George Groves The Movie Sound Pioneer

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 (pictured above) 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 oral history described how moving into the Opera House meant that the experimental days were finally over: 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. Recording rooms were created out of the theatre’s boxes and its dressing rooms became 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: 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:  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. This would later be adopted as the standard speed for LP records. However, unlike LPs, the needle tracked from the inside to the outside of the disc. The stylus quickly became worn, so had to be replaced after each playback and the discs themselves needed to be discarded after just twenty plays. Note the 1 - 20 boxes on the above picture which were for the projectionist to cross off after the disc was played.

For the recordings at the Manhattan Opera House a new condenser-type microphone was used, which had only recently been developed by the boffins at Bell Labs. The microphone included a CTA – which stands for condenser transmitter amplifier – and which made the device very bulky, weighing around eight pounds. The above photo shows the microphone and CTA suspended from rope on a George Jessel short. 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: 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 – was allocated its own microphone, which was then isolated and George performed a live mix between them. In doing so he became the first film industry music mixer: 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 orchestra section 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 for the American Film Institute: 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, all renowned artistes in their day. Audiences at the plush theatre were accustomed to a live symphony orchestra playing specially composed music as accompaniment to films. However, Don Juan's musical score plus sound effects of clashing swords and chiming bells were now emanating from disc and had been carefully synchronised to match the on-screen action.

The Vitaphone show was rushed to the Pacific Coast by a 'special express car', so the programme could be released simultaneously with the premiere in New York. It was successfully 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: On September 3rd 1926, less than a month after Don Juan's New York 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... In 1973 George Groves commented on Hollywood's lack of foresight: 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: A similar format was adopted for Old San Francisco, which told the story of the 1906 earthquake. The film had been 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 large symphony orchestra was playing. George explained how implementing Crosland's instructions became an early attempt at soundtrack editing: 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 melodrama film called The Jazz Singer. No one could have possibly known that they were going to make history.