NitrateVille.com

Hi all

I've been reading a few of Mordaunt Hall's contemporary reviews on the New York Times website. Its interesting to read his descriptions of the shorts that accompanied feature showings... Such as those with Sunrise, 7th Heaven etc.

Have any of these 'movietone features' survived? If so, are they available on DVD or online? It would be fun to see them to put the film premieres into context.

John

I'm pretty sure that most of these exist in one format or another. Some of the more famous ones (the Arthur Conan Doyle & George Bernard Shaw newsreels) are on DVD.

thanks!

John

Blackhawk Films released quite a few of these on 16mm and Super 8mm film back in the 1970s and early 1980s. Prints can be found on eBay, if you are patient.

Blackhawk made up compilations of some Movietone material as well. They had access to raw footage, that is, more material that was in some released newsreels like, I think, the GBS one. I was the Blackhawk agent at the time in my country. They said that they got the material from vaults in New Jersey where there were rusting cans & lots of rats. So was this footage always stored there and was it the same building that burned in 1937? I havew always been puzzled about this.

There were fashions, Shirley Temple & I think, Herbert Hoover amongst other material issued.

I've seen one of the Robert Benchley ones (`Sex Life of a Polyp') on several public domain websites.

Coincidentally, he must have shot it around the same time as he wrote his famous New Yorker article about sound invading the movies, which set the scene for all discussions on this topic for decades. All the familiar elements are there - terrified stars, nervous crews, shuttered vaudeville theatres, elocutionists scrambling to Hollywood, and so forth. It could almost be a capsule summary of `Singin' In The Rain'.

Do you know approximately when this New Yorker article appeared? The contents of the entire life of the magazine are available on its website.

Not any more - they've recently moved to a new model where a lot of the archives are only available if you're a subscriber. It seemed to coincide with their push into the Ipad market.

Fortunately, I have a copy on file:

Came the Movietone
by Robert Benchley
The New Yorker - 14th July 1928

The cruel and relentless myrmidons of science have surrounded Hollywood, and are, at this very moment, waiting, with their spears raised in ominous silence, for the command to enter the city and drag its inhabitants around the walls. The movietone has begun its conquest of the silent movie, and Southern California is in a panic.

First-hand and reliable reports from the scene present a terrifying picture. Perceiving the advent of the Film Which Talks Like a Man, hundreds of movie stars who have attained their eminence because of a dimple in the chin or a bovine eye, but whose speaking voices could hardly be counted on to put across the sale of a pack of Fatimas in a night club, are now frantically trying to train their larynxes into some sort of gentility. Voice culture has become the order, even the command, of the day.

There has been, they say, a great sale of recording gramophones, with which many a dainty miss tortures herself daily listening to the sound of her own voice in an attempt to locate and correct its faults, and the suicide squad of the Los Angeles police is said to have been doubled in anticipation of the rush for dock-ends which is expected to result.

The greatest bonanza of all, however, comes to the voice teachers, who are reported to be rushing by the covered-wagon-load to the Pacific Coast to get in on the newly opened gold fields. The movie stars have money and are willing to pay anything to keep it. Elocution teachers from New York, whose trade has not been so brisk since Edwin Booth died, are now on their way westward to earn their fortunes teaching public idols to say "Mi-mi-mi-mi" correctly. Old declamation books are being brought out in new, de luxe editions; and, on a quiet evening, it is said that Beverly Hills resounds with throaty appeals to the Carthaginians and treble accounts of Bob Cratchit's Christmas dinner. If you are burning to know what the home life of your favorite motion-picture star is at the moment, it probably consists of walking up and down his Early Moorish bedroom muttering, "Napoleon was sitting in his tent. Beside him lay the map of Italy."

Not only are the actors in for a summer of worry; the whole personnel is
nervous. A community, which even in its heyday lived in constant terror of losing jobs, is now ashen white. The talking picture will call for people who can write and direct dialogue, whole squads of technical men who understand the microphone, and complete remodelling of the mammoth studios, for talking pictures must be made in soundproof rooms; otherwise a passing truck or a whistling workman would ruin the whole scene.

The movietone is a big success in the hinterland, threatening vaudeville and legitimate theatres, and the novelties it makes possible are now important auxiliaries to movie entertainment in New York. One theatre man we heard talking about it said that, being a mechanical thing, it would unquestionably be perfected and that, with the development of technique in presentation, it will mean a revolution in the amusement field. He said that half the legitimate theatres in New York will be out of business as such within ten years. We wouldn't know about that.

moviepas wrote:They said that they got the material from vaults in New Jersey where there were rusting cans & lots of rats. So was this footage always stored there and was it the same building that burned in 1937? I havew always been puzzled about this.

The Fox vaults that burned were in Little Ferry, New Jersey. After that fire, the studio bought land in Ogdensburg, New Jersey, and nitrate film was stored there until about ten years ago when the vaults were cleared. The nitrate elements of fiction films went to the Academy Film Archive. If there was any newsreel material it would have gone to the Library of Congress.

David Pierce