Dialogue Editing

How We Got Where We Are 7
It was clear to all that a method of showing sound and picture was of
great commercial interest. In the late 1880s, Edison and his associate, W.K.L.
Dickson, linked the Edison cylinder phonograph with a larger tube that was
slotted much like the Zoetrope. It wasn’t elegant, but it did produce synchronized
images and sound. 3 Georges Demeny, in 1891, claimed to produce a
synchronous sound system, but like so many assertions in this time of riotous
invention, this proved unfounded. There were many other attempts to add
sound to the ever more popular moving picture, but at least three impediments
came between a successful marriage of sound and picture: reliable
synchronization, amplifi cation, and the fact that silent pictures were so effective
and popular.
Early Attempts at Sound in Movies
Many early sound movies were merely prerecorded playback tracks to which
“silent” actors mimed. By the 1920s, when commercial talkies were a real
possibility, sound playback was usually from a phonograph synchronized to
the fi lm projector via belts, pulleys, and cogs. The most successful interlocked
phonograph/projector system was the Vitaphone, made by Western Electric
and Bell Laboratories. But this double-system playback failed completely in
the event of a fi lm break or a skip in the record. The projectionist had no
choice but to return to the beginning of the reel. Eugene Augustin Lauste
patented a form of optical fi lm soundtrack in 1910, but it would be another
20 years before optical recording was adopted for fi lm sound. 4
Amplifi cation of disk or cylinder recordings posed a hurdle, since early phonographs
played their sounds acoustically rather than through amplifi cation—hardly
appropriate for large halls. The German Tri-Ergon sound-on-fi lm
system, later improved on by American Lee De Forest, enabled a sound reader
to convert variations in the optical track into a signal that could be amplifi ed
by valve amplifi ers newly improved by the Marconi company and others.
This was the beginning of a standard for sound reproduction that would last
more than 50 years—optical sound printed directly onto the fi lmprint.
But there was one more hurdle to clear in order to bring sound movies out
of the “gee whiz” ghetto and into commercial success. Simply stated, silent
pictures worked. By the mid-1920s silent fi lms had established a language
and an audience and were rightly considered both entertainment for the
3 Mark Ulano. “Moving Pictures That Talk, Part 2: The Movies Are Born a Child of the
Phonograph” (http://www.fi lmsound.org/ulano/index.html).
4 David A. Cook. A History of Narrative Film (New York: Norton, 1981, pp. 241–44).