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How to Say Things with Songs: Al Jolson, Vitaphone Technology, and the Rhetoric of Warner Bros. in 1929

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509200802241365

1543-5326

Jennifer Fleeger,

Music History and Culture

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments Jennifer Fleeger is currently completing a doctoral dissertation in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa on the centrality of opera and jazz to the cinema's conversion to sound. She recently published an article in the anthology Shopping for Jesus: Faith in Marketing in the USA (Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2008) and book reviews in Popular Music and Society and The Annals of Iowa. Notes 1. Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound 1926–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 146. 2. Information collected from reports in Barrons throughout 1929 and reprinted in Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System: A History (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 54. 3. Al Jolson is given authorial credit for the film's seven songs, though the practice is recognized somewhat ironically by Variety, “Al sings seven songs in all, four by DeSylva, Brown and Henderson … whilst the other three were written by Billy Rose and Dave Dryer, Jolson credited with having participated in the writing of the entire seven.” Review of Say It With Songs, 14 August 1929. 4. The lack of distinction between score and source music is characteristic of features made using the Vitaphone during the conversion period. See for example Broadway Babies (1929), where the radio plays a similar role as it does in Say It With Songs, Dawn Patrol (1930), where the phonograph seems ever present yet undetected, or Under a Texas Moon (1930), which diegetically places two men with guitars to assist in the hero's serenades but fails to consistently differentiate between their melodies and the themes of the film score. 5. Variety takes issue with the jail performance and its nondiegetic orchestral accompaniment, complaining that “Still, jails so far have not yet been wired. It does look a bit incongruous … to have a prisoner sing to synchronized music.” Review of Say It With Songs, 14 August 1929. 6. It is certainly possible that these scratches are a condition of the version of the film to which I had access and may not be heard on all prints. Regardless of print quality, however, the image of the phonograph calls the viewer's attention to the sound it makes and the diegetic silence in the moments before Katherine drops the needle makes these noises more audible. 7. Douglas Gomery, The Coming of Sound (New York: Routledge, 2005), 95. 8. Concerning Songs, the paper complains that the “throatiness” of the Western Electric horns complicates the clarity of Jolson's lines. Review of “Say It With Songs with Al Jolson,” Harrison's Reports, 17 August 1929, 130. 9. On the week of Songs’ August release, Exhibitors Herald-World published an article by L.A. Elmer of Bell Labs that attempted to offset some of these complaints by describing a change-over device designed to overcome the coordination problems often experienced with sound-on-disc projection. “The Problems in Rotating Discs for Recording,” 3 August 1929, 46. Even Photoplay weighed in on the issue of competing sound systems: in late 1929 the magazine called the process of sound reproduction used by Warners “old fashioned” in comparison to the Fox Grandeur Movietone film. “The Film of the Future,” Photoplay Magazine, December 1929. 10. Crafton, The Talkies, 148 and 198. 11. Reprinted in Crafton, The Talkies, 147. 12. Rick Altman explains the placement of the Vitaphone speakers as a strategy to represent the live orchestra. Through his mode of crisis historiography, he demonstrates that one way that Warners understood sound-on-disc was as a replacement for theatrical musical accompaniment for feature films like Don Juan. Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 162. 13. “Four Vitaphones on Broadway Two Times in Month,” Exhibitors Herald-World, 2 February 1929, 40. 14. The column, “Music of the Films,” reviewed two such recordings from Say It With Songs (identified in the pages of Photoplay Magazine by the title Little Pal) October 1929, 108. 15. The Film Daily 1929 Year Book, ed. Maurice D. Kann (New York: The Film Daily, 1929), 276. 16. This advertising announcement was featured in Variety, 3 April 1929. 17. Warner Bros. Advertising Announcement, Exhibitors Herald-World, 26 January 1929, 1. 18. This advertisement was printed in Photoplay Magazine, July 1929. 19. Indeed, in a note written atop the “Temporary Titles” submitted for Desert Song, the author draws attention to the connection between the music, image, and title tracks: “I believe that a slightly ‘rhetorical’ style is appropriate in order to match the gorgeousness of the images on the screen. Please note that this alleged ‘rhetorical’ manner is accomplished … to employ simplicity, but [also] to give [the words] as much of a musical flavor as I can.” File on Desert Song, USC Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California. 20. James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Lastra's complex theoretical and historical account considers many more factors in the development of these two systems. 21. Rick Altman, “Sound Space,” in Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 61, 205. 22. General ad for Vitaphone and its “celebrated musical comedy hits” in the coming season, Photoplay Magazine, October 1929. 23. In making these claims I examined as many ads as possible in issues of Photoplay Magazine and Exhibitors Herald-World from 1929. The text in quotation comes from ads for Fox Movietone Follies and Broadway Melody (MGM). 24. Quotation from Miljan and description of Warner's production of trailers for sound films reprinted in Crafton, The Talkies, 120. 25. Photoplay Magazine, March 1929. 26. Letter from W.C. Kyle, Jr., “Music Broadcast from Mouth of Jolson Cutout is Good Idea,” Exhibitors Herald-World, 9 February 1929, 48. 27. One could certainly make more of the conventions of gender that allow Jolson to stand in for the apparatus while Fanny Brice may not. See Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 28. “Jolson and Mike … in ‘Say It With Songs” [part of title has been lost], Warner Bros. Pressbook for Say It With Songs, 1929. 29. “Vitaphone Will Celebrate Three Years of Rapid Strides Since ‘Don Juan,’” Exhibitors Herald-World, 3 August 1929, 31. 30. “Al Jolson Triumphs in Third Vitaphone All-Singing Special,” Warner Bros. Pressbook for Say It With Songs, 1929. 31. Reprinted in Sheldon Hochheiser, “AT&T and the Development of Sound Motion-Picture Technology,” in The Dawn of Sound, ed. Mary Lea Bandy (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 23. 32. Quoted in Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 83. 33. Review of Say It With Songs, Variety, 14 August 1929. 34. Hays’ statement renews claims that circulated in the late 19th century and concerned the phonograph's role in the preservation of the human voice after death. For an account of these earlier discourses, see Friedrich A. Kittler, “Gramophone,” in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 21–114; Amy Lawrence, “The Pleasures of Echo: The ‘Problem’ of the Speaking Woman,” in Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 9–34; John Durham Peters, “Phantasms of the Living, Dialogues with the Dead,” in Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 137–176; Jonathan Sterne, “A Resonant Tomb,” in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 287–334. 35. This assessment can be found in the Mordaunt Hall's review of the film in The New York Times, 7 August 1929. 36. “The New Pictures,” Review of Say It With Songs, Time Magazine, 19 August 1929. 37. “Al Jolson in Say It With Songs with Davey Lee,” The Film Daily, 11 August 1929. 38. Review of “Say It With Songs with Al Jolson,” Harrison's Reports, 17 August 1929, 130. 39. Review of Say It With Songs, Variety, 14 August 1929. 40. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 92–94. 41. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 190. 42. Other than recasting Davey Lee and Jolson in the roles of father and son, of particular note in this regard is The Film Daily's estimation that, “Each situation parallels the major developments in ‘The Singing Fool.’” Review of Say It With Songs’ premiere, 7 August 1929. 43. “Contests,” Warner Bros. Pressbook for Say It With Songs, 1929. 44. “Talking Pictures Complete Transformation of Jolson,” Warner Bros. Pressbook for Say It With Songs, 1929. 45. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 147. 46. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 190, 200. 47. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 182. 48. Further investigation of source material reveals that the original story on which The Singing Fool was based was written by Michael Curtiz, titled “Pagliacci” or “The Clown,” and contained multiple references to the opera. In the finale of this version, the character eventually played by Jolson becomes a cabaret singer performing a blackface jazz version of Pagliacci. Inter-Office Communication, Michael Curtiz to Roy Obringer, November 14, 1956 and Warner Bros. Story Dept. File on The Singing Fool, Story by Michael Curtiz, not dated but later determined to be 1927, USC Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California. 49. This is in fact the second close-up of the record in the film; the first appears early on when Katherine gazes lovingly at the object as a substitute for Joe, who had just left the scene to fight for her honor. 50. My explanation of Jolson's voice as both textually dominant and diegetically contained is again based on Kaja Silverman's division between male and female voices in the cinema in her book The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. 51. Alice Maurice, “‘Cinema at Its Source’: Synchronizing Race and Sound in the Early Talkies,” Camera Obscura 49 (2002): 31–71. 52. “Jolson OutJolsons Self With Davey Lee in ‘Say It With Songs,’” Warner Bros. Pressbook for Say It With Songs, 1929. 53. Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Yale French Studies, 60 (1980): 33–50. 54. See note 7 and “Sound on Film or Sound on Disc,” Harrison's Reports, 2 March 1929, 1. 55. The text of Will Hays’ speech is printed in The Dawn of Sound, ed. Mary Lea Bandy (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 17.