Happy Birthday Alan Crosland! Born today in 1894, this American stage actor and film director is noted for having directed the first film using spoken dialogue.
Born to a well-to-do Jewish family, Crosland, years later, attended Dartmouth College. After graduation, he took a job as a writer with New York Globe magazine.
Interested in the theatre, he began acting on stage, appearing in several productions with Shakespearean British and American stage actress Annie Russell.
Crosland began his career in the motion picture industry in 1912 at Edison Studios in The Bronx, New York, where he worked at various jobs for two years until he had learned the business sufficiently well to begin directing short films. By 1917, he was directing feature-length films.
In 1925, Crosland was working for American pioneer motion picture producer Jesse L. Lasky's film production company Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount Pictures)
While there, Crosland was later hired by Warner Bros. to work at their Hollywood studios. Crosland had directed several silent films for Warner Bros.
This included directing the 1926 American black and white silent romantic/adventure film 'Don Juan', starring John Barrymore as the titular hand-kissing womanizer.
The film was the first feature-length feature to utilize the Vitaphone sound-on-disc sound system with a synchronized musical score and sound effects, though it has no spoken dialogue.
The film has the most kisses in film history, with Barrymore kissing (all together) American actress Mary Astor and American actress, singer, model, and animal rights activist Estelle Taylor one hundred and twenty-seven times!
The following year, Crosland was chosen to direct American singer, comedian and actor Al Jolson in the film for which Crosland is best known. This was the 1927 American black and white musical/drama film 'The Jazz Singer'.
The film would later make him famous as the first of the new talkies that changed the course of motion pictures.
'The Jazz Singer' was based on the titular play by leading American playwright, screenwriter and fiction writer Samson Raphaelson. The play itself was adapted from his 1922 short story The Day of Atonement.
Jolson's "Wait a minute" line prompted a loud, positive response from the audience, who were dumbfounded by seeing and hearing someone speak on a film for the first time, so much so that the double-entendre was missed at first. Applause followed each of his songs.
Excitement built, and when Jolson and when American actress Eugenie Besserer began their dialogue scene, "the audience became hysterical."
'The Jazz Singer' developed into a major hit, demonstrating the profit potential of feature-length "talkies".
However, American author Donald Crafton has shown that the reputation the film later acquired for being one of Hollywood's most enormous successes to date was inflated.
The movie did well, but not astonishingly so, in the major cities where it was first released, garnering much of its impressive profits with long, steady runs in population centers large and small all around the country.
As conversion of movie theaters to sound was still in its early stages, the film actually arrived at many of those secondary venues in a silent version.
On the other hand, Crafton's statement that 'The Jazz Singer' "was in a distinct second or third tier of attractions compared to the most popular films of the day and even other Vitaphone talkies" is also incorrect.
In fact, the film was easily the biggest earner in Warner Bros. history, and would remain so until it was surpassed a year later by Lloyd Bacon's ('42nd Street') 1928 American black and white musical/melodrama film 'The Singing Fool'. This was another Jolson feature, but was only part "talkie".
In the larger scope of Hollywood, among films originally released in 1927, available evidence suggests that 'The Jazz Singer' was among the three biggest box office hits.
It had trailed only William A. Wellman's ('The Public Enemy', 'The Ox-Bow Incident') 1927 American silent black and white drama/action war film 'Wings'
This also, perhaps, trailed American filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille's ('The Ten Commandments') 1927 American silent black and white epic drama/independent film 'The King of Kings'.
At the very first Academy Awards ceremony on May 16, 1929, Douglas Fairbanks presented a special Oscar to Warner Bros. American film producer and studio executive Darryl F. Zanuck,
He accepted on behalf of his studio for "producing 'The Jazz Singer', the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry."
Zanuck dedicated the award to Sam Warner, the brother who had served as the studio's chief executive and who had died the day before 'The Jazz Singer' opened. Zanuck described the late executive as "the man responsible for the successful usage of the medium."
Zanuck won an Honorary Academy Award "for producing 'The Jazz Singer', the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry".
However, before the 1st Academy Awards ceremony was held in May 1929, it had honored films released between August 1927 and July 1928.
Nonetheless, 'The Jazz Singer' was ruled ineligible for the two top prizes—the Outstanding Picture, Production and the Unique and Artistic Production—on the basis that it would have been unfair competition for the silent pictures under consideration.
The ceremonies ended on a lighter note as Jolson, entertained with patter and song.
"I noticed they gave 'The Jazz Singer' a statuette," he said. "But they didn't give me one; For the life of me, I can't see what Jack Warner can do with one of them. It can't say yes."
Crosland passed as a result of a car accident on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California on July 16, 1936. He was 41.
Crosland is interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. His grave remained unmarked for sixty-seven years until a headstone was donated by The Hollywood Underground in 2003.
His son, American film editor and director Alan Crosland Jr., would also later have a successful career in the industry.
On AFI's 100 Years...100 Quotes list, the line "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!" ranked in at #71.
In 1996, 'The Jazz Singer' was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" motion pictures.
In 1998, the film was chosen in voting conducted by the American Film Institute as one of the best American films of all time, ranking in at #90.
Crosland had been active from 1916-1935.
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