Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/600849
68 CINEMONTAGE / FALL 2015 CinemaScope lens, which helped capture her voluptuous widescreen glamour in How to Marry a Millionaire. Summarizing the heated debates about the merits of various processes, Gitt also delivers intricate stories about the sometimes-startling business of Hollywood — like the remarkable tale of how William Fox was driven out of business. Producer Fox, in addition to being largely responsible for ending Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company stranglehold on America's early movie business, was key in making sound films commercially viable. In 1925, a year before other studios showed a commercial interest in sound, Fox acquired 90 percent of western hemisphere rights to the German Tri-Ergon patents, which included important flywheel patents for talking pictures. He also bought rights to Theodore Case's Movietone sound system in 1926. Movietone sprang from the Phonofilm research of Case, Lee DeForest and Earl I. Sponable, and is a name now most associated with Fox Movietone newsreels. Fox also purchased the patents of Freeman Harrison Owens (who was previously sued by DeForest for patent infringement). The first Hollywood picture using sound on film technology was Fox Film Corporation's 1927 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans with a synchronized musical score and sound effects. Those who actually made the films were less affected by competing sound systems and patent wars; they generally worked with whatever equipment the studio supplied. In a 1928 photograph of the 13-member Hollywood Vitaphone sound crew — which was creating sound sequences for Warner Bros. features and making 10-minute sound shorts documenting performances of singers, jazz bands, comedians, etc. — every man wears a tie, and only two are without suit or sport coats. The "Vitaphone Shorts" segued into dramatic shorts, one of which, Night Hawks (1928) grew to seven reels. Retitled Lights of New York, it became the first all-talking Vitaphone feature. The editor of Lights of New York, Jack Killifor, who continued working until his death in 1956, received credit on the main title card. One of A Century of Sound's treats is the visual and aural presentation of different variable density and variable area optical, and later, magnetic tracks. There were many types of tracks in the variable area optical category alone (unilateral, bilateral, dual bilateral, etc.), which are shown singly, side-by-side and on the sides of picture film clips. The merits and drawbacks of each, as well as the ways those drawbacks were minimized by further inventions — such as modifications to the Western Electric light valve — are explained. For the makers of this project, there were challenges not only in restoration of the original films, but in finding a way for the viewer to see and hear actors while simultaneously looking at the soundtracks. "We printed the clips in a manner that departs from the normal way optical tracks are printed," Gitt explained. "Normally, optical sound is printed 20 frames before the picture to compensate for the fact that picture goes through the projector gate intermittently, but sound is picked up continuously. An image of the sound projected on screen along with the picture would then be out of sync with the actors." Warner Bros.' Rebel Without a Cause (1955) was a CinemaScope production released in Hollywood producer Hal Roach, right, watches technicians install sound amplifiers and Vitaphone turntables in the projection room of his studio, circa 1928.