October 6 · This Day in America
At Warner Bros.' flagship theater in Times Square, the lights go down on The Jazz Singer. For most of its length it is a silent film like any other — title cards, an orchestra in the pit. Then Al Jolson, mid-scene, turns to the audience and says, out loud, off the screen: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothing yet." The theater goes wild. Sound has arrived, and an entire art form changes overnight. Within three years the silent era is over — careers ended, studios rebuilt, an industry remade around the human voice. The film itself is bound up in the uglier conventions of its time, including Jolson in blackface, and that is part of the record too. But the moment the audience heard a man on a screen speak back to them, the twentieth century got a little louder.
Source: www.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1889
Thomas Edison's lab unveils an early Kinetoscope — moving pictures meant, at first, only as a visual sidekick to his beloved phonograph. He did not foresee the theaters, the stars, the century of light thrown on a wall in the dark. He thought he was improving the record player. He was inventing the movies.
Source: www.loc.gov
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothing yet.”Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, 1927