The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926-1930
About this book
Although film and the movies had existed for some years prior, it was D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, that turned what had been a flickering novelty into a transformational art form. In the years following that first epic film, that art form had been refined and reinterpreted many times and in many ways, and such masters of the silent film as F.W. Murnau, King Vidor, and Erich von Stroheim had emerged to create movies that were visual works of art. And then in 1926 came sound, and with it, at least in the eyes of many, came the end of art. Certainly it marked the end of moviemaking as its first creators had known it. Their careers, and those of many others who had been celebrated during Hollywood's silent era, were over. It was a turbulent, colorful, and altogether remarkable period, four years in which America's most popular industry reinvented itself. For the first time ever, here is the epic story of the transition from silent films to talkies, that moment when movies were totally transformed and the American public cemented its love affair with Hollywood. In The Speed of Sound, author Scott Eyman, whose biography of filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch was hailed as "resoundingly wonderful," has created a mixture of cultural and social history that is at once both scholarly and vastly entertaining. Here is the first and last word on the missing chapter in the history of Hollywood, the ribbon of dreams by which America conquered the world.