Vitaphone Varieties is a series title (represented by a pennant logo on screen) used for all of
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (commonly known as Warner Bros. or abbreviated as WB) is an American film and entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California, and a subsidiary of Warner Bros. D ...
', earliest
short film
A short film is any motion picture that is short enough in running time not to be considered a feature film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes ...
"talkies" of the 1920s, initially made using the
Vitaphone
Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone was the last major analog sound-on-disc system and the only one th ...
sound on disc process before a switch to the sound-on-film format early in the 1930s. These were the first
major film studio
Major film studios are production and distribution companies that release a substantial number of films annually and consistently command a significant share of box office revenue in a given market. In the American and international markets, the ...
-backed
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 ...
s, initially showcased with the 1926 synchronized scored features ''
Don Juan
Don Juan (), also known as Don Giovanni (Italian), is a legendary, fictional Spanish libertine who devotes his life to seducing women. Famous versions of the story include a 17th-century play, '' El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra'' ...
'' and ''
The Better 'Ole
''The Better 'Ole'', also called ''The Romance of Old Bill'', is an Edwardian musical comedy with a book by Bruce Bairnsfather and Arthur Elliot, music by Herman Darewski, and lyrics by Percival Knight and James Heard, based on the cartoon charac ...
''. Although independent producers like
Lee de Forest
Lee de Forest (August 26, 1873 – June 30, 1961) was an American inventor and a fundamentally important early pioneer in electronics. He invented the first electronic device for controlling current flow; the three-element "Audion" triode va ...
's
Phonofilm
Phonofilm is an optical sound-on-film system developed by inventors Lee de Forest and Theodore Case in the early 1920s.
Introduction
In 1919 and 1920, Lee De Forest, inventor of the audion tube, filed his first patents on a sound-on-film process, ...
were successfully making sound film shorts as early as 1922, they were very limited in their distribution and their audio was generally not as loud and clear in theaters as Vitaphone's. The success of the early Vitaphone shorts, initially filmed only in New York, helped launch the sound revolution in Hollywood.
Overview
The series featured were many of the great
vaudeville
Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition ...
and musical performers of the 1920s. Classical musicians who dominated the early days of recorded sound made their film debuts, along with the many future stars of radio's "golden age":
Fred Allen
John Florence Sullivan (May 31, 1894 – March 17, 1956), known professionally as Fred Allen, was an American comedian. His absurdist, topically pointed radio program ''The Fred Allen Show'' (1932–1949) made him one of the most popular and for ...
,
Jack Benny
Jack Benny (born Benjamin Kubelsky, February 14, 1894 – December 26, 1974) was an American entertainer who evolved from a modest success playing violin on the vaudeville circuit to one of the leading entertainers of the twentieth century with ...
,
George Burns
George Burns (born Nathan Birnbaum; January 20, 1896March 9, 1996) was an American comedian, actor, writer, and singer, and one of the few entertainers whose career successfully spanned vaudeville, radio, film and television. His arched eyebr ...
,
Gracie Allen
Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen (July 26, 1895 – August 27, 1964) was an American vaudevillian, singer, actress, and comedian who became internationally famous as the zany partner and comic foil of husband George Burns, her straight man, ap ...
,
Edgar Bergen
Edgar John Bergen (born Edgar John Berggren; February 16, 1903 – September 30, 1978) was an American ventriloquist, actor, comedian, vaudevillian and radio performer, best known for his proficiency in ventriloquism and his characters Ch ...
,
Jack Haley
John Joseph Haley Jr. (August 10, 1897 – June 6, 1979) was an American actor, comedian, dancer, radio host, singer and vaudevillian. He was best known for his portrayal of the Tin Man and his farmhand counterpart Hickory in the 1939 Metro-G ...
just to name a few. Several top stars at Warner Bros. and other studios like
Joe E. Brown
Joseph Evans Brown (July 28, 1891 – July 6, 1973) was an American actor and comedian, remembered for his friendly screen persona, comic timing, and enormous elastic-mouth smile. He was one of the most popular American comedians in the 19 ...
,
Joan Blondell
Joan Blondell (born Rose Joan Bluestein; August 30, 1906 – December 25, 1979) was an American actress who performed in film and television for 50 years.
Blondell began her career in vaudeville. After winning a beauty pageant, she embarked on ...
,
William Demarest
Carl William Demarest (February 27, 1892 – December 27, 1983) was an American character actor, known especially for his roles in screwball comedies by Preston Sturges and for playing Uncle Charley in the sitcom ''My Three Sons'' Demarest, w ...
,
Claire Trevor
Claire Trevor ( Wemlinger; March 8, 1910April 8, 2000) was an American actress. She appeared in 65 feature films from 1933 to 1982, winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in ''Key Largo'' (1948), and received nomina ...
,
Sylvia Sidney
Sylvia Sidney (born Sophia Kosow; August 8, 1910 – July 1, 1999) was an American stage, screen and film actress whose career spanned over 70 years. She rose to prominence in dozens of leading roles in the 1930s. She was nominated for the Aca ...
,
Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey DeForest Bogart (; December 25, 1899 – January 14, 1957), nicknamed Bogie, was an American film and stage actor. His performances in Classical Hollywood cinema films made him an American cultural icon. In 1999, the American Film In ...
and
Spencer Tracy
Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (April 5, 1900 – June 10, 1967) was an American actor. He was known for his natural performing style and versatility. One of the major stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, Tracy was the first actor to win two cons ...
first appeared on screen in ten-minute dramatic and comedy sketches, as did a few silent stars making the transition like
Blanche Sweet
Sarah Blanche Sweet (June 18, 1896 – September 6, 1986) was an American silent film actress who began her career in the earliest days of the Hollywood motion picture film industry.
Early life
Born Sarah Blanche Sweet (though her first na ...
.
Al Jolson
Al Jolson (born Eizer Yoelson; June 9, 1886 – October 23, 1950) was a Lithuanian-American Jews, Jewish singer, comedian, actor, and vaudevillian. He was one of the United States' most famous and highest-paid stars of the 1920s, and was self-bi ...
filmed ''
A Plantation Act
''A Plantation Act'' (1926) is an early Vitaphone sound-on-disc short film starring Al Jolson, the first film that Jolson starred in. Jolson in blackface sings three of his hit songs: " April Showers", "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody" ...
'' in August 1926, a full year before ''
The Jazz Singer
''The Jazz Singer'' is a 1927 American musical drama film directed by Alan Crosland. It is the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music score as well as lip-synchronous singing and speech (in several isolated ...
''. When Warner Brothers decided to promote the feature as Jolson's talkie debut, the earlier short was removed from circulation. Initially thought lost, it was restored, in part by the Vitaphone Project's efforts, for a laser disc set in the 1990s and later released on DVD with the feature.
At the time, there was much fear that these little films (and the sound features that followed) would kill vaudeville, a fear that was justified for many individual performers. While there was always a chance that a stage performer could become a household name by appearing in these, his or her act could no longer be repeated on stage, town after town, once one filmed performance appeared in theaters across the country. A few comedy acts for Vitaphone even made light of this fact, particularly
Georgie Price
George Edwards "Georgie" Price (January 5, 1901 – May 10, 1964) was an American vaudeville singer and comic who performed in Vitaphone shorts in the 1920s and 1930s.
Early life, family and education
Price was born on the Lower East Side of ...
’s 1929 title, ''Don't Get Nervous''.
Although the term "Vitaphone Variety" was still used with some Warner film shorts running under one reel (or 10 minutes) well into the 1950s, the trade periodicals marketed them under different logos after the 1931–32 season: Pepper Pots and Vitaphone ''Novelties'' (after 1936), while lengthier productions (running two reels or 20 minutes) morphed into the
Broadway Brevities
Broadway Brevities are two-reel (17–21 minutes long) musical and dramatic film shorts produced by Warner Bros. between 1931 and 1943. The series continued as Warner Specials in later years.
Overview
Other titles used for these black and white ...
. By this time, the primary producer in charge was
Samuel Sax
Samuel Sax (September 5, 1880 –January 2, 1962) was an American film producer. He produced 80 films between 1925 and 1946, including the last films of Roscoe Arbuckle. From 1938 to 1941, Sax headed Warner Brothers's British subsidiary at T ...
, who oversaw the majority of the New York filmed productions. Later titles completed in California in the forties and fifties sometimes recycled the "Vitaphone Variety" logo, but were usually marketed in the trade periodicals as either "Hollywood Novelties" or "Warner Novelties" and were mostly documentary rather than musical or comedy acts. Among this later group, two 1945-46 titles, ''
Story of a Dog'' and ''
Smart as a Fox'', were nominees for the
Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film
The Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film is an award presented at the annual Academy Awards ceremony. The award has existed, under various names, since 1957.
From 1936 until 1956 there were two separate awards, "Best Short Subject, One- ...
in the one-reel category.
Recent rediscovery
The impact that the earliest Vitaphone Varieties had on world cinema has been a frequent footnote in many film history books, but it was only in recent decades that books have bothered to analyze them in depth (among them, Roy Liebman's ''Vitaphone Films'' and Edwin M. Bradley's ''The First Hollywood Sound Shorts, 1926–1931'').
The
Vitaphone Project
Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone was the last major analog sound-on-disc system and the only one th ...
only started in 1991 rounding up missing discs and matching them with films made before the studio switched to optical film soundtracks. Three years later, MGM/UA issued the first group of them to laser disc, with Warner releasing the first significant number on DVD as part of a multi-disc edition of ''
The Jazz Singer
''The Jazz Singer'' is a 1927 American musical drama film directed by Alan Crosland. It is the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music score as well as lip-synchronous singing and speech (in several isolated ...
''. Since then, the
Warner Archive Collection
The Warner Archive Collection is a home video division for releasing classic and cult films from Warner Bros.' library. It started as a manufactured-on-demand (MOD) DVD series by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment on March 23, 2009, with the inte ...
has made more available in a series of sets, as well as re-releasing ''Don Juan'' with its accompanying shorts.
List of Vitaphone Varieties
The following list is not complete but fairly close. The 1926–1932 titles (the official "Vitaphone Varieties") are arranged by the Vitaphone title card numbers. They are then grouped by the year in which they were filmed, but not necessarily the same year they were released to theaters. If known, that date is listed right after the major credits (just the key director, if known, and the performers). Sometimes the date
Film Daily
''The Film Daily'' was a daily publication that existed from 1918 to 1970 in the United States. It was the first daily newspaper published solely for the film industry. It covered the latest trade news, film reviews, financial updates, informatio ...
reviewed it or the copyright date (©) is listed. DVD availability is also listed at the end of each line.
[''Motion Pictures 1912–1939 Catalog of Copyright Entries''. 1951. Library of Congress]
1926
Listed by Vitaphone number. Filmed in 1926 in New York City.
1927
Listed by Vitaphone number. Filmed in 1927 both in
Brooklyn
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
(NYC) and
Hollywood
Hollywood usually refers to:
* Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California
* Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States
Hollywood may also refer to:
Places United States
* Hollywood District (disambiguation)
* Hollywood, ...
(LA)
1928
Listed by Vitaphone number. Filmed in 1928 in Hollywood unless marked (NYC)
1929
Filmed in 1929 in Hollywood (LA) and Brooklyn (NYC).
1930
Filmed in 1930 in Hollywood (LA) and Brooklyn (NYC).
1931
Filmed in 1931 in Brooklyn, New York.
1932
Vitaphone Varieties in Technicolor (1929–1930)
Warners Brothers and its Vitaphone and
First National subsidiaries produced more features and shorts in two-strip
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 ...
during the late twenties and early thirties than any other studio. Unfortunately not all of them survive in their original format as black and white TV prints are sometimes the remaining available ones. The following were filmed in Hollywood in the fall of 1929 through the spring of 1930. One title, ''
Bubbles'', is available in black and white form on
Meet Me In St. Louis
''Meet Me in St. Louis'' is a 1944 American Christmas film, Christmas musical film made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Divided into a series of seasonal vignettes, starting with Summer 1903, it relates the story of a year in the life of the Smith famil ...
(2-disc) DVD & ''Vitaphone Cavalcade of Musical Comedy Shorts'' (Warner Archive) DVD
Assorted Vitaphone promotionals and commercials
Not a complete list, but a select number of 1926–1931 shorts of interest
* ''The Birth of the Telephone'' /
Thomas A. Watson (former assistant to
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell (, born Alexander Bell; March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was a Scottish-born inventor, scientist and engineer who is credited with patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Te ...
) / June 1926
* ''Reverend J. Ford and Reverend H. Hickman: 100th anniversary of Jamestown, New York'' / June 1927
* ''Special Star Number for Theater Opening'' /
Al Jolson
Al Jolson (born Eizer Yoelson; June 9, 1886 – October 23, 1950) was a Lithuanian-American Jews, Jewish singer, comedian, actor, and vaudevillian. He was one of the United States' most famous and highest-paid stars of the 1920s, and was self-bi ...
/ December 1928
* ''Voice of Vitaphone'' / August 1929 / Short reel numbered #877
* ''Intimate Dinner in Celebration of Warner Bros. Silver Jubilee'' /
John G. Adolfi (director) / August 1930 /
The Jazz Singer
''The Jazz Singer'' is a 1927 American musical drama film directed by Alan Crosland. It is the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music score as well as lip-synchronous singing and speech (in several isolated ...
DVD
* ''Chesterfield Celebrities'' /
Clark & McCullough / January 18, 1931 / 22 minute special
* ''Graduation Day in Bugland'' /
animated cartoon
Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most anima ...
/ March 1, 1931
* ''Slopes of the Andes'' / March 29, 1931 / commercial for American Coffee
Pepper Pots (1931–1936)
"Pepper Pots" replaced "Vitaphone Varieties" as a marketing name for Warner's black & white one-reel (running under 11 minutes) shorts released between 1931 and 1936. These included comedy acts, a series spotlighting famous songwriters and a number of sports, animal subjects and other human-interest documentary films.
Vitaphone "Novelties" and revived Vitaphone Varieties (1936–1939)
All of these are black and white shorts, running under 11 minutes and completed at the Brooklyn (NYC) facilities.
Hollywood Novelties / Warner Novelties (1940–1953)
Most of these were completed in California, explaining the change in series name. In the mid-forties, the studio reverted to the old "Vitaphone Varieties" logo with a number of titles, although these black and white documentaries (all running 8–11 minutes in length) were very different than the twenties and thirties musical and comedy acts. After a few years absence, they were revived as "Warner Novelties", consisting mostly of newsreel and earlier recycled footage stretching past the decades. Excluded from the following list (for space reasons) are the first two
Joe McDoakes
''Joe McDoakes'' is an American short film comedy series produced and directed by Richard L. Bare for Warner Bros. A total of 63 black and white live action one-reel short subjects films were made and released between 1942 and 1956. The ''Joe ...
comedies of 1942 that were issued under the Hollywood Novelty logo, those featuring archery expert
Howard Hill and compilation director
Robert Youngson. See their articles for further information.
See also
*
List of vaudeville performers: A-K (many appearing in the films)
*
List of vaudeville performers: L-Z
*
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 ...
*
Vitaphone
Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone was the last major analog sound-on-disc system and the only one th ...
*
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (commonly known as Warner Bros. or abbreviated as WB) is an American film and entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California, and a subsidiary of Warner Bros. D ...
*
List of short subjects by Hollywood studio#Warner Brothers
Notes
References
*
*
*
* {{Cite book, last=Maltin, first=Leonard, title=The Great Movie Shorts, url=https://books.google.com/books?id=w22GAAAAIAAJ, year=1972, publisher=
Bonanza Books
The Crown Publishing Group is a subsidiary of Penguin Random House that publishes across several fiction and non-fiction categories. Originally founded in 1933 as a remaindered books wholesaler called Outlet Book Company, the firm expanded int ...
, isbn=9780517504550
* ''Motion Pictures 1912–1939 Catalog of Copyright Entries'' 1951 Library of Congres
* ''Motion Pictures 1940–1949 Catalog of Copyright Entries'' 1953 Library of Congres
* ''Motion Pictures 1950–1959 Catalog of Copyright Entries'' 1960 Library of Congres
BoxOffice back issue scans available
External links
The Vitaphone ProjectFilm Daily linksindividual titles covered in more detail on the IMDb.comPepper Pots on IMDb.com
Vitaphone short films
Warner Bros. short films