Abstract
By 1927, the continuity script had, for around 13 years, provided Hollywood with a clearly structured and relatively efficient means of structuring a story idea within the context of film production. The appearance in that year of The Jazz Singer represented little less than a heart attack, its effects immediately visible as the studios struggled to find ways of adapting their writing practices to cope with the shock. In time, the screenplay would be overhauled, with a measure of consistency re-emerging once the transition to sound had been completed, although an inter-studio consensus comparable to that surrounding the continuity would never fully return.
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Notes
The Jazz Singer, ed. Robert L. Carringer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979).
Edwin Scallert, ‘Vitaphone Activity in Hollywood’, Motion Picture News, 8 July 1927, pp. 35–36; reprinted in The Jazz Singer, pp. 175–79.
Mordaunt Hall, ‘The Screen’, New York Times, 1 January 1929, p. 61.
Edwin Schallert, ‘Pathos of Love Story Stressed’, Los Angeles Times, 14 January 1929, p. A7.
The following discussion of Hughes’ plans for the film draws on Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes (New York: Norton, 1979), esp. p. 66, and Charles Higham, Howard Hughes: The Secret Life (New York: G.B. Putnam, 1993), esp. pp. 46–49.
See 42nd Street, ed. Rocco Fumento (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), pp. 14–21.
42nd Street folder, Warner Brothers collection, USC. See also Steven Price, The Screenplay: Authorship, Theoryand Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 104–05.
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© 2013 Steven Price
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Price, S. (2013). The Coming of Sound. In: A History of the Screenplay. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315700_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315700_7
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