The shorter, more entertaining version of my dissertation
I was interested in this topic because I thought it was funny, because the electrical reproducers used in theaters in the late 1920s looked like all-in-one 1970s DJ consoles. The purpose of this radically condensed version of the main text is to pique your interest. There weren’t any jokes, but I found the whole thing entertaining and funny.
History, and especially the history of technology, often tries to create a linear story that leads us smoothly to the present through a series of significant events or innovations. But some technologies, no matter how successful in the short term, don’t fit into the long term story arc. They were replaced by the chain of evolution and forgotten. The mini-disc will probably suffer this fate.
Think of the 1920s. Silent movies. saw Singing ‘In the Rain? Sound films sweep the board all night. Talkies, Talkies, Talkies! In the US things moved quickly. The entire industry is dominated by five companies, which control production, and own their own chains of cinemas. They can invest in sound equipment to produce new types of films, and new sound projectors for their cinemas.
In Britain the film industry is miserable. Less than 5% of the films shown were made in the UK, and Hollywood production made up most of the rest. Of the 4,000 cinemas in the UK, 3,000 are independently owned and operated. Business was bad, and getting worse every year, but the cinema owners (exhibitors) didn’t care who made the films as long as they were popular. They eagerly looked at their balance sheets for the First World War period, when 20m people every week paid to see what was available. Exhibitors grumbled (about taxes), and worried (that the public would forget the movies and go ice skating instead). They need gimmicks, but cheap gimmicks. The cheaper the better.
In the 1920s people went to the pictures without caring what was there, or when it started. The movies are still running – you just showed up. Enthusiasts will base their choice on the comfort of the cinema and the quality of the music and how much they can afford. In fact, musicians’ wages can amount to a third of weekly expenses. The popular image of a lone plinky plonky piano accompaniment is what you get at the worst local fleapit. Most theaters have at least three, if not four or five permanent musicians, and the music is arranged rather than improvised, a patchwork of popular tunes and classical snippets that mean ‘sorrow’. ‘chase’, ‘suspense’, ‘comedy’ etc, collected by the Musical Director. In a beautiful picture palace the ensemble can include sections from up to 60 separate pieces. Theater owners and managers depended on the musicians, but resented them and the Musicians’ Union, which negotiated their rates.
Into this environment came the Electrical reproducer – the first generation of record players with modern electrical pickups, which could be amplified and played through speakers. The market for such equipment was slow to take off in the UK, as the traditional clockwork acoustic gramophone was too loud for the home, so Brunswick, an established record company based in the US, created a two turntable machines for use in dancehalls, theaters and cinemas. Although expensive, the success of Brunswick’s machine, the Panatrope, soon spawned a variety of cheaper imitations.
The main advertising angles for these machines are that a) you can have the best musicians in the world in your cinema, and b) you don’t have to pay them. Panatrope advertisements like this openly boast about the number of orchestras they replace.
That the Panatrope should arrive at the same time as talking pictures is not entirely coincidental, since they both grew out of the same experimental programs at Bell Laboratories in the US, but their integration in Britain led to some unexpected developments.
Although exhibitors were happy with American films as long as audiences wanted them, there remained a certain resentment and distrust of US studios and their distributors, and their ever-increasing dominance of industry. The film trade press gravitated toward a patriotic anger at American culture and business, exemplified by their almost unanimous dismissal of talking pictures, viewed as nothing more than a passing fad. Gullible American audiences may have enjoyed them, but the British public was not to be taken for granted. There are many reasons why the industry closed the ranks decisively, but the main concern is, as before, money. Small exhibitors would never dream of paying what Warner Bros. demanded for Vitaphone equipment, and the prices were not even for outright purchase, but for a 10-year lease. The bigger players were initially reluctant to reveal that they could do this, because they were more concerned with reducing the tax burden so they could make more money.
Then something happened in Leeds, in the North of England. The manager of the Theater De Luxe replaced his orchestra with one man and a Panatrope, but instead of just playing records at shows, the operator, a skilled musician called Reginald Johnson, knew the full potential of the new engine, which develops a new one. technique of musical presentation in the summer of 1927. By October Johnson had a library of 250 records, and put together sections of 25-40 discs per film, marking the parts with chalk, working from a complex cue sheet, and changing the needle on each deck for each record played. I don’t think he did any digging, but I think there are reasonable grounds to name him the Godfather of Turntablism.
Innovation is one of the founding principles of the film industry, so news of the Panatrope miracle spread rapidly through the trade press, and cheap machine copies appeared for weeks, along with companies offering to provide records for specific films or to produce ready-made cue sheets for them. Panatrope Operators are in demand, although few actually use their equipment fully.
The Panatrope isn’t just a gimmick, though. ago The Jazz Singer opened in London, using Panatrope special effects to accompany Paramount’s production of the FW Murnau classic. Sunriseand in New York, Paramount also used a battery of custom made Panatropes for the original presentation of one of their first sound pictures, Wings. Brunswick also produced a full set of records to accompany these films so that provincial audiences could experience a film with the same music and effects as the West End, and Paramount was about to sign a contract of British Phototone, a branch of the leading Brunswick firm that manufactured synchronizers. to link film projectors to their Panatrope-based machines.
The Panatrope and its imitators sold well, and there was enthusiasm in the exhibition sector for the Phototone and other synchronizers such as the Electrocord, mostly because they were cheaper than the American equipment, but in the end there were many small which are British companies with relatively primitive technology. could compete with the giants of Hollywood. The fight could have lasted a long time if not for a new reason – the perfection of the Movietone sound-on-film system that, despite its cost, swept the board first in America, and then around the world, replaced all disc systems in the next two or three years.
Simon Murphy, February 2006
2025-01-03 17:56:00
