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A brief overview of the prehistory of sound film, from Thomas Edison through the work of Lee DeForest, noting that most of these early films were marked by musical performance. The origins of the Warner Bros. studio and, ultimately, its marketing of the Vitaphone sound system. Early sound films: Don Juan and Vitaphone, Giovanni Martinelli, Al Jolson, George Jessel. The rival studios begin work of their own. The culmination of this early period with Warners' The Jazz Singer, the success and impact of which have sometimes been misunderstood.

1928 was the year when sound film was genuinely established. As the early part-talking films were produced, the studios scramble to mount the sound-film bandwagon while audiences were compelled to readjust their viewing habits. Lights of New York, an inept melodrama, triumphed as the first all-talking film. Al Jolson's second feature film, The Singing Fool, was a far greater success than The Jazz Singer, and its success was integral to the sound-film juggernaut (although it is today an unwatchable relic). Other companies began producing their own sound films, sometimes with music, as with Universal's forgotten The Melody of Love. Audiences, while enthusiastic, also still enjoyed the more tenable artistry of silent film, despite such audible works as Fannie Brice in My Man.

From May to September 1924, the Six Brown Brothers and Their Thirty-Piece Saxophone Band toured as a between-movies attraction in cinemas from the Midwest to the East Coast. Despite the attraction's successes, Variety compared them unfavorably to more conventional dance bands. From December 1924 until March 1925, the Brothers (without the Saxophone Band) toured in Australian vaudeville. During May-August 1925, Tom fronted his own Forty Famous Minstrels (without the Six Brown Brothers) in cinemas, and from October 1925 until some time in 1927, he toured vaudeville and cinemas with His Merry Minstrel Orchestra, a jazz band that recorded for Okeh in 1925 and 1926. In 1926, Tom and Theresa Valerio divorced. The Brothers act was revived in July 1927 as a feature traveling with the Merry Minstrels and continued as an independent unit after the Merry Minstrels disbanded. The combined attraction made a Vitaphone short in 1927.

Curtiz arrived in New York City via the ocean liner Leviathan on June 10, 1926; the story that his ship docked on July 4 and he thought the holiday fireworks were a celebration of his American arrival was a PR fiction that would be repeated for decades by Warner, Hal Wallis, and Curtiz. Curtiz arrived in Hollywood with his treatment of Noah’s Ark, but instead Jack Warner assigned him a crime drama, The Third Degree (1926), based on a 1908 stage play. He scrambled to learn about American criminal procedures by spending time in the L.A. County Jail and having the script translated into Hungarian. He added a great deal of unscripted material to the picture, a harbinger of future strife between him and the studio.As he completed more pictures for Warner Bros., including A Million Bid and The Desired Woman, he began his long association with Darryl F. Zanuck.He also met the screenwriter Bess Meredyth,who would become his second wife. His immigration status proved to be a problem, as it had to be extended each year by Warner Bros. until he could become a legal resident.

Making their screen debuts little more than a decade apart, Geraldine Farrar and Marion Talley, both singers with the Metropolitan Opera Company, reveal the degree to which changes in the cinematic representation of the opera diva can be traced to larger cultural and technological shifts in the reproduction of music. Farrar’s earnings on her silent films were enormous, thanks not only to her devoted fan following, but also to the way that her film image relied on signifiers of her opera roles. Marion Talley‘s first film, a short for Warners’ new sound-on-disc system, the Vitaphone, flopped. Although it seems unbelievable that a silent screen diva would be more popular than an audible opera singer, the shift from live to recorded sound in film exhibition unraveled the requirements for representing singing women.

The first chapter tells the story of Hollywood’s mobilization of the jazz-opera by examining film adaptations of two works: the 1892 opera I Pagliacci by Ruggiero Leoncavallo and “Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody” by James P. Johnson. The films that incorporate this music negotiate conversion-era concerns about assimilation and the balance between performance and preservation. Although these pieces define New York City and the rural South respectively, each conveys the promise of musical, racial, and ethnic integration. Analyzing the films in connection with promotional materials for Vitaphone and Movietone technologies, it argues that each studio associated its sound system with particular cultural and aesthetic values more evident in its shorts than its feature films. The chapter claims the structure of the song and representation of the voice are prominent factors in the interpretation of musical shorts, and it articulates the importance of this reading for an active model of spectatorship.

Once technologies that could synchronize sound with moving images emerged in the early twentieth century, the film industry developed new formats to capitalize on them. This chapter investigates the developments of two of the most prominent formats, the Soundie—viewed on coin-operated Panoram jukeboxes—and the Vitaphone short. This chapter analyzes the staging of the Soundie Hot Chocolate (1941), which features the Duke Ellington Orchestra playing “Cottontail,” and concludes that the musical structure is integral to the filmic composition. The discussion then considers a Vitaphone short featuring Paul Tremaine and His Aristocrats, before turning to another Soundie, Count Basie’s Take Me Back, Baby (1941). In this case, the director offers the audience a fantasized representation of the band’s performance that could never have had an equivalent in live performance. The chapter concludes that Soundies and shorts represent early stages in aesthetic and technical developments toward presenting jazz performance on screen.