Warner Brothers And The New Medium Of Radio

In the early 1900’s, as films stated centering their focus on profit, large scale studios came onto the film scene. The studios that were discussed in the chapter were: Universal, United Artists, Paramount, Warner Bros, MGM, Fox, Columbia, and RKO. These studios employed some of the biggest names in the film world at the time. Many of these studios are still in business today, and have given prominent actors and directors their shot at fame. Universal was the first studio to move to the west coast. They produced popular films such as The

The movie “Radio” is the tale of a young African-American man who suffers from severe mental retardness and his journey to fame from football in the small South Carolinian town of Anderson. James “Radio” Kennedy is befriended by the T. L. Hanna High School head football coach, Coach Jones, and begins to help as an “assistant coach” of some sort. Eventually, James begins to attend Hanna High as an eleventh grade student due to the persistent efforts of Coach Jones.

During 1926 and 1927, the Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. and engineers from Bell Laboratories and Western Electric, began working on motion picture with sound. In a factory in Burbank, California, this team created the first movie with completely synchronized singing and speaking (The Jazz Singer) in 1927 (Thomas Riggs, 2015). After this film, movies became more popular, a daily occurrence in most people’s lives. Not to mention, a new multimillion dollar business had opened. According to statistica.com, the average income of the Warner Bros. in 2015 is 1,539,2 million dollars while Disney’s income is 124.7 million. That is an incredible amount of money. The invention of synced motion picture with sound changed views of theaters and movies forever, opening the public's eyes to the possibilities of the

One hundred and twenty years ago a young Italian, Gugliemo Marconi, from Bologna Italy, sent and received the first radio signal. Since that time the development of the radio has come a long way. From the 1920s to the 1940s radios were the main source of news and entertainment in homes across America. It was not until 1969 when the first boombox was invented. The boombox was the staple of the 1990s. As we can see in movies such as Say Anything¬¬¬— produced the same year as Do the Right Thing— the boombox became the trademark of a generation. Spike Lee comprehends the effectiveness of the boombox and cleverly develops a character based around it, Radio Raheem. Radio Raheem’s boombox gives voice to the oppressed black community in the New

The Radio was introduced to society because of the telegraph and the telephone. These inventions don’t do the same things but their similar branch of technology. “Radio technology began as “wireless telegraphy”. “It all started with the discovery of radio waves, electromagnetic waves that have the capacity to transmit music, speech, pictures and other data invisibly through air.” [Bellis] Majority of technology uses electromagnetic waves to send data information or TV broadcasts. During the 1860’s, Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell predicted the existence of radio waves; and in 1886, German physicist, Heinrich Rudolph Hertz showed how fast the variation of electric current could be placed into space in the form of

In the 1920’s, one of the biggest studios in Hollywood was Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. Or as you may know it as, “MGM”, or “the company with the lion at the beginning of movies.” This studio was founded in 1924 and their first film was released in 1925. They have released many popular films that most people have either seen or heard of as well as some not-so popular films that most people didn’t even knew existed. Some you may recognize is Poltergeist, The Hobbit, and even The Wizard of Oz. Today, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer is still one if the biggest and most influential studios in Hollywood. However, the success, figuring everything out, and how the studio became, didn’t happen overnight.

Audiences described their first experience with the new sound technology of the Vitaphone as “great”, “more real” and “miraculous” (Crafton 1999). The Vitaphone, endorsed by Warner Brothers was used to make the first half-silent, half-talking musical, The Jazz Singer in 1927, which was met with great success. The Vitaphone technology recorded sound on a separate wax disc that the projectionist then had to synchronize with the film (Miller

Satellite Radio: Will Howard Stern's move make us change the way we think about radio? Howard Stern's plan to move to satellite radio in January 2006 marks a major turning point for the radio industry. Not only has Stern brought the  possibility of subscribing to satellite radio into the minds of the millions in his audience, he has also gotten more people to start thinking and talking about what really distinguishes satellite radio from traditional radio. Satellite radio was first authorized by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) in 1997, seven years after initial applications.

There have been many different aspects that have come out of the “old-time” radio era that have impacted our culture today. It was not just the news that people learned about it was also entertainment. Usually, in a time when there was nothing to be happy about. In order for us to understand the difference that these people made in the lives of others. It needs to be understood why they were created and where they came from. Also, it was not just about the actors, it was the story lines and the dramas that helped people escape and either enjoy a good thriller or comedy show.

A company owning the means of production, distribution, and exhibition called vertical integration. It was first seen with Thomas Edison and others setting up The Motion Picture Patent Company, “The Trust”, in 1908. The companies controlled over the production and exhibition by enforcing the patent and ruling out other competitors. Edison wanted to control the distribution system across the country and the first nationwide distributor, General Film Co., was created by the MPPC in 1910. Fox Film Company who did not sell out to the Trust pioneered in vertical integration as Fox intended to produce films as a distributor. W.W. Hodkinson started fist nationwide feature film distribution and created Paramount. Zukor & Famous Players Lasky later

The first silent sound hybrid was Don Juan, which had went into production as soon as they opened their Brooklyn studio (cite). The film had been shot like a traditional silent film, and then after successful screenings a Vitaphone version was distributed. The Vitaphone prints were screened in properly equipped theaters, and an all silent version was released simultaneously (cite). Don Juan was not a sound film by any stretch of the imagination, but instead its use of sound is confined to standardize musical score and neatly timed musical cues. Less than three weeks after the Vitaphone debut, Warner Bros. announced all of its forthcoming films would use the technology. The films would also be available as silent films in theaters that were not equipped to play the sound version. In November of 1926 sensing that Warner Bros, had made a breakthrough with movie audiences four rival companies Paramount, MGM,, United Artists, and PDC offered to purchase fifty percent interest in the Vitaphone. Warner declined the offer instead looking to license the sound technology to make a higher profit. Warner Bros stock increased from $21a share in 1925 to $132 a share in 1927, and this was due to the gamble the studio took on sound

“The innovation and diffusion phases of transformation took place between 1926 and 1930. Seemingly overnight the silent film era ended; by 1930 Hollywood switched completely to talkies. In 1925 silent filmmaking was the standard; a mere five years later Hollywood produced only films with sound….Within nine months, formerly perplexing technical problems were resolved, marketing and distribution strategies were reworked, soundproof studios were constructed, and 15,000 theaters were wired for sound.” (Gomery and Pafort-Overduin)

As each generation comes and goes, the things that define them come and go as well. In the late 1700’s and early 1800’s it was the Roman Catholic church, in the mid-1800’s to the early 1900’s it was technology and industrialization, then throughout the 1900’s it was war. Today and for the past ten plus years. Media has defined our generation. All types of media, social, news, mass, etc. is everywhere we look and it is how we see and perceive the world today. This is especially true when it comes to the perception of drugs in our society today. When one thinks of the word “drug” most of the time their first thought is not a good one. Media has shifted society into thinking that most drugs are bad and have no good qualities about them and that there are very few good drugs in the world today.

The first film that showed early signs of a rise in the quality of technology was the Western “The Great Train Robbery.” When this film first came out the audience were so amazed at the fact that they could watch something on a TV or at the cinema. Although this film was very good for the 1900s it still lacked some key features that make films much easier to understand such as dialogue, sound and camera shots. The one feature of a film that developed the quickest over the period of time was sound. Sound was introduced in October 1927 in the film “The Jazz singer”, which had three song numbers and a few lines of spoken dialogue. Apart from these few songs and words, the rest of the movie was silent, but the audience still thought that it was amazing that words had been spoken in the film, they used to call it “the movie that talked”.

The silent film era was the birth of film in that it was the first time the public was able to see motion picture images moving within a frame that are not physically there. Although as the title of the era confirms there was no voice with the picture partly because it dated before recording techniques became advanced enough using mixing and modern recording techniques. Because music was not recorded at this point instead a live band, orchestra, or solo organist would perform at the theater. Unlike today where a theater could easily show over twenty films at one time because they were all filmed at the same time. During the early silent film era the film production process took much longer and as a result would be released much further apart from each other. Instead of a copious amount of movies to choose from for viewing most audiences would have three or four at most to choose from at different times of the day. Live performers provided many issues including one of the most vital methods of film music, which is synchrony. As with most professions inventers took it upon themselves to solve the issue of synchrony and provide the audiences with an even better experience other than watching people move on a screen. In this case the two inventors to work on this issue were Mr. Theodore Presser and Mr. Thomas Edison who combined the phonograph for the audio part and the vitagraph as the visual part. Later in 1926 an exhibition in New York City unveiled the Vitaphone. Perfectly synchronizing the music to the image on the screen. Now not only the music would be synchronized, but voice would also be synchronized and we would move into the era of the “Talkies”. A review from a critic at the exhibition had this to