The Pittsburgh Press (August 6, 1946)
Monahan: Saluting the talkies on 20th birthday
They’re doing okay despite sour prophecies from the skeptics
By Kaspar Monahan
The talkies are 20 years old today. As one of the purblind prophets who predicted (and in the public prints, too) that they wouldn’t last, it is only fitting and proper that I herewith make public acknowledgment of my grievous error. I will even sing it, lift my rich, resonant whatsit-tone in bellowing accents:
“Happy birthday to you,
“Happy birthday to you,
“Happy birthday, dear talkie-squawkies,
“Happy birthday to you.”
Of course, there were what they call mitigating circumstances associated with my bum prophecy. For one thing the guy who had the only sound equipment in town (not this town, incidentally) wasn’t friendly to our another I didn’t like the fellow and he didn’t like me because I had intimated on occasion that his feature films were something less than masterworks of the cinema, and he told his doorman and ushers to throw me out the minute I approached the portals of his gaudy emporium.
For still another the screen in its first bouts with words and sentences was a far cry from perfection in diction. Some of the apparatus was highly erratic. Quite often in the middle of an oration from the hero there’d be a whir and a click and the boy would be going through the motions, but no sounds would come forth from his chiseled lips. Then, on occasion, the heroine would day “I love you” in deep bass tones. This, when the synchronization went haywire and the boy friend’s masculine voice was switcher to her – or vice versa, which was even more disconcerting.
At such times the uncouth citizens (of which I was one) in the audience would snicker or break into loud guffaws. Louts that we were, we didn’t sense that we were privileged to sit in on the early stirrings of a great new era in the world of amusement. (Indubitably we were the direct descendants of those unimaginative troglodytes who hollered “baloney” when Galileo remarked that the earth was round and those later thick-skulled skeptics who lined the banks of the Hudson to hoot at Fulton and his steamboat).
For it was quite a while after Al Jolson had astounded the world when he chirped “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” that the screen began to learn to use its newly acquired tongue and larynx – a couple years, forsooth, before it could talk as lucidly and sensibly as an average six-year-old youngster. Today is really the 20th anniversary of the first feature with sound, “Don Juan”; for it was more than a year later that audiences saw and heard Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer,” and that boasted of only a few squibs of dialogue.
As late as 1928 the majority of movie moguls were hesitant about sound and dialogue in films. That year I made my first trip to Hollywood, primarily to find out what it was all about. Warners then was riding high on the crest of the new device, but such big outfits as Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer were still skeptical, although engaged in erecting their first sound stages. Many of the big film people I talked to were not at all sure that the talking film would completely supplant the silent variety. Among them was the then famous Herbert Brenon, director of “Beau Geste,” voted the top film of 1927. Mr. Brenon assured me that there would always be silent pictures, even if the talkie could prove itself more than just a passing novelty.
I went to a big-to-do at the Chinese Theater where took place the “world premiere” of a film called “White Shadows of the South Seas” – with sound. It was MGM’s first experiment with dubbed-in music and, as far as I could discover, nobody thought very much of it, not even MGM’s faithful drumbeaters. White-haired Sid Graumann was on hand, bouncing around and agitated, for he was worried about his “stage presentation.” A long, interminable affair with babes, mostly blonds, pretending to be Polynesians and lounging around the stage in what they thought were provocative attitudes. The audience grew restless – particularly the glamor gals and their guys from rival studios – so they were in no receptive mood for a trick talkie-short which followed.
This short undoubtedly set the talking movie back a couple of years. A fellow on the screen would say something, ask a question – and a stooge in the audience was supposed to answer. The stooge hadn’t a chance, for the audience would holler the answers and the wrong answers. Finally they had to stop the talkie-short midway and then somebody made a speech and on came “White Shadows.” By that time everybody was sick and tired of sound movies, talkies, any kind of movie. This was a factor in the forming of a conviction that talkies would end up a cropper – so I wrote a piece for my paper saying they were on the way out. (Not long after, for some reason, I resigned my job at that paper.)
Evidently I was wrong, for the Wall Street Journal announces that the amusement tax for the fiscal year ending June 30, last was $415,267,867. Talking movies represent at least 90 per cent of that figure.
So far I’ve made no predictions about television. I’m not going to. Anybody want to buy a slightly-malformed crystal ball?