The Early Sound Short.pdf

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Introduction:

Beyond Vitaphone:

The Early Sound Short

Rob King

One thing about shorts: When they’re good,

like the little girl in the book, they’re very good,

but when they’re bad – whooey.

“Thoughts on Shorts”, Exhibitors Herald-World

(22 February 1930): 27.

necessary “buffer” to the feature presentation, but

also in ensuring the diversity of appeals necessary

to sustain a mass audience. Travelogues, cartoons,

slapstick, and sing-alongs all constituted just a frac-

tion of the many and varied genres of short subjects

during this period, to say nothing of the more outré

examples featuring, for example, talking dogs

(MGM’s “Dogville” comedies, 1929–1931), golf in-

struction (Vitaphone’s “How I Play Golf, by Bobby

Jones” shorts, 1931–1932), and glee club recitals

(Educational’s “Spirit of the Campus” series,

1932–1933), among many others. So even if the

feature was disappointing, audiences might still have

found something to enjoy in, say, the spectacle of

all-dog casts performing genre burlesques, as in The

Dogway Melody (1931).

Still, none of this quite gets us to the specific

historicity of the short subject qua short subject; that

is, the changing parameters – industrial, economic,

textual, cultural – that shaped short-format filmmak-

ing during this period. Conventional film histories still

fail to treat early sound shorts as much more than

experimental steps on a teleological path toward

feature-length talkies. Meanwhile, the “balanced pro-

gram” framework only explains the continued pres-

ence of shorts on exhibition schedules; it does not,

in itself, secure any further analysis beyond the obvi-

ous fact of the short subject’s heterogeneity. (Which

is why, no doubt, most film history textbooks are

content simply to summarize the various genres of

short-subject production during this period.) In the

spirit of provocation, then, let me begin this special

issue of Film History dedicated to the early sound

short with a bolder gambit: namely, that innovations

and transformations within the short subject were

among the crucial capstones of the classic studio

he perception of the short subject’s low stand-

ing within the hierarchy of American commercial

film production almost goes without saying, but

perhaps nowhere more so than in the years

following sound’s advent. The silent era could at least

boast a number of enduring achievements within the

short-subject realm: the one- and two-reel master-

pieces of the great slapstick artists; the first “moving

picture newspapers”, or newsreels; action-packed

serials starring Pearl White and Ruth Roland – all of

which continued to be produced long after the feature

film’s emergence as the industry’s chief commodity.

But when the sound-era equivalent would seem to

be, say, the violent knockabout of Columbia’s long-

running Three Stooges shorts (1934–1959) or Flash

Gordon’s serialized adventures on the planet Mongo

(1936) – well, for some, “whooey” might seem the

appropriate response.

Not, of course, that early sound-era shorts

have been entirely overlooked in the existing schol-

arship. Warner Bros.’ pioneering sound-on-disc Vita-

phone shorts loom large in conventional histories of

the coming of sound, as do Walt Disney’s early

experiments with sound-image relations in cartoons

like Steamboat Willie (1928). There is also, in the

existing scholarship, a familiar defense of the short

subject during this period, one that defers to their

important role within the “balanced program” con-

cept of the era’s exhibition practices. Short subjects,

this line of argument goes, had value not only as a

248 FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 3 (2011)

Rob King

system’s consolidation at the end of the 1920s; that,

in fact, Hollywood’s “grand design” – as a set of

business practices organized around the production

and distribution of classical sound film, both as tex-

tual form and as viewing experience – is inconceiv-

able outside of developments in the short-subject

field. 1 At least three assertions can be made under

this rubric, as follows:

First, the short subject vouchsafed the stand-

ardization of film exhibition and spectatorship at the

beginning of the sound era . A major component of

the “evening’s entertainment” ideal of 1920s theater

programming had been the inclusion of live pro-

logues and presentation acts; yet sound short sub-

jects would make the practice largely obsolete. The

very raison d’être of Warner Bros.’ pioneering Vita-

phone shorts – which initially emphasized noted

vaudeville performers and other “canned” stage acts

– had been to provide smaller exhibitors with a cost-

cutting substitute for live performances. Soon, indus-

try insiders and commentators were lending their

voices to the death-knell chorus. As slapstick pro-

ducer Jack White bluntly asserted in 1929: “Short

dialogue comedies will kill the presentation racket.

… [T]he thing is obvious, it speaks for itself”. 2 In a

similar spirit, Martin J. Quigley, editor of the Exhibitors

Herald-World , declared the same year: “The short

subject, with dialogue and music, … makes possible

the return to an all-film policy which would not other-

wise be possible. Pictures for picture houses is the

best policy for the industry at large.” 3

One may, of course, wonder who Quigley had

in mind by the phrase “industry at large”. For the truth

was that these developments ultimately served the

interests of producers far more than exhibitors: thea-

ter owners had in many cases embraced live pres-

entations, at least initially, as a way to assert their

autonomy by differentiating their shows from com-

peting theaters, while the major studios had long

discouraged the practice because they diverted po-

tential film rental revenue to live performers. Here,

then, was a way in which the substitution of sound

shorts for live acts could consolidate power in the

producers’ hands.

But it was also a way of standardizing specta-

torship and the viewing situation, as the first two

essays in this issue demonstrate. Phil Wagner’s

opening paper richly evokes the frequently bizarre

confections of live entertainments offered in pro-

logues in the years before the sound short, examin-

ing the stage presentations produced by Fanchon

and Marco, Inc., for the West Coast Theatre circuit.

The notion of spectatorial “distraction” so famously

evoked by Siegfried Kracauer in his description of

Berlin movie palaces of the 1920s hardly does justice

to the prologues here described, the outlandish

modernity of which provoked complaints from pro-

ducers whose feature films were overshadowed. 4 As

such, moreover, Wagner’s essay provides an ideal

starting point for assessing just how drastically

moviegoing would change in subsequent years, as

distraction on this scale became mostly a thing of the

past – a theme that Nicholas Sammond’s essay next

takes up by examining the spatial relations of sound-

era exhibition. With the disappearance of live acts,

Sammond suggests, the three-dimensional space of

the theater was now fully subordinated to the two-di-

mensional space of the film screen; equally, the local

and neighborhood orientation of silent-era exhibition,

when theater owners had drawn upon regional net-

works of live entertainers, was now increasingly con-

strained in the face of Hollywood’s more uniform

entertainment imaginary. Yet uniformity was here in-

separable from questions of racial politics; for, as

Sammond also argues, animated sound shorts

helped enforce a standardized regime of stereotyp-

ing that displaced the more variable articulation of

racial meanings afforded in an earlier era of live

presentations.

Second, the short subject functioned as a labo-

ratory for working through the textual practices and

cultural meanings of the sound film. In a sense, this

is the most obvious point. The innovations of Lee de

Forest’s Phonofilm technology (debuting in 1923),

Warners’ Vitaphone (in 1926), and the Fox-Case

Movietone system (1927) – all these technologies

were first experimented with and brought before the

public in short-subject novelties. The lower-risk envi-

ronment of short-subject production might thus

rightly be viewed as a necessary “incubation stage”

– a testing ground for judging audience receptivity

and determining textual and technological standards

– prior to sound’s incorporation into full-length fea-

tures.

Still, as Charles Wolfe argued some twenty

years ago, it would be a mistake to consider the

Vitaphone or Movietone shorts merely as spring-

boards for subsequent technological development,

experimental steps in a linear history whose inevita-

ble destination was the classical feature film. Dia-

logue features, Wolfe wrote then, “do not ‘use up’ the

experimental work of the shorts but have an ongoing

Introduction: Beyond Vitaphone: The Early Sound Short

FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 3 (2011) 249

relation to them” – a relation, furthermore, that em-

braced both continuity and difference. 5 One area of

difference, for example, was in terms of sound’s

implications for classical illusionism. For, as Kather-

ine Spring argues in her essay here, sound added at

least two new illusionist wrinkles to American cin-

ema’s textual processes: that of embodiment (the

illusion that the body was the source of the voice) and

that of simultaneity (that the filming of the image and

the voice recording occurred concomitantly). Yet, as

Spring also shows, the conditions of feature-film

production meant that illusionist practices estab-

lished for shorts could not always be smoothly trans-

ferred to features – here examined through the

“scandal” of Richard Barthelmess’s lip-synching in

the feature Weary River (1929). A similar sensibility

informs Wolfe’s contribution to this issue, in which he

revisits and extends his earlier work on Vitaphone

vaudeville from a perspective attuned to the formal

conventions of dialogue humor. What Wolfe finds in

the “cross-talk” comedy shorts of George Burns and

Gracie Allen (1929–1933) is thus not classicism, nor

merely “canned” vaudeville, but rather a new, inter-

medial style of film comedy in which stage traditions

of verbal byplay were matched with a disorienting

cinematic textuality.

Third, the film industry’s structure as a mature

oligopoly, beginning in the early sound era, was se-

cured in part through the majors’ involvement in short-

subject production . The move by the major studios

into the production of in-house short subjects during

the mid-1920s – headed by Paramount and Loew’s-

MGM – represented a fundamental step in their quest

to dominate the film industry. Being able to provide

a “full service” – that is, short subjects as well as

features – meant that the majors could now make

inroads onto the independent-dominated market for

shorts and thereby cement the entire industry under

their control. It also meant that the majors could more

easily extend the practice of block-booking to short

subjects, requiring exhibitors to book packages of

their shorts as a condition of accepting features, a

practice known as “full-line forcing”. The major stu-

dios, in sum, were now firmly in the business of

producing exhibition programs , not simply feature

films, and they dictated to a greater extent than ever

before the evening’s entertainment offered at their

contracted theaters.

Such business tactics were controversial, of

course, not least because they stripped exhibitors of

any last vestige of genuine autonomy in catering to

their publics. The Federal Trade Commission cited

the practice of full-line forcing in its initial 1928 litiga-

tion against the majors. Although the practice was

ultimately found legal by the US circuit court of ap-

peals in April 1932, exhibitor protests gathered re-

newed strength following Franklin Delano

Roosevelt’s election victory later that year. 6 Indeed,

in a telling indication of exhibitor discontent, the issue

of full-line forcing represented one of the few areas

of compromise grudgingly made by the industry’s

moguls under the National Industrial Recovery Act of

1933, which required industries to draw up codes of

fair competition. 7

Nor was it only exhibitors who struggled under

this system. If anything, the situation for independent

producers and distributors of shorts was even more

fraught, forcing them either to seek distribution deals

through the majors or risk bankruptcy. These dilem-

mas form the backdrop for my own essay here on

Educational Pictures, a company that, despite its

name, had been the leading independent distributor

of short-format slapstick comedy of the late silent

era. Increasingly restrictive economic conditions in

the early 1930s, I argue, forced Educational to adapt

its comedy output to déclassé markets, such as the

small-town and rural circuits marginalized within the

majors’ oligopoly – a process with lasting implica-

tions for slapstick’s place within the era’s taste hier-

archies. Also stressing the relation between short

subjects and rural/small-town audiences is Ross

Melnick’s paper on “Major” Edward Bowes’ “Ama-

teur Hour” series, a multimedia franchise in the 1930s

that included radio shows, touring performances,

and filmed short subjects – and a precursor for

today’s “vote-for-your-favorite” television reality pro-

grams like American Idol . Within this media empire,

Melnick suggests, Bowes’ filmed shorts played an

important role in bringing New Deal-era fantasies of

success and mobility to regions not yet covered by

his touring shows and radio broadcasts; yet, in so

doing, the films also sacrificed the aura of “liveness”

– and the real-time ability of listeners to phone in and

vote – that had distinguished his radio broadcasts,

thus proving disappointments to the small-town pub-

lics to which they were largely addressed.

It will already be clear from these prefatory

comments that the title of this special issue, “Beyond

Vitaphone”, is not to be taken too literally; there is,

after all, nothing to be gained from dogmatically

ignoring Warners’ sound shorts as a topic of re-

search. Rather, “Beyond Vitaphone” stands as a

250 FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 3 (2011)

Rob King

metaphor for reassessing the dominant historiog-

raphic frameworks that have reduced the era’s

shorts to the servant’s role in introducing sound

technology. The contributors to this issue all share a

commitment to challenging those frameworks; they

each examine the complex heterogeneity of the early

sound short within historically specific contexts and,

in so doing, draw upon untapped archives and pri-

mary sources. That the topics of their papers are,

furthermore, so entirely new testifies to the impor-

tance of continued research outside of Hollywood’s

own feature-oriented canons of cultural value during

this transformative period in the production and re-

ception of the classical American cinema.

Rob King

University of Toronto

Acknowledgements: My thanks to all the contributors,

and to Richard Koszarski for his guidance, generosity,

and patience in the preparation of this special issue.

Notes

The term “grand design” is Tino Balio’s, from his

Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business

Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1995).

Charles Wolfe, “Vitaphone Shorts and The Jazz

Singer ”, Wide Angle 12.3 (July 1990): 61.

“Tying-In Shorts with Features Is Lawful, Legal Opin-

ion Holds”, Motion Picture Herald (16 April 1932): 20.

Whereas previously exhibitors had often been forced

to accept many more major-studio short subjects

than they could possibly play in a single season – a

strategy designed to freeze out independently pro-

duced shorts – the Motion Picture Code conceded

a more equitable arrangement: distributors could

now force shorts only in proportion to the number of

rented features. For the relevant portion of the Motion

Picture Code, see “Complete Text of the Code”,

Motion Picture Herald (2 December 1933): 32.

“Audien Shorts Will Kill Presentations, Declares Jack

White”, Exhibitors Herald-World (27 April 1929): 36.

Martin J. Quigley, editorial, Exhibitors Herald-World

(25 May 1929): 18.

Siegfried Kracauer, “The Cult of Distraction”, in The

Mass Ornament , Thomas Levin (ed. and trans.)

(Cambridge:

Harvard

University

Press,

1995),

323–328.

upcoming

issues/

call for

papers

Film History 23, 4 (2011)

Global Issues

Edited by Richard Koszarski

Film History 24, 2 (2012)

Film As Literature

Edited by Stephen Bottomore

Film History 24, 1 (2012)

Digital Cinema

Edited by John Belton

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