Talk:Vitaphone

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

untitled[edit]

I don't think Vitaphone would pass THX muster

In New Zealand in the early 1970s I worked with older (retired) cinema projectionists who had seen or used the Vitaphone system. There were cinemas in existence then that still were using the original Western Electric Universal Base that the Vitaphone system was based on. The machines I saw had the turntables removed, but you could see the mounting brackets where they had been and where the turntable drive had "spudded" into the main projector drive. The rest of the system including all the audio amplifiers and speakers was exactly as they had been when installed in the late 20s early 30s. The main article on this topic concurs exactly with what I saw of these machines and what the old projectionists who had used it told me —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.184.35.131 (talk) 00:37, 5 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]


Don Juan was able to draw huge sums of money at the box office,[1] but was not able to match the expensive budget Warner Bros. put into the film's production.[2] In the wake of the failure of Don Juan, Paramount head Adolph Zukor offered Sam a deal as an executive producer for the company if he brought Vitaphone with him.[3] Sam, not wanting to take any more of Harry's refusal to move forward with using sound in future Warner films, agreed to accept Zukor's offer,[3] but the deal died after Paramount lost money in the wake of Rudolph Valentino's death.[3] Harry eventually agreed to accept Sam's demands,[4] and Sam pushed ahead with a new Vitaphone feature, based on a Broadway play and starring Al Jolson. The Jazz Singer broke box-office records, established Warner Bros. as a major player in Hollywood, and single-handedly launched the talkie revolution.

Who are the "Sam" and "Harry" this paragraph refers to? The article never mentions anyone by those names. Please don't assume readers are on a first-name basis with obscure names from almost a century ago. Yggdriedi (talk) 16:37, 26 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That would be Sam and Harry Warner (2 of the 3 Warner Brothers). It seems like someone has either edited this in from elsewhere or edited away the rest of what was here. JamesBenjamin (talk) 17:57, 3 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Sperling, Millner, and Warner (1998), p. 111.
  2. ^ Sperling, Millner, and Warner (1998), p. 113.
  3. ^ a b c Sperling, Millner, and Warner (1998), p. 114.
  4. ^ Sperling, Millner, and Warner (1998), p. 116.