The Coming of Sound (review)

Over the past three decades, media scholars have sought to counter the myth that the transition to sound in the movies was a bolt from the blue that precipitated chaos in the studios. According to this myth, silent film actors could not easily make the transition to the "talkies" because of their unsuitable voices or inability to memorize scripts, and studio executives mostly dismissed the first talkies as a passing fad. Then they had to furiously scramble to catch up after the release of Warner Brothers' pioneering 1927 film The Jazz Singer, in which Al Jolson sang and spoke a few lines. Following on his oft-cited 1975 dissertation, Douglas Gomery has published numerous articles about this myth, some of which are now revised and collected in this full-length treatment of the coming of sound.

Gomery argues that the transition to sound had been long in coming, and that by 1927 it was thought to be virtually inevitable. In part this was because so-called silent films were normally accompanied by live music in theaters, and various ways of adding "mechanical" sound to films had existed at least since 1892. Gomery does not deny that by adding spoken dialog, singing, and audio special effects, mechanical sound had profound and sometimes disruptive effects on the content of movies. But content is not really his concern here. Rather, the coming of sound becomes a case study in the ways that corporate leaders use rational economic decision-making processes to bring about technical change. He argues that the sole cause for change was the desire to increase corporate profits.

The technology for adding sound to the movies incubated rapidly during the first two decades of the twentieth century, its maturation paralleling that of the motion picture industry itself even though it had not yet been incorporated into commercially successful films. By the mid-1920s, Gomery argues, the technology of sound and the business of moviemaking were finally ready to combine. When Fox began to release movies using one of the new sound systems, each of the other studios explored its own technical options. Although Warner Brothers used a highly refined version of a phonograph-based technology to produce The Jazz Singer, Gomery is at pains to show that it was actually a later Jolson film, The Singing Fool, whose profitability ensured that talkies would become the norm. At exactly the same time, the motion picture industry was consolidating into a vertically integrated oligopoly, and the leading studios acted together to manipulate the adoption of a standardized form of this new, capital-intensive technology between 1928 and 1930.

The Coming of Sound could profitably be read alongside Donald Crafton's 1997 book, The Talkies. Gomery and Crafton both tackle the corporate and economic background for the introduction of sound, but in very different ways. Crafton shows how the final form of movie sound technology resulted from interactions among the Hollywood movie producers, the consumers they served, and the general cultural environment. One of his major aims is to provide (in the language of cultural history) a reception study, though historians of technology will appreciate his analysis in terms of social construction theory. Gomery dismisses culture-based analysis, arguing that the implementation of sound technology was a top-down process determined by Hollywood executives, which resulted in a technological transition that was quick but orderly. Even though both approaches have their merits, historians of technology are likely to feel that Gomery's pays insufficient attention to well-established theories of technological change.

Something else should be mentioned about The Coming of Sound. My own approach to scholarly reviewing is to emphasize a book's contributions rather than dwell on the minor shortcomings that mark nearly every historical work. In this case, however, I feel compelled to alert readers that The Coming of Sound is riddled with typographical, compositional, and stylistic errors; sentences and entire paragraphs are repeated, and some passages are entirely unintelligible. It is astounding that a manuscript could [End Page 654...