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Why no mention?
Anyone know? - Jcbarr 13:28, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
The article already makes clear that The Jazz Singer was the first feature-length movie with talking sequences, but not the first sound feature.
For the curious, earlier feature-length movies with sound include:
— Walloon 03:13, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
According to a documentary I saw, the film lost several scenes in its Spanish showing, because it was censored as pro-Jewish propaganda.
Also, there seemed to be a silent version (the same?) that was playe along (by Enrique Jardiel Poncela?) with records of Jewish and jazz music. -- Error 22:29, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
The third season Simpsons episode “Like Father, Like Clown” is an obvious homage to this film. We have included this reference in the episode, but I thought a similar link should be posted on this site. ( 207.81.164.238 18:24, 7 February 2007 (UTC))
Probably should add to the AFI reference that in 2005 “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!” was #71 on the “100 YEARS...100 MOVIE QUOTES” list.
The film is used during 2004’s “The Aviator.” Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) takes a business associate to an audience viewing the film as a means of convincing the associate that their recently completed silent motion picture epic, Hell’s Angles, needs to be entirely reshot for sound. ( 207.81.164.238 03:26, 11 February 2007 (UTC))
I put back the full stops because after complete sentences the period has to persist, no matter whether there is only one sentence or more. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Captions. Sentence fragments like e. g. the description of theatrical posters in the infobox don't need periods. I already had the same discussion at Talk:Friday the 13th (film)#Caption. Dutzi ( talk) 18:39, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
Can please stuck a fork in this sh*t and be done with it? This cartoon character was inspired by Al Jolson's blackface character in The Jazz Singer. Case closed. Now....MENTIONED IN THE ARTICLE. -- Ragemanchoo ( talk) 08:53, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
The 10:34, 24 December 2008 DCGeist version of this article is translated into Chinese Wikipedia.-- Wing ( talk) 21:35, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
The detail and complexity of this section, with its cites, might be a turn-off for many. A lot of it goes into minutiae about the contracts and dollar comparisons which I feel is best left for the books, should people want more details like that. It also overwhelmed the Reference section. -- Wikiwatcher1 ( talk) 02:39, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
One of the keys to the film's success was an innovative marketing scheme conceived by Sam Morris, Warner Bros.' sales manager. In Crafton's description:
[A] special clause in Warners' Vitaphone exhibition contract virtually guaranteed long runs. Theaters had to book The Jazz Singer for full rather than split weeks. Instead of the traditional flat rental fee, Warners took a percentage of the gate. A sliding scale meant that the exhibitor's take increased the longer the film was held over. The signing of this contract by the greater New York Fox circuit was regarded as a headline-making precedent. [2]
Similar arrangements, based on a percentage of the gross rather than flat rental fees, would soon become standard for the U.S. film industry's high-end or "A" product.
Though in retrospect, the success of The Jazz Singer signaled the end of the silent motion picture era, this was not immediately apparent. Mordaunt Hall, for example, praised Warner Bros. for "astutely realiz[ing] that a film conception of The Jazz Singer was one of the few subjects that would lend itself to the use of the Vitaphone." [3] In historian Richard Koszarski's words, "Silent films did not disappear overnight, nor did talking films immediately flood the theaters.... Nevertheless, 1927 remains the year that Warner Bros. moved to close the book on the history of silent pictures, even if their original goal had been somewhat more modest." [4] Crafton points to the January 1928 national release of the sound version as the true turning point: two months later, Warners announced that The Jazz Singer was playing at a record 235 theaters (though many could still show it only silently). [2] In May, a consortium including the leading Hollywood studios signed up with Western Electric's licensing division, ERPI, for sound conversion. In July, Warner Bros. released the first all-talking feature, Lights of New York, a musical crime melodrama. Within another year, Hollywood would be producing almost exclusively sound films. Jolson went on to make a series of movies for Warners, including The Singing Fool, a part-talkie, and the all-talking features Say It with Songs (1929), Mammy (1930), and Big Boy (1930).
It's a film found in the Library of Congress featuring Concha Piquer in 1923. The film is directed by Lee DeForest.
In 1922, she debuted in New York City at the age of 14, and later appeared with Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, and Fred and Adele Astaire. On 15 April 1923, she appeared in a short film, "From Far Seville", made by Lee de Forest in his Phonofilm sound-on-film process, and shown at the Rivoli Theater in New York City. This film is now in the Maurice Zouary collection at the Library of Congress.
As it says in wikipedia article about Concha Piquer.
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.17.135.66 ( talk) 23:10, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
I think the caption of the poster in the section entitled, "Commercial impact and industrial influence" is incorrect. It states that "...the image of Jack, in a suggestive nightrobe, carrying Mary does not actually appear in the film." I believe the image IS in the film; it is the scene where Jack catches Mary as she dances backwards off stage right. He's not carrying her at all, and he's not in a suggestive nightrobe; he's in a bathrobe before (or after) he goes on stage. The scene occurs about 27 minutes into the film. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jblykins ( talk • contribs) 04:39, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
I appreciate that the earnings for older films are patchy at best, but I think we should try and cover it in some form. If we can't pin down an exact amount I agree it shouldn't go in the infobox. The $3.5 million figure I added in this edit [1] appears to be the US rentals from its first run according to Variety: [2]. Variety seems to be pretty accurate for US theatrical rentals, so I think we should cover this data at some point in the "Reception" section. The bottom line is that was a pretty good take back in the 20s, and it provides a contempory context for the relative success of the film, even if we can't pin down an exact gross amount. Betty Logan ( talk) 18:07, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: pages moved per notability, educational value, and usage of the film as the primary topic. -- JHunterJ ( talk) 01:18, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
– The 1927 film by far is the most notable use of "The Jazz Singer". It was the first feature-length film with talking sequences. The other links at "The Jazz Singer" are just remakes of the 1927 film and a soundtrack from one of the remakes. JDDJS ( talk) 18:11, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
References
Crafton 1999, p. 111
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).Hall 1927
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).(I copied this from my talk page. BMK ( talk) 15:48, 8 April 2016 (UTC))
Hi BMK,
Regarding your reversion of my recent IP edit adding a parenthetical to The Jazz Singer:
My WP editing philosophy is that I don't feel much obliged to cite a source when correcting an error in material that cites no sources, and the affected paragraph is entirely and perniciously unsourced. It includes the song fragments in question in a mini-catalog of "numerous synchronized singing sequences", which is misleading at best. My source, in fact, is the film itself -- in articles about films readily available on home video, perfectly acceptable per WP, the last I heard -- and a viewing will make the lack of lip-synchrony in those bits patently obvious to anyone. Folks seeing the film for the first time must have wondered if that was all the much-touted Vitaphone was going to add to the experience, until the first of the live-recorded sequences began and made matters clear. To anyone familiar with the contemporary recording technology and scoring procedure, it will also be clear that the vocal is of a piece with the background score and was therefore recorded at the time the finished footage was scored, i.e., the "wild" vocal was post-dubbed.
The parenthetical disclaimer was an antidote to the misleading inclusion of those bits. An alternative approach, more heavy-handed than my simple addition but probably preferable, would be to delete "Two popular tunes are performed by the young Jakie Rabinowitz, the future Jazz Singer;" and accordingly replace the following "his" with "Jakie's". 66.81.242.131 ( talk) 09:37, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
You've still got this bug up your butt? Well, since you're so all-fire hot to "prove" this, I'm not going to accept your say-so on what the commentary says, so find an available reliable source that can be verified without having to take your word for it. A transcript of the commentary will do. BMK ( talk) 03:23, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
This article is incomplete and requires cleanup of its information. The plot section is too long an contains an unnecessary amount of dialogue quotations which need to be consolidated and/or removed whenever necessary with some rewrites done to it in order to shorten it so that it meets wikipiedia's standards. The Production section is incomplete and also requires cleanup. This section contains pieces of information that aren't fully explained and varies in tone and style that would be considered not encyclopedic in tone and should be rewritten and reformatted so that it meet Wikipiedia's standards of writing style and tone. The Production section should be split into three subsections detailing information on the film's development, casting, and filming (Information on the film's casting and filming will need to be expanded since information currently in the article on these topics are very short and somewhat fragmented). The Realease and reception section should be split into two different sections, one detailing the films releases (with subsections detailing its theatrical and home media releases). The reception section should also include subsections that detail both the film's initial response and later response as well as awards/nominations. All of the above listed changes and additions should include properly formatted citations for all information given. This article can very easily become a Featured Article if enough attention is given to it.-- Paleface Jack ( talk) 00:28, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
One disappointing aspect of the DVD release of The Jazz Singer is that its commentary track provides hardly any information about the score we are hearing, and which is the totality of most of the film's soundtrack. For example, there is what might be tagged as the "ghetto theme"—is it a traditional European Jewish melody? If so, does it, or its title, serve as an illuminating comment on the scenes it accompanies? Are the various ditties that accompany scenes of chorus rehearsals, etc., contributions by Irving Berlin, or originals by the score's composer, or ...? I recognize the tune that opens the Coffee Dan's sequence as "Hop, Skip", a circa 1926 song appropriate there because of its San Francisco origin (SF is where the sequence is set, despite misidentification as LA in the commentary: that's the SF Ferry Building in the subtitle card illustration, and "SF" in the "Coffee Dan's" logo, not "LA"), just the sort of musical comment that was often used in early film scores and is probably salted throughout this one. I was prompted to post this by just now coming across the claim in the article for the song " Beau Soir" that it was "used as a backdrop near the very end" of this film. In short, a musicological section, the more detailed the better, would, IMO, be a valuable contribution to this article. 66.81.245.3 ( talk) 08:18, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
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Should we call The 1927 Jazz Singer a romantic musical drama or is that OK as is? -- TMProofreader ( talk) 18:37, 25 September 2020 (UTC)#
Does anyone know how he does the whistling thing? As seen here: [3]. Is he actually doing it all live or is it synced? I'm guessing the latter given the cuts? 104.232.119.107 ( talk) 11:35, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
![]() | The Jazz Singer was a Media and drama good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
![]() | Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the " On this day..." column on October 6, 2004, October 6, 2005, October 6, 2006, October 6, 2007, October 6, 2010, October 6, 2012, October 6, 2014, October 6, 2015, October 6, 2019, October 6, 2021, and October 6, 2023. | ||||||||||||
Current status: Former good article nominee |
![]() | This ![]() It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Why no mention?
Anyone know? - Jcbarr 13:28, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
The article already makes clear that The Jazz Singer was the first feature-length movie with talking sequences, but not the first sound feature.
For the curious, earlier feature-length movies with sound include:
— Walloon 03:13, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
According to a documentary I saw, the film lost several scenes in its Spanish showing, because it was censored as pro-Jewish propaganda.
Also, there seemed to be a silent version (the same?) that was playe along (by Enrique Jardiel Poncela?) with records of Jewish and jazz music. -- Error 22:29, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
The third season Simpsons episode “Like Father, Like Clown” is an obvious homage to this film. We have included this reference in the episode, but I thought a similar link should be posted on this site. ( 207.81.164.238 18:24, 7 February 2007 (UTC))
Probably should add to the AFI reference that in 2005 “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!” was #71 on the “100 YEARS...100 MOVIE QUOTES” list.
The film is used during 2004’s “The Aviator.” Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) takes a business associate to an audience viewing the film as a means of convincing the associate that their recently completed silent motion picture epic, Hell’s Angles, needs to be entirely reshot for sound. ( 207.81.164.238 03:26, 11 February 2007 (UTC))
I put back the full stops because after complete sentences the period has to persist, no matter whether there is only one sentence or more. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Captions. Sentence fragments like e. g. the description of theatrical posters in the infobox don't need periods. I already had the same discussion at Talk:Friday the 13th (film)#Caption. Dutzi ( talk) 18:39, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
Can please stuck a fork in this sh*t and be done with it? This cartoon character was inspired by Al Jolson's blackface character in The Jazz Singer. Case closed. Now....MENTIONED IN THE ARTICLE. -- Ragemanchoo ( talk) 08:53, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
The 10:34, 24 December 2008 DCGeist version of this article is translated into Chinese Wikipedia.-- Wing ( talk) 21:35, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
The detail and complexity of this section, with its cites, might be a turn-off for many. A lot of it goes into minutiae about the contracts and dollar comparisons which I feel is best left for the books, should people want more details like that. It also overwhelmed the Reference section. -- Wikiwatcher1 ( talk) 02:39, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
One of the keys to the film's success was an innovative marketing scheme conceived by Sam Morris, Warner Bros.' sales manager. In Crafton's description:
[A] special clause in Warners' Vitaphone exhibition contract virtually guaranteed long runs. Theaters had to book The Jazz Singer for full rather than split weeks. Instead of the traditional flat rental fee, Warners took a percentage of the gate. A sliding scale meant that the exhibitor's take increased the longer the film was held over. The signing of this contract by the greater New York Fox circuit was regarded as a headline-making precedent. [2]
Similar arrangements, based on a percentage of the gross rather than flat rental fees, would soon become standard for the U.S. film industry's high-end or "A" product.
Though in retrospect, the success of The Jazz Singer signaled the end of the silent motion picture era, this was not immediately apparent. Mordaunt Hall, for example, praised Warner Bros. for "astutely realiz[ing] that a film conception of The Jazz Singer was one of the few subjects that would lend itself to the use of the Vitaphone." [3] In historian Richard Koszarski's words, "Silent films did not disappear overnight, nor did talking films immediately flood the theaters.... Nevertheless, 1927 remains the year that Warner Bros. moved to close the book on the history of silent pictures, even if their original goal had been somewhat more modest." [4] Crafton points to the January 1928 national release of the sound version as the true turning point: two months later, Warners announced that The Jazz Singer was playing at a record 235 theaters (though many could still show it only silently). [2] In May, a consortium including the leading Hollywood studios signed up with Western Electric's licensing division, ERPI, for sound conversion. In July, Warner Bros. released the first all-talking feature, Lights of New York, a musical crime melodrama. Within another year, Hollywood would be producing almost exclusively sound films. Jolson went on to make a series of movies for Warners, including The Singing Fool, a part-talkie, and the all-talking features Say It with Songs (1929), Mammy (1930), and Big Boy (1930).
It's a film found in the Library of Congress featuring Concha Piquer in 1923. The film is directed by Lee DeForest.
In 1922, she debuted in New York City at the age of 14, and later appeared with Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, and Fred and Adele Astaire. On 15 April 1923, she appeared in a short film, "From Far Seville", made by Lee de Forest in his Phonofilm sound-on-film process, and shown at the Rivoli Theater in New York City. This film is now in the Maurice Zouary collection at the Library of Congress.
As it says in wikipedia article about Concha Piquer.
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.17.135.66 ( talk) 23:10, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
I think the caption of the poster in the section entitled, "Commercial impact and industrial influence" is incorrect. It states that "...the image of Jack, in a suggestive nightrobe, carrying Mary does not actually appear in the film." I believe the image IS in the film; it is the scene where Jack catches Mary as she dances backwards off stage right. He's not carrying her at all, and he's not in a suggestive nightrobe; he's in a bathrobe before (or after) he goes on stage. The scene occurs about 27 minutes into the film. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jblykins ( talk • contribs) 04:39, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
I appreciate that the earnings for older films are patchy at best, but I think we should try and cover it in some form. If we can't pin down an exact amount I agree it shouldn't go in the infobox. The $3.5 million figure I added in this edit [1] appears to be the US rentals from its first run according to Variety: [2]. Variety seems to be pretty accurate for US theatrical rentals, so I think we should cover this data at some point in the "Reception" section. The bottom line is that was a pretty good take back in the 20s, and it provides a contempory context for the relative success of the film, even if we can't pin down an exact gross amount. Betty Logan ( talk) 18:07, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: pages moved per notability, educational value, and usage of the film as the primary topic. -- JHunterJ ( talk) 01:18, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
– The 1927 film by far is the most notable use of "The Jazz Singer". It was the first feature-length film with talking sequences. The other links at "The Jazz Singer" are just remakes of the 1927 film and a soundtrack from one of the remakes. JDDJS ( talk) 18:11, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
References
Crafton 1999, p. 111
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).Hall 1927
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).(I copied this from my talk page. BMK ( talk) 15:48, 8 April 2016 (UTC))
Hi BMK,
Regarding your reversion of my recent IP edit adding a parenthetical to The Jazz Singer:
My WP editing philosophy is that I don't feel much obliged to cite a source when correcting an error in material that cites no sources, and the affected paragraph is entirely and perniciously unsourced. It includes the song fragments in question in a mini-catalog of "numerous synchronized singing sequences", which is misleading at best. My source, in fact, is the film itself -- in articles about films readily available on home video, perfectly acceptable per WP, the last I heard -- and a viewing will make the lack of lip-synchrony in those bits patently obvious to anyone. Folks seeing the film for the first time must have wondered if that was all the much-touted Vitaphone was going to add to the experience, until the first of the live-recorded sequences began and made matters clear. To anyone familiar with the contemporary recording technology and scoring procedure, it will also be clear that the vocal is of a piece with the background score and was therefore recorded at the time the finished footage was scored, i.e., the "wild" vocal was post-dubbed.
The parenthetical disclaimer was an antidote to the misleading inclusion of those bits. An alternative approach, more heavy-handed than my simple addition but probably preferable, would be to delete "Two popular tunes are performed by the young Jakie Rabinowitz, the future Jazz Singer;" and accordingly replace the following "his" with "Jakie's". 66.81.242.131 ( talk) 09:37, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
You've still got this bug up your butt? Well, since you're so all-fire hot to "prove" this, I'm not going to accept your say-so on what the commentary says, so find an available reliable source that can be verified without having to take your word for it. A transcript of the commentary will do. BMK ( talk) 03:23, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
This article is incomplete and requires cleanup of its information. The plot section is too long an contains an unnecessary amount of dialogue quotations which need to be consolidated and/or removed whenever necessary with some rewrites done to it in order to shorten it so that it meets wikipiedia's standards. The Production section is incomplete and also requires cleanup. This section contains pieces of information that aren't fully explained and varies in tone and style that would be considered not encyclopedic in tone and should be rewritten and reformatted so that it meet Wikipiedia's standards of writing style and tone. The Production section should be split into three subsections detailing information on the film's development, casting, and filming (Information on the film's casting and filming will need to be expanded since information currently in the article on these topics are very short and somewhat fragmented). The Realease and reception section should be split into two different sections, one detailing the films releases (with subsections detailing its theatrical and home media releases). The reception section should also include subsections that detail both the film's initial response and later response as well as awards/nominations. All of the above listed changes and additions should include properly formatted citations for all information given. This article can very easily become a Featured Article if enough attention is given to it.-- Paleface Jack ( talk) 00:28, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
One disappointing aspect of the DVD release of The Jazz Singer is that its commentary track provides hardly any information about the score we are hearing, and which is the totality of most of the film's soundtrack. For example, there is what might be tagged as the "ghetto theme"—is it a traditional European Jewish melody? If so, does it, or its title, serve as an illuminating comment on the scenes it accompanies? Are the various ditties that accompany scenes of chorus rehearsals, etc., contributions by Irving Berlin, or originals by the score's composer, or ...? I recognize the tune that opens the Coffee Dan's sequence as "Hop, Skip", a circa 1926 song appropriate there because of its San Francisco origin (SF is where the sequence is set, despite misidentification as LA in the commentary: that's the SF Ferry Building in the subtitle card illustration, and "SF" in the "Coffee Dan's" logo, not "LA"), just the sort of musical comment that was often used in early film scores and is probably salted throughout this one. I was prompted to post this by just now coming across the claim in the article for the song " Beau Soir" that it was "used as a backdrop near the very end" of this film. In short, a musicological section, the more detailed the better, would, IMO, be a valuable contribution to this article. 66.81.245.3 ( talk) 08:18, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
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Should we call The 1927 Jazz Singer a romantic musical drama or is that OK as is? -- TMProofreader ( talk) 18:37, 25 September 2020 (UTC)#
Does anyone know how he does the whistling thing? As seen here: [3]. Is he actually doing it all live or is it synced? I'm guessing the latter given the cuts? 104.232.119.107 ( talk) 11:35, 2 May 2024 (UTC)