Jack Pickford

Danny · Post by **Danny** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 5:32 am

Does a sample of Jack Pickford's voice exist? I believe he made a talkie short. Does it survive?

Danny

misspickford9 · Post by **misspickford9** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 4:44 pm

Ooo this is a good question! Apparently Jack's last film "Gang War" had talkie sequences. It also apparently had Steamboat Willie as its short (the dreaded W provides this info). Does it still exist? And more importantly did Jack speak in it?

Id be curious to hear Lottie...but that aint gonna happen (Mary even barked her out of a radio program idea!) Maybe the Pickford Institute has the Jack info?

Harold Aherne · Post by **Harold Aherne** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 5:36 pm

There's a bit of ambiguity regarding this stage of Jack Pickford's career--the Silents Majority bio for Jack says that his last film was the Vitaphone short "All Square" in 1930. The IMDB says that "All Square" was the UK title for Gang War--but I asked about it on AMS some time ago. I learned from Rob Farr and Joe Moore that a Vitaphone two-reeler by that name was copyrighted on 15 January 1930. The plot dealt with the theft of $100 from a young man. Pickford's presence was not confirmed in that thread, but Roy Liebman's book Vitaphone Films: A Catalogue of the Features and Shorts (McFarland, 2003) could probably provide confirmation or denial. Liebman also has a book discussing actors' transition to talkies, entitled From Silents to Sound(McFarland, 1998) that may provide additional details. It includes an index of performers who never made a talkie--I notice (via Google books) that Jack is *not* listed (it goes from Olga Petrova to Billy Quirk), so his voice must have been recorded for a film at some point.

Gang War does not appear on the list of surviving FBO titles posted on AMS in 2004. Its soundtrack was likely recorded by the (optical) RCA Photophone system, as there were already plans to transform FBO into RKO. But the track might have been dubbed to discs as well; not all theatres at the time had the ability to play both the disc and optical sound systems. Likewise, the discs for "All Square" may survive even if the picture doesn't. Most likely, I should stop rambling and let Ron Hutchinson comment!

-Harold

misspickford9 · Post by **misspickford9** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 7:40 pm

Harold Aherne wrote:There's a bit of ambiguity regarding this stage of Jack Pickford's career--the Silents Majority bio for Jack says that his last film was the Vitaphone short "All Square" in 1930. The IMDB says that "All Square" was the UK title for Gang War--but I asked about it on AMS some time ago. I learned from Rob Farr and Joe Moore that a Vitaphone two-reeler by that name was copyrighted on 15 January 1930. The plot dealt with the theft of $100 from a young man. Pickford's presence was not confirmed in that thread, but Roy Liebman's book Vitaphone Films: A Catalogue of the Features and Shorts (McFarland, 2003) could probably provide confirmation or denial. Liebman also has a book discussing actors' transition to talkies, entitled From Silents to Sound(McFarland, 1998) that may provide additional details. It includes an index of performers who never made a talkie--I notice (via Google books) that Jack is *not* listed (it goes from Olga Petrova to Billy Quirk), so his voice must have been recorded for a film at some point.

Gang War does not appear on the list of surviving FBO titles posted on AMS in 2004. Its soundtrack was likely recorded by the (optical) RCA Photophone system, as there were already plans to transform FBO into RKO. But the track might have been dubbed to discs as well; not all theatres at the time had the ability to play both the disc and optical sound systems. Likewise, the discs for "All Square" may survive even if the picture doesn't. Most likely, I should stop rambling and let Ron Hutchinson comment!

-Harold

Neat! And very interesting...I wonder then what its status is. With Lottie I can understand the loss of info but with Jack I would have thought Mary would have protected his films a little. Guess not.