SILENT FILMS OR TALKIES????

[Brooksie]

I have a book of essays written in like 1929. The essays come from a meeting of industry types and the subject was basically silent vs sound films.

It seems that the consensus at the time was that the two forms would coexist. Sound was seen as a boon to the new craze for musicals (and musical numbers) as well as for sound effects in comedy and drama films. Few saw that real talkies would replace drama films since no one would want to sit and listen to endless dialog.

The fan magazines from that time are the same - plenty of people turned up to watch stagey dramas with scratchy canned music and badly written, poorly synched dialogue. Not surprisingly, they didn't see it as the better alternative.

Alexander Walker's theory in`The Shattered Silents' is an intriguing one. He suggests that had `The Jazz Singer' come a year or two later, the Depression would have rendered the cost of conversion unviable.

It's tempting to picture an alternate silent/sound universe resulting from this scenario, but here in Australia, where it DID take a year or two to come in and was already financially unviable, it still managed to succeed, in the process delivering a death blow to the local film industry.

Then again, they were still making silents in Japan in the late 30s ...

[Daniel Eagan]

The time it took to make prints and the quality of the prints are probably the answer. For Technicolor, their first process of cementing two strips was laborious, and the end result was unsatisfactory. When they started doing dye-transfer, it was still far slower than normal black and white printing (and yeah, cost way more).

And that's just post-production costs. Actual production costs for color were a lot higher than for black-and-white. Production design, costumes, makeup all were more expensive. Lighting in particular was time-consuming and costly. I think I remember Robert Gitt saying that the ASA for Becky Sharp was 4, and by Gone With the Wind it had only increased to 12. That's not just a lot of lights, but shooting time was reduced because it was hard on the performers.

Also, the first live-action dye-transfer Technicolor films didn't show up until the mid-thirties. While I'm fond of the pastel look to earlier color films, audiences of the time weren't so favorable. So with increased costs, developing technologies, limited expertise, and public tastes, it's not surprising that color didn't become widespread for a long time.

[Peggy Levy]

I have always been under the impression that music was the primary focus, not dialogue. At least, in the beginning. If Al Jolson's dialogue did not work, it was going to be cut out of the film, wasn't it? To me, that says that the music synchronization was the primary focus, but "hearing" Mary Pickford's voice was an exciting bonus for fans.