The Jazz Singer has persisted in posterity and popular memory far in excess of the merits of its actual content—it is however remembered as a revolutionary picture, one that precipitated a sudden reorientation of the industry. But the real story behind the switch to talkies is messier—and doesn’t have much of anything to do with The Jazz Singer. It is instead a story about the dynamics of format wars.
Readers of a certain age may remember the VHS vs. Betamax war of the 1980s; perhaps some of you were early adopters of camcorders and struggled to compare VHS-C to Hi8. There were two kinds of laserdiscs—one was foolish and the other expensive. When DVD was rolled out, it was the product of a consortium of manufacturers who had hoped to work together to avoid another format war, only to face a competitor product called DivX on the format’s debut. Blu-Ray beat out HD, but then failed to capture the market share it had anticipated because streaming video beat out physical media. Go back in time and you can find Pathex 9.5mm versus Kodak 8mm in the 1920s.1
You could even go back to the very beginning, where motion picture technology itself was a scrum of competing formats—was film a celluloid product or paper-based, was it recorded on glass, did the sprockets run down the sides or the middle, how wide was the gauge…. I once met a man who maintained an astounding personal museum of archival movie equipment, including the camera used to film Lilian Gish’s first ever appearance. The number of different film formats from the late 19th century he had on display would have choked a horse.
But the format war of interest here is the battle between Vitaphone and Movietone. I set the story up by invoking format wars with which I hope you are familiar, because the more you understand the dynamics of those battles the more you can understand how this particular process played out. And that in turn matters, because the popular reception of The Jazz Singer was not what pushed talkies into American theaters. The movies started to talk because William Fox had his back against the wall trying to compete with Jack Warner.
William Fox is one of those classically American rags-to-riches success stories, who built a movie empire through true grit and personal endurance. He had an infrastructure of nationwide chains of theaters through which he could release productions starring some of the country’s most popular stars. But even at the height of his success he was running behind Paramount and MGM, and by the mid–1920s he was losing ground.
So in 1925, he sat down with his closest advisors—Saul Rogers and Winfield Sheehan—and formulated a strategy to get back on top. The central element of this strategy was to invest heavily in the development of sound recording technology. He had an engineer already, by the name of Theodore W. Case, and Fox also bought the patents of inventor Lee DeForest. This was the foundation of Movietone, a sound-on-film process that by 1927 Fox started to roll out, principally in short subjects like two-reel comedies or newsreels.
Whereas Movietone was a sound-on-film process, its chief competitor, Vitaphone, involved recording sound on discs and playing the platters while the film unspooled. Remarkably, Vitaphone didn’t have nearly as many synchronization problems as you’d expect, but as a technology it was inferior to the Movietone approach—so the fact that sound-on-film eventually became the default industry standard and sound-on-disc became a museum piece makes sense. Back in 1927, though, this was nowhere near a certain outcome.
The very first ever Movietone program was the premiere of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, at Fox’s Times Square theater in New York on September 23, 1927. There was a Movietone newsreel and then Sunrise was shown with synchronized music and sound effects—the first ever feature film to have a synchronized soundtrack.
Meanwhile, Fox’s top competitor in the race to sound was Warner Brothers, whose Vitaphone process was similarly used initially on short subjects, and was rolled out as a synchronized music-and-effects accompaniment to an otherwise silent feature, Don Juan. The entire industry still eyed sound warily as a novelty. In order to equip themselves to even screen sound films, theaters had to undertake costly retrofitting that could run upwards of $30,000—per screen—and to make the sound films in the first place, studios needed to abandon their existing plants and invest in entirely new soundproof stages.
Theater owners are famously conservative businessmen. They don’t, as a rule, even bother paying to clean their sticky floors until a health inspector demands it. (Yes. I’ve worked at movie theaters. I speak from experience.) So why write a $30k check? They did it because sales people from Fox and Warners convinced them they had to in order to keep apace with their competitors–and having spent that money (in 1930s dollars mind you) they weren’t about to let those speakers go idle.
Nobody was eager to go spend that kind of money until they had to—and Fox and Warner Brothers were spending that kind of money only because they were jockeying for position in a future market whose existence they were only speculating.
Fox was winning that race, hands down. And he was winning it by using sound sparingly, and making mostly silent features. Warner Brothers decided on a desperate but bold ploy—
They made an all-talkie feature film, with big musical numbers, starring one of the country’s top singing stars. This was of course The Jazz Singer, and the gamble worked. In 1926, Warners was losing millions of dollars a year—after The Jazz Singer they were seeing profits of millions.
For the industry as a whole, it was the tipping point. Now, all of a sudden, theaters that had been reluctant to switch over to sound did so in droves—which in turn pushed down the costs, making it easier for other smaller theaters to do so too, which created a spiral effect that quickly retrofitted the entire exhibition industry. Having made these investments in new screening technology, those theater owners wanted to make sure they got the benefit of the investment—they wanted to be able to advertise that they had this sparkly new fad, and they wanted to prioritize talkie screenings. Theaters started to refuse to book silent films.
Please note that their refusal to book silent films was not a response to audience demand for talkies, it was an attempt to create audience demand for talkies—any theater that spent the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars in 1928 money to hook up some speakers and then let that equipment idle while they paid a piano player to accompany silent films was a chump.
Fox’s Movietone process was now the second-runner. To regain his status, he needed to aggressively push Movietone—bear in mind Movietone and Vitaphone were not compatible formats, so if a theater equipped for one it couldn’t play the other. Every theater that signed up for the opposing side’s format was a lost sale, a vanished customer. Once you buy a VHS player you won’t be buying any Betamax tapes. This was war.
So Fox invested major sums in a new studio complex called Movietone City.
To finance this expansion, Fox took out loans of $30 Million—and that was just for Movietone City. Fox was also buying up theater chains like they were going out of style. All these debts were to come due at the end of 1929 and the start of 1930. His plan was to repay those loans by selling new shares of stock, whose value would be pumped up by the newly expanded production facilities, shiny new technology, and new theater outlets. It was a risky plan. And it was while he was arranging this new round of stock issuance he was injured in a car crash and hospitalized.
His creditors seized the moment of his incapacitation to claim he was in default—it was a hostile takeover. Suits were filed, old friends stabbed each other in the back, the press ate up the juicy gossip, and when the dust settled William Fox had lost control of his company and was no longer in the movie business. Winfield Sheehan stepped up and took the reins—Fox no longer had any role in the company that bore his name.
Sheehan was a ruthless player, and he sided with the hostile takeover against Fox. Sheehan felt that with all the money going into Movietone, and with the obvious direction the market was going, that it was imperative for the studio to turn out sound pictures and nothing but.
It is ironic that the first feature film to have a synchronized soundtrack was F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise. The Movietone process used on Sunrise forced Fox to aggressively push Movietone to compete with Vitaphone, and led to theaters stopping booking silent films altogether. So, in other words, the movie at the heart of this transition from silents to talkies isn’t really The Jazz Singer at all, it’s Sunrise.