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Chapter 11

“Giddyap!”

Long before Winsor McCay’s speech at Roth’s, Max Fleischer had been working on a novel way to improve cartoons. Starting in the early 1920s, he had tinkered with ways to give them better sound, synchronized with the action on-screen. It was a long, difficult process, involving one early experiment that had ended in disaster.

Dr. Hugo Riesenfeld, conductor at the Rialto Theater, a luxurious movie palace on Broadway, had hired Fleischer to animate a cartoon conductor that would direct his live orchestra from the screen. As Max set up for a rehearsal, he was startled by the sudden sight of an Apache Indian, tomahawk in hand, bearing down on him atop a white horse galloping at full speed. But the horse never got to him—it was on a treadmill, a setup devised by Riesenfeld to create a live soundtrack of a horse galloping for a later showing of The Vanishing American, a silent western featuring the lantern-jawed Richard Dix.

Fleischer watched as his young son, Richard, napping in the front row, was jolted awake by the noise. The horse was aimed right at him, and Fleischer realized that the treadmill setup was disaster waiting to happen. “You can’t do that!” he shouted at the director. “What would happen if, when the horse is going full gallop, the treadmill jammed? That horse would come flying off that treadmill right into the orchestra pit and probably into the audience too.”

Fleischer offered a solution: Position the horse sideways, which was safer and would allow the audience to see all its legs in motion. “All we have to do is turn the treadmill sideways, put the horse and rider on it, and say, ‘Giddyap!’” he explained.

The horse was shifted and brought again to a full gallop.

Then the treadmill jammed. The horse launched into the stage wings, hooves clattering, and smashed into a wall, breaking its neck; the rider jumped off right before the crash, sustaining only minor injuries. This was a story Fleischer liked to tell later, as a way to illustrate why movies needed to get the sound question figured out.

Riesenfeld was also drawn to the challenge of matching sound and film, and hired Fleischer as a creative technical consultant, introducing him to his friend Dr. Lee de Forest, a sound engineer.

Bushy-eyebrowed, with a push-broom mustache, Lee de Forest was something of a throwback, a man from that age of inventors who spent their time in laboratories crammed full of interesting gear. He held 216 patents, including one for the thermionic triode detector, an electric current amplifier that helped usher in the age of broadcast radio. Like Fleischer, de Forest had also been struggling with the many challenges of sound synchronization. If inconsistent hand-cranked cameras didn’t ruin the timing, then projectionists cutting damaged frames out of film reels did. Many notable engineers had failed to solve these problems, including Thomas Edison, who in 1913 invented the Kinetophone, a device composed of a phonograph placed near a screen and connected to the projector by wires running under the floor. His attempt was a failure—rats constantly chewed through the wires, and the sound was almost always scratchy, prompting annoyed audiences to boo. Defeated, Edison eventually began arguing that synchronized sound wasn’t desirable. “Americans require a restful quiet in the moving picture theater,” he reasoned. “For them talking from the lips of the figures on the screen destroys the illusion.”

Unlike Edison, de Forest wasn’t willing to give up so easily. All he needed was money, but American investors were wary. They feared de Forest was running a stock manipulation scheme, a crime he was narrowly acquitted of earlier in his career. He also had a string of bankruptcies to his name, and a history of getting swindled by his business partners. With his prospects of working in the United States thus limited, de Forest found financial backing in Berlin instead, working on his “Phonofilm” idea there. In Germany he made progress, solving many of the synchronization problems by imprinting the sound recordings directly onto the film instead of playing them separately. Returning to America in 1923, he began screening examples of what Phonofilm could do: a film of Calvin Coolidge giving a speech about the evil of taxes; another of singer Eddie Cantor warbling a song about “Georgie Porgie”, and a third showing performer DeWolf Hopper onstage reciting “Casey at the Bat.”

Fleischer was sold once he saw de Forest’s demos. Using his introduction from Riesenfeld, he enlisted the engineer’s help on an idea he was working up: the Song Car-Tunes series, in which audiences sang along to a ball bouncing across lyrics projected onto the screen. Their first film together was 1924’s My Old Kentucky Home, which was technically the first sound cartoon.

Even though My Old Kentucky Home was released in 1924, by 1927 the industry still hadn’t converted from silents to sound. Fleischer had been an exception, an early adopter of new technologies. But other industry leaders were wary. They worried that sound threatened their preexisting business models, criticizing it in the same way that high priests once called the printing press a passing fad. They ignored the potential and saw only the drawbacks, such as the hissy sound or the way actors’ voices garbled each other out.

Those fearful of sound had various and differing reasons. Theater owners dreaded the expense of wiring cinemas for sound. Filmmakers resisted the extra hours of preparation sound required before a shoot. Actors worried it would drain spontaneity and life from their performances—Chaplin’s Modern Times, portraying machinery as a confusing tangle of gears, was in part a statement on this. Critics likewise had their reservations, worrying that sound would drag cinema, a unique art form, into an unholy alliance with theater. Musicians were also scared: cinemas were one of their biggest employers, hiring them to fill the orchestra pits and play during silent features.

The biggest opponents of sound, however, were the studio moguls. They already fretted about the new radio technology, fearful of families abandoning movies to stay home at night and listen to prizefights and concerts instead. To neutralize what they saw as a growing threat, they had even launched a stealth propaganda campaign against “the dangers of radio,” publishing alarming editorials about how radios “poisoned the air,” causing hearing loss and starting house fires. Their initial fear of “talkies” was similar; they worried that foreign audiences wouldn’t accept movies where only English was spoken. “Who the hell wants to hear the actors talk?” grumbled Harry Warner of Warner Bros.

Harry Warner’s fears quickly evaporated, however, once he realized how much money he could save by firing the thousands of musicians hired to play in his theaters. After that realization finally set in, sound was suddenly the future! In 1925, Warner Bros. met with Western Electric, where engineers were using de Forest’s triode detector to develop a public-address system that could also work for movies. The new system they created for Warner Bros., a system called “Vitaphone,” was announced in 1926.

The rest of the industry remained skeptical, and the other studios began organizing to fight what they called the “Warner Vitaphone Peril.” But their opposition soon crumbled after Variety, an important trade paper, called Vitaphone an impending revolution. The other moguls also no doubt noticed Warner Bros. stock soar from $8 to $65 per share in late 1926, another enticement to jump aboard the train. In a flash, every studio was suddenly advertising new sound systems: Movietone! Cinematophone! Cameraphone! Synchroscope! Phonofilm!

In October 1928, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, widely credited as the first “talkie.” Audiences paid as much as $10 a ticket to watch Al Jolson in blackface, his arms outstretched and hands wagging, crooning, “You ain’t heard nothing yet!”

There was no looking back. Eighteen months after The Jazz Singer debuted, a mere three of the seventeen movie theaters on Broadway were still showing only silent films. With the industry disrupted, the old fears no longer mattered. But, despite Max Fleischer’s advocacy for sound, there was still one area of cinema where it had not yet flourished: cartoons. Since the images were drawn by hand, they were more difficult to synch than live action. Nor did audiences seem particularly eager for sound cartoons. Something about them just didn’t seem natural. “Drawings are not vocal,” animator Wilfred Jackson said. “Why should a voice come out of a cartoon character?”