“Talkie” Pictures

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 72, 18 December 1928, Page 55 (Supplement)

“Talkie” Pictures

ENTIRELY NEW SCREEN TECHNIC NEEDED

(Comments by Carl Laemmle, President of Universal Pictures Corporation.)

“Talking pictures will be permanently successful only when an entirely new technique is utilised in their production,” says Carl Laemmle, in disclosing the results of eight months’ intensive work, investigation and study of sound synchronisation. This investigation has been going on at Universal City, and in the New York laboratories of the company ever since it made its agreement with the Electrical Research Products, Inc., eight months ago.

In these eight months, plans involving the expenditure of over a million dollars at Universal City and 256,000 dollars in the laboratories and studio at Bort Lee have been drawn, and the materials required have been ordered, and insofar as Universal City is concerned, are already being installed. “There is a novelty, it is true, about hearing the human voice on the screen, which is a distinctly box-office draw at this moment,” continued Mr. Laemmle, “but as soon as the novelty of this phenomenon has worn 'off, and audiences have become accustomed to hearing the characters talk, they will no longer overlook the crudities of the technique of what is commonly called the talking picture of to-day. Unless a new technique is devised, a new technique of directing, of acting, and of cutting and titling, we will be right back where we were before, except that audiences will be yearning for the good old days when the moving picture was the silent drama, and they were glad of it. “In the development of our sound activities at Universal City, and at New York, we have been proceeding cautiously, with a view to making our sound pictures as technically new and advanced as a new art deserves to be. Bor, to my mind, talking pictures present an entirely new sitaution. Moving pictures did not become an art until they entirely divorced themselves from the stage method of telling a story. They. developed their own’ method of story telling. Now, with the new di-

mension, as it were, our organisation is struggling, as probably every other one is, to fit it in artistically, effectively and in a manner which will be purely moving picture and not theatric. “Our plans for synchronisation include ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin,’ 'The Man Who Laughs,’ ‘The Last Warning,’ ‘The Girl on the Barge,’ and “Give and Take.’ But more elaborate technique will enter into such pictures as ‘The Cohens and Kellys in Atlantic City,’ with George Sidney and Vera Gurdon: Reginald Denny in ‘Red Hot Speed,’ an automobile story; ‘Man. Woman and Wife,’ with Pauline Starke. Norman Kerry, Kenneth Harlan and Marian Nixon; ‘Lonesome,’ the Paul Bejos special. Others will be added to the list of this year's pictures as they go into production, and we determine what treatment is best to use with them.”