One Summer: America, 1927

point of impact been fractionallymiscalculated, Keaton would have been killed. Perhaps nothing says more about silent movies and those who performed in them than that actors routinely risked their lives for the sake of a good joke. That didn’t happen in talking pictures.
    Steamboat Bill Jr . was one of Keaton’s finest movies, but it was a failure at the box office. By the time it came out, people were already abandoning silent pictures. At the time he filmed Steamboat Bill Jr. , Keaton was earning well over $200,000 a year. By 1934, he would be bankrupt.
     
    Talking pictures were the salvation of Hollywood, but that salvation came at very considerable cost – in anxiety for stars and producers, in new equipment costs for studios and cinemas, in job losses for thousands of musicians whose accompaniments were no longer needed. The greatest fear for the industry in the beginning was that sound movies would prove to be a passing fad – an unnerving possibility given the amount of investment necessary to get into talking pictures. Every cinema in the country that wanted to show sound movies had to invest between $10,000 and $25,000 in equipment. For the studios, a fully equipped sound stage cost a minimum of half a million dollars – and that was assuming the studio could even acquire the necessary recording equipment since demand very quickly outran supply. One desperate producer, unable to get hold of sufficient sound-recording equipment, seriously considered filming his movie as normal in California but with the sound recorded, via telephone line, on equipment in New Jersey. Luckily, he managed to acquire some sound equipment and didn’t have to discover, as he most assuredly would have, that his long-distance scheme could never result in decent reproduction.
    Once equipped, studios often discovered that they had to find new, quieter locations and quieter working conditions within those locations. ‘When a scene is to be shot, the carpenters have to suspend their hammering, and the scene painters must stop singing at their work,’ explained one observer earnestly. Delivery truckscouldn’t sound their horns or rev their engines. Doors could not be slammed. Even the most carefully muffled sneeze could spoil a scene. At first, many pictures were shot in the dead of night to minimize the complications of background noise.
    Another mighty blow was the loss of foreign markets. More than a third of Hollywood’s income came from abroad. For a silent movie to be sold overseas, it simply needed new title cards inserted, but, pending the invention of dubbing and subtitles, sound movies could only be shown where people spoke the language in which the movie was made. One solution was to make multiple versions of a movie, using a single set but with up to ten different troupes of actors from different language groups filming one version after another.
    All of these problems were of course overcome, and talking pictures quickly enjoyed success beyond anyone’s wildest hopes. By 1930, virtually every cinema in America had sound. Movie audiences jumped from 60 million in 1927 to 110 million in 1930. Warner Brothers’ worth shot up from $16 million to $200 million. The number of cinemas it owned or controlled went from one to seven hundred.
    Talkies at first were often called ‘speakies’, though sometimes they were also called ‘dialogue pictures’. For some time, what exactly constituted sound movies was a matter of uncertainty. Eventually a consensus arose. A picture that offered recorded music but no talking was said to be ‘With Sound’. If it additionally had some sound effects, it was said to be ‘With Sound and Effects’. If it had any recorded speech at all, it was a ‘Talking Picture’. If it was a proper movie, with a full range of speech and sounds, it was an ‘All-Talking Picture’. The first true all-talking picture was The Lights of New York in 1928, but such was the sound quality still that it came with subtitles as well.
    Variety in the summer of 1927 noted that some four hundred aliens were working as actors or in other creative positions in Hollywood, and that more than half of all leading roles were takenby performers of foreign birth. Pola Negri, Vilma Bánky, Lya De Putti, Emil Jannings, Joseph Schildkraut, Conrad Veidt and many others from Germany or central Europe were big stars, but only so long as the public couldn’t hear their accents. Universal and Paramount were both dominated by