Blog Archives

Don Juan, the first film with a Vitaphone instrumental soundtrack, premiers on this day in 1926.  Only a year later, the first film with a full recorded dialogue and singing soundtrack, the Jazz Singer, will be released.  Both Don Juan and the Jazz Singer are produced at Warner Brothers Studios using  elaborate and complex sound technology.  At the premier of Jazz Singer Oct 6, 1927,  fifteen reels of film and fifteen separate disks had to be managed and cued very quickly.  But audience reaction was strongly positive, and it was clear by 1927 that the end of silent cinema was in sight.

Jack L. Warner, CEO and majority shareholder of Warner Brothers Studios, is born on this day in 1892.  Known as the Hollywood studio that pioneered sound with the 1927 movie “Jazz Singer,” Warner Brothers became one of the big six studios in the 20th century,  along with Paramount, Universal, RKO, MGM and Fox. Jack was one of four brothers who went into film distribution around 1906 and fought the MPPC,  Thomas Edison’s movie monopoly, then helped the company move to Hollywood and start making films there in 1919. They struck their first major success with Rin-Tin-Tin in 1923. Other notable movies produced by Jack Warner included Captain Blood, Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, East of Eden and hundreds of others. Jack Warner tricked the rest of his family into selling him shares of Warner brothers and assumed total control in the 1950s.  The company merged with other major media players to become Time-Warner in 1990.

First Technicolor cartoon  — Walt Disney’s Flowers and Trees, the first cartoon short to use Technicolor, premiers on this day in 1932.

Ken Burns, documentary film director, is born on this day in 1953.

Stanley Kubrick, director, is born on this day in 1928. Kubrick was famous for films such as:Dr. Strangelove;  Spartacus; Lolita;  2001 A Space Odyssey; Full Metal Jacket; The Shining; Clockwork Orange; and many others. Perhaps most influential was Dr. Strangelove (played by Peter Sellers, left) —  a 1964  black comedy  that depicted an accidental escalation of conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States.  The horror of the film’s conclusion helped the two countries pursue somewhat better restraints on accidental breakout of  nuclear war, but it should be noted that a great deal more  needs to be done.  Kubrick would have agreed.

US v Paramount — An anti-trust suit against Paramount and most of the movie industry is filed on this day in 1938 by the Justice Department, seeking to break up vertical integration between studios and movie theaters.  The net effect, ten years later when the US wins the suit, is to break up the old Hollywood studio system.

Hollywood Sign is dedicated in Los Angeles on this day in 1923. It originally read “Hollywoodland,” but the four last letters were dropped after renovation in 1949.

Fox vault fire — The silent film archives of Fox Film Corporation are destroyed in a fire on this day in 1937 as highly flammable nitrate film is accidentally set ablaze. Films of Tom Mix, Buster Keaton and many other Hollywood greats are lost.

Vittorio De Sica,  Italian director ( Bicycles Thieves ) and a major figure in the neo-realist movement, is born on this day in 1901.  

Louis B. Mayer, co-founder of MGM film studios in Hollywood, born on this day in 1882.