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Rereading Alexander Walker's 'The Shattered Silents', he mentions some of the dialogue from TENDERLOIN (1928) being erased from the discs, partly due to its quality and to censorship issues.

I would have thought it very difficult to erase dialogue from a disc without making the rest of the film look and sound rather odd. Also, to erase sections would have been technically difficult anyway. Alterations of that kind would have presumably taken longer as the film would have needed replacement discs recorded and copied rather than ones which had been tampered with. Think of the time and skill needed to alter the discs individually! And surely New York censors would have raised objections at the script stage, or at least before the film went into cinemas. As the film no longer appears to survive (which AW neglected to mention), it is hard to get at the truth of the matter.

Can anyone enlighten?

I can't think of any way you could "erase" a disc, unless you physically attack the grooves with a sharp instrument. And it likely wouldn't play after that anyway.

I imagine the sound discs would have to be repressed, with the offending dialogue muted during the transfer.

Does the film still exist? The IMBD shows it as a lost film.

As far as I know neither the film nor the discs survive. Some films were junked as long ago as the late 1940s when they had become unstable, but I don't know about his one. There is a pretty big gap in Curtiz's surviving films from 1928-1929, with NOAH'S ARK and MAMMY only still around to my knowledge.

Noah's Ark first went out with added sound sections at 135mins. I was withdrawn and some talking sections removed and re-released. It was later restored to 108mins. It is believed the 135mins version is now lost, In 1957 Robert Youngson constructed a 75mins silent version for Dominant Pictures.

The current restoration of NOAH'S ARK is very impressive. I suppose the 135m cut would have been a Roadshow, in the same way the films such as THE COCOANUTS and RIO RITA were the following year, so how many prints would have gone out at that length one may never know. A pity, though one is extremely grateful for the 108m version.

s.w.a.c. wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 01, 2021 7:40 am

I can't think of any way you could "erase" a disc, unless you physically attack the grooves with a sharp instrument. And it likely wouldn't play after that anyway.

I imagine the sound discs would have to be repressed, with the offending dialogue muted during the transfer.

^This.

Discs could be duped, by playing the original while cutting a new one. And while duping, you could pause/mute passages, and/or add new material, by mixing in new audio from another source (this was sometimes done in Radio, as when repackaging shows for AFRS.)

But as S.W.A.C. says, you cannot erase the material on a grooved platter.

- Craig

Careening off topic for a moment the reel 1 Ingagi disk I obtained had the first couple of minutes (an extended title crawl on screen) very carefully scratched to a specific point - think of a single long scratch neatly placed at a diagonal to the grooves - which presumably was a cue for the projectionist to start playing from that later point instead of the beginning. For any other film, say one with synced dialog, it would seem to be an impossible task but for a narrated jungle film with no dialog it just might have worked. Still, the only way I would think you could edit a disk would be to mute the sound in the offending section with the disk still playing so you didn't throw the sync off, never to be in alignment again until the next reel.

wich2 wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 08, 2021 11:57 am

s.w.a.c. wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 01, 2021 7:40 am

I can't think of any way you could "erase" a disc, unless you physically attack the grooves with a sharp instrument. And it likely wouldn't play after that anyway.

I imagine the sound discs would have to be repressed, with the offending dialogue muted during the transfer.

^This.

Discs could be duped, by playing the original while cutting a new one. And while duping, you could pause/mute passages, and/or add new material, by mixing in new audio from another source (this was sometimes done in Radio, as when repackaging shows for AFRS.)

But as S.W.A.C. says, you cannot erase the material on a grooved platter.

- Craig

Yes, though this would be impractical during the run of the film. Will have to check where AW got that information...