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GEORGE GROVES' WORK ON DON JUAN (1926-27)

The first feature film to have a synchronised score
-  the sowing of the seeds of the talking picture

 Somehow or other it never seemed to dawn on anybody that they should talk in motion pictures  -  [George Groves]

A crowd queuing to see Don Juan and the 6 Vitaphone short subjects on the bill

In June 1925 Warner Brothers acquired the revolutionary sound-on-disc technology that George Groves had helped to develop at Bell Labs. The Vitaphone Corporation was created to employ it in films and after experimenting with various short subjects Don Juan, the lavish costume spectacular starring John Barrymore and Mary Astor, was chosen as the ideal vehicle to fully test its capabilities. There was to be no dialogue in the film. Instead the audio accompaniment was an orchestral soundtrack provided by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra supplemented by sound effects for enhanced realism. George Groves was given the responsibility to record and mix Don Juan's specially composed soundtrack as well as a number of short musical performances that would be exhibited along with Don Juan.

As the New York Philharmonic numbered 107 musicians, it was soon realised that Warners' Vitagraph studios in Flatbush, Brooklyn would not be suitable for the scoring sessions. (Although one of the shorts on the Don Juan bill was shot and scored there). So Sam Warner and Stanley Watkins drove around New York scouting for alternative venues and settled on the Manhattan Opera House (left) on 35th Street. The Opera House had been built in 1906 by Oscar Hammerstein I but by 1926 was owned by Scottish masons who gave Warner Brothers a short-term lease. George Groves in his AFI oral history described how he felt that the experimental days were finally over:

This was the start of big things because now they had decided to score some pictures with a big orchestra and to make Vitaphone short subjects with famous talent.

Shooting a short in the Manhattan Opera House. George Groves was recording on the 6th floor. Note the soundproof camera booth on the right and orchestra behind it.

The first job was converting a theatre into a movie sound studio. The seats in the Grand Ballroom were all removed and the stage was extended over the whole auditorium. The boxes became recording rooms and dressing rooms were used as machine rooms and repair shops. George said "we moved in bag and baggage". The empty theatre was very live acoustically for recording, so carpets and drapes were hung to cut down on reverberation and echo. The only convenient place where a sound mixer could sit was in the Masonic Shrine room which was on the 6th floor at the front of the building:

So all the microphone lines from the stage were run up through the ventilating system to this Shrine room and brought out through the grill where the ventilating air normally came out and the mixer panel fastened onto that grill. And that’s where I sat and spent a lot of my time recording the first Vitaphone programs. Anytime there was a change of set-up or slight case of trouble I had to go down six flights in an elevator, run up to the stage, get back up and go back up stairs.  I did a lot of running.

As private meetings were held in the Shrine room on most evenings, all George's mixing and recording equipment had to be removed at the end of each day and reinstalled the following morning. That wasn't the only problem, however. Just as Warners began to lease the opera house, work began on building the 8th Avenue subway and blasting would sometimes vibrate the building and throw the needle off the wax discs that George was cutting. Stanley Watkins recalled in his memoirs how noisy crickets were a further difficulty on one occasion:

When Reinald Werrenrath was to be recorded in a woodland setting, a resourceful member of the technical staff brought in a boxful of field crickets for sound effects and some of them escaped. Entomological note: crickets are difficult to locate and sing loudest when the director says 'Quiet'!

The recordings were made onto soft, wax discs, 16” in diameter and 1” thick which were cut by an electrical stylus, "like a little chisel going along" said George.

At that time the speed of commercial records was 78 revolutions per minute (rpm). In order to accommodate ten minutes of playing time, which was the running time of 1000 feet of film, the Bell Labs engineers reduced the speed of the turntable to 33⅓ rpm, which was later adopted as the standard speed for LP records. However, unlike LPs the needle tracked from the inside to the outside of the record. The stylus quickly became worn, so had to be replaced after each playback and the discs themselves were discarded after twenty plays. Note the 1-20 boxes on this picture (above) for the projectionist to mark off.

For the recordings at the Manhattan Opera House a condenser-type microphone was used which had only recently been developed by the boffins at Bell Labs. The microphone included a CTA - condenser transmitter amplifier - which made the device very bulky, weighing around 8 pounds.

Although sound pick-up was enhanced, it did cause problems for George. In his oral history of 1973 he described how moisture tended to build up between the diaphragm and the magnetic structure inside the microphone creating a popping sound:

So this would happen quite frequently, you know you’d be in the middle of a take and then pop, pop, pop, pop.

Recording an orchestra of 107 musicians presented a challenge for George. It was standard practice to use a single microphone on an orchestra but George decided to employ an innovative, multi-microphone technique to obtain a more balanced sound perspective. Each section - including brass, violins, woodwind and percussion - were allocated their own microphones which was then isolated and George performed a live mix between them. In doing so he became the first ever music mixer the film industry ever had:

That was one innovation that I felt responsible for...So we got each section properly balanced on each microphone then blended those six microphones together and came up with quite good recordings. This was quite an innovation at that time to have this multiple pick up and mixing of microphones to get a good balance and get good coverage over all sections of the orchestra.

Some thought that George's technique was a waste of time and effort and he accepted a challenge from Victor recording engineers. Two overtures were first recorded using a solitary microphone hanging over the centre of the auditorium. Then the music was repeated with George recording and mixing each section of the orchestra using six microphones.

Once pressings had been made the two sets of recordings were played back and the consensus was that George's discs had more clarity and better resonance than the Victor engineers' recordings. As George put it in his oral history to the American Film Institute:

They gave in. They thought we were wasting a lot of time running around with a lot of microphones. Now, of course, they use thirty microphones on thirty men. Every man has his own microphone.

A bilboard advertising Don Juan which was premiered on August 6th 1926

On 6th August, 1926 at the Warners Theater on 52nd Street, Broadway, Don Juan and the six Vitaphone shorts that were also on the programme were premiered to considerable acclaim. The 'Vitaphone Prelude' included soprano Anna Case, violinist Mischa Elman and tenor Giovanni Martinelli amongst others. These were renowned artistes in their day and George Groves became used to working with such prestigious talent:

All the great concert and opera stars of the day, I had the privilege of recording in those early days.

Audiences at the plush Warners Theater were used to a live symphony orchestra playing specially composed music as accompaniment to films. However, the Don Juan score and sound effects of clashing swords and chiming bells were now emanating from disc, carefully synchronised to match the on-screen action.

Bidding 'Godspeed' to the Vitaphone films as they were rushed to the Pacific Coast

The Vitaphone programme was rushed to the Pacific Coast by 'special express car' so it could be released simultaneously with the New York premiere. It was succesfully exhibited at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard which had only been opened four years earlier by showman Sid Grauman.

Don Juan's success, however, reinforced the general feeling in Hollywood that Vitaphone's sole purpose was to create musical accompaniments to films. Dialogue was most definitely not yet on the agenda. There was both an economic and populist argument for Vitaphone. It was considered as a cost-effective means of replacing the large symphony orchestras which played in the more luxurious theatres. Plus the masses in the flea-pits who only had a pianist or organist could now enjoy a full orchestral accompaniment to their films. Because of Vitaphone, uniformly good presentations could be made wherever a film was shown.

Sam Warner was very much the Vitaphone enthusiast within the brothers and was a rare voice in Hollywood arguing in favour of talking films. His brothers mocked him, referring to Vitaphone as "Sam's toy phonograph" and were quite sceptical of the 'talkie' ever becoming a reality.

Stanley Watkins in his 1964 memoirs recalled Harry Warner saying:

We'll record music to go with all our pictures so that even in the smallest theatres they'll have the music of a great orchestra...But no talk in the pictures.

On September 3rd 1926, less than a month after Don Juan's premiere, Jack Warner on a business trip in Chicago was quoted by Associated Press (right) as saying that talking films would never be successful because they "...fail to take into account the international language of the silent pictures and the unconscious share of each onlooker in creating...the imagined dialogue for himself."

In 1973 George Groves commented on Hollywood's lack of foresight:

One thing that has impressed me during the passing of time is that nobody thought at that time of putting talking sequences in. Everything we did, somebody was singing, either an opera or a vaudeville act of some kind....Somehow or other it never seemed to dawn on anybody that they should talk in motion pictures.

Don Juan had been shot in Hollywood and the musical accompaniment created in New York. As the nation's musical talent and movie sound experts were based mainly in New York, this was logical. Sound fx were also added:

In the recording of Don Juan we probably recorded the first synchronised sound effects. On the sidelines in the sword fight we got the noise of swords clashing on the recordings.

A similar format was adopted for Old San Francisco, the story of the 1906 earthquake. It was scored in the Manhattan Opera House but then the film's director Alan Crosland decided to make some picture cuts and add some earthquake sound effects that couldn’t be done while a big symphony orchestra was playing. George explained how this was an early attempt at soundtrack editing:

Here was the first re-recorded job. We took the original recording and by taking a couple or three pressings of that particular score, playing down a certain part of one and a certain part of another, we made a music cut to conform to the picture cut and at the same time piped in the sound effects of the earthquake. Synthetic sound effects. We didn’t have the real sounds of earthquakes but at least we had sound effects to simulate the earthquake and I think that was probably the first attempt at dubbing.

Shooting in Hollywood and scoring soundtracks in New York to match the finished pictures was starting to lose its attraction as directors' use of Vitaphone became more ambitious. When Alan Crosland decided to insert singing sequences into an otherwise silent picture that he was shooting, it was decided that the fledgling Warner Brothers / Vitaphone Sound Department should relocate. So in April 1927 they moved their New York-based team, including George Groves, to Hollywood to work on the Al Jolson melodrama, The Jazz Singer.

NEXT PAGE - THE JAZZ SINGER George Groves & Al Jolson (1927)

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