Part 6 - The Vitaphone / Warner Years (1928-31)

I supervised the dubbing, scoring, production. I was jack of all trades running around keeping an eye on everybody  -  {George Groves}

The Vitaphone group featuring George Groves in Hollywood 1928
The Vitaphone team in Hollywood - George Groves is pictured second left in the front row

Lights of New York poster
By 1928 George Groves had become settled in Los Angeles and was enjoying the Californian climate, which was somewhat warmer than he experienced in St.Helens and New York! George said that this was the reason why he never picked up his French horn to play again. He probably also didn't have much spare time as he was in great demand after successfully recording The Jazz Singer in the previous year.

Early in 1928 George recorded Lights of New York, the first all-talking picture, which was premiered on July 28th. This was also the first full-length feature to immobilise the camera and the actors as microphones had to be strategically placed within sets. George in his oral history described the film's static nature:
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.
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 connected to a vacuum tube amplifier called a CTA (condenser transmitter amplifier) contained within a heavy, wooden box. This emitted a 'boing' sound if there was any movement or if it was touched. George again:
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.
a camera booth on the set of The Singing Fool with George Groves standing with arms folded
Cameras were also static as being very noisy they had to be contained within a large soundproofed housing that the cameraman and his assistant sat in. This made them virtually immobile. "You couldn’t push a house around the stage", said George. Stanley Watkins, though, in his memoirs claimed that the cameras could "easily" be moved. However, he did concede that "eight or nine strong men" were required! Pictured right is a camera booth on the set of The Singing Fool with George Groves standing with arms folded. The cameraman shot through double plate glass windows to capture the action. Other problems were caused by the noisy and smokey arc lamps that were used on the early sound films, including The Jazz Singer. However, by the time of Lights of New York, the film studios were able to employ incandescent lighting, which had been developed by the General Electric Company at the request of Frank Murphy, head of the electrical department at Warner Bros.

Poster for The Singing Fool (1928)
Despite the technical limitations and corny dialogue, Lights of New York was a huge success and took $2 million in box office receipts. George then recorded another Jolson production, the 1928 blockbuster The Singing Fool, which like The Jazz Singer was a part-talkie musical drama.

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.

Fanny Brice in My Man recorded by George Groves - 1928
George Groves recording Fanny Brice in the musical 'My Man' using a stage mixer (1928)

Still of Al Jolson and George Groves in Say It With Songs
By now Al Jolson was being billed as the 'world's greatest entertainer' and in 1929 Warners released Say It With Songs, another sentimental musical drama although Jolson was not in his trademark 'black-face' make-up. This was his third feature film and it was his first full length, all-talkie. Jolson played a former boxer who was now a successful radio singer but who ends up in prison on a manslaughter charge.

For a publicity still (aka 'gag photo') Al Jolson got members of the production crew for Say it With Songs to dress up in convicts' uniforms. George is pictured standing directly behind the conducting Jolson (see picture left). However the film did not fare all that well at the box office. This is blamed on a number of factors: 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.

say it with songs (1929) poster
Also in 1929 George recorded The Desert Song, a musical operetta based on Oscar Hammerstein II's play which was a huge hit, especially in the UK. When George was seconded to Teddington Studios in1931, British newspapers preferred to comment on his sound work for The Desert Song rather than The Jazz Singer. One paper ran the headline 'Recorded The Desert Song'.

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 on the set of Mammy
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.

Warners disc dubbing equipment 1930
Although editing of the picture was a simple cut of the film, editing of the soundtrack became, as George put it, "a terribly, terribly complicated job". As described on our Don Juan page, the first attempt at dubbing from disc to disc had been crudely attempted in 1927 on the score of Old San Francisco using just two or three records.

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 (right) 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

George Groves in a portable mixer booth with composer Sigmund Romberg. Note the orchestra
in the background preparing to play a musical number for Viennese Nights.
George Groves as stage mixer on the set of Viennese Nights (1930)

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 this technique the music was recorded in advance of filming and then was played back at low volume for the vocalists to sing or mime along to.

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 Béla Lugosi) the stage production mixer using headphones. In the early sound films all sound recording were done in a mixing booth with loudspeakers as George explained:

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.
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 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.
Poster for Song of the Flame 1929
In 1930 Warners' Sound Department received their first Oscar nomination for George’s work on the musical operetta Song of the Flame which was another Alan Crosland film and there would be many more to come! Over thirty more films that George Groves worked on, in fact, would be nominated for academy awards.

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.

Viatphone - Marvel of this marvelous age
The early sound films suffered from static, stilted acting caused by immobile cameras and microphones that had to be tied down with ropes. Now the rapid changes in technology were improving production practice and starting to give actors freedom of movement.

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!

George Groves Oral History