Technical Innovations and Industrial Transformation

Technical Innovations and Industrial Transformation

Module 2  ·  COMM/THEA 479W: American Film History

Technical Innovations: Sound & Color

Vitaphone

Vitaphone was Western Electric's sound-on-disc system, which synchronized audio recorded on a separate disc with the picture on screen. Warner Bros. was the studio that took it up first, betting on the untested technology at a moment when the rest of the industry was still committed to silent film. (Lecture)

Warner Bros. and the Talking Pictures

Warner Bros. began experimenting with Western Electric's sound technology in Brooklyn in 1925. To prove the system could handle more than dialogue, the studio signed the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and popular stage entertainers, including vaudeville singer Al Jolson, to appear in short sound demonstrations before committing to a feature. (Lecture)

Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer

The Jazz Singer premiered in New York on October 6, 1927, and is remembered as the first American "talking picture," though the label oversells it a little: the film was shot silent and had its soundtrack added afterward, and outside of Jolson's musical numbers it contains only two brief scenes of actual dialogue. Even so, its box-office success convinced the industry that sound was commercially viable. (Lecture)

Sound Engineering and Sound Design

Because Vitaphone recorded sound to a separate disc rather than directly onto the film strip, keeping picture and audio in sync required careful mechanical precision on set and in the projection booth alike. That technical fragility is part of why early talkies used dialogue so sparingly while the new equipment and workflow were still being worked out. (Lecture)

Hand Tinting

The earliest attempts to bring color to film were done by hand: Thomas Edison's studio was hand-tinting frames as early as 1895, and D. W. Griffith later used uniform tinting, coloring an entire sequence a single hue, in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Broken Blossoms (1919). The technique never scaled well, since it meant painting every individual frame, and a single hour of film ran to 57,600 frames. (Lecture)

Charles Urban and Kinemacolor

In 1909, Charles Urban introduced Kinemacolor, generally credited as the first practical color motion-picture system, moving color photography beyond the frame-by-frame hand-tinting process that preceded it. (Lecture)

Technicolor

Technicolor was developed starting in 1915 by Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Comstock, and W. Burton Westcott, though it took four separate process revisions to become commercially workable. Process No. 4, introduced in 1932, debuted in Disney's short Flowers and Treesand became the industry standard for the next two decades, used in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Gone with the Wind (1939). (Lecture)

Theoretical Foundation of Color

Technicolor's name points to its scientific origins: the "Tech" nodded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where founders Kalmus and Comstock had studied. Getting from concept to usable process was not straightforward; the company worked through four distinct technical approaches over roughly seventeen years before Process No. 4 finally solved the problems that had limited earlier versions. (Lecture)

The Studio System and Genre

Contract System/Star System

After the 1929 crash and the costly conversion to sound, the major studios restructured around the contract system, under which writers, directors, technicians, and performers all worked directly for a single studio. This arrangement gave studios an efficient, stable labor pool and let them build a recognizable identity around whichever talent they had under exclusive contract at a given time. (Lecture)

Studio Style

Because the same directors, cinematographers, writers, and stars tended to work together repeatedly at a given studio, distinct "signature styles" emerged. Audiences could often tell which studio made a film simply by its visual and tonal qualities, since a studio's style depended in large part on the specific talent it had under contract at the time. (Lewis, pg. 149; Lecture)

Classical Hollywood Cinema

Classical Hollywood cinema describes the dominant storytelling mode that developed out of the contract system: linear, third-person narratives told through a seamless, "invisible" visual style designed so audiences would lose themselves in the story rather than notice the filmmaking itself. (Lecture)

Irving Thalberg

Irving Thalberg, nicknamed "the boy wonder," ran production at MGM during this period and helped the studio secure contracts with a remarkable share of Hollywood's biggest names, among them Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, and Spencer Tracy. MGM's dominance under Thalberg is a major reason the studio is credited with helping build the Hollywood star system itself. (Lecture)

Hollywood Genres: Gangster

Gangster films followed a rags-to-riches-to-rags arc: an ambitious, often immigrant, protagonist claws his way to wealth outside the law, only to be destroyed by the same violent methods that got him there. Warner Bros.'s Little Caesar (1931) and The Public Enemy (1931) established the template, with Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney as sociopathic but magnetic leads. Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932) pushed further, borrowing the low-key lighting and mobile camera style of German expressionist filmmaking; censors forced a reworked ending in which Tony Camonte is tried and hanged rather than gunned down in the streets. Gangster pictures made up nearly a fifth of studio output in the early 1930s before the Production Code Administration's 1934 enforcement sharply curtailed the genre. (Lewis, pg. 120-123)

Hollywood Genres: Melodrama

Melodrama rests on the premise that life is fundamentally unfair; its characters suffer repeatedly and rarely get what they deserve, and the genre resists tidy resolutions in favor of showing that circumstance, not merit, drives the course of a life. Director Josef von Sternberg shows how much room the genre could leave a distinctive visual stylist: working almost exclusively in melodrama with his muse Marlene Dietrich at Paramount, he adhered to the genre's usual conventions while still making films that looked like no one else's. (Lewis, pg. 128; Lecture)

Hollywood Genres: Horror

Horror films exploit deep-seated fears, of confinement, disfigurement, possession, and especially the unknown, often embodied by a monster whose presence signals a violation of the human body or mind. Cash-strapped after 1929, Universal turned to horror as an inexpensive genre and, aided by émigré talent fleeing political upheaval in Europe, built its house style out of German Expressionist filmmaking. Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) and James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) established the studio's two signature monsters, both of whom, like the Mummy after them, commit violence less out of malice than because their monstrous nature leaves them no other way to act. (Lewis, pg. 128-131; Lecture)

Hollywood Genres: Musical

The arrival of synchronized sound made it possible to adapt Broadway musical comedies directly to film, and two distinct approaches developed side by side. Warner Bros. specialized in the "backstage musical," pairing a Depression-inflected story about struggling performers with elaborate production numbers shot almost as a film within the film; choreographer Busby Berkeley's kaleidoscopic set pieces for 42nd Street (1933) and Gold Diggers of 1933 are the genre's signature examples. RKO took the opposite approach with its Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers pictures, integrating song and dance directly into the plot instead. (Lewis, pg. 133-136; Lecture)

Hollywood Genres: Comedy

Sound was hard on silent-era clowns: aside from Chaplin, the genre's chase-based "golden age" mostly gave way to a more verbal style built around wisecracking dialogue, carried by vaudeville holdovers like W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers. Alongside them, romantic comedy emerged as one of the era's most dependable genres. Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) is often cited as its first true sound-era example, and Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) built on that foundation and swept the major Oscars; a blanket its runaway heiress and reporter string up between their motel beds, nicknamed the "walls of Jericho," becomes visual shorthand for the class divide the story slowly closes. Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth(1937) and Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938), which reverses the genre's usual gender dynamic by making Katharine Hepburn's Susan Vance the engine of the plot, extended the formula further. (Lewis, pg. 136-148)

Censorship

Self-Censorship

By the late 1920s, so many states, cities, and even townships had their own local censorship boards that the film industry faced a real threat of inconsistent, patchwork regulation. That pressure, compounded by organized grassroots groups such as Combat, Mothers of Minnesota, the PTA, and the Catholic War Veterans, is what pushed the studios toward industry-wide self-regulation rather than risk having outside authorities impose it for them. (Lewis, pg. 114-115; Lecture)

Will Hays and the "Don'ts" and "Be Carefuls" List

As head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Will Hays introduced the industry's first self-regulatory document in 1927: a list of eleven flat "Don'ts" and twenty-five "Be Carefuls." It focused heavily on what a mass audience might imitate from the screen, even as Hays argued "highbrow" media like novels and plays needed no such restriction. The list carried no enforcement mechanism, and studios largely ignored it whenever censorship threatened a film's commercial appeal. (Lewis, pg. 114; Lecture)

The Motion Picture Production Code

When the "Don'ts" and "Be Carefuls" proved toothless, the MPPDA turned to Father Daniel Lord and Martin Quigley to draft something more comprehensive. Completed in 1930, the Code, soon nicknamed the Hays Code, laid out twelve areas of concern, from crimes against the law and sex to costume, dance, and religion. It had little real teeth until the Catholic Legion of Decency organized boycotts in 1933, a Philadelphia boycott alone cut local box-office receipts by 40 percent, pressuring the studios to create the Production Code Administration in 1934. Under enforcer Joseph Breen, the PCA held real authority over American screens for the next two decades. (Lewis, pg. 114-120; Lecture)