The Grand Dame

How it feels

This is a short film from the late 1920s or early 1930s made with the Vitaphone sound system. It was part of a series of early talkies that helped bring sound to movies.

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What happens

Vitaphone Varieties is a series title (represented by a pennant logo on screen) used for all of Warner Bros.' earliest short film "talkies" of the 1920s, initially made using the Vitaphone sound on disc process before a switch to the sound-on-film format early in the 1930s. These were the first major film studio-backed sound films, initially showcased with the 1926 synchronized scored features Don Juan and The Better 'Ole. Although independent producers like Lee de Forest's Phonofilm were successfully making sound film shorts as early as 1922, they were very limited in their distribution and their audio was generally not as loud and clear in theaters as Vitaphone's. The success of the early Vitaphone shorts, initially filmed only in New York, helped launch the sound revolution in Hollywood. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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