Introduction:
Beyond Vitaphone:
The Early Sound Short

Introduction: Beyond Vitaphone: The Early Sound Short

Rob King

One thing about shorts: When they’re good,
like the little girl in the book, they’re very good,
but when they’re bad – whooey.

“Thoughts on Shorts”, Exhibitors Herald-World

(22 February 1930): 27.

T

he perception of the short subject’s low stand-
ing within the hierarchy of American commercial
film production almost goes without saying, but
perhaps nowhere more so than in the years

following sound’s advent. The silent era could at least
boast a number of enduring achievements within the
short-subject realm: the one- and two-reel master-
pieces of the great slapstick artists; the first “moving
picture newspapers”, or newsreels; action-packed
serials starring Pearl White and Ruth Roland – all of
which continued to be produced long after the feature
film’s emergence as the industry’s chief commodity.
But when the sound-era equivalent would seem to
be, say, the violent knockabout of Columbia’s long-
running Three Stooges shorts (1934–1959) or Flash
Gordon’s serialized adventures on the planet Mongo
(1936) – well, for some, “whooey” might seem the
appropriate response.

Not, of course, that early sound-era shorts

have been entirely overlooked in the existing schol-
arship. Warner Bros.’ pioneering sound-on-disc Vita-
phone shorts loom large in conventional histories of
the coming of sound, as do Walt Disney’s early
experiments with sound-image relations in cartoons
like Steamboat Willie (1928). There is also, in the
existing scholarship, a familiar defense of the short
subject during this period, one that defers to their
important role within the “balanced program” con-
cept of the era’s exhibition practices. Short subjects,
this line of argument goes, had value not only as a

necessary “buffer” to the feature presentation, but
also in ensuring the diversity of appeals necessary
to sustain a mass audience. Travelogues, cartoons,
slapstick, and sing-alongs all constituted just a frac-
tion of the many and varied genres of short subjects
during this period, to say nothing of the more outré
examples featuring, for example, talking dogs
(MGM’s “Dogville” comedies, 1929–1931), golf in-
struction (Vitaphone’s “How I Play Golf, by Bobby
Jones” shorts, 1931–1932), and glee club recitals
(Educational’s “Spirit of the Campus” series,
1932–1933), among many others. So even if the
feature was disappointing, audiences might still have
found something to enjoy in, say, the spectacle of
all-dog casts performing genre burlesques, as in The
Dogway Melody (1931).

Still, none of this quite gets us to the specific

historicity of the short subject qua short subject; that
is, the changing parameters – industrial, economic,
textual, cultural – that shaped short-format filmmak-
ing during this period. Conventional film histories still
fail to treat early sound shorts as much more than
experimental steps on a teleological path toward
feature-length talkies. Meanwhile, the “balanced pro-
gram” framework only explains the continued pres-
ence of shorts on exhibition schedules; it does not,
in itself, secure any further analysis beyond the obvi-
ous fact of the short subject’s heterogeneity. (Which
is why, no doubt, most film history textbooks are
content simply to summarize the various genres of
short-subject production during this period.) In the
spirit of provocation, then, let me begin this special
issue of Film History dedicated to the early sound
short with a bolder gambit: namely, that innovations
and transformations within the short subject were
among the crucial capstones of the classic studio

Film History, Volume 23, pp. 247–250, 2011. Copyright © 2011 Indiana University Press

ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America

FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 3, 2011 – p. 247

system’s consolidation at the end of the 1920s; that,
in fact, Hollywood’s “grand design” – as a set of
business practices organized around the production
and distribution of classical sound film, both as tex-
tual form and as viewing experience – is inconceiv-
able outside of developments in the short-subject
field.

1

At least three assertions can be made under

this rubric, as follows:

First, the short subject vouchsafed the stand-

ardization of film exhibition and spectatorship at the
beginning of the sound era. A major component of
the “evening’s entertainment” ideal of 1920s theater
programming had been the inclusion of live pro-
logues and presentation acts; yet sound short sub-
jects would make the practice largely obsolete. The
very raison d’être of Warner Bros.’ pioneering Vita-
phone shorts – which initially emphasized noted
vaudeville performers and other “canned” stage acts
– had been to provide smaller exhibitors with a cost-
cutting substitute for live performances. Soon, indus-
try insiders and commentators were lending their
voices to the death-knell chorus. As slapstick pro-
ducer Jack White bluntly asserted in 1929: “Short
dialogue comedies will kill the presentation racket.
… [T]he thing is obvious, it speaks for itself”.

2

In a

similar spirit, Martin J. Quigley, editor of the Exhibitors
Herald-World, declared the same year: “The short
subject, with dialogue and music, … makes possible
the return to an all-film policy which would not other-
wise be possible. Pictures for picture houses is the
best policy for the industry at large.”

3

One may, of course, wonder who Quigley had

in mind by the phrase “industry at large”. For the truth
was that these developments ultimately served the
interests of producers far more than exhibitors: thea-
ter owners had in many cases embraced live pres-
entations, at least initially, as a way to assert their
autonomy by differentiating their shows from com-
peting theaters, while the major studios had long
discouraged the practice because they diverted po-
tential film rental revenue to live performers. Here,
then, was a way in which the substitution of sound
shorts for live acts could consolidate power in the
producers’ hands.

But it was also a way of standardizing specta-

torship and the viewing situation, as the first two
essays in this issue demonstrate. Phil Wagner’s
opening paper richly evokes the frequently bizarre
confections of live entertainments offered in pro-
logues in the years before the sound short, examin-
ing the stage presentations produced by Fanchon

and Marco, Inc., for the West Coast Theatre circuit.
The notion of spectatorial “distraction” so famously
evoked by Siegfried Kracauer in his description of
Berlin movie palaces of the 1920s hardly does justice
to the prologues here described, the outlandish
modernity of which provoked complaints from pro-
ducers whose feature films were overshadowed.

4

As

such, moreover, Wagner’s essay provides an ideal
starting point for assessing just how drastically
moviegoing would change in subsequent years, as
distraction on this scale became mostly a thing of the
past – a theme that Nicholas Sammond’s essay next
takes up by examining the spatial relations of sound-
era exhibition. With the disappearance of live acts,
Sammond suggests, the three-dimensional space of
the theater was now fully subordinated to the two-di-
mensional space of the film screen; equally, the local
and neighborhood orientation of silent-era exhibition,
when theater owners had drawn upon regional net-
works of live entertainers, was now increasingly con-
strained in the face of Hollywood’s more uniform
entertainment imaginary. Yet uniformity was here in-
separable from questions of racial politics; for, as
Sammond also argues, animated sound shorts
helped enforce a standardized regime of stereotyp-
ing that displaced the more variable articulation of
racial meanings afforded in an earlier era of live
presentations.

Second, the short subject functioned as a labo-

ratory for working through the textual practices and
cultural meanings of the sound film. In a sense, this
is the most obvious point. The innovations of Lee de
Forest’s Phonofilm technology (debuting in 1923),
Warners’ Vitaphone (in 1926), and the Fox-Case
Movietone system (1927) – all these technologies
were first experimented with and brought before the
public in short-subject novelties. The lower-risk envi-
ronment of short-subject production might thus
rightly be viewed as a necessary “incubation stage”
– a testing ground for judging audience receptivity
and determining textual and technological standards
– prior to sound’s incorporation into full-length fea-
tures.

Still, as Charles Wolfe argued some twenty

years ago, it would be a mistake to consider the
Vitaphone or Movietone shorts merely as spring-
boards for subsequent technological development,
experimental steps in a linear history whose inevita-
ble destination was the classical feature film. Dia-
logue features, Wolfe wrote then, “do not ‘use up’ the
experimental work of the shorts but have an ongoing

FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 3, 2011 – p. 248

248

FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 3 (2011)

Rob King

relation to them” – a relation, furthermore, that em-
braced both continuity and difference.

5

One area of

difference, for example, was in terms of sound’s
implications for classical illusionism. For, as Kather-
ine Spring argues in her essay here, sound added at
least two new illusionist wrinkles to American cin-
ema’s textual processes: that of embodiment (the
illusion that the body was the source of the voice) and
that of simultaneity (that the filming of the image and
the voice recording occurred concomitantly). Yet, as
Spring also shows, the conditions of feature-film
production meant that illusionist practices estab-
lished for shorts could not always be smoothly trans-
ferred to features – here examined through the
“scandal” of Richard Barthelmess’s lip-synching in
the feature Weary River (1929). A similar sensibility
informs Wolfe’s contribution to this issue, in which he
revisits and extends his earlier work on Vitaphone
vaudeville from a perspective attuned to the formal
conventions of dialogue humor. What Wolfe finds in
the “cross-talk” comedy shorts of George Burns and
Gracie Allen (1929–1933) is thus not classicism, nor
merely “canned” vaudeville, but rather a new, inter-
medial style of film comedy in which stage traditions
of verbal byplay were matched with a disorienting
cinematic textuality.

Third, the film industry’s structure as a mature

oligopoly, beginning in the early sound era, was se-
cured in part through the majors’ involvement in short-
subject production. The move by the major studios
into the production of in-house short subjects during
the mid-1920s – headed by Paramount and Loew’s-
MGM – represented a fundamental step in their quest
to dominate the film industry. Being able to provide
a “full service” – that is, short subjects as well as
features – meant that the majors could now make
inroads onto the independent-dominated market for
shorts and thereby cement the entire industry under
their control. It also meant that the majors could more
easily extend the practice of block-booking to short
subjects, requiring exhibitors to book packages of
their shorts as a condition of accepting features, a
practice known as “full-line forcing”. The major stu-
dios, in sum, were now firmly in the business of
producing exhibition programs, not simply feature
films, and they dictated to a greater extent than ever
before the evening’s entertainment offered at their
contracted theaters.

Such business tactics were controversial, of

course, not least because they stripped exhibitors of
any last vestige of genuine autonomy in catering to

their publics. The Federal Trade Commission cited
the practice of full-line forcing in its initial 1928 litiga-
tion against the majors. Although the practice was
ultimately found legal by the US circuit court of ap-
peals in April 1932, exhibitor protests gathered re-
newed

strength

following

Franklin

Delano

Roosevelt’s election victory later that year.

6

Indeed,

in a telling indication of exhibitor discontent, the issue
of full-line forcing represented one of the few areas
of compromise grudgingly made by the industry’s
moguls under the National Industrial Recovery Act of
1933, which required industries to draw up codes of
fair competition.

7

Nor was it only exhibitors who struggled under

this system. If anything, the situation for independent
producers and distributors of shorts was even more
fraught, forcing them either to seek distribution deals
through the majors or risk bankruptcy. These dilem-
mas form the backdrop for my own essay here on
Educational Pictures, a company that, despite its
name, had been the leading independent distributor
of short-format slapstick comedy of the late silent
era. Increasingly restrictive economic conditions in
the early 1930s, I argue, forced Educational to adapt
its comedy output to déclassé markets, such as the
small-town and rural circuits marginalized within the
majors’ oligopoly – a process with lasting implica-
tions for slapstick’s place within the era’s taste hier-
archies. Also stressing the relation between short
subjects and rural/small-town audiences is Ross
Melnick’s paper on “Major” Edward Bowes’ “Ama-
teur Hour” series, a multimedia franchise in the 1930s
that included radio shows, touring performances,
and filmed short subjects – and a precursor for
today’s “vote-for-your-favorite” television reality pro-
grams like American Idol. Within this media empire,
Melnick suggests, Bowes’ filmed shorts played an
important role in bringing New Deal-era fantasies of
success and mobility to regions not yet covered by
his touring shows and radio broadcasts; yet, in so
doing, the films also sacrificed the aura of “liveness”
– and the real-time ability of listeners to phone in and
vote – that had distinguished his radio broadcasts,
thus proving disappointments to the small-town pub-
lics to which they were largely addressed.

It will already be clear from these prefatory

comments that the title of this special issue, “Beyond
Vitaphone”, is not to be taken too literally; there is,
after all, nothing to be gained from dogmatically
ignoring Warners’ sound shorts as a topic of re-
search. Rather, “Beyond Vitaphone” stands as a

FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 3, 2011 – p. 249

Introduction: Beyond Vitaphone: The Early Sound Short

FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 3 (2011)

249

metaphor for reassessing the dominant historiog-
raphic frameworks that have reduced the era’s
shorts to the servant’s role in introducing sound
technology. The contributors to this issue all share a
commitment to challenging those frameworks; they
each examine the complex heterogeneity of the early
sound short within historically specific contexts and,
in so doing, draw upon untapped archives and pri-
mary sources. That the topics of their papers are,
furthermore, so entirely new testifies to the impor-
tance of continued research outside of Hollywood’s

own feature-oriented canons of cultural value during
this transformative period in the production and re-
ception of the classical American cinema.

Rob King
University of Toronto

Acknowledgements: My thanks to all the contributors,
and to Richard Koszarski for his guidance, generosity,
and patience in the preparation of this special issue.

1.

The term “grand design” is Tino Balio’s, from his
Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business
Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1995).

2.

“Audien Shorts Will Kill Presentations, Declares Jack
White”, Exhibitors Herald-World (27 April 1929): 36.

3.

Martin J. Quigley, editorial, Exhibitors Herald-World
(25 May 1929): 18.

4.

Siegfried Kracauer, “The Cult of Distraction”, in The
Mass Ornament, Thomas Levin (ed. and trans.)
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995),
323–328.

5.

Charles Wolfe, “Vitaphone Shorts and The Jazz
Singer”, Wide Angle 12.3 (July 1990): 61.

6.

“Tying-In Shorts with Features Is Lawful, Legal Opin-
ion Holds”, Motion Picture Herald (16 April 1932): 20.

7.

Whereas previously exhibitors had often been forced
to accept many more major-studio short subjects
than they could possibly play in a single season – a
strategy designed to freeze out independently pro-
duced shorts – the Motion Picture Code conceded
a more equitable arrangement: distributors could
now force shorts only in proportion to the number of
rented features. For the relevant portion of the Motion
Picture Code, see “Complete Text of the Code”,
Motion Picture Herald (2 December 1933): 32.

Notes

Film History

23, 4 (2011)

Global Issues

Edited by Richard Koszarski

Film History

24, 1 (2012)

Digital Cinema

Edited by John Belton

Film History

24, 2 (2012)

Film As Literature

Edited by Stephen Bottomore

upcoming
issues/
call for
papers

FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 3, 2011 – p. 250

250

FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 3 (2011)

Rob King