Talkies and the Studio Machine

The first talkie hardly talks.

The Jazz Singer opened in New York in October 1927. Warner Bros. had already released films with synchronised music and sound effects using its Vitaphone system, which played sound from large discs kept in step with the projector. The Jazz Singer added songs, and with them a little speech. Most of the film is a silent picture with intertitles and a recorded score. But at one point Al Jolson, having finished a number, turns to the crowd in the café and says: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" It was a line from his stage act. In a cinema in 1927 it sounded like the future. A later scene in which he chats to his screen mother at the piano, also largely improvised, was just as startling: a film star talking casually, as people do.

Within a couple of years the industry had converted. Studios built soundstages, cinemas installed speakers, and the expensive art of silent film was abandoned in an astonishingly short time.

The story attached to the transition is that it destroyed the silent stars, whose voices turned out to be squeaky, thick or comic. John Gilbert is the usual example, a great romantic lead supposedly laughed off the screen by his high voice. The real record is murkier. Gilbert's voice was not obviously unsuited to sound, and his decline is variously blamed on poor material, a quarrel with the head of his studio, drink, and fashion. Some careers did end, for many reasons, foreign accents among them. Many others carried on, and stage-trained actors arrived from New York to join them. Singin' in the Rain (1952) gave the legend its most memorable form in Lina Lamont, whose voice is so dreadful that another woman has to dub her. It is a brilliant comedy, made a quarter of a century after the events, and it is a satire rather than a source.

What did change for every actor was the working day. Early microphones were fixed and fussy, cameras were shut inside soundproofed booths to stop their whirring being recorded, and the free, mobile style of late silent film stiffened for a few years. Actors gathered near hidden microphones. Directors fought back with booms and blimps, and by the early 1930s the camera was moving again.

The larger change was industrial. By the 1930s Hollywood ran on the studio system. A handful of companies made the films, distributed them and owned many of the cinemas that showed them. Actors signed long contracts, typically seven years, and could be renamed, loaned to other studios and placed on unpaid suspension for refusing a role. Worse, the suspension time was added to the end of the contract, so a difficult actor could be kept indefinitely.

Olivia de Havilland, tired of the parts Warner Bros. offered her, refused roles, was suspended, and in 1943 sued. In 1944 the California Court of Appeal held that seven years meant seven calendar years, whatever the suspensions. The ruling is still known in California as the De Havilland Law, and it shifted power, a little, from the studio to the star.

The studios also policed themselves. The Production Code, often called the Hays Code after Will Hays, head of the industry's trade association, was adopted in 1930 and widely ignored until 1934, when enforcement was handed to an office under Joseph Breen and no film could be released without its seal. For three decades it governed what American films could show, from married couples' beds to the punishment of criminals. It was replaced by a ratings system in 1968.

The final blow came from the courts. In 1948 the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures found that owning the whole chain, from studio to cinema, was anticompetitive, and the big companies had to sell their theatres. Without guaranteed screens, and with audiences staying home with television, the factory could no longer keep a roster of stars on salary. Actors became freelancers with agents. That is the business we still live in, and it started with a man who said wait a minute.