June 23, 2025: Sound in Film: Vitaphone’s Anniversary

[100 years ago this week, the brothers Harry and Sam Warner struck a deal with Bell Labs to use their innovative Vitaphone technology in the production of the first sound films for Warner Brothers. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for talking pictures!]

On three other historic moments that help contextualize the one we’re commemorating this week.

1)      De Forest’s Alternative: I first learned about the groundbreaking scientist and inventor Lee de Forest when I made him the Memory Day Nominee for August 26^th (his birthday, in 1873). De Forest’s inventions (and one in particular, the audion) helped shape virtually every significant 20^th century communications and media technology, from the telephone to radio to television to, yes, sound films. But while the audion did play an important role in the development of Vitaphone, over those same years de Forest would also create his own sound-on-film system, Phonofilm, which he debuted in April 1923. Unfortunately for him, its sound quality was apparently not the greatest, and so the brothers Warner decided to make their June 1925 deal with Western Electric’s Bell Laboratories instead.

2)      Don Juan (1926): Just over a year after they signed that deal, Warner Brothers formally introduced the new technology with the August 5^th, 1926 premiere of their silent film Don Juan, starring John Barrymore as the Latin lothario. There was no spoken dialogue (that would come about a year later, with the famous moment I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post), but the film did feature both a symphonic score and sound effects. Perhaps even more important as a demonstration of the technology were the series of shorts that preceded the film, most of which featured live-recorded music and one of which also qualified as a “talkie,” as it included an “Introduction of Vitaphone Sound Pictures” from studio spokesperson Will Hays. Don Juan made a substantial haul at the box office (nearly $1.7 million), yet not enough to recoup the new technology’s costs—both telling details, I’d say.

3)      Carnival Night in Paris (1927): For the first year (and beyond), both shorts and feature film scores utilizing Vitaphone were filmed in New York City, where the technology had been invented and where a sizeable number of musicians and recording studios could be found. But it was inevitable that the technology, like every aspect of the film industry in the 1920s, would migrate to Hollywood, and Vitaphone did so first with the 1927 short Carnival Night in Paris. Filmed in Hollywood and featuring the Henry Halstead Orchestra and hundreds of background dancers, this short was on its own terms eminently inconsequential—yet, as with every significant moment in the development of this technology, it helped change everything for film and America in the years to come.

Next film sound studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Examples of sound in film you’d highlight?