The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930 - Hardcover

Eyman, Scott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684811626 ISBN 13: 9780684811628

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1997

Synopsis

The author of Mary Pickford: America's Sweetheart provides an account of the bad and the good that happened in Hollywood after Al Jolson first opened ears in the Jazz Singer, the seminal film that led to the rise of new stars and a decline of the old ones. 12,500 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Scott Eyman is the Books Editor for The Palm Beach Post.

Reviews

Eyman follows his highly acclaimed Ernst Lubitsch (1993) with an astute look at the most significant upheaval in Hollywood history: the arrival of talking pictures. Legend has it that Al Jolson's impassioned monologue to his mother in The Jazz Singer was the first time that anyone talked in the movies and the event that saved Warner Brothers from bankruptcy. Eyman's meticulously researched history of the coming of sound punctures those misconceptions and many others. In fact, as Eyman documents, there were early experiments with sound films shortly after the turn of the century. But there were technical, financial, and sociological reasons for the initial failure of these experiments. Not until 1926, when Sam Warner and William Fox became the champions of two competing versions, did sound films become commercially viable. And that breakthrough would engender hundreds of short films, involving everyone from Gertrude Lawrence and the Metropolitan Opera to singing canaries. Eyman deftly traces the race among competing inventors to get their various methods accepted, the unease with which most of the studios watched the contest from the sidelines, and the chaos that ensued when ``talkies'' finally came in. The constraints necessitated by early sound-recording technology turned the once imperious directors of the silent film into prisoners of the their sound engineers. But there were directors who refused to allow their cameras to be chained down, and as Eyman reports, a few early talkies succeeded as art as well as novelty. Eyman is particularly good at conveying the beauty of the fully developed art that was silent cinema; in the years 192627 as sound began to supplant silence, Hollywood produced silent films of such accomplishment as Sunrise, Seventh Heaven, The Crowd, and The Docks of New York. Eyman tells this story with wit and skill, detailing a surprisingly overlooked but crucial period in Hollywood history. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The transition from silent film to sound has been covered in many histories of Hollywood but nowhere so thoroughly and delightfully as here. The author of such biographies as Mary Pickford: America's Sweetheart (LJ 2/1/90), Eyman combines a historian's zeal for detail and context with a storyteller's talent for the perfect illustrative anecdote. The author deftly juggles a number of stories, including film-by-film accounts of key transition directors King Vidor and F.W. Murnau. He also manages to describe the technical aspects of his story without bogging down in the kind of jargon that would put a lay reader to sleep. A remarkable book that belongs in every film history collection.?Thomas Wiener, "Satellite DIRECT"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cinema's transition from silents to talkies has inspired many myths, but Eyman maintains that no aspect of film history has been so slighted. Al Jolson's explosive performance in The Jazz Singer (1927, and silent with a few sound sequences) is usually credited with ushering in sound, but it was the all-talking Lights of New York (1928)--"a dreadful little movie," Eyman says--that threw the industry into a tizzy (primitive synchronized sound devices date from as far back as 1905). Eyman captures the tenor and the terror of the times, as panicked studio executives and theater owners made the investment in sound, huge stars underwent humiliating voice auditions (fewer careers were shattered than legend claims), and technicians searched for ways to conceal microphones and otherwise adjust to the technology. The transformation was total, from the escalation in importance of writers to the appearance of food in theaters. A fascinating account of what Eyman terms "the destruction of one great art and the creation of another." Gordon Flagg

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684811626
• ISBN 13: 9780684811628
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416