The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930
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The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930 Details
Amazon.com Review Nowadays the "talkie" seems, like some other technological breakthroughs, to have obliterated its less-advanced predecessor, the silent movie, in one fell swoop. The reality, of course, is more complex. As Scott Eyman writes in his prologue to The Speed of Sound, "To examine this period of unparalleled industrial change, it is necessary to reverse the perspective, to give a fair, detailed idea of what silents were like to the people who made and watched them, and how talkies permanently changed the creative and personal equations." Eyman's eye-opening book fulfills this mission. He focuses on just five years--1926 through 1930--but tells the story on many levels. We learn about the technology, the details of actors' and technicians' lives, the elaborate business machinations associated with the rise of sound, and the resulting transformation of not just the movies but Hollywood itself. The Speed of Sound fills a gap in any film buff's library. Read more From Library Journal The transition from silent film to sound has been covered in many histories of Hollywood but nowhere so thoroughly and delightfully as here. The author of such biographies as Mary Pickford: America's Sweetheart (LJ 2/1/90), Eyman combines a historian's zeal for detail and context with a storyteller's talent for the perfect illustrative anecdote. The author deftly juggles a number of stories, including film-by-film accounts of key transition directors King Vidor and F.W. Murnau. He also manages to describe the technical aspects of his story without bogging down in the kind of jargon that would put a lay reader to sleep. A remarkable book that belongs in every film history collection.?Thomas Wiener, "Satellite DIRECT"Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Reviews
This title is an excellent look at an important transitional era in Hollywood history. It's a very detailed overview of what were perhaps the most critical years in the development of sound films. It covers the early experiments of Edison and other pioneers of the earliest days of movies, moves on to the adversarial joint efforts of Case and DeForest, and culminates in the battles bewteen Vitaphone and Movietone.This makes an excellent companion piece to A SONG IN THE DARK by Richard Barrios (detailing the birth of the musical film during basically the same time period). This book is very highly recommended. I've recently become more interested in this period of film history, and efforts like this really provide a tresure trove of information. The changeover to sound hasn't been very well-documented in the past, so a book like THE SPEED OF SOUND is greatly appreciated.