Customer Reviews

The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926-1930

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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.

If you have a passing interest in this period, this is not for you. It is a very detailed -- often overdetailed -- history of the coming of the talkies. Everyone who writes on silents tends to overpraise them,and Eyman is no exception, but this is not a screed and not overly nostalgic, just a good revealing history of the the time.

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.

I am a huge silent movie buff. This book is utterly fascinating. The detail given to the movie industry at the time, the descriptions of movie goers reactions to the new fangled soundies and the reactions of the movie makers puts you right into the era. We are so numb in our current times that very little amazes and excites us. Reading this book transports you to the late 1920s and the wonders (and problems) that sound movies created. Excellent reading!!

Silent comedy gets ignored in this book. I read every word and found no explanation for why the author would fail to make no more than passing references to the silent work of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. Though Eyman goes into great detail on THE CROWD and SUNRISE, surely some editor should have pointed out the need for greater balance by bringing into the book an analysis of at least one comedy. Comedy is what many people think of first when they think of silent film

Following in the footsteps of his biographies of Mary Pickford and Ernst Lubitsch (his best book), Scott Eyman tells the story of how an industry changed in spite of itself. We are all familiar with Jolson's outburst of speech and how sound ruined many careers, but this book tells about how it had to be. Sound came in not because of any artistic desire (that wouldn't happen for a few years) but because one man (Sam Warner) at one studio wanted to make his company more than it was and somehow knew that the public would be ready for something new. That it succeeded beyond his wildest dreams and changed an art form forever is what Eyman illustrates with this magnificent history. Some of the familiar is here (the decline of John Gilbert, the opening of THE JAZZ SINGER amidst the death of one of the brothers Warner) mixed in with the making of the silent era's greatest films (SUNRISE, THE CROWD) and the recollections by artists and technicians of how crazy it really was-the pages instructing projectionists how to splice films with sound on discs is almost too funny to believe. Profusely illustrated and with an exhaustive bibliography, THE SPEED OF SOUND is a welcome addition to both film lovers as well as those of us fascinated by a time when it seemed that every day something new was about to happen