I just watched this movie for the first time, and like others on the board have previously mentioned, I was surprised that the whole movie wasn't in synchronized sound. My question is, why is that?
Was it a cost issue? Was the technology still not there for a full feature film? Any insight or a point in the right direction would be appreciated. :)
Seriously expencive to make at the time. Im not sure about the technology, though i would asume if they can do it for some parts they would be able to for others. I think it was mostly a case of money and lack of experiance with the consept. Also if i remember, the idea was not a particularly popular one at the time so they may have just been testing the waters with it.
(by rememeber i mean my history, not my actual memories, lol.)
'We gotta get outa here before one of those things kills Guy'
The Jazz Singer is pretty much an experimental film although a pretty well made experimental film by a soon to become major Hollywood studio, Warner Brothers. I take it you mean that why doesn't the whole movie have pre-recorded speech. Since it does have sound all the way through played in the Vitaphone process. The movie is considered what for the next 3 or 4 years would become 'part talkies'. Warner Bros and the other studios did not know if the movie audience wanted recorded speech in their movies or throughout them. So bits of dialogue were incorporated as a would be selling point or even novelty while the bulk of the film was kept as a silent that is with pre-recorded music & sound effects along with inter-title cards. The Jazz Singer went over so well with 1927 audiences not only because of the Vitaphone but most likely to see and hear Al Jolson speak from the screen. The very next Warners production with speech/sound was "The Lights of New York" and was more profitable than TJS. "Lights" is a terrible film when judged today and it also didn't have Alan Crosland as director but the novice Bryan Foy.
shareThank you!
shareAlso at that time, they had not invented boom mics. The microphone had to be placed in a box equal distance from the people speaking to keep the sound just right. So the actors could not move. It doesnt seem like a difficult idea but this was all new to people at that time. nobody was demanding "talkies" it was an experiment.
shareThis link gives some insight into that topic.
http://www.mtsu.edu/~smpte/twenties.html
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Sound was still completely new then and they didn't know how the public was going to react to seeing a sound picture. It was also very expensive.
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"Everytime a bell rings, an angel gets its wings"
And you might be interested in the fact that when talkes finally became popular, it spelled the end for some actors. They did not come across that great when they actually opened their mouths and spoke. When the world first heard Greta Garbo's co-star John Gilbert, (I remember my mom telling me this), everybody in the theatre went "Oh my god, he sounds like a pansy". That's exactly what she said. And that was the end of John Gilbert's acting career. You see, in silent movies, the eyes were the actor's best secret. They conveyed emotion. But when they act to open their mouths and actually be recorded, well, they had much to learn. I find this absolutely fascinating.
shareThe end of John Gilbert's acting career ... except for the nine movies he made after his sound debut, which includes the classic Queen Christina.
Janet! Donkeys!
I just saw it for the first time myself, and I assumed that it wasn't all a talkie for the same reason "The Wizard of Oz" wasn't all in color, or "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" wasn't all animation (or all live action): the impact of going from "silent" to "talkie" just seemed like it would have been something new and dramatic to the audiences back in 1927. I assume the marketing for the movie would have emphasized the sound, so when the movie began the audience might have initially believed that this merely meant the lack of live accompaniment. That alone would have been impressive. When Jolson stands up to sing, there might have been some additional appreciation for the fact that the musical soundtrack was synchronized to his orchestra. And then when he actually opens his mouth to sing, BAM, the technical wizardry hits them again. I expect there might have been a few "oohs" and "aahs" in the theater at that point.
I could be wrong about all of this, I'm only speculating. But it does seem to me that they really dramatized the technique by choosing to reveal it as they did.
About a year before "The Jazz Singer" a film called "Don Juan" was released with a full synchronized musical score and a few isolated sounds such as doors closing and I think swords clanging during swordfight scenes. I think Warner Brothers thought it prudent to just build on this idea and expand sound in movies to a few songs and a few lines of dialogue.
It might have been too much for an audience familar with only silent movies to go to an all sound film with no transitional films first. This is just speculation on my part. I don't think mass panic would have ensued. It just seems to make more sense to "ease" into sound by steps rather than do it in one fell swoop.
Before The Jazz Singer most "talkies" had been films of musical acts or spoken monologues given directly to camera; static and filmed in one or two very long takes. Adapting synchronised sound filming to the film-making techniques (editing, reverse angle shots etc.) that had been developed for features during the silent era proved to be difficult.
For sound the camera had to be in a sound-proof booth restricting the use of pans and making tracking shots impossible. Also as has been mentioned the performers had to remain close to the fixed-position microphones. And the sound-on-disc system used by Warners made life even more difficult since each disc had to be recorded in one take. Thus sound takes were long as well as being static. Finally sound editing was near impossible with discs (Warners did later create a complex sound editing system for discs that worked by copying bits from a number of original discs, but it was cumbersome and gave poor results).
Because of these problems Warner Brothers gave up using discs for original recording in 1930, though since many theaters were still only equipped for the sound-on-disc system at that time discs continued to be made available for these theaters (copied from optical film masters) until the mid 1930s.