George Groves The Movie Sound Pioneer

By 1928 George Groves had become settled in Los Angeles and was enjoying the Californian climate.

This was somewhat warmer than he experienced in St Helens and New York and George said that was the reason 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 the microphones had to be strategically placed within sets. George in his oral history described the film's static nature: 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).

This was contained within a heavy, wooden box but emitted a 'boing' sound if there was any movement or if it was touched. George again: 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!

The cameraman shot through double-plate glass windows to capture the action.

Other problems were caused by the noisy and smoky 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.

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. The above photo shows a camera booth on the set of the film with George Groves standing with his arms folded.

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. 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 facing a manslaughter charge.

For a publicity still (aka "gag photo") Al Jolson persuaded members of the production crew for Say it With Songs to dress up in convicts' uniforms. George is pictured above standing directly behind the conducting Jolson. 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 too similar to The Singing Fool and Jolson's on-screen character not being called Al, as they tended to be.

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 in 1931, British newspapers preferred to comment on his sound work for The Desert Song rather than The Jazz Singer. One paper even ran the headline "Recorded The Desert Song". In the above photograph George demonstrates the stage production mixer using headphones to John Miljan and Louise Fazenda who both performed in The Desert Song.

He also worked as scoring mixer and production mixer in 1929 on hit musicals Gold Diggers of Broadway and The Show of Shows.

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 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 vocalists sang on set. 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 1,000 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' – as he described in his oral history: In Mammy in 1930, Al Jolson reverted to his black-face minstrel persona in a film of Irving Berlin songs. The musical drama also contained some Technicolor sequences.

A photograph was taken in which Jolson holds out a Vitaphone disc in front of a smiling George Groves.

Director Michael Curtiz is also in the picture, which was probably taken for George to send back to his family in England.
Another photograph was taken of Jolson with the Mammy production crew, which is displayed above with George Groves arrowed.

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 the 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 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: 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 the early sound films all sound recording was done in a mixing booth with loudspeakers, as shown in the above Viennese Nights photo with composer Sigmund Romberg (note orchestra in background).

However as George explained in his oral history, mixing booths were increasingly being replaced by stage production mixers and headphones: Although sound-on-disc recording was an astonishing innovation, by March 1930 it had been displaced by sound-on-film.

With this technique the soundtrack was 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: 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 and been replaced by camera blimps.

Noisy, smoky, 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.

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. Warners now even had a location sound unit vehicle as shown in the above photograph, with George Groves pictured in the centre holding a tripod.

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!