical score and four separate synchronized dialogue sequences, including the famous line “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” The film was a commercial sensation, the highest-grossing film in Warner Bros. history up to that point, and it demonstrated to the industry that audiences would pay to hear actors speak.

Warner Bros. had been a relatively small studio in 1925, and the gamble on sound was a desperate bid for market share. The studio had acquired the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, developed by Western Electric, in 1925, and had used it to provide synchronized musical scores for Don Juan (1926) and The Better ‘Ole (1926). The Jazz Singer was the first Vitaphone release with synchronized dialogue. The follow-up The Lights of New York (1928) was the first 100% all-talking picture.

The Technical Challenges

The transition to sound was technically messy. Vitaphone was a sound-on-disc system: the soundtrack was recorded on a separate phonograph record that had to be kept in sync with the projector. The rival system, sound-on-film, recorded the soundtrack directly on the film strip itself. The two systems were incompatible, and the studios that had invested in one or the other were locked in. RCA developed the Photophone sound-on-film system, adopted by RKO and by some of the independent producers. Fox introduced the Movietone sound-on-film system in 1927-28, and the Movietone News newsreels (including the first sound footage of Charles Lindbergh returning from Paris in June 1927) became the principal newsreel product of the late 1920s. By 1930 the industry had standardized on sound-on-film, but only after a period of expensive technical chaos.

The international soundtrack problem was even more difficult. The early talkies were in English only, which locked the American studios out of the major non-English-language markets of Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The Paramount Foreign Legion, the multilingual version studio, was set up at Paramount’s Joinville studios near Paris in 1930-32 to make multiple-language versions of the same film. The 1930s dubbed versions eventually replaced the multilingual versions, and the American film industry, having solved the technical problem of international distribution, consolidated its domination of the world market.

The Studio Winners and Losers

The transition rewarded some studios and punished others. Warner Bros., the pioneer, was the biggest winner in 1927-28 but was soon overshadowed. MGM under Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg was the most successful early talkies studio; the 1929-30 musicals, including The Broadway Melody (1929, the first sound film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture), established the genre. RKO produced the Astaire-Rogers musicals of the mid-1930s — Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936) — that defined the genre. Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie (1928) was the first cartoon with synchronized sound. The smaller studios, unable to afford the conversion costs of the new sound equipment, were forced into bankruptcy or merger. The 1929-30 period saw a wave of bankruptcies and takeovers that consolidated the industry into the Big Eight of 1930.

The Star Transitions: Who Survived, Who Didn’t

The transition was especially hard on the stars. Clara Bow (1905-1965), the “It” girl of 1927, made her first talkie, City Streets (1931), with some success, but a series of scandals and a 1933 mental breakdown ended her career. Janet Gaynor (1906-1984), the first Best Actress Academy Award winner in 1929, made a successful transition to sound. Norma Talmadge (1894-1957), the silent era queen, made a series of unsuccessful sound films in 1929-30 and retired in 1930. Lon Chaney (1883-1930), “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” died of throat cancer in 1930 before he could make a talkie.

John Gilbert (1897-1936), the top male star of the silent era alongside Greta Garbo, was the most famous casualty. His 1926 Man, Woman and Sin was his first talkie, and the studio publicity built up the film as a test of his voice. The voice turned out to be high-pitched, and the film and his subsequent talkies were unsuccessful. He was paired with Garbo in Queen Christina (1933) in a vain attempt to restore his career; he died in 1936, age 38. Pola Negri (1897-1987), the Polish silent era star, had been a sensation in the 1923 Madame DuBarry; her talkies were unsuccessful, and she left Hollywood in 1932.

The successful transitions were less dramatic but no less important. Greta Garbo (1905-1990) was the most famous actress of the sound era as well as the silent era; her 1930 Anna Christie was her first talkie. Joan Crawford (1905-1977), Clark Gable (1901-1960), and James Cagney (1899-1986) all made successful transitions in 1930-31 and became the dominant stars of the next generation.

The 1930s Consolidation and the Cultural Transformation

The transition was consolidated by two pieces of regulation. The Hays Code, the production code elaborated by Martin Quigley and Daniel A. Lord in 1930, was not strictly enforced until 1934, but its production guidelines began to constrain the content of American film in 1930. The Motion Picture Academy Foundation, established in 1933, gave the industry an institutional framework for self-celebration that has survived into the present.

The cultural transformation was the largest of all. The end of the international silent film market and the rise of the American English-language film as the world standard reshaped the global film industry. The UFA studio in Germany, the most important European studio of the silent era, ran into severe financial difficulty in 1928-29 and was effectively absorbed by the German government in 1933. The French and Italian film industries did not recover a substantial share of their own markets until the 1930s. The other lasting change was the consolidation of the New York-Hollywood axis and the central role of the Jewish immigrants who had founded the studios. Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, William Fox, Marcus Loew, and Samuel Goldwyn were all born in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. By 1930, the American film industry, founded by immigrants, was exporting American popular culture to the world, and the silent film, the most distinctive American art form of the early twentieth century, had given way to the talkie.

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