The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930 [Hardcover]

Scott Eyman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 13, 1997

The story of Hollywood's transition from the silent era to that of sound. In that period, heralded by the words of Al Jolson in "The Jazz Singer", fortunes were made and lost, and the American film industry came fully into its own.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Nowadays the "talkie" seems, like some other technological breakthroughs, to have obliterated its less-advanced predecessor, the silent movie, in one fell swoop. The reality, of course, is more complex. As Scott Eyman writes in his prologue to The Speed of Sound, "To examine this period of unparalleled industrial change, it is necessary to reverse the perspective, to give a fair, detailed idea of what silents were like to the people who made and watched them, and how talkies permanently changed the creative and personal equations." Eyman's eye-opening book fulfills this mission. He focuses on just five years--1926 through 1930--but tells the story on many levels. We learn about the technology, the details of actors' and technicians' lives, the elaborate business machinations associated with the rise of sound, and the resulting transformation of not just the movies but Hollywood itself. The Speed of Sound fills a gap in any film buff's library.

From Library Journal

The transition from silent film to sound has been covered in many histories of Hollywood but nowhere so thoroughly and delightfully as here. The author of such biographies as Mary Pickford: America's Sweetheart (LJ 2/1/90), Eyman combines a historian's zeal for detail and context with a storyteller's talent for the perfect illustrative anecdote. The author deftly juggles a number of stories, including film-by-film accounts of key transition directors King Vidor and F.W. Murnau. He also manages to describe the technical aspects of his story without bogging down in the kind of jargon that would put a lay reader to sleep. A remarkable book that belongs in every film history collection.?Thomas Wiener, "Satellite DIRECT"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1ST edition (March 13, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684811626
• ISBN-13: 978-0684811628
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,156,605 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ONE OF THE BEST FILM BOOKS EVER WRITTEN, July 22, 2000

By 

anonymous (san francisco, ca United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930 (Hardcover)

You know you're dealing with a serious achievement when you read a book and can't conceive how one person was able to write it. Eyman does some amazing things in this book. He covers the BUSINESS side of the talkie revolution. He covers the TECHNOLOGICAL side of it. He covers the ARTISTIC side of it. And he covers the HUMAN side of it. Moreover, he does this in the context of a flowing narrative that drops some stories here and picks them up there, juggles one aspect with another; sets them aside, traces another development . . . without ever losing the flow, without ever losing the reader. I've read a lot of film books, and the skill and the intelligence of this one just amazed me. This is a dazzling piece of work, and it reads like a really good novel. I couldn't recommend a book more enthusiastically.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hollywood's turbulent era, October 10, 2001

By 

Bruce Calvert "silent movie collector" (Dallas, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930 (Hardcover)

Scott Eyman's masterful research of the Talkie Revolution is a must-read for silent-film and early sound-film fans. He covers early unsuccessful sound-film attempts, some of the last great silent film classics like THE CROWD and SUNRISE, Warners' and Fox's different sound systems, and many other topics. The main scope of the book is the period from 1926-1930. The focus of the book is on how the business of filmmaking and the art of filmmaking was completely changed with the coming of the talking movie. Careers were born and destroyed overnight. Sometimes a performer's voice was a problem in sound films. In other cases, like John Gilbert's, the studio thought that he was too expensive and the type of film that was his forte became passe. For a couple of years, the sound-man was the most important person on a movie set.

Eyeman's book is comprehensive, but not comprehensive enough. Curiously, he gives short shrift to some comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Raymond Griffith. Except for a brief mention of the British change-over, the book focuses exclusively on Hollywood studios. He covers all of the bases such as legal wrangling over patents, financial profits and losses, the problems that studio artists encountered in making sound films, and the many poor films that were produced in the early sound era. If you like classic films, you will love this book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If You Have Any Interest In Film History, September 19, 2004

By 

Clyde A. Warden Jr. (Taiwan (http://cwarden.org)) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930 (Hardcover)

A history of the transition from silent cinema to sound, this book was much better than I expected, mostly because Eyman spends a lot of time on the technical details, which of course I enjoy. My work in film/video production from the time I was a teen to the digital technology I use no for my class Websites, make me very aware of the most complex and troublesome of issues--synchronization. Eyman's book does of course go into the personalities of the transition, from the movie Mongols like Fox and the Warner brothers, but the book never sinks into gossip. I was most impressed with Eyman's grasp and appreciation of the film art form and how that was forever lost, replaced with talking that often explains rather than do. That criticism is true right up to today's Hollywood movies that spend so much of their time explaining!