"The Jazz Singer is incredibly important... What was important was, after decades of attempts to make talking pictures successful, every one of which were miserable failures, from Edison's cylinders, going on to other kinds of other attempts, what happened with this film was a wedding of technology and, in this case, the World's Greatest Entertainer to make an event that from then on, there was no turning back and remaining with silents."


Yowza, Yowza, Yowza. This is Brian Marcus Decker, for the Jolson and Friends Blog located on the web at www.JolsonBlog.com  which is the first tech-nostalgic blog dedicated to the musical influences of Al Jolson and Friends.

Well folks, it's now time to start anew with another insightful journey down memory lane. Today I am fortunate enough to be in the home of Ron Hutchinson, one of the co-founders of the Vitaphone Project. Due to their extensive efforts working with private collectors, university film archives, the Library of Congress, Warner Bros. and Turner Entertainment they have successfully preserved hundreds of early Vitaphone and Vitaphone Variety film performances. Included in this illustrious Vitaphone catalog include performances by the legendary Al Jolson, Burns & Allen, Baby Rose Marie, Ruth Etting, Weber & Fields, The Seven Little Foys, Georgie Price, George Jessel, Joe E. Brown, Sissle & Blake, Jack Benny, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, William Demarest, Joe Frisco, Jack Norworth, Molly Picon, Rudy Vallee and many, many more.

We will also have an opportunity to discuss with Ron Hutchinson of the Vitaphone Project the overall involvement with the recent Commemorative 80th Anniversary Edition of the legendary film, THE JAZZ SINGER: This three-disc deluxe DVD EDITION is nothing short of fantastic. For Jolson fans and anyone interested in early 20th century performing arts, music, film and nostalgia, this is a must buy. This incredible three-disc collection includes more than several hours of digital transferred and immaculately refurbished soundtracks from the original Vitaphone Sound on Disc recordings. This special collection also includes behind the scene Jazz Singer photo cards, souvenir programs that include reviews, news articles, a Vitaphone brochure, replicas of postcards and more.

Commemorative 80th Anniversary Edition of the legendary film, THE JAZZ SINGER

Click here to shop for this three-disc DVD from Amazon

Free Jolson and Friends Podcasts

You can listen to the entire series of interviews including my current eight-part interview with Ron Hutchinson of the Vitaphone Project, Rich Conaty of the Big Broadcast radio show, Asa the Magnificent Minstrel, the Vaudeville series with author Trav S.D. and Sybil Jason.

To listen to this free Jolson and Friends Blog Podcast published audio files,

just click on the listen to podcast icon on bottom of this post

International Al Jolson Society 2008 Jolson Festival in Orlando

Thursday, May 22, 2008 through Sunday, May 25, 2008 at the Holiday Inn Select

This exciting annual Jolson event will take place on Friday, May 22nd through Sunday, May 25th in Orlando, Florida. Featured performers include Richard Halpern (Mr. Tin Pan Alley), Tony Babino (The heart of Jolson), William Campbell (Scotland's Own Jolson) and a special tribute to the late Rudy Wissler
(The voice of the young Asa in The Jolson Story).

The admission price for this complete weekend package is $175 per person, including dinners and shows, access to the memorabilia rooms, showings of Jolson films, Jolson material for sale, auction, and raffle, and the chance to mingle with others who are helping perpetuate and proclaim the fame of the World's Greatest Entertainer: Al Jolson.
.
For more information on this great event, go to www.Jolson.org . 

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Al Jolson Limited Edition T-shirt "The Singing Fool": This is a vintage color reproduction of a 1928 theatrical program.

Eddie Cantor Limited Edition T-shirt "Tell it to the Judge": This is a vintage two-color reproduction of 1930s board game.

Moon Rocket Ride Limited Edition Carnival T-shirt: This is a vintage color reproduction of a hand painted tin carnival sign.

Jolie Black & White Limited Edition T-shirt: This is a vintage B/W illustration of Jolie from the 1920s.

History of Time Baseball Limited Edition T-shirt: This is real deal for real baseball fans, an authentic turn of the century History of Baseball T-shirt featuring Boston, New York, Chicago and Detroit.

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White or Natural T-Shirt: $17.00 with FREE U.S Shipping and Matching Gift Card (Regular price $20.00)

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Pack of 5 gift cards: with envelopes is now $8.50 with FREE U.S Shipping (Regular price $10.00)

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For additional information, special orders, discounted shipping outside the U.S., payments through Pay Pal, please contact: brian@affinitee.com.

To order please specify style (Jolson, Cantor, Moon, Jolie, Houdini King of Cards, World's Greatest Mystery Man, History of Old Time Baseball, Asbury Park Clown, Sherlock Double Profile, Sherlock Improbable, Sudoku), quantity, size, t-shirt color (white/natural or black), type (t-shirts or matching gift cards) and your shipping address. Please send checks to:

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Brian Marcus Decker
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West Orange, NJ 07052

Jolson Blog Goes to the Talkies: Vitaphone Interview Part I

"The Jazz Singer premiered at Warner's Strand in New York City on October (23), 1927, a date enshrined in film history, with all the dread decisiveness of Waterloo, Sarajevo, and Pearl Harbor. On this date the death knell of the silent movies was sounded, and the talkies were born. It had died one night in a theater when people were mesmerized by a Mammy singer. According to film historians, however, it was not Jolson the singer who shook the medium to its foundations, but Jolson the talker." - Andrew Sarris (Great quote, wrong date)



Brian Marcus Decker: Yowza, Yowza, Yowza. This is Brian Marcus Decker, for the Jolson and Friends Blog located on the web at www.JolsonBlog.com , which is the first tech-nostalgic blog dedicated to the musical influences of Al Jolson and Friends.

Well folks, it's now time to start anew with another insightful interview. Today I am fortunate enough to be in the home of Ron Hutchinson, one of the co-founders of the Vitaphone Project. They have discovered and helped preserve a vast number of early Vitaphone and Vitaphone Variety film performances, due to their extensive efforts working with private collectors, university film archives, the Library of Congress, Warner Bros. and Turner Entertainment. Included in this illustrious Vitaphone catalog include performances by the legendary Al Jolson, Burns & Allen, Baby Rose Marie, Ruth Etting, Weber & Fields, The Seven Little Foys, Georgie Price, George Jessel, Joe E. Brown, Sissle & Blake, Jack Benny, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, William Demarest, Joe Frisco, Jack Norworth, Molly Picon, Rudy Vallee and many, many more.

We will also have an opportunity to discuss with Ron Hutchinson of the Vitaphone Project the overall involvement with the recent Commemorative 80th Anniversary Edition of the legendary film, THE JAZZ SINGER: This three-disc deluxe DVD EDITION is nothing short of fantastic. For Jolson fans and anyone interested in early 20th century performing arts, music, film and nostalgia, this is a must buy. This incredible three-disc collection includes more than several hours of digital transferred and immaculately refurbished soundtracks from the original Vitaphone Sound on Disc recordings. This special collection also includes behind the scene Jazz Singer photo cards, souvenir programs that include reviews, news articles, a Vitaphone brochure, replicas of postcards that even Al Jolson sent to Jack Warner following the death of his brother and more.

Ron, first of all I would like to thank you for taking the time to talk with me and the Jolson and Friends blog community.

Ron Hutchinson: It's my pleasure.

Brian Marcus Decker: Ron, can you tell us about the origins, some of the founding members and many of the important accomplishments of the Vitaphone project?

Ron Hutchinson: Well, the project started, Brian, in 1991, and the idea that I had at the time was to leverage the record collectors worldwide to see what Vitaphone sound track discs; the 16-inch, 33 1/3 sound track discs that accompanied early talkies, and find out what was in private hands, in record collectors' hands because over the years, I had a few and I knew other collectors; when they were collecting 78's at flea markets and so on, had acquired these things.

And this is kind of pre-Internet. The Internet really came into its own in the late 90's. So, this was letter writing. It was letters to the editor in record collector magazines and so on. And we started with me, John Newton, who has a wonderful Jolson collection. John Lutis in Delaware is a record collector, the late David Goldenberg, another big Jolson fan and Vitaphone enthusiast, and Sherwin Dunner, who is a record and DVD Producer. They put a lot of jazz and blues out. And the four of us really started mobilizing, getting the word out.

Incredibly, within a year, we had already uncovered about 600 or 700 discs in private hands. So, these were not known before this. And at the same time, we were able to work with Warner Bros., which is still the only studio that kind of welcomes collectors and enthusiasts with open arms, and said, "Look, if somebody finds a disc and loans it for the restoration of a short, don't you think it would be appropriate for them to get their own personal copy? They can't sell it, but they ought to be able to at least get the finished product." It sounds like an obvious thing, right, but it's not. And to this day, no other studio will do that. And Dick May, who was then Head of the Warner Bros. and Turner Entertainment Archives, said, "Of course," because collectors were notoriously concerned that I'm going to say I got this disc and they're going to say it's my property. The studio will abscond with it and that's the end of it. And that happened in the 50's and 60's, with some studios.

So, armed with that reassurance from Warner Bros. and starting the ball rolling, we were able within a year or two to uncover a disc for the first restoration, which was Baby Rose Marie, the Child Wonder; this wonderful seven-year-old performer, later known as Rose Marie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Hollywood Squares and Murphy Brown. She's still working today. And we were able to find the disc in Delaware, worked with the Library of Congress and Warner Bros., which had the mute, silent film portion. And they were wedded together at UCLA, which has really worked with us to restore almost 85 shorts now, Robert Gitt is the head of the archive there, and basically recreated a sound-on-film short with Rose Marie. And we were able to sit with her in 1993, when for the first time in 70+ years, the short where she sings three wonderful songs with a very adult, bluesy, jazzy voice; this is not a Shirley Temple-type voice at all.

Brian Marcus Decker: Very sassy.

Ron Hutchinson: Yes. She's on the DVD set, so you can see what I mean. And to see her performance on the big screen again, after all those years, obviously, everybody was looking over at the 75-year-old woman sitting in the audience, watching herself on the screen and then back and forth. And it was just a wonderful kickoff of the Vitaphone Project.

Since then, we've, of course with the help of the Internet and screenings and lots of other publicity we've found in private hands, incredibly, over 3,500 of these 16-inch, shellac sound track discs in private hands, worked with the Library of Congress, Warner Bros., UCLA, British Film Institute and, of course, private collectors, who generously loan their discs or film and we've done about 85 restoration of shorts, some of which are in the set, mainly vaudeville, jazz, little playlets and comedy and so on, as well as about 12 features.

So, right now, I'm happy to say that there are some 50 more shorts that are in the pipeline that will be completed in about the next 18 months. So, what we always do is look for what film exists with no sound and hopefully, we can find some sound to go with the picture and marry it up.

Brian Marcus Decker: Andrew Sarris, the famous film critic, historian and author of the seminal, You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet, talks about, "The Jazz Singer premiered at Warner's Strand in New York City on October 23, 1927, a date enshrined in film history, with all the dread decisiveness of Waterloo, Sarajevo, and Pearl Harbor. On this date the death knell of the silent movies was sounded, and the talkies were born. It had died one night in a theater when people were mesmerized by a Mammy singer. According to film historians, however, it was not Jolson the singer who shook the medium to its foundations, but Jolson the talker."

These observations by Andrew Sarris, about the importance of the Jazz Singer, are brilliant; even discounting the fact that the October 23, 1927 New York premiere date is actually the wrong date.

Ron Hutchinson: Right, it's the 6th, right? Yeah.

Brian Marcus Decker: Obviously October 6th. What is clear is that this original 1927 film did start, in fact, a cultural revolution.

What is your perspective on the historical importance of the movie?

Ron Hutchinson: The Jazz Singer is incredibly important. I think if you stood back and just said, "Well, as a film is it the greatest film of all time," I think even then the reviewers said, "You know, we have a schmaltzy performance," and none of that mattered even then in all of the reviews. What was important was, after decades of attempts to make talking pictures successful, every one of which were miserable failures, from Edison's cylinders, going on to other kinds of other attempts, what happened with this film was a wedding of technology and, in this case, the World's Greatest Entertainer to make an event that from then on, there was no turning back and remaining with silents.

And let me explain what I mean. Up until that time, there really weren't any processes to, first of all, fill a theater with sound. The sound quality of the other attempts was acoustic, so these were kind of not realistic sounding sound tracks from cylinders and so on. And we can kind of get into later about some of the previous history. But, basically, the technology finally caught up with radio development, microphones and so on.

So, you had the technical part and the synchronization part finally fixed with Western Electric's system that Warner Bros. called Vitaphone, but how to put it over, whereas all the other attempts failed. Well, this time, what you had was this entertainer who was hired specifically in his contract, not only to just sing, but in Jolson's contract, both for The Jazz Singer and his earlier short, A Plantation Act, it says he will sing and speak.

And Warner Bros. knew that if this personality could really be captured, it was going to be mesmerizing to audiences and really convince them that this medium was finally here to stay and this is the future of motion pictures. And certainly, the Jolson persona, which was largely known from his touring and his appearances in big cities, was now going to be seen and heard everywhere. So, the fact that he not only sang; because his singing voice was known from commercial 78's, but was seen, did a pretty good job of acting in the film, if you look at the restored film today, and spoke and sang, and you had the whole package.

So, from a historical perspective, it's really the pivotal point where within two years, if you were making a film in Hollywood, it either talked or you were out of business. And you can just chart from that moment the complete change and revolution in motion pictures. It was a big change, obviously a costly change. But, you can target it to October 1927 and see everything stem from that.

Brian Marcus Decker: The movie has also been referred to as the First Movie Heard Around the World. What impact did this film have on the global film business?

Ron Hutchinson: Well, huge. Keep in mind that the silent film was an international business. And by simply changing subtitles, a feature made in Hollywood could be made to play throughout all the theaters in the world. And very often, half or more of the revenue from a film was garnered from overseas ticket sales. The concern certainly at the beginning was that sound pictures were going to kill all of that. And initially, of course, there was no dubbing. Subtitles weren't really known.

So, the films that were successful were first of all, the musical ones, because nobody cared in Germany or France if you were hearing Jolson singing in English. They expected that. So, the early Jolson films generally were not really impacted. But, the dramatic ones were. And only a few stars, Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton; kind of interesting that they were mainly comedians, would actually refilm their shorts or features by reading phonetically off of slates right off of camera range. And they would do their entire film; Keaton did three and four versions of his features at MGM, in different languages. And they were hugely [sounds like] successful. They were paying, I think, $25,000 per version and they were probably bringing in another $200,000 or $300,000 each in each country.

So, the initial impact was that the most successful talkies were the musical ones, so, the band shorts, the singers and so on, where there was no need to make other versions. But, in 1929, in the Brooklyn studios, Warner Bros. Vitaphone Studios did start making foreign language shorts in German, French, Italian and so on, which is really not known today. Eventually dubbing came in. Subtitles came in. And they were able to recover some, but not all, of the business. But, initially, it had an impact.

Jolson Blog: Vitaphone Project Interview Part II: April 27, 2008

• Can you provide us with any context for this type of negative sentiment for The Jazz Singer and other early Vitaphone sound films?
• Are there other examples of important silent movies beyond Chaplin's Modern Times that were released after The Jazz Singer in 1927?
  
  

Jolson and Friends Blog Required Viewing and Reading List

Commemorative 80th Anniversary Edition of the legendary film, THE JAZZ SINGER
 

This three-disc deluxe DVD EDITION is nothing short of fantastic. For Jolson fans and anyone interested in early 20th century performing arts, music, film and nostalgia, this is a must buy. This incredible three-disc collection includes more than several hours of digital transferred and immaculately refurbished soundtracks from the original Vitaphone Sound on Disc recordings. This special collection also includes behind the scene Jazz Singer photo cards, souvenir programs that include reviews, news articles, a Vitaphone brochure, replicas of postcards and more.

Click here to shop for this three-disc DVD from Amazon



No Applause--Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous (Paperback) by Trav S.D.

Click here to shop and buy this book from Amazon

My Fifteen Minutes: An Autobiography of a Child Star of the Golden Era of Hollywood (Paperback) by Sybil Jason

Click here to shop and buy this book from Amazon

When Jolson Was King: (Paperback) by Richard Grudens

Richard Grudens has written an entertaining and informative (must read) book for anyone interested in the legendary, Al Jolson "The World's Greatest Entertainer".

"The book contains many facets of Jolson' career including those around him, his competition, employers, and comments from those he inspired enough to form their own careers, the issue of minstrel, blackface performers, fabled stories of the famed Friar's Club, a chapter of the infamous Shubert Brothers, and chapters covering Jolson's experiences in film, radio and his extensive USO travels. Covered too are vignettes of the theatres in which Jolson performed, and of those great theatrical competitors like the Barrymore's and where they were voicing their talents while Jolson was pulling them in at the Winter Garden, and a full feature on Jolson's films from the first talkie, The Jazz Singer to his famed bio-pics The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again." - Richard Grudens

Click here to shop and buy this book from Amazon

Changes to Jolson and Friends Blog

In the upcoming months I am looking to continue to evolve the Jolson and Friends Blog and wanted preview some upcoming changes. I am continuing to promote the sale of Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Houdini, History of Baseball and several other unique Limited Edition T-shirt designs (featured above) and matching gift cards (all with free U.S. shipping). The sales from these items help offset the cost of maintaining this blog. Your continued support is greatly appreciated and besides they are great T-shirts.

Due to the time intensive nature of ongoing research, content development, production and maintaining and the Blog, the next monthly blog update will happen on April 27, 28th. I am starting to work on several future Jolson and Friends projects including:

• Jolson and Friends Recommended Reading and Viewer Lists including cost-saving shopping links to find unique books, videos and more.
• Coverage of local events.
• Future podcasts of upcoming interviews and special performance-based content.

To ensure that you are automatically informed about new postings, please enter your email address at the sidebar on the left of this blog page or send an email to my attention, with the subject line "Subscribe", to: brian@JolsonBlog.com .

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