The Jazz Singer

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The Jazz Singer (1927)

American part-talkie musical drama.

The son of a Jewish Cantor must defy the traditions of his religious father in order to pursue his dream of becoming a jazz singer.

The Jazz Singer (1927) is the first feature-length movie with audible dialogue.

The intention was for the film to only have synchronized music, not speech. Al Jolson improvised all of the dialogue in the talking scenes.

Many documentaries and historians have stated that all of Hollywood switched to sound immediately after this film’s success, but the transition actually took several years.

One factor was two competing, incompatible sound systems. The Vitaphone process, which relied on an electro-mechanical interface between the projector and the turntable,

and Fox’s Fotofilm, which  was a sound-on-film process that allowed for easier editing, but required a costlier projector.

Using either sound process nearly doubled a film’s budget.

Also slowing the transition was the fact that theater chains faced enormous conversion costs.

MGM’s parent company, Loew’s Inc., which owned over 1,000 outlets, took a deliberately slow wait-and-see attitude toward sound.

Studio bosses also faced a limited amount of sound equipment and qualified sound technicians.

Silent films were also easier to market internationally, using translated title cards.

Before the advent of subtitles, making a talkie for international distribution usually meant producing completely different foreign language versions simultaneously.

Many studios produced silent and sound versions of their films.

The first feature film with all synchronous dialog was Lights of New York (1928).

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