Huh? What? What did he say?

What? I can't hear you! Oh wait, there we go. In the early 1900's, films started coming out with a soundtrack! Not the techno music or romantic classical during a kissing scene that we see today, but with the actors voices. Now, the theatres didn't have surround sound, but instead, a Cinemacrophonograph or Phonorama, a disc-playing sound machine. It was also really hard to synchronize the sound from the disc to the mouths on the film screen. The volume on the sound machine was also hard to make loud enough to hear, but the people kept coming. The new technology was drawing people in, even though it wasn't perfect. In 1913, Edison made the problem a little less harsh, and brought out the Kinetophone, successfully linking the sound and picture to bring the accuracy up. In march 1924, the technology of talking pictures is perfected by Dr. Lee De Forest, and the cinematic industry as a means of commercial entertainment is born. Guess who comes into play now? Warner Bros. studios. In 1926, they used sound discs to make the first feature length film, a 3 hour long production of Don Juan. It had sound effects and music, but no acting voices... in other words, it was meant to be a silent film when filmed, but was changed around by the studio. Paramount and MGM, Universal and the fading First National—and Cecil B. DeMille's small but prestigious Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC)all agreed to use the same provider for sound conversion in 1927, therefore solidifying the sound-on-film idea. The sound disks are done.

Europe isn't far behind, with Alfred Hitchcock's first directed film in 1929, Blackmail. Austria, Poland, Japan and China follow in the next twenty years, and the movie industry has officially caught on in a worldwide epidemic. Yay to the guys who made all this possible! next up: color films!