Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931.
Vitaphone was the last major analogue sound-on-disc system, and the only one that was widely used and commercially successful.
The soundtrack was not printed on the film itself, but issued separately on phonograph records. The discs, recorded at 33+1⁄3 rpm (a speed first used for this system) and typically 41 cm in diameter, would be played on a turntable physically coupled to the projector motor while the film was being projected. It had a frequency response of 4300 Hz.
Many early talkies, such as The Jazz Singer (1927), used the Vitaphone system. The name Vitaphone derived from the Latin and Greek words, respectively, for living and sound.
The Vitaphone trademark was later associated with cartoons and other short subjects that had optical soundtracks and did not use discs.
In the early 1920s, Western Electric was developing both sound-on-film and sound-on-disc systems, aided by the purchase of Lee De Forest's Audion amplifier tube in 1913, consequent advances in public address systems, and the first practical condenser microphone, which Western Electric engineer E.C. Wente had created in 1916 and greatly improved in 1922. De Forest debuted his own Phonofilm sound-on-film system in New York City on April 15, 1923, but due to the relatively poor sound quality of Phonofilm and the impressive state-of-the-art sound heard in Western Electric's private demonstrations, the Warner Brothers decided to go forward with the industrial giant and the more familiar disc technology.
The business was established at Western Electric's Bell Laboratories in New York City and acquired by Warner Bros. in April 1925.
More information: Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. introduced Vitaphone on August 5, 1926 with the premiere of their silent feature Don Juan, which had been retrofitted with a symphonic musical score and sound effects.
There was no spoken dialogue. The feature was preceded by a program of short subjects with live-recorded sound, nearly all featuring classical instrumentalists and opera stars. The only pop music artist was guitarist Roy Smeck and the only actual talkie was the short film that opened the program: four minutes of introductory remarks by motion picture industry spokesman Will Hays.
Don Juan was able to draw huge sums of money at the box office, but was not able to match the expensive budget Warner Bros. put into the film's production.
After its financial failure, Paramount head Adolph Zukor offered Sam Warner a deal as an executive producer for Paramount if he brought Vitaphone with him. Sam, not wanting to take any more of Harry Warner's refusal to move forward with using sound in future Warner films, agreed to accept Zukor's offer, but the deal died after Paramount lost money in the wake of Rudolph Valentino's death. Harry eventually agreed to accept Sam's demands. Sam then pushed ahead with a new Vitaphone feature starring Al Jolson, the Broadway dynamo who had already scored a big hit with early Vitaphone audiences in A Plantation Act, a musical short released on October 7, 1926.
On October 6, 1927, The Jazz Singer premiered at the Warner Theater in New York City, broke box-office records, established Warner Bros. as a major player in Hollywood, and is traditionally credited with single-handedly launching the talkie revolution.
At first, the production of Vitaphone shorts and the recording of orchestral scores were strictly a New York phenomenon, taking advantage of the bountiful supply of stage and concert hall talent there, but the Warners soon migrated some of this activity to their more spacious facilities on the West Coast.
Dance band leader Henry Halstead is given credit for starring in the first Vitaphone short subject filmed in Hollywood instead of New York. Carnival Night in Paris (1927) featured the Henry Halstead Orchestra and a cast of hundreds of costumed dancers in a Carnival atmosphere.
The Vitaphone process made several improvements over previous systems:
-Amplification. The Vitaphone system used electronic amplification based on Lee De Forest's Audion tube.
-Fidelity. Contrary to conventional wisdom, neither Vitaphone's ability to fill a theatre with an adequate volume of sound nor its success in maintaining synchronization was unprecedented.
-Distribution. Vitaphone records had to be distributed along with film prints, and shipping the records required a whole infrastructure apart from the already-existing film distribution system. Vitaphone's projectors had special levers and linkages to advance and retard sync, but only within certain limits.
-Editing. A phonograph record cannot be physically edited, and this significantly limited the creative potential of Vitaphone films. Warner Bros. went to great expense to develop a highly complex phonograph-based dubbing system, using synchronous motors and Strowger switch-triggered playback phonographs.
-Fidelity versus Sound-on-Film. The fidelity of sound-on-film processes was improved considerably after the early work by Lee De Forest on his Phonofilm system and that of his former associate Theodore Case on what eventually became the Fox Movietone system, introduced in 1927.
More information: George Groves
Warner Bros. kept the Vitaphone trademark alive in the name of its short subjects division, The Vitaphone Corporation (officially dissolved at the end of 1959), best remembered for releasing the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons.
In the 1950s, the Warner Bros. record label boasted Vitaphonic high-fidelity recording. In the 1960s, the end titles of Merrie Melodies cartoons, beginning with From Hare to Heir (1960), carried the legend A Vitaphone Release.
Looney Tunes of the same period, beginning with that same year's Hopalong Casualty, were credited as A Vitagraph Release, making further use of the name of the venerable Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn, which the Warners had bought in 1925, used as a facility for working out practical sound film production techniques and filming some early musical shorts, and from which a name for the previously nameless Western Electric sound-on-disc system had been derived.
By late 1968, the Vitaphone/Vitagraph titles had become swapped in-between the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series titles.
Vitaphone was among the first 25 inductees into the TECnology Hall of Fame at its establishment in 2004, an honour given to products and innovations that have had an enduring impact on the development of audio technology. The award notes that Vitaphone, though short-lived, helped in popularizing theatre sound and was critical in stimulating the development of the modern sound reinforcement system.
Though operating on principles so different as to make it unrecognizable to a Vitaphone engineer, DTS is a sound-on-disc system, the first to gain wide adoption since the abandonment of Vitaphone.
More information: NPR
I think Warner Bros. are probably some of the best people
in marketing films in the world.
Jeff Nichols
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