Phonofilm
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In 1919, Lee De Forest, inventor of the audion tube, filed his first patent on a sound-on-film process, DeForest Phonofilm, which recorded sound directly onto film as parallel lines. These parallel lines photographically recorded electrical waveforms from a microphone, which were translated back into sound waves when the movie was projected. This system, which synchronized sound directly onto film, was used to record vaudeville acts, political speeches, and opera singers. Some of the people filmed included vaudevillians Weber and Fields, Eva Puck and Sammy White, Eddie Cantor, Ben Bernie, Phil Baker, ballet company La Chauve Souris, opera singers Eva Leoni, Abbie Mitchell, and Marie Rappold, and politicians Calvin Coolidge, Robert La Follette, Al Smith, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. De Forest founded the De Forest Phonofilm Corporation in 1921 with studios at 314 East 48th Street in New York City, but was not able to interest any Hollywood movie studios in his invention.
On 15 April 1923, DeForest premiered 18 short films made in Phonofilm -- presenting vaudeville acts, musical performers, and ballet -- at the Rivoli Theater in New York City. He was forced to show these films in independent theaters such as the Rivoli, since Hollywood movie studios controlled all major U.S. movie theater chains at the time. De Forest's decision to film primarily short films, not features, due to lack of Hollywood investment, limited the appeal of his process. All or part of the Paramount Pictures features Bella Donna (premiered 1 April 1923) and The Covered Wagon (premiered 16 March 1923) were reportedly filmed with Phonofilm as an experiment, but, if so, were only shown this way at the premiere engagements, also at the Rivoli Theater in NYC.
- Max Fleischer and Dave Fleischer used the Phonofilm process for their Sound Car-Tunes series of cartoons -- featuring the "Follow the Bouncing Ball" gimmick -- starting in May 1924. The Fleischers stopped releasing the Sound Car-Tune films in Phonofilm in September 1926, and later re-released some of these titles 1928-1932 with new soundtracks using the RCA Photophone process.
- De Forest also worked with Theodore Case (1888-1944), using Case's patents to perfect the Phonofilm system. However, the two men had a falling out, and Case went to movie mogul William Fox, who bought Case's patents, the American rights to the German Tri-Ergon patents, and the work of Freeman Harrison Owens to create Fox Movietone.
- Shortly before the Phonofilm Company filed for bankruptcy in September 1926, Hollywood introduced a different method for the "talkies" -- the sound-on-disc process introduced by Warner Brothers as Vitaphone, releasing the feature film Don Juan on 6 August 1926.
- A cinema owner in the UK, M. A. Scheslinger acquired the UK rights to Phonofilm and filmed short films of British music hall performers -- along with famous actors such as Sybil Thorndike reading excerpts of works by Shakespeare, Shaw, and Dickens -- from September 1926 to May 1928. On 4 October 1926, Phonofilm made its UK premiere with a program of short films presented at the Empire Cinema in London. According to the British Film Institute website, the UK division of DeForest Phonofilm was taken over in August 1928 by British Talking Pictures and its subsidiary British Sound Film Productions which was formed in September 1928.
- Almost 200 short films were made in the Phonofilm process, and many are preserved in the collections of the Library of Congress and the British Film Institute. Today, many sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica list Lee De Forest as one of the inventors of sound movies.
