Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet!
I have always wondered, did Al Jolson know what he was saying with those eleven very simple words in 1927’s The Jazz Singer? Did writer Alfred Cohn know what he was doing when he put those words down on paper? Did director Alan Crosland know what he was seeing in the room where those words were being said?
Those eleven simple words, four seconds of screen time, kicked off a revolution. Because those eleven words were the first words of spoken dialogue ever put on screen in a motion picture.
Wait a Minute
America was comfortably in the roaring twenties. Prohibition was in full swing. And the movie business in Hollywoodland (as it was known then) was still in its infancy. The Warner brothers, who produced The Jazz Singer, founded Warner Features Company just 16 years prior. Silent pictures were still the rage, and in a lot of ways, seemed to be the only way the art form would exist. You want to hear someone talk? You go see a play.
But on the 6th of October, 1927, everything changed. 20 minutes into a movie that had already had four musical numbers, Al Jolson speaks those eleven simple words. It’s hard to convey the ground shift that the entertainment world must have felt. Those eleven simple words were like Kennedy’s promise to go to the moon. It would be like seeing that walking brachiosaurus in Jurassic Park. (Sure we had seen computer generated imagery before 1993, but to see a living, breathing animal, an animal that had never been seen before, brought to life on screen using purely computers, blew our minds.)
You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet!
It’s also important to note that The Jazz Singer wasn’t the first time audio was put to film. Music had already been done, removing the need for a live orchestra to be playing in time with a silent film. Speeches had been filmed. Short “talkies” had been made. But this was the first in a feature length film. The Jazz Singer only had two scenes with dialogue. But it was enough.
To explain the plot of The Jazz Singer in 2022 would be 95 years too late. The story of a child defying his religious father to become an entertainer is one of the touchstones of Hollywood stories. Yes, the movie does end with our hero Jackie Robin in blackface. But the movie’s standing in cinematic lore is less to do with that, and more to the simple fact that The Jazz Singer was the first to do this thing that we all, as a society, now take for granted.
Just know that for four seconds, 95 years ago today, and through eleven simple words, the entertainment world, and the world in general, began to change.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet!
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