One Summer: America, 1927

Jazz Singer was by no means the first sound movie. It wasn’t even the first talking picture – but that was a nicety lost on its adoring audiences. For most people, The Jazz Singer would be the picture that made talking pictures real.
     
    The Jazz Singer was originally a Broadway play by SamuelRaphaelson which originated as a short story called The Day of Atonement . Warner Brothers decided to make it into its first talking production because they had the eager participation of Al Jolson, then one of the performing world’s greatest stars.
    Jolson was born Asa Yoelson, the son of a rabbi, in Lithuania, in 1885 or 1886 (he was never clear about this) and came to the United States with his family when he was about four. At the age of nine, he ran away from home and worked at odd jobs, including in a circus. Eventually juvenile authorities found him working in a bar in Baltimore and deposited him in the St Mary’s Industrial School for Boys – the same school that would become home to Babe Ruth the following decade. Unlike Ruth, Jolson stayed just a short while.
    Jolson was not an adorable person. His idea of a good joke was to urinate on people, which may go some way to explaining why he had four wives and no friends. But he had a wonderful voice and, by all accounts, a powerful stage presence, and he became America’s most popular performer. Warner Brothers knew it was lucky to get him.
    It has often been written that Warner Brothers was so broke before the making of The Jazz Singer that Al Jolson had to lend the company money to pay for sound equipment, but that seems not to have been the case at all. Warner Brothers was a small studio, but not a destitute one. In fact, in 1927 it had the biggest star in Hollywood after Clara Bow – the performing dog Rin Tin Tin. This beloved German shepherd starred in one successful movie after another – four in 1927 alone – and in one poll was voted the most popular performer in America. According to Susan Orlean in her biography of the dog, Rin Tin Tin was also voted the Academy Award for best actor before the new motion picture academy had second thoughts about what that said about the talents of its human stars and insisted that it go to a person, Emil Jannings.
    The great irony of all this is that apparently Rin Tin Tin wasn’t one dog but many. In 1965, Jack Warner confessed to a reporter that his studio, fearful of the loss of the real Rin Tin Tin,had bred eighteen lookalikes and had substituted them freely in the making of the films. It was also said by many of those who worked with him that the original Rin Tin Tin was the most ill-tempered animal they had ever encountered. At all events, whether Rin Tin Tin was one dog or several, the franchise made Warner Brothers wealthy.
    The Jazz Singer did, however, represent a considerable gamble. It cost $500,000 to make and, at the time of its filming, could be shown in just two cinemas in the world. Jolson, for all his star quality, was himself a gamble. He had never acted in front of a camera before. There was no point. He had no talent that suited silent movies. But now he shone.
    The Jazz Singer took four months to shoot. The sound portion of the filming was all done in just two weeks between 17 and 30 August. It took such a short time because there was so little sound to be recorded. Altogether the movie had just 354 spoken words, nearly all coming from Jolson. The dialogue was not terribly polished, to say the least. A sample: ‘Mama, darling, if I’m a success in this show we’re gonna move from here. Oh, yes, we’re gonna move up in the Bronx. A lot of nice green grass up there and a whole lotta people you know. There’s the Ginsbergs, the Guttenbergs, and the Goldbergs. Oh, a whole lot of Bergs, I don’t know ’em all.’ (Accounts vary as to whether Jolson’s words were spontaneous or scripted.)
    As Jolson was filming his talking sequences in Los Angeles, 400 miles to the north in Sacramento Buster Keaton was filming what may be the single most memorable scene in any silent film – certainly one of the most perfect comic scenes, not to mention most dangerous. It was the scene in Steamboat Bill Jr . in which the front wall of a house falls on to Keaton, but he survives because he is standing in the space of an open window. To make the scene maximally thrilling – and it truly is – the window was made just two inches wider than Keaton on either side. Had the wall warped or buckled slightly or the