Technological Advancements

As we sit in darkened theaters today, anticipating the latest Marvel blockbuster or the next epic war film, we often take the high-quality sound and pictures we experience for granted. We are accustomed to seeing films in vivid color, with crystal-clear audio and awe-inspiring visual effects. But just over a century ago, the movie-going experience was quite different. Imagine being one of the first moviegoers to see a film with color technology or a "talkie" with high-quality sound and sound effects. It would have been a truly transformative experience that would have forever changed how people thought about the movies.

In the early days of cinema, silent films ruled the screen. However, with the advent of sound technology in the late 1920s, the movie industry underwent a dramatic transformation. With sound becoming a central focus for research institutions and industry interest groups, rapid advancements were made in sound recording, editing, playback, and reproduction.

MGM was one such studio that saw around five hundred improvements in sound recording and reproduction alone. These advancements paved the way for the iconic soundtracks that are now integral to the movie-watching experience. In this context, the Academy's Research Council took stock of the numerous improvements in sound technologies, paving the way for a new sound training course in the mid-1930s.

"With sound centrally on the research agendas of institutions (AMPAS), industrial interest groups (such as the SMPE) and their allied and affiliated research companies, like ERPI, Bell Labs and RCA, improvements in sound quality continued to be made. Beyond the transitional period, and throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, research into, and refinements of, sound technologies led to advancements in all aspects of sound recording, editing, playback and reproduction through advances in microphone technology, moviolas for sound editing, multi-track mixing apparatus and refinements in the quality of film stocks, photographic emulsions and sensitometry. One commentator, Barrett Kiesling of MGM, writing in 1937, estimated that since the introduction of sound around five hundred improvements in sound recording and reproduction had been made at that studio alone, and that ‘for the entire industry such variations would run into thousands’.  The Academy took stock of the numerous improvements in sound technologies, and in the spring of 1936 its Research Council, which, from August 1932, replaced the Technical Bureau in co-ordinating the Academy’s technical activities, ran a new sound training course, updating the Schools of Sound, publishing the lectures as Motion Picture Sound Engineering in 1938."¹

In addition to advancements in sound technology, the movie industry saw significant progress in color technology during the 1930s and 1940s. The introduction of Technicolor, a three-strip color process, revolutionized the way films were made, and many studios, including MGM, invested heavily in the technology. Technicolor allowed for vivid, lifelike colors on the screen, and its popularity soared with the release of films such as "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) and "Gone with the Wind" (1939). Technicolor quickly became the standard for color films in Hollywood despite its cost, and its legacy can still be seen in modern-day cinema.