The Talkies

The first full-length moving picture with synchronized sound was "The Jazz Singer" starring Al Jolson, released in 1927. In only a few short years, in the early 1930s, talkies were all the rage all over the world.

America embraced talkies! The American entertainment industry embraced talkies. Talkies are what made Hollywood the center of the entertainment industry galaxy. The same can't be said for other countries, though.

In Europe the talkies were treated with cautious suspicion. European film makers and film critics were pretty sure that the addition of sound to movies would take the audience's attention away from the action on the screen and focus that attention on the dialogue being spoken.

Japan really resisted the talkies! It was customary in Japan for live vocal performances to accompany silent movies. India didn't much like the idea of picture and sound integration, either.  

Of course, synchronizing moving picture with sound presented a whole array of technological problems. At first the plan was to record the movie and the sound separately and play them back on two different pieces of equipment. That didn't work out very well. But innovations continued, and eventually it became possible to record the moving picture and the accompanying sound at the same time. But there were still problems.

The problem was that the sound technology now lagged behind the film technology. Microphones were very directional. If the actor was not directly in front of the microphone, the sound was faint or wasn't recorded at all.

Even though the idea of moving pictures with accompanying synchronized sound had been around for several decades, it wasn't until the late 1920s that the two technologies were successfully combined. "The Jazz Singer" was the first — since then, there have been thousands of others, and the technology continues to improve.