Hollywood has died many times. It died in 1913, again in 1918, again in 1927 (Al Jolson, the authors note, sang at the funeral), and it seems to have died every year since 2000. That is how Gary Rydstrom and Gianluca Sergi open The Endless End of Cinema: A History of Crisis and Survival in Hollywood (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), a book about an industry that keeps announcing its own death and keeps surviving it.
The book moves through eight crises: the patent wars, the coming of sound, television, the myths of Old and New Hollywood, millennials, the value of films in an age of endless content, and two pandemics a century apart. It reads like a conversation between a film historian and a filmmaker, and it is often funny. Here I want to stay with the chapter closest to this blog: "The Big Bang: The Crisis of Sound".
The silent era was never silent
This is the first surprise of the chapter, and the authors put it plainly: "The silent era was never silent." Before synchronised sound, films were shown with orchestras, organists and lecturers, with effects made live by machines such as the Allefex, a box built to produce storms, waterfalls, barking dogs and birds, and with troupes of actors speaking the dialogue from behind the screen. Adolph Zukor, later the founder of Paramount, ran one of these companies, with twenty-two troupes on the road. Sound was already part of the show; it simply belonged to the theatre, not to the film.
A crisis nobody prepared for
Scientists worked on synchronised sound almost from the first day of cinema, yet Hollywood paid little attention. Edison's kinetophone of 1913 had the phonograph at the front of the hall and the projector at the back, joined by a long cord that rats liked to eat; it was gone a year later. When Warner Bros. bet on Vitaphone, Sam Warner, who had pushed for it against his brother Harry, died the night before The Jazz Singer opened. And in many cities the sound audiences got was worse than what they had before: a thin, hissing track in place of a live orchestra. They chose it anyway.
Learning a new craft
The most enjoyable pages are about people learning a new craft under pressure. Disney tested Steamboat Willie in the yard behind the studio, projecting the cut on a sheet while his animators played music and made effects behind it, with Walt himself as the voice of Mickey. On live-action stages, cameras were shut in boxes and stars faced voice tests. Then limitations became tools. Once silence was a choice rather than a given, it became dramatic; the authors quote Robert Bresson, who wrote it in capitals: "THE SOUNDTRACK INVENTED SILENCE". Horror films of 1931 such as Dracula and Frankenstein even drew their unease from the flaws of early recording, its hollow rooms and unnatural voices.
Murray Spivack and King Kong
For anyone who works with sound, the key figure here is Murray Spivack, a drummer who joined RKO in 1929 and helped invent the job of sound editor, starting from a tin shack where Tom Mix had kept his horses. For King Kong (1933) he recorded real sounds outside the studio, then reversed them, slowed them down and layered them into creatures nobody had heard before. The book notes that the same techniques were used sixty years later on Jurassic Park, a film Rydstrom knows from the inside: at VIEW 2012 he walked us through the walrus, the baby dolphin and the baby elephant hidden in its dinosaurs.
Counterpoint
The chapter also gathers the early arguments about what sound should do. René Clair hoped for "an intelligent selection of a few useful ones" rather than an imitation of every noise; Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov asked for sound in counterpoint to the image. The line ends, fittingly, with a cartoon sound man: Treg Brown, who, as Chuck Jones put it, "never used an appropriate sound". Anyone who heard Rydstrom's keynote will recognise the idea.
Timing is everything
What if sound had arrived earlier, or later? Had Edison succeeded in 1913, cinema might have become a way of recording theatre and opera. Had it come after the Depression, the studios could not have paid for it. Two decades without synchronised sound gave Hollywood the time to become an art of images; sound then made it whole. And in the end it was the audience that decided: between 1927 and 1930, moviegoers grew from 60 to 110 million.
An ending without an end
The book closes with a chapter called "Inconclusion (No, That Is Not a Typo)", and with a line from Ben Burtt: "films are not released, they escape". It is a good book to read at a time when every new tool seems to announce the end of something. The coming of sound was the first time a technology changed cinema from the inside; it was not the last. The story I tell in DROIDS, a small team at Lucasfilm putting sound on a screen in the early 1980s, is another chapter of the same conversation between art and technology, and Gary was kind enough to write its foreword.
The Endless End of Cinema: A History of Crisis and Survival in Hollywood, by Gianluca Sergi and Gary Rydstrom. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023 (paperback 2024). Available from the publisher: bloomsbury.com
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