Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/778398
12 W I N T E R 2 0 1 7 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y Book Review: of history that focuses on moguls L.B. Mayer and Sam Goldwyn rath- er than their bosses, the Schenck brothers and Marcus Loew, operat- ing from corporate headquarters in NYC. Much of this is due to who has written on this topic. Previous stud- ies have been approached from the technology/invention perspective. It has also been very common for cultural theorists, accepting pre- viously published assumptions as foundational, to focus on present- ing whatever their current theory might be. Important histories such as Harry Geduld's 1975 The Birth of the Talkies, Abel and Altman's The Sounds of Early Cinema, and Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson's The Classical Hollywood Cinema, narrowly aimed at inven- tion, public demand, or the impact on better storytelling. In parallel to the absence of aca- demic coverage of sound production in university film curricula, much of the technical and commercial history of sound coming to the movies is rarely taught in-depth or celebrated. There were many attempts to have film sound commercially succeed during the 35 years between 1894 and 1929. The Coming of Sound sets the table for the breakthrough years that followed. Gomery debunks works like Scott Eyman's 1997 The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930; yet another reiteration of The Jazz Singer-as-beginning myth; a myth beloved and almost unassailable within the industry, "… tales of woe spoken by aging silent stars whom wax on about the 'good old days' [of silents]." Eyman's misguided centerpiecing of The Jazz Singer paints the Warner Bros. as upstart underdogs and grossly mischaracter- izes Zukor, Schenck, Fox, and Sarnoff as dumb and caught unaware—when the profoundly opposite was true. These powerful men and their companies brought the Warner Bros. to the grown-ups' table. Douglas Gomery's The Coming of Sound T here is no sin in adoring Kelly & Donen's Singin' in the Rain as the genius-work of enduring entertainment it clearly is, but it has proved to be so emotionally persuasive that it has been broadly misinterpreted as actual history. This, along with the very mistaken notion that The Jazz Singer was the first sound film or even the most commercially suc- cessful early "Talkie," is very deeply ingrained and relentlessly repeated as undisputed truth. In my passion to explore the early history of sound for motion pictures, a few seminal works stand as pillars resisting this anti-factu- al trend. Early on, I came across Douglas Gomery's 1975, 500- page thesis, The Coming of Sound to the American Cinema: A History of the Transformation of an Industry, investi- gating, with comprehensive refer- ences to primary sources, the actual corporate machinations of moving the industry from silents to talkies—effectively in less than five years (from 1926 to 1930). This book, The Coming of Sound (2005), is a refined dis- tillation of the enormous doctoral thesis that preceded it. It is a true record of the coming together of Adolph Zukor, Joseph Schenck, David Sarnoff, the Warner Bros., William Fox, and AT&T to standardize and control the international motion picture industry for decades, setting in place one of the most successfully colluded oligarchies in modern business history. So much has been mythologized and reiterated as factual about the Hollywood transition from silent to sound films that, even with extensive documentary evidence to the con- trary, the culture of "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend" (John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), dominates. Over time, this has skewed the historical facts to fit the "legend," thus masking much of the incredibly premeditated and designed transition of the industry. This mirrors the kind demic coverage of sound production in university film curricula, corporate machinations of moving the industry from silents b y M a r k U l a n o C A S