American Film Short Subjects and the Industry's
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AMERICAN FILM SHORT SUBJECTS AND THE INDUSTRY’S TRANSITION TO SOUND Edwin M. Bradley Presented to the American Culture faculty of the University of Michigan-Flint in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Liberal Studies in American Culture November 12, 2001 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Shorts Shrift ................................................................2 Golden Silence................................................................................. 7 Beginnings ..................................................................................... 14 DeForest and Case.......................................................................... 20 The Warners Take a Chance ........................................................... 27 Jolson Sings (and Talks)..................................................................37 Sly Fox.............................................................................................44 The “Jazz Singer” and More ............................................................54 Voices Carry................................................................................... 58 Movietone on the March .................................................................70 Keeping U p ..................................................................................... 81 Giving ’Em What They Want .......................................................104 The Eyes of the Public .......................................... I ll Unequal Opportunity...................................................................... 116 News of the World ......................................................................... 123 Hazards of the Trade ...................................................................... 131 Make Room for Mickey..................................................................141 Conclusion: A “New” Short ...........................................................159 Bibliography....................................................................................162 1 INTRODUCTION: SHORTS SHRIFT His name has been lost in the mists of time, but one day in that tumultuous year of 1929, an aging vaudevillian was on a movie set, nervously enduring his first appearance before the new and intimidating sound camera. So tentative was the trouper that he required seven rehearsals and three takes becore finally settling down to present his comedy act the way he had for years in the comfort of live audiences. During the fourth take — the one that the director figured would be the keeper — the vet, somehow still shaky despite his smoothed delivery, stopped without warning to ask the man behind the camera, “How am I doing — all right?” A lot of movie performers were asking a lot of movie directors that question in 1929. The above account was presented as a blind item in a prominent Hollywood trade publication, which means it may be less an actual incident than a parable of the uncertainty of the few short years in the mid to late 1920s when scientists and technicians teamed with creative talents to effect a revolution that would carry the cinema down new avenues of appearance and artistry. The movies could always be seen; now they could be heard! We can look back now at the sound revolution in the motion picture are marvel at how fast, in relative terms, the cinema adapted to its important new element. The halting, 2 stagebound earliest “talkies” paled in comparison to the fluid, lyrical silents they replaced in the favor of audiences, but within five years of the first official foray into sound by a Hollywood studio, filmmakers had become unencumbered of the limitations imposed on them by the unrefined earliest audible technology. The outstanding artistic achievements of 1931 were visually on a par with those of 1926 -- and the later pictures had the added benefits of dialogue, song and sound effects. However, five years was long enough for careers to have ripened or been ruined, and studio fortunes to have been made or lost. The transition from silent to sound films is perhaps the most fascinating period in the history of mass entertainment, although scholarship in earnest on the era has only recently began to emerge. Only a handful of books published prior to the mid 1990s dealt with the period in detail, but since then there have been at least four. What has been missing from this impressive burst of research has been a study specifically dealing with the early sound short subject as opposed to its feature-length counterpart. Then again, the short frequently has been overlooked. Most general film histories touch on a few key moments in the transition to sound — from “Don Juan” (1926), the first Hollywood-produced feature with sound elements, albeit only a synchronized music score and sound effects, to “The Jazz Singer” (1927), the first feature with song and dialogue sequences, to “Lights of New York” (1928), the first all-talking feature, and on into the flowering of the sound medium during the early 1930s. The truth is that the short subject -- defined for purposes of this study as a film presentation of four reels (roughly 45 minutes) or (usually) fewer — played an important role in the pursuit of sound. When “Don Juan” premiered in New York on August 6, 1926, the attention devoted to it was eclipsed by that for the program of singing 3 and talking shorts that preceded it on the bill. Before even one paying customer heard A1 Jolson exclaim, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” in “The Jazz Singer,” the studio that made possible his revelation had already made scores of audible short subjects. Months prior to the unveiling of “Lights of New York” by that pioneering studio, Warner Bros., the company had produced its first plotted all-dialogue shorts. In the period between the debuts of “Don Juan” and, in July 1928, “Lights of New York,” the short subject achieved a rare primacy over the feature-length film in public curiosity, if not in mass viewership. Because of their very nature -- they could be produced more quickly and cheaply than features -- shorts had to begin the overall transition to sound. Between the premiere of the “Don Juan” prologue and the end of 1929 -- when the transition to sound features was virtually complete — nearly 2,000 sound shorts were produced by Hollywood-based companies. These included musical performances, comedy sketches, dramatic playlets, monologues, newsreels, documentaries, travelogues, and animated cartoons. In comparison, only about 300 features containing some degree of synchronized dialogue and music were issued during the same period. Mere quantity aside, why should we care enough about the early sound short subject to devote a study to it? The answer is that, like its feature-length counterpart, the short reveals significant information about America and the world, historically and culturally, in the second half of the third decade of the 20th Century. ~ The nature of show business. The sound revolution brought hundreds of performers into the medium of motion pictures who had not previously participated in it. The need for aurally-oriented artists prompted Hollywood studios to employ singers, 4 dancers, comedians, dramatic actors and monologists who came from the competing mediums of vaudeville, the legitimate (Broadway) theater and radio (but primarily vaudeville). Some of these performers went straight into feature films, but a wide majority of them either began in shorts before “graduating” to longer works or performed exclusively within the short-subject domain. As we examine the incredibly wide range of talent in shorts alone, we get an idea of what kind of diversions amused us in the late 1920s. It was not just song and dance, and -- especially in terms of current attitudes toward race, ethnicity and gender — not always politically correct. -- Unearthing the obscure. In collecting information about shorts, we recognize the efforts of scores of personalities who rarely, if ever, have been included in film histories. A1 Jolson, Jack Benny, Ginger Rogers and the little girl who became Judy Garland appeared in early sound shorts, but so did “Oklahoma” Bob Albright and His Rodeo Do Flappers, Leo Beers (billed as the “World Renowned Whistling Songster”), Carl Emmy and His Pals (a man and his dogs), and the female impersonator Karyl Norman, whose many admirers called him “The Creole Fashion Plate.” Moreover, many sound shorts gave exposure to minority performers — like Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, and Chief Caupolican (“The Indian Baritone”) -- that they would not have received in features of the era. — The state of journalism. The newsreel is an especially interesting kind of early sound short. The recording of politicians, entertainers, athletes, and other notables brought the non-fiction short a new vitality. To analyze the subjects of stories within the newsreel is to determine the priorities of late 1920s news gathering, and by extension, publically held values. For example, why would Fox Movietone, the first sound newsreel 5 series, devote so many shots to marches by West Point cadets or Columbia-Yale rowing matches? We will also examine the balance between news and entertainment in the early sound newsreel — which, we’ll find, mirrors the balance of seventy years later in the traditional news media. -- Media wars. In a sense, the coming of sound affirmed the status of the motion picture as ‘"the people’s entertainment.” Hollywood was able to turn back the formidable challenge of the radio industry to public