[Dixielandjazz] Fwd: "The Jazz Singer"

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
This one, via the Australian Dance Bands list, may be of interest.
A bit long, but that's what the delete button id for.
8>)
Regards,
Bill.

> Talkies Challenge: Synch Sight, Sound
>
> by Jim Beckerman
> Bergen Record, October 1, 2007
>
> It wasn't the first talkie.
>
> It wasn't, strictly speaking, really a talkie at all.
>
> But the first audiences who saw "The Jazz Singer," released 80 years
> ago Saturday, didn't care that the movie was 80 percent silent with a
> few "talking" sequences. Or that the story was corny even by 1927
> standards.
>
> Once the movie was released on Oct. 6, 1927, the talkie revolution
> was on.
>
> "It was an earthquake," says Colin Egan, director of Loew's Jersey,
> the 78-year-old, 3,187-seat Jersey City movie palace that has a rare
> souvenir from those hectic days.
>
> Climb five flights of stairs -- the equivalent of an eight-story
> building -- to the booth at the top of the theater, and you will find
> an ungainly contraption that looks like a Civil War cannon poised for
> bombardment.
>
> Forgotten discs
>
> It's a Vitaphone projector -- the only one in a theater in the
> Northeast, according to Egan.
>
> "The Jazz Singer," like most of the earliest talkies, was recorded
> not with today's sound-on-film process, but on large records,
> synchronized -- sometimes not very well -- with the image.
>
> "Vitaphone" ("life sound") it was called -- and it was the process
> Loew's used when it opened in 1929, two years after "The Jazz
> Singer," with the tearjerker "Madame X."
>
> "Keeping it in synch was always a bit of a challenge," Egan
> says. "One of the skills of the Vitaphone projectionist was not just
> operating the machines, but knowing how to nudge the arm of the
> turntable forward or backward, just enough to keep it in synch with
> the picture."
>
> The Vitaphone projector at the Loew's was not the one used there
> originally -- it was donated to the theater about eight years ago.
> But Loew's does have its original storage cabinet, used for the
> housing of the 16-inch, 33 1/3 r.p.m. Vitaphone discs. Several years
> ago, they discovered two such discs, forgotten in a corner of a
> shelf: the soundtrack to a Hal Roach comedy short, "Madame Q" (almost
> certainly shown in conjunction with "Madame X").
>
> "It had been played several times, because [the discs] were marked
> with a series of numbers," Egan says. "Each time you played it you
> had to X it out, because after about 30 plays it would be considered
> worn out."
>
> Hollywood's "talkie transition" is mostly remembered today as a
> comedy of errors, full of ill-concealed microphones and out-of-synch
> sound ("Singin' in the Rain"), or else as a tragedy of silent stars
> nose-diving into obscurity when their voices proved nasal, twangy or
> flowery ("Sunset Boulevard").
>
> But it was also the first great panic of the media age -- one that
> would be repeated in the 1950s with TV's challenge to movies and
> radio, and again in the 21st century with the Internet threat.
>
> "This was the first example of a media revolution, if you will," Egan
> says.
>
> Vitaphone was not the first attempt to link movies and sound.
>
> There had been experiments as far back as 1893, when Edison's first
> films came out of his West Orange studio. In 1913, and again in the
> early 1920s, proto-sound films flopped with audiences.
>
> What was new about Vitaphone was not synchronized speech, but another
> technical leap of the late 1920s -- electric recording, microphones
> and amplified sound.
>
> "It was the first time people heard electrical recording, instead of
> that muffled acoustic sound from people yelling into a horn," says
> Ron Hutchinson, founder of the Vitaphone Project.
>
> Since 1991, Hutchinson has been networking with film buffs, record
> collectors and archivists, trying to piece together some of the
> roughly 2,000 shorts and 150 features from Vitaphone's brief heyday.
>
> Vitaphone was the Beta or 8-track of the talkie revolution -- the
> technology that didn't make it. By 1930 the more efficient sound-on-
> film format had pretty much replaced it.
>
> Last flowering
>
> Vitaphone films that do survive often exist piecemeal -- discs
> without films, films without discs. But they're worth hunting down,
> Hutchinson says -- not least because the first flowering of sound
> happened to coincide with the last flowering of vaudeville. Many of
> the acts recorded by Vitaphone during those three years are,
> historically, priceless. And many are still hugely entertaining today.
>
> "In many cases, these shorts are the only record of these
> performances," says Hutchinson, a Piscataway resident. "And many are
> just fantastic. This is not like watching something dusty and
> historical. These are truly entertaining, funny people at the top of
> their form."
>
> A 3-disc DVD "collector's edition" of "The Jazz Singer," arriving
> from Warner Home Video on Oct. 16, contains not only the Jolson
> movie, but a full disc of Vitaphone shorts uncovered by Hutchinson,
> some by well-known stars like Burns and Allen, others by such
> forgotten headliners as Trixie Friganza, Joe Frisco and Paul Tremaine
> and His Aristocrats.
>
> There's also the film debut of a powerhouse 6-year-old with a
> gutbucket voice: Baby Rose Marie, known to latter-day audiences as
> Rose Marie of "The Dick Van Dyke Show."
>
> 'You little brat'
>
> Rose Marie, who grew up in Fort Lee, is probably the last surviving
> star who can claim to have performed for the Vitaphone cameras.
>
> "We filmed it just once," recalls Rose Marie, 84, now a California
> resident. "We didn't have the pleasure of a retake."
>
> As a matter of fact, "Baby Rose Marie, The Child Wonder," included in
> the "Jazz Singer" package, ended up being the original short subject
> in front of another Al Jolson feature, "Say It With Songs," in 1929.
> And she well remembers appearing live with the "Mammy" man at a
> theater where the two films were playing in tandem.
>
> "I remember Al Jolson hated me," Rose Marie says. "Everybody was
> raving about my short. I went over to him and I said, 'I thought you
> were wonderful, Mr. Jolson.' And he said, 'Get away, you little
> brat.' "
>
> On the Web: http://vitaphoneproject.com/
> ________________________________________
>
> Talkie Timeline
>
> * 1894. "The Gay Shoe Clerk," an early Edison film with synchronized
> sound, shows two men dancing.
>
> * 1900. "Phono-Cinema Theatre" unveiled in France.
>
> * 1913. Edison's "Kinetophone" lays an egg. "Talkers Flop," says a
> Variety headline.
>
> * 1923. Lee De Forest's "Phonofilm," the sound-on-film process that
> paved the way for modern sound movies, makes its Broadway debut.
>
> * 1926. Warner Bros. debuts its sound-on-disc process, Vitaphone. The
> program consists of several sound shorts and a silent feature, "Don
> Juan," with recorded musical accompaniment.
>
> * 1927. "You ain't heard nothin' yet!" bawls Al Jolson in "The Jazz
> Singer," the film that launches the sound era. The "part-talkie"
> earns a then-unprecedented $2.6 million.
>
> * 1928. The first "all-talking" picture, "The Lights of New York,"
> debuts on July 6.
>
> * 1930. Warner Bros. and First National, the only studios using sound-
> on-disc processes, switch to sound-on-film. The Vitaphone era is over.
> ________________________________________
>
> Keeping Al Jolson's Magic Alive
>
> by Jim Beckerman
> Bergen Record, October 1, 2007
>
> It wasn't so much the technology -- crude and unreliable -- that
> sold "talkies" to the public in 1927.
>
> It was Al Jolson.
>
> "He was the Elvis Presley of the 1920s," says Rich Curtiss. "His
> voice was very strong and powerful. When he used to sing at the
> Winter Garden in New York, people used to jump off their seats."
>
> Curtiss, 68, an Elmwood Park resident, has been channeling that magic
> for years in his Jolson impersonation shows. He's played the "Mammy"
> guy on the "Joe Franklin Show," at the Red Blazer Too, and at various
> senior centers (he'll be at Waterview Center Genesis Healthcare in
> Cedar Grove on Tuesday).
>
> "There are a lot of people who think I am Jolson, come back from the
> dead," he says.
>
> While Jolson (1886-1950) might seem like a relic today, it's
> important to understand that he was the coolest thing that most
> audiences had ever seen in 1927. He jiggled, wiggled, shook and
> shimmied; he bleated songs; he whistled; he sank to one knee --
> whatever it took to keep his hold on an audience. He was mesmerizing.
>
> It was his Broadway-honed star power, triumphing over the crudeness
> of the technology, that made "The Jazz Singer" a hit and the sound
> revolution inevitable.
>
> The fact that the movie's plot -- about a cantor's son who rebels and
> becomes a pop star -- was so clearly based on Jolson's life gave the
> movie a special wallop.
>
> "His old man really was a cantor, and he left the house at an early
> age," says Curtiss, who first saw "The Jazz Singer" on his dad's
> black-and-white Zenith television in 1953.
>
> "It was pretty exciting, a good story," he says.
>
> --- End forwarded message ---