1929 In Film
The following is an overview of 1929 in film, including significant events, a list of films released and notable births and deaths. Top-grossing films (U.S.) The top ten 1929 released films by box office gross in North America are as follows: Events The days of the silent film are numbered. A mad scramble to provide synchronized sound is on. * February 1 – ''The Broadway Melody'' is released by MGM and becomes the first major musical film of the sound era, sparking a host of imitators as well as a series of ''Broadway Melody'' films that will run until 1940. * February 18 – The first Academy Awards, or Oscars, are announced for the year ended August 1, 1928. * March 3 – William Fox announces that he has taken control of Loews Inc., including its subsidiary Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, buying shares from Marcus Loew's widow and sons and Nicholas Schenck for $50 million. The acquisition eventually falls through. * May 16 – The first Academy Awards are distributed at The Hollyw ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Broadway Melody
''The Broadway Melody'', also known as ''The Broadway Melody of 1929'', is a 1929 American pre-Code musical film and the first sound film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. It was one of the first musicals to feature a Technicolor sequence, which sparked the trend of color being used in a flurry of musicals that would hit the screens in 1929–1930. Today, the Technicolor sequence survives only in black and white. The film was the first musical released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and was Hollywood's first all-talking musical. ''The Broadway Melody'' was written by Norman Houston and James Gleason from a story by Edmund Goulding, and directed by Harry Beaumont. Original music was written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, including the popular hit " You Were Meant for Me". The George M. Cohan classic "Give My Regards to Broadway" is used under the opening establishing shots of New York City, its film debut. Bessie Love was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sound Film
A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before sound motion pictures became commercially practical. Reliable synchronization was difficult to achieve with the early sound-on-disc systems, and amplification and recording quality were also inadequate. Innovations in sound-on-film led to the first commercial screening of short motion pictures using the technology, which took place in 1923. The primary steps in the commercialization of sound cinema were taken in the mid-to-late 1920s. At first, the sound films which included synchronized dialogue, known as "talking pictures", or "talkies", were exclusively shorts. The earliest feature-length movies with recorded sound included only music and effects. The first feature film originally presented as a talkie (although it had only limited so ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Hallelujah! (film)
''Hallelujah'' is a 1929 American pre-Code Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical directed by King Vidor, and starring Daniel L. Haynes and Nina Mae McKinney. Filmed in Tennessee and Arkansas and chronicling the troubled quest of a sharecropper, Zeke Johnson (Haynes), and his relationship with the seductive Chick (McKinney), ''Hallelujah'' was one of the first films with an all-African American cast produced by a major studio. (Although frequently touted as Hollywood's first all-black cast musical, that distinction more properly belongs to ''Hearts in Dixie'', which premiered several months earlier.) It was intended for a general audience and was considered so risky a venture by MGM that they required King Vidor to invest his own salary in the production. Vidor expressed an interest in "showing the Southern Negro as he is" and attempted to present a relatively non-stereotyped view of African-American life. ''Hallelujah'' was King Vidor's first sound film, and combined sound recorded on l ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Roxy Theatre (New York City)
The Roxy Theatre was a 5,920 seat movie palace at 153 West 50th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, just off Times Square in New York City. It was one of the largest movie theatres ever built in North America. It opened on March 11, 1927 with the silent film ''The Love of Sunya'' starring Gloria Swanson. It was a leading Broadway film showcase through the 1950s and also noted for its lavish stage shows. It closed and was demolished in 1960. Early history The theater was conceived by film producer Herbert Lubin in mid-1925 as the world's largest and finest movie palace. To realize his dream, Lubin brought in the successful and innovative theater operator Samuel L. Rothafel, aka "Roxy", enticing him with a large salary, a percentage of the profits and stock options, and even offering to name the theatre after him. It was intended as the first of six Roxy Theatres in the New York area. Roxy was determined to make the theater the summit of his career, realizing all of his theatric ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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On With The Show (1929 Film)
''On with the Show!'' is a 1929 American pre-Code musical film produced by Warner Bros. Filmed in two-color Technicolor, the film is noted as the first all-talking, all-color feature length film, and the second color film released by Warner Bros.; the first was the partly color, black-and-white musical ''The Desert Song'' (1929). Plot With unpaid actors and staff, the stage show ''Phantom Sweetheart'' seems doomed. To complicate matters, the box office takings have been robbed and the leading lady refuses to appear. The cast includes William Bakewell as the head usher eager to get his sweetheart, box-office girl Sally O'Neil, noticed as a leading girl. Betty Compson plays the temperamental star and Arthur Lake the whiny young male lead. Louise Fazenda is the company's eccentric comedian. Joe E. Brown plays the part of a mean comedian who constantly argues with Arthur Lake. Cast Songs * "Welcome Home" Music by Harry Akst, Lyrics by Grant Clarke, Performed by Henry Fink and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Technicolor
Technicolor is a series of Color motion picture film, color motion picture processes, the first version dating back to 1916, and followed by improved versions over several decades. Definitive Technicolor movies using three black and white films running through a special camera (3-strip Technicolor or Process 4) started in the early 1930s and continued through to the mid-1950s when the 3-strip camera was replaced by a standard camera loaded with single strip 'monopack' color negative film. Technicolor Laboratories were still able to produce Technicolor prints by creating three black and white matrices from the Eastmancolor negative (Process 5). Process 4 was the second major color process, after Britain's Kinemacolor (used between 1908 and 1914), and the most widely used color process in Cinema of the United States, Hollywood during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Technicolor's #Process 4: Development and introduction, three-color process became known and celebrated for its highly s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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70 Mm Grandeur Film
70mm Grandeur film, also called Fox Grandeur or Grandeur 70, is a 70mm widescreen film format developed by William Fox through his Fox Film and Fox-Case corporations and used commercially on a small but successful scale in 1929–30. Filmography In 1925, with the advent of television on the horizon, William Fox of the Fox Film Studio empire envisioned a "grand" cinema experience to keep the public coming to the movie theaters. As such, he soon put full efforts behind enhancing the silent 35mm film showings by the addition of sound to be coupled to a wider than 35mm end product, with the hoped for result being a grand and lifelike experience for the viewers. This wide screen vision of William Fox soon resulted in his creating a partnership with Theodore Case and his assistant, Earl Sponable, pioneers of Sound on Film, with the partnership to be named the Fox-Case Corporation. The result was, first, the advent of Movietone Sound, then soon combined with the 70mm "Grandeur" wide scree ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Fox Movietone News
Movietone News is a newsreel that ran from 1928 to 1963 in the United States. Under the name British Movietone News, it also ran in the United Kingdom from 1929 to 1986, in France also produced by Fox-Europa, in Australia and New Zealand until 1970, and Germany as Fox Tönende Wochenschau. History Movietone News evolved from an earlier newsreel established by Fox Films called Fox News which was founded in 1919. It produced silent newsreels. When Fox entered talkies in 1928 with '' Mother Knows Best'', the name Fox Movietone was applied to Fox's sound productions. In the U.S. as Fox Movietone News it produced cinema, sound newsreels from 1928 to 1963, and from 1929 to 1986 in the UK (for much of that time as British Movietone News), as well as 1929 to 1975 in Australia. One of the earliest in the series featured ''George Bernard Shaw Talks to Movietone News'', released on June 25, 1928. One of the known early producers of these newsreels was Abraham Harrison also known as Harry, f ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel
The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel is a historic hotel located at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles, California. It opened on May 15, 1927, and is the oldest continually operating hotel in Los Angeles. History The hotel was built in 1926, in what is known as the Golden Era of Los Angeles architecture, and was named after the 26th president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. It was financed by a group that included Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Sid Grauman."The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel: The Story of an L.A. Icon" Discover Los Angeles. May 14, 2014. It cost $2.5 million ($ today) to complete and opened on May 15, 1927. The hote ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Nicholas Schenck
Nicholas M. Schenck (14 November 1880, Rybinsk, Russia – 4 March 1969, Florida) was a Russian-American film studio executive and businessman. Biography Early life One of seven children, Schenck was born to a Jewish household in Rybinsk, a town on the Volga River in the Yaroslavl Governorate of Tsarist Russia. With his parents, he and his brothers, George and Joseph, emigrated to the United States in 1892 where they settled in a tenement on New York's Lower East Side. Subsequently, he relocated to Harlem, the population of which at that time consisted primarily of Jewish and Italian immigrants. Upon his arrival in the United States, he and his older brother Joseph worked as a team running errands and selling newspapers while studying at the New York College of Pharmacy at night. They subsequently began working in a drugstore in the Bowery. Within two years they had saved up enough money to buy out the drugstore's owner and opened another store on Third Avenue at 110th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Marcus Loew
Marcus Loew (May 7, 1870 - September 5, 1927) was an American business magnate and a pioneer of the motion picture industry who formed Loew's Theatres and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio (MGM). Life and career Loew was born in New York City, into a poor Jewish family, who had emigrated to New York City a few years previously from Austria and Germany. He was forced by circumstances to work at a very young age and had little formal education. Nevertheless, beginning with a small investment of money saved from menial jobs, he bought into the penny arcade business. Shortly after, in partnership with Adolph Zukor and others, he founded the successful but short-lived Automatic Vaudeville Company which established a chain of arcades across several cities. After the company dissolved in 1904 Loew converted his share of the business into nickelodeons and over time he turned Loew's Theatres into a leading chain of vaudeville and movie theaters in the United States. By 1905, Marcus Loew ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Loews Inc
Loews may refer to: * Loews Cineplex Entertainment, formerly Loews Incorporated, a defunct North American cinema chain which formerly owned Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer **''United States v. Loew's Inc.'', a United States Supreme Court case involving Loews * Loews Corporation, an American holding company * Loews Hotels, a North American hotel chain See also * Lowe's, an American home improvement store chain * Lowes (other) Lowes or similar words may refer to: Businesses * Lowe's, a big box home improvement chain * Lowes Foods, an American grocery store chain * Lowes Menswear, an Australian menswear chain * Lowe's Market, a regional supermarket chain with locatio ... * Loew {{disambiguation ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |