Vitaphone

For other uses, see Vitaphone (disambiguation).

The Warner Bros. Vitaphone logo.

Vitaphone was a sound film process used on feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects produced by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1930. Vitaphone was the last, but most successful, of the sound-on-disc processes. The soundtrack was not printed on the actual film, but was issued separately on 16 inch (40 cm) and, later, 12 inch (30 cm) phonograph discs recorded at 33 1/3 rpm, a speed first used for this process. The discs would be played on a turntable indirectly coupled to the projector motor while the film was being projected. Many early talkies, such as The Jazz Singer (1927), used the Vitaphone process. The name "Vitaphone" was created from the Latin and Greek words, respectively, for "living" and "sound". It was later associated with cartoons and other short subjects that had optical soundtracks and did not use discs.

Early history

In the early 1920s, Western Electric researched both sound-on-film and sound-on-disc systems, aided by the purchase of Lee De Forest's Audion amplifier tube in 1913, and the development of the public address system and the condenser microphone in 1915. DeForest himself debuted his Phonofilm sound-on-film system on April 15, 1923 in New York City. However, due to the relatively poor sound quality of Phonofilm, Warners decided to go forward with the disc system as the more familiar technology.

The business was established at Western Electric's Bell Laboratories in Manhattan, New York, and acquired by Warner Bros. in April 1925. Warner Bros. introduced Vitaphone on August 6, 1926, with the release of the silent feature Don Juan starring John Barrymore with music score and sound effects only (no dialogue). The feature was accompanied by several talkie short subjects featuring mostly opera stars and classical musicians of the day (the only "pop music" artist was guitarist Roy Smeck), and a greeting from 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. In the wake of the failure of Don Juan, Paramount head Adolph Zukor offered Sam Warner a deal as an executive producer for the company 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, and Sam pushed ahead with a new Vitaphone feature, based on a Broadway play starring Al Jolson, who had just starred in a musical short for the company, A Plantation Act. On October 6, 1927, The Jazz Singer premiered at the Warners Theater in New York City, broke box-office records, established Warner Bros. as a major player in Hollywood, and single-handedly launched the talkie revolution.

Orchestra leader Henry Halstead is given credit for starring in the first Warner Brothers Vitaphone short subject filmed in Hollywood instead of New York. "Carnival Night in Paris" (1927) featured Halstead's band and a cast of hundreds of costumed dancers in a Carnival atmosphere.

Process

A Vitaphone-equipped theater used normal projectors equipped with a special turntable and reproducer, a fader, an amplifier, and loudspeaker system. The projectors operated as normal motorized silent projectors would, but also provided a mechanical interlock with an attached phonograph turntable. When the projector was threaded, the projectionist would align a start mark on the film with the picture gate, and would at the same time place a phonograph record on the turntable, being careful to align the phonograph needle with an arrow scribed on the record's surface. While the projector rolled, it rotated the linked turntable and (in theory) automatically kept the record "in sync" (correctly synchronized) with the projected image.

The Vitaphone process made several improvements over previous systems:

• Amplification - The Vitaphone system was one of the first to use electronic amplification, using Lee De Forest's Audion tube. This allowed the sound of the phonograph to be played to a large audience at a comfortable volume.
• Fidelity - In the early days, Vitaphone had superior fidelity to sound-on-film processes, particularly at both low and high frequencies. Phonographs also had superior dynamic range, on the first few playings.

These innovations notwithstanding, the Vitaphone process lost the early format war with sound-on-film processes for many reasons:

• 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. The records would start to suffer from audible wear after an estimated 20 screenings (a check box system on the label kept track of the number of plays) and were then supposed to be replaced with a fresh set. Damage and breakage were inherent dangers and could stop the show cold for the day, so a spare set of discs was usually kept on hand. This consumed even more distribution overhead.
• Synchronization - Vitaphone was vulnerable to severe synchronization problems, some of which were spoofed in a few hilarious scenes in MGM's Singin' in the Rain starring Gene Kelly. If a record was improperly cued up, it would start out of sync with the picture and the projectionist would have to try to manually acquire sync. If the wrong record had been cued up (the cause of much audience hilarity on occasion) there was no realistic option but to pause the show for a few minutes while swapping in the right record, resetting everything and trying again. If the film print became damaged and was not precisely repaired, the relationship between the record and the print would be thrown off, also causing a loss of sync. The Vitaphone projectors had special levers and linkages to advance and retard sync, but only within certain limits. Scrupulous care and attention were demanded from the projectionist, which, if amply supplied, left only the equipment itself to occasionally go awry.
• Editing - A phonograph record cannot be physically edited, and this significantly limited the creative potential of Vitaphone films. Warner Brothers went to great expense to develop a highly complex phonograph-based dubbing system, using synchronous motors and Strowger switch-triggered playback phonographs. Multiple source discs would be carefully cued up, then parts of each in turn were dubbed to a new master disc. The cutting of the new wax master could not be paused, so each playback turntable had to be started at just the right moment and each signal switched to the recorder at just the right moment. The system actually worked, but imprecisely enough that the reel of film typically required some adjustment by adding a few frames here and removing a few there in order to conform it to the disc of edited sound. This discouraged frequent changes of scene in the film and the lively pace that they created. Not only was editing sound on disc a nightmare for the editor, but it was increasingly obvious to everyone that while the system sufficed for musical shorts and a synchronized musical accompaniment for otherwise silent films, it was no way to make a feature-length film with "live" sound. By the middle of 1931, Warner Brothers-First National had thrown in the towel and was recording and editing optical sound on film, like all the other studios, and only then dubbing the completed soundtrack to discs for use with the Vitaphone projection system.
• Fidelity versus Sound-on-Film - The fidelity of sound-on-film processes improved considerably after the early work by Lee DeForest on his Phonofilm process, and the introduction by the Fox Film Corporation of Fox Movietone in 1927. The DeForest and Fox systems were variable-density, but were superseded by RCA's variable-area sound-on-film process RCA Photophone, introduced in 1928.

With improvements in competing sound-on-film processes, Vitaphone's technical imperfections led to its retirement early in the sound era. Warner Bros. and First National stopped recording directly to disc, and switched to the Photophone sound-on-film recording. The Warner studio had to publicly concede that Vitaphone was being retired, but put a positive spin on it by announcing that Warner films would now be available in both sound-on-film and sound-on-disc versions. Thus, instead of making a grudging admission that its technology was flawed, Warner appeared to be doing the entire movie industry a favor.

Theater owners, who had invested heavily in Vitaphone equipment only a short time before, were unwilling (or financially unable) to abandon the sound-on-disc process so quickly. Sound on film was now standard, but demand for sound on discs continued, compelling the Hollywood studios to offer disc sets for new films, although in ever-dwindling numbers, on into the mid-1930s. (This is analogous to today's movie studios continuing to issue new films on VHS videotape after the DVD format had eclipsed it.)

Warner Bros. kept the "Vitaphone" name alive as the name of its short subjects division, The Vitaphone Corporation (officially dissolved at the end of 1959), most famous for releasing Leon Schlesinger's Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, later produced by Warner in-house from 1944 on. The Vitaphone name was adopted in the 1950s by Warner Bros.' record label, as a trade name for "Vitaphonic" high-fidelity recording. Later still, in the 1960s, end titles of Merrie Melodies cartoons carried the legend "A Vitaphone Release", while Looney Tunes of the same period were listed as "A Vitagraph Release".

Vitaphone soundtrack discs

In 1924-1925, when Western Electric established the format of the system which would eventually be named Vitaphone, they settled on a 16 inch (40 cm) diameter disc rotating at 33 1/3 rpm as a good practical compromise of disc size and speed. The slow speed permitted the 11 minute playing time needed to match the maximum running time of a standard reel of film projected at 24 fps, yet the increased diameter preserved the average effective groove velocity, and therefore the sound quality, of a smaller, shorter-playing record rotating at the then-standard speed of about 78 rpm.

Like most ordinary records, Vitaphone discs were made of a shellac compound rendered lightly abrasive by its major constituent, finely pulverized rock. They were designed to be played with a very inexpensive, imprecisely mass-produced steel needle with a point that quickly wore to fit the contour of the groove, but then went on to wear out in the course of playing one disc side, after which it was meant to be discarded and replaced. Unlike ordinary records, Vitaphone discs were recorded inside out, so that the groove started near the scribed synchronization arrow and proceeded outward. As one consequence, the needle would be fresh where the groove's undulations were most closely packed and needed the most accurate tracing, and suffering from wear only as the much more widely spaced and easily traced undulations toward the edge of the disc were encountered.

Initially, Vitaphone discs had a recording on one side only, each reel of film having its own disc. As the sound-on-disc method was slowly relegated to second-class status, economies were effected, first by making use of both sides of each disc for non-consecutive reels of film, then by reducing the discs to 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter. The use of RCA Victor's new "Victrolac", a lightweight, flexible and less abrasive vinyl-based compound, made it possible to downsize the discs while actually improving their sound quality.

The Vitaphone Project

Today there is a group of hobbyists known as "The Vitaphone Project", whose mission is to restore long-unseen Vitaphone productions. The members track down mute picture elements and their corresponding Vitaphone discs, and produce new, synchronized 35mm versions using the latest motion picture and sound technology. (Today's technicians have found that the original Vitaphone discs have superior sound fidelity, and are often preferable to the identical tracks in archival, sound-on-film copies.) To date the Project has restored more than 50 Vitaphone shorts from the dawn of sound, featuring many stars of 1920s vaudeville, radio, and the concert stage.

Though operating on principles so different as to make it unrecognizable to a Vitaphone engineer, Digital Theater Sound is a sound-on-disc system, the first to gain wide adoption since the abandonment of Vitaphone.

Legacy

The Vitaphone process was among the first 25 inductees into the TECnology Hall of Fame at its establishment in 2004, an honor 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 theater sound and was critical in stimulating the development of the modern sound reinforcement system.

See also

• List of film formats
• Movietone
• Phonofilm
• Photokinema
• RCA Photophone
• Sound film
• sound-on-film
• Vitagraph Studios

Further reading

• Barrios, Richard (1995), A Song in the Dark, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0195088115. Examination of early sound musicals, with extensive coverage of Vitaphone.

• Bradley, Edwin M. (2005), The First Hollywood Sound Shorts, 1926-1931, McFarland & Company. ISBN 0786410302

• Crafton, Donald (1997), The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931, Charles Scribner's Sons ISBN 0-684-19585-2

• Liebman, Roy (2003), Vitaphone Films: A Catalogue of the Features and Shorts, McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-1279-8

• Warner-Sperling, Cass; Millner, Cork; Jack Warner (1999). Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story, University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-813-10958-2

External links

• Blog describing the history of the Vitaphone Process in detail
• Vitaphone Project dedicated to the restoration of Vitaphone films
• List of Early Sound Films at Silent Era website