Movies were a familiar part of the U.S. cultural landscape by the 1930s, but this decade brought technological advances that vastly increased their popularity. In 1920 movies were silent and black-and-white. By 1940 they had been transformed by sound, color, and animation.

From the earliest days of motion pictures, filmmakers had struggled to bring sound to the medium. Thomas Edison experimented with synchronizing phonograph recordings with the action on the screen. Warner Brothers, a new film studio in the 1920s, explored the commercial possibilities of this technology through a subsidiary company called Vitaphone. This method was complicated, and coordinating sound with the moving image proved difficult. Nevertheless, the most-famous early "sound" movie, Warner Brothers' The Jazz Singer (1927) starring Al Jolson, used the Vitaphone technology. The Jazz Singer was actually a silent film with a few recorded songs and snatches of dialogue. But audiences sensed an important breakthrough and cheered when Jolson suddenly and prophetically declared,: "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet." The first film featuring sound from beginning to end, Warner Brothers' Lights of New York (1928), also used Vitaphone recordings.

Meanwhile, as early as 1900 an inventor had secured a patent for a different technology that involved adding a soundtrack to the film itself by means of a photoelectric cell. Development lagged until 1923, when radio pioneer Lee DeForest invented a technique he called Phonofilm. Fox film studio acquired Phonofilm, rechristened it "Movietone," and introduced sound films far superior to those using Warner Brothers' Vitaphone system.

Movies of the 1930s were a cacophony of sound: spoken dialogue, orchestras in musical extravaganzas, and squealing tires and explosive gunfire in gangster films. The Wurlitzer theater organs that had accompanied the silent movies gathered dust; stars of the silent era whose voices did not match their appearance faded. The coming of sound initially made movies more stilted and artificial by forcing actors to stand motionless near microphones hidden in trees, lamps, and flower pots, but this problem was soon solved. Another unanticipated consequence was to slow the export

of U.S. films to non-English-speaking

countries.

Color came more slowly, even though experiments with tinting motion-picture film dated to 1890s. In 1915 two Americans, Herbert Kalmus and Daniel Comstock, developed a more advanced system, which they called Technicolor. It involved a camera with two film tracks and two apertures, one with a red filter and the other with a blue filter. The two films were then bonded together in the production process. The first film made by this method was Toll of the Sea (1922).

This primitive technology was not very satisfactory, but the Technicolor company made improvements, notably a movie camera that could film the same scene simultaneously in the three primary colors, red, blue, and green, with the three films later combined into one. Two hit movies of 1939, Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, introduced color to the masses. The latter had a particularly powerful effect because the opening scenes, set in Kansas, were black-and-white. When Dorothy awakens in Oz, the movie bursts into color.

Film animation, too, has a long history. Gertie the Dinosaur, an animated cartoon by Winsor McCay, a New York newspaper cartoonist, appeared in 1908. In the 1920s movie bills included simple cartoons featuring comic-strip characters such as Felix the Cat. The animation process was slow and labor-intensive, involving individual photographs of hundreds of drawings. A key breakthrough was "cel" animation, by which the moving parts could be sketched on celluloid sheets without redrawing the entire character.

By the late 1920s animation technology became more sophisticated, and theaters presented more and more cartoons Walt Disney (1901-1966), a Chicago art student, moved to Los Angeles in 1923 to make animated cartoons. His most famous character, Mickey Mouse, first appeared in Plane Crazy in May 1928 and made his sound debut later that year in Steamboat Willie. Three Little Pigs, an all-color animated cartoon, delighted audiences in 1933. Donald Duck made his debut in Orphan's Benefit (1936). Along with his technical genius, Disney rationalized the animation process and, like Henry Ford, put it on a mass-production basis. With Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), he moved from short cartoons to feature-length films. His Fantasia (1940), featuring imaginative and colorful visual sequences accompanying well-known musical works, was a watershed in animation history.

The cultural (and economic) impact of these technological developments was great. Thanks to sound, color, and animation--along with marketing innovations such as double features (1931) and drive-in theaters (1933)--the movie industry not only survived but prospered in the hard times of the 1930s. Movies provided cheap entertainment, and the technical innovations of these years added to their appeal and novelty.

The addition of sound, bringing spoken dialogue, music, and sound effects to the screen, was especially important. A series of musicals with elaborate dance routines choreographed by Busby Berkeley, such as Footlight Parade (1933), proved highly popular. Dancers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers wove together music and dance in Flying Down to Rio (1933) and other films. Disney integrated music in many of his animated films.

The added realism that sound brought to films added to the alarm of the Catholic Legion of Decency and other conservative groups concerned about the moral effect on the young of sexual suggestiveness in romantic movies and brutal violence in gangster films. To forestall a movement to boycott or censor objectionable movies, Hollywood in 1934 adopted a production code that imposed strict rules on what could be shown on the screen.

The new technologies also affected the fortunes of the film industry. The high costs involved in converting to sound and color encouraged consolidation and mergers, reducing the number of smaller producers. As the studios borrowed heavily to acquire the new technologies, Wall Street gained an increasingly important behind-the-scenes role in the industry. The rise of corporate economic power in Hollywood had a subtle but distinct effect on film content, encouraging escapist, predictable formula films most likely to turn a profit, and discouraging riskier work and critical explorations of the darker corners of American society.