A Musical Truth: "Singin' in the Rain" as Documentary

Low-res image from Wikipedia.
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fair-use exemption.

Many people regard MGM's 1952 Singin' In the Rain as the best musical ever made. (It's not my favourite, but that's beside the point.) What I like about the movie is the way it manages to tell a fairly accurate story of what it was like to work in Hollywood during the often chaotic transition from silent to sound movie-making.

The history lesson begins at the party hosted by studio head R. F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell) celebrating the premiere of his latest picture, The Royal Rascal (the clips we see are very reminiscent of the 1920s work of Douglas Fairbanks): Simpson shows his guests a demo reel of a "talking picture" system, presented by an unnamed gent played by vaudevillian Julius Tannen.* This sort of demonstration happened a fair amount in the early and mid-'20s—and in fact the first synchronized-sound feature film appeared in 1926, before The Jazz Singer, which is referenced at the end of this scene.

A few scenes later, production of a new picture is abruptly shut down because  the Jazz Singer is a huge hit and Simpson has decided to convert his studio for sound production. This change happens off-screen, which is probably the only way it could have been done.

I'm not sure how you could write a musical number about pleading with New York bankers for the money required to convert not just sound stages but cinemas themselves (mostly owned by studios at this time) to make and show talkies. A little-noted side-effect of the cost of conversion was that Hollywood studios lost their financial independence: they were still trying to pay off these loans when the stock market crashed, several went bankrupt, and they ended up being controlled by New York financial conglomerates. This is something Loew's, Inc. wouldn't want mentioned in an MGM picture. (In fact Loew's had controlled MGM since 1924.)

But watch the scenes immediately after the conversion, then compare with the before scene. See what's happened to the camera? Before sound, the camera was free to move anywhere. After conversion, it was quickly discovered that the sound of the camera's motors and gears was picked up readily by the audio recorder. Until silent motors and gears could be developed and deployed (a process that took a couple of years) the only way to make talkies was to muffle cameras.

The big glass-windowed boxes shown in Singin' in the Rain were the industry's first solution to the audio problem; the result was that the first talking pictures had essentially immobile cameras anytime dialogue was required. The next-stage solution (portrayed in High Risk) was the wrapping of large padded shrouds around the cameras; these were called blimps.

Another point to note when watching the movie: the director (played by a wonderfully frazzled Douglas Fowley) constantly checks with the audio technician in his booth, to ensure that everything sounds satisfactory. At this time the "sound man" was the uncrowned king of Hollywood; few studio executives or directors knew anything at all about sound recording, so the natural instinct was to defer to the expert. (One of the best-known of these early sound experts was Canadian: Montreal-born Douglas Shearer—brother of MGM star Moira.) The difficulties the crew has recording sound in general, and dialogue in particular, are also quite true to the period. By 1929 microphone booms were in use, and microphones themselves were much improved. But early talkies often sound every bit as bad as the parody in Singin' in the Rain.

Hollywood often seems to me to be a little too pleased with itself when it comes to movies about the movies (does anyone watch The Player these days?) but in the case of Singin' in the Rain Hollywood got it just about exactly right.

*Wikipedia claims this is an "homage to the original 1921 DeForest Phonofilm demonstration"; I note though that Tannen's character describes his voice being "on a record." Phonofilm was an optical ("sound on film") technology; what Tannen describes sounds a lot more like the Vitaphone technology develope by MGM rival Warner Bros.