THE VITAPHONE / WARNER YEARS (1928-31)
Lights of New York, The Singing Fool,
Viennese Nights, Mammy etc.
Plus how the rudimentary technolology was
inhibiting production.
I was supervisor on the whole business. I supervised the dubbing, scoring, production. I was jack of all trades running around keeping an eye on everybody - [George Groves]
The Vitaphone
team in Hollywood - George Groves is 2nd left
in the front row
Early in 1928 George recorded Lights of New York, the first all-talking picture which was premiered on 28th July. This was also the first full-length feature to immobilise the camera and actors as microphones had to be strategically placed within sets. George in his oral history:
One microphone was even located within a telephone on a desk! The sound crew used a newly developed condenser microphone which was very sensitive but needed to be closely connected to a vacuum tube amplifier called a CTA (condenser transmitter amplifier) contained within a heavy, wooden box. This would emit a 'boing' sound if there was any movement or if it was touched. George again:Finally somebody said “Let’s make an all-talking picture” and this was Lights of New York. That was the first 100% talkie, they talked all the way through it and very corny dialogue and very corny if you see it now, it’s just funny. But nevertheless it caused a tremendous sensation...You heard people talk in synchronism with the picture but the action was very static. Nobody could move around, not very much anyway.
There was no way of moving the microphone and its associated microphone amplifier. This meant that when a microphone was located in a set, it couldn't be moved; in other words you couldn't follow people around with it. So it had to be tied off with ropes, tied off in a certain position. Anybody that talked or said or did anything had to go to the microphone.
Other problems were caused by noisy and smokey arc lamps which were used on the early sound films, including The Jazz Singer. However by the time of Lights of New York, they were using incandescent lighting which Frank Murphy head of the electrical department at Warner Bros. had persuaded the General Electric Co. to develop.
Although a little known picture today, The Singing Fool broke all box office records and it took Gone With The Wind eleven years later to surpass it in terms of revenue. It also featured the first song in a picture to sell over a million. In fact Jolson's rendition of Sonny Boy eventually sold three million copies in total of sheet music, piano rolls and phonograph records.
At the premiere of The Singing Fool in September 1928, Al Jolson personally thanked George Groves for his invaluable input into the making of the film. He singled him out as having made "the greatest contribution to the film’s success". Later in 1928 George recorded the popular Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice in the part-talkie, part-musical, part-silent film My Man. Despite the success of Lights of New York, it was still not standard practice to make films all-talkies.
George Groves recording Fanny Brice in the musical 'My Man' using a stage mixer (1928)
For a publicity still (aka 'gag photo') Al Jolson got members of the production crew to dress up in convicts' uniforms. George is pictured standing directly behind the conducting Jolson (see picture left). However, Say it With Songs did not fare well at the box office. This is blamed on there being no black-face musical numbers in the picture, it being very similar to The Singing Fool and Jolson's on-screen character not being called Al, as they tended to be.
He also worked in 1929 on hit musicals Gold Diggers of Broadway and The Show of Shows as scoring mixer and production mixer. The latter film grossed over $5 million worldwide on a production budget of $500,000. Such box office smashes using Vitaphone did wonders for Warner Brothers' fortunes. They were losing money when Don Juan was in production but in 1929 they made a net profit of over $14 million.
Although 'pre-scoring' (the pre-recording of musicians) was just around the corner, the music in musicals was at this time 'standard recorded'. This means that an orchestra played just out of shot as on-set vocalists sang. A live mix was performed by George who recorded the sound onto a single monaural track of a disc, while as many as three cameras rolled (see Singing Fool picture above). They often didn't wrap until each camera had shot 1000 feet of film and a 10 minute Vitaphone disc had been recorded. This led to George being involved in all aspects of sound recording and as Chief Mixer he had a supervisory role over other 'sound men'.
I did all the scoring work. When I wasn’t on the scoring stage, I was walking round supervising all the production mixers. I used to walk around with a pair of headphones and sit in with them and make any comments to see that they were turning out a speech track that was up to Warners' standards...I was supervisor on the whole business. I supervised the dubbing, scoring, production. I was jack of all trades, running around keeping an eye on everybody.
Al Jolson and George Groves posing with Mammy playback turntables
In
Mammy
in
1930, Al Jolson reverted to his black-face
minstrel persona in a film of Irving Berlin
songs. A photograph was taken in which
Jolson holds out a Vitaphone disc in front
of a smiling George Groves
(above).
This
was probably taken just for George to send back
to his family in England.
(See
Photo-album
for other Mammy
pictures)
Over the next three years, as shooting became more complex, 50 or 100 records had to be dubbed in each ten minute reel. In 1927 editing was performed by manually releasing records by hand but automatic machinery was soon designed that would start and stop records on preset cues. The accuracy of sound dubs was rarely perfect, however, so the picture had to be re-cut to match the sound edits. The picture above taken in 1930 shows a row of turntables in the dubbing suite at Burbank that worked like a telephone dialling system, triggered by a system of relays and selector switches. George said:
We would operate relays that would release the turntables and they would start to spin. We had a crew of men who would stand there [and] put the next record in the rack, pull it down, take the old one off and get the next one set ready to go and reset the footage counter so that each turntable took off at the right time. We developed it down to quite a science but it was doing a job the hard way...it was a very, very complicated, cumbersome, inefficient way of trying to dub a picture.
George Groves
in a portable mixer booth with composer Sigmund
Romberg.
Note the orchestra preparing to play a musical
number for Viennese Nights.
Also in 1930 George recorded Viennese Nights, a musical operetta film created by Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II and photographed entirely in Technicolor. This was the first film in which pre-scoring or pre-recording took place.
In these pictures (above and right) both methods of recording orchestras and actors are demonstrated. George is photographed in a recording booth talking to Sigmund Romberg as he prepares to record an orchestra. In the second picture he is demonstrating to two of the actors (one is Bela Lugosi) the stage production mixer using headphones. In the early sound films all sound recording had been done in a mixing booth using loudspeakers as George explained:
Although sound-on-disc recording was an astonishing innovation, by March 1930 it had been displaced by sound-on-film, with the soundtrack recorded optically on 35mm film stock using Western Electric's variable density system. This facilitated improved synchronisation and mobility than sound-on-disc recording plus editing became a breeze. At a stroke the banks of turntables needed to edit a soundtrack became obsolete:Eventually they had to get away from monitoring on a loudspeaker and monitor on headphones and have the mixer console right there on the stage, so you get in between the lights into the set almost to see the action and follow it....You put the mixer out on the stage and he was not a lone wolf hidden away some place with easy access of the action. So you could make changes, change microphones, whatever you wanted to do.
Eventually we had to do what everybody else finally did and record the sound on film...it was so much more convenient to take a piece of film soundtrack and edit it with a pair of scissors than go through all this complicated turntable deal.
By the end of 1930 George Groves could take stock of his career at Warner Bros. and muse on the sweeping changes in technology and production practice. In just five years Warners had revolutionised the movie business with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, the 'marvel of this marvelous age', then discarded it for sound-on-film. Editing which had been incredibly complicated was now a piece of cake. The sound-proofed housing that the cameraman had to sit in without proper ventilation had vanished, replaced by camera blimps (see photo-album). Noisy, smokey arc lights had been replaced by incandescents. Stage mixers had been introduced so George could get in on the action and pre-scoring was becoming standard practice.
As the technical limitations on a director's imagination were disappearing, so the sound film was moving from a novelty to a real art form and the best and most marvellous was yet to come!
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PAGE - GEORGE GROVES AND WARNER BROS.
(1931-56)
