10 Facts About “The Jazz Singer,” History's First Spoken Movie
1. "The Jazz Singer" was the first spoken film in history to really stir popular imagination and premiered on October 6, 1927 in New York City. The following day would be celebrated the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, on which the film is based.
2. Before “The Jazz Singer”, films like “Don Juan”, 1926, already had images and sounds, but none as engaging as this cinematic milestone, which was nicknamed “first film”. spoken of history ”even though it was not.
3. The movie is 89 minutes long and had the sound recorded separately from the footage, using a technology called Vitaphone, developed by Warner Studios.
4. The Vitaphone system recorded disc sounds and was quite complex, needing to be played in sync with the projection. The technology was used for only 4 years, until it was replaced by a more advanced one.
5. Since it was a transition from silent to spoken cinema, “The Jazz Singer” has long silent sequences interrupted by sporadic songs.
6. At the time, racism was still very evident in the US, and blacks rarely appeared in the movies. For this reason, actor Al Jolson used today's much-criticized blackface makeup technique, in which a white performer darkens his face to impersonate an African descendant.
7. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you haven't heard anything yet”: this was the first sentence in movie history, being voted the 71st best ever by the American Film Institute.
8. The movie cost $ 500, 000 - a big deal by Hollywood standards in 1927. Fortunately, Warner grossed nearly 8 times the box office ($ 3.9 million) and proved the audience was prepared for the news. .
9. At first, Warner wanted teator actor George Jessel, who had previously taken “The Jazz Singer” to the stage, to perform in the feature film, but Jessel wanted to charge a higher fee for appearing with his voice in the movie. . Because of this, he was replaced by Al Jolson.
10. In a sad fatality, one of Warner Brothers' founders, Sam Warner, the leading talk-movie enthusiast and Vitaphone, died on the eve of the film's October 5 release. The other brothers, Harry, Albert and Jack, who also funded the production, missed their debut because of the wake.
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