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56 CINEMONTAGE / Q2 2019 then-SMPE president L.A. Jones, which he captions as "The motion picture organism." Whether to accept the conclusion that SMPE members believed that film was a "living medium" is best left to the reader. In contrast to the specialized content from SMPE, Larkin also utilizes the period's popular fanzines. These references are most effective in revealing how synchronous sound changed the public's relationship to movies — especially the often-discussed question of which stars would suffer ruined careers when audiences heard their voices. Here, Hollywood's publicity machine is shown reproducing the crisis, characterized by a 1929 Photoplay cover featuring a close-up of Norma Talmadge (although Larkin fails to identify the star) gazing hopefully up through long lashes at a microphone. Tag lines on the cover proclaim: "The Microphone – The Terror of the Studios" and "You Can't Get Away with It in Hollywood." In Chapter Four, "Transition to Post-Production: The Rise and Fall of the Monitor Man," the author provides the most entertaining stories; those about the dreaded and feared "Monitor Man" (italics mine). This was the term, common for only a few years, used to refer to a sound recordist/mixer working onstage during production. Post-Production and the Invisible Revolution positions the Monitor Man at the fulcrum of the complicated switch to synchronized sound. Usually lodged high above the stage in a sound booth, this technician was hyperbolized in 1930 by Photoplay: "They call him God around the studio and god indeed he is, since he controls the destinies of the famous ones of filmdom... He is the Jove of Hollywood, the Wotan of the screen world. He sits high above the stars and looks down on them." The Monitor Man was in effect also the sound editor, particularly within the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system. What sound editor today would not wish to be thought of as cinema's Wotan, a god of pre-Christian Germanic tribes? Discs and other very early sound recording devices did not lend themselves to post-production editing, so recording and mixing took place using a variety of techniques. Larkin quotes Carroll Dunning (vice president of the Prizma Color Process Company, although not identified by Larkin as a key player in early color and process photography) from an SMPE publication in 1929 describing how multiple sound sources were recorded simultaneously while cameras rolled for a nautical scene: "The sound of the side-wash of the water was picked up by hanging a microphone over a water-filled box through which a workman swished a wooden paddle. A second mike [sic] picked up the dialogue and song while a third recorded the orchestral accompaniment of a Hawaiian orchestra, supposedly midships of our nailed- to-the floor yacht." All of this occurred at the same time on different parts of the same stage. Other accounts in this chapter are similarly intriguing. Such tidbits of Hollywood history are fascinating and worth gathering in a book — and Larkin recounts them well. He goes on to discuss topics like the increased need for continuity in filming and post- production practices as these became codified. Still, the lovely examples, such as a photograph positioned near the book's end of an attractive female caressing a 1928 Moviola, fail to support Larkin's thesis, rephrased repeatedly, that true authorship of a film is found in post-production. Better to present the many facts and fascinating stories imbedded in Post-Production and the Invisible Revolution as a straightforward history, unburdened by an overlay of academic theory. f