|
Vitaphone Varieties was a series title (represented by a pennant logo on screen) for all of Warner Brothers' earliest short film “talkies” of the 1920s, initially done with the Vitaphone disc process before a switch to the sound-on-film format early in the 1930s. These were the first major film studio-backed sound films, initially showcased with the 1926 synchronized scored features ''Don Juan'' and ''The Better 'Ole''. Although independent producers like Lee de Forest’s Phonofilm were successfully making sound film shorts as far back as 1922, they were very limited in their distribution and their audio was generally not as loud and clear in theaters as Vitaphone's. The success of the early Vitaphone shorts, initially filmed only in New York, helped launch the sound revolution in Hollywood. == Overview == Featured were many of the great vaudeville and musical performers of the 1920s. Classical musicians who dominated the early days of recorded sound were given their film debuts, along with the many future stars of radio’s “golden age”: Fred Allen, Jack Benny, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Edgar Bergen, just to name a few. Several top stars at Warner Bros. and other studios like Joe E. Brown, Joan Blondell, William Demarest, Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy also first appeared on screen in ten-minute dramatic and comedy sketches, as did a few silent stars making the transition like Blanche Sweet. Al Jolson filmed ''A Plantation Act'' in August 1926, a full year before ''The Jazz Singer''. When Warner Brothers decided to promote the feature as Jolson’s talkie debut, the earlier short was removed from circulation. Initially thought lost, it was restored, in part by the Vitaphone Project’s efforts, for a laser disc set in the 1990s and later released on DVD with the feature.〔Liebman, Roy. ''Vitaphone Films – A Catalogue of the Features and Shorts''. 2003. McFarland & Company, p. 13〕 At the time, there was much fear that these little films (and the sound features that followed) would kill vaudeville, a fear that was justified for many individual performers. While there was always a chance that a stage performer could become a household name by appearing in these, his or her act could no longer be repeated on stage, town after town, once one filmed performance appeared in theaters across the country. A few comedy acts for Vitaphone even made light of this fact, particularly Georgie Price’s still humorous today 1929 title, ''Don't Get Nervous''. Although the term “Vitaphone Variety” was still used with some Warner film shorts running under one reel (or 10 minutes) well into the 1950s, the trade periodicals marketed them under different logos after the 1931-32 season: Pepper Pots and Vitaphone ''Novelties'' (after 1936), while lengthier productions (running two reels or 20 minutes) morphed into the Broadway Brevities. By this time, the primary producer in charge was Samuel Sax,〔Maltin, Leonard. ''The Great Movie Shorts''. 1972. Bonanza Books, p. 22〕〔Koszarski, Richard. ''Hollywood On the Hudson: Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff''. 2008. Rutgers University Press, p. 157〕 who oversaw the majority of the New York filmed productions. Later titles completed in California in the forties and fifties sometimes recycled the “Vitaphone Variety” logo, but were usually marketed in the trade periodicals as either “Hollywood Novelties” or “Warner Novelties” and were mostly documentary rather than musical or comedy acts. Among this later group, two 1945-46 titles, ''Story of a Dog'' and ''Smart as a Fox'', were nominees for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in the one-reel category. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Vitaphone Varieties」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|