This is the season of Hollywood's unrestrained id: the brainless summer blockbuster, the air-conditioned multiplex, the bottomless popcorn refills, the avalanche of kids emerging blinking into bright sunlight, waiting for their parental pickup. But August is also the anniversary of the movies themselves! It was on August 31, 1897 that Thomas Edison patented his first movie camera, the Kinetograph. In honor of 119 years of cinematic glitz and glamour, we've asked movie buff and Jeopardy! tough Ken Jennings to give us the "reel" truth on all kinds of old-movie misinformation.
The Debunker: Was The Jazz Singer the First Sound Film?
Every time the deafening THX or Dolby Digital logo appears on the screen of my neighborhood theater, I kneel down in my row and say a quick thank-you prayer to the makers of Hollywood's first "talkie," without which none of this would be possible. Thank you, movie gods, for…1928's Lights of New York. Oh, you thought I was talking about The Jazz Singer? Wait a minute, wait a minute—you ain't heard nothing yet.
The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson as Jewish entertainer Jack Robin, was a box office success, one of the biggest hits of 1927. In large part, that was because it starred the popular Jolson, but reviews also noticed that audiences were going gaga for the film's synchronized dialogue sequences, a novelty at the time. "I for one suddenly realized that the end of the silent drama is in sight," Robert Sherwood wrote prophetically in Life.
But! The Jazz Singer was far from the first film to incorporate sound. As far back as the 1890s, film pioneers like Thomas Edison and Leon Gaumont were trying out various systems to synchronize audio playback. Edison, memorably, used a complicated system of pulleys to connect one of his phonographs with one of his film projectors. 1926's Don Juan used the same Vitaphone technology as The Jazz Singer, and did it first—but the soundtrack was just music and effects. Don Juan only had one synchronized spoken-word section, and it was just a pre-movie introduction.
But The Jazz Singer wasn't much different. Watching this "landmark talkie" today, audiences are often surprised that it plays just like a silent film, with title cards and a mostly wall-to-wall instrumental score. The dialogue sequences in the movie add up to just two minutes. It wasn't until the following summer that Warner's crime drama Lights of New York became the first all-talking full-length film. Yes, The Jazz Singer was the first feature-length movie to have synchronized dialogue, but that's pretty hair-splitty, when the most important thing it did was sell a bajillion tickets. Also, Don Juan and Lights of New York don't have blackface.
Quick Quiz: What singer played the title role in the disastrous, Golden Raspberry-winning 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer?
Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.