In 1926, Jack Warner, then head of Warner Bros studio, declared that talking films would never be a commercial success. Silent films, he argued, had an international appeal, a visual language that transcended the spoken word. They allowed the audience to invest their own meanings, imagine their own dialogue. No, the talkies would never take off. Within just a couple of years, Warner would be demonstrated to be dramatically, fundamentally wrong in his assessment. Which just goes to add weight to William Goldman’s oft-quote film industry aphorism, ‘Nobody Knows Anything’.

The first talkie – that is to say the first film with dialogue on its soundtrack – was The Jazz Singer, in 1927. But the Al Jolson vehicle wasn’t, in fact, the first feature to be issued with a soundtrack. That honour goes to Don Juan (1926), a rather fruity film in which innocent maidens were beset by debauched men intent on ravishing them. The soundtrack was recorded on long-playing records, each the same length as a reel of film. Recorded on the discs was a score by the New York Philharmonic, some faint thumps, bells ringing and the indistinct clashing of swords.

What made The Jazz Singer such a sensation was the fact that, in addition to the songs on the soundtrack, there were a couple of spoken ad-libs from Jolson: “Wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet” being the most famous. The audience went wild for the film, and specifically for Jolson himself, whose electric performance style was almost as important a component in the film’s success as the fact that audiences could hear his voice. Actually rather a poor film, with a thin story and mawkish sentiments, it was the novelty, and force of personality, that earned the The Jazz Singer over $3 ½ million at the box office. Jolson’s follow up took even more – he was the first artist whose career was launched to a new level by the advent of sound.

To say that the talkies revolutionised cinema would be an understatement. The ramifications impacted on the business side of the industry, the technical side and the artistic side. Sound cinema famously ended some careers and kick-started others. The irony is that, despite the fact that audiences seemingly couldn’t get enough of the new innovation, the early talkies are generally considered to be very poor, particularly compared to the heights of artistic merit reached in silent cinema during the late 1920s.

Uncertain as to what to do with sound technology, Hollywood initially played it safe and, to all intents and purposes, simply transposed existing musical stage shows to the screen. Acting was exaggerated, denunciation extremely laboured in ordered to be recorded by the rudimentary microphone systems. Stories were filled with dialogue just because they could be. Films of this period made little mark on the history of cinema as an art form, they were all about making money.

The demise of the silent film was far more rapid than anyone could have predicted: the last mainstream silent movie was Points West, released by Universal in the late summer of 1929. Even so, it took a couple of years for the studios to fully commit themselves to recorded dialogue – considered by some to be a passing fad – rather than just recorded music. In 1929, Fox released ‘the first outdoor all-talkie’, In Old Arizona, for which cameras were hidden in bushes.

The early days of sound were dogged by numerous technical problems. The cameras used at the time were huge and extremely loud. In order for the noise not to be picked up by the microphones, the cameras were isolated in glass cabinets, severely restricting the already limited range of movement achievable with these behemoths. Actors too found their movements limited as, until the invention of the boom mic a few years later, they had to stay within close range of a static microphone.

Some actors fared better with the new technology than others. Silent movie queen Norma Talmadge made two talkies but quit film altogether because audiences had problems reconciling her voice – a broad Jewish Brooklyn drawl – with her sweet silent screen persona. Likewise Vilma Banky’s career was killed because of her thick Hungarian accent. It is often said that Clara Bow’s star abruptly fell because of her voice but there may well have been other issues at stake. Bow was something of a handful, unpredictable and difficult for her employers to handle. The studios used the advent of the talkies as an excuse to shed unwanted talent; get out of expensive contracts and generally undermine their actors, bringing them into line or deposing of them. The actress Louise Brooks recalled that she was told by Paramount that she could stay on, without the raise her contract stipulated, or quit. She quit. But there were other, less celebrated casualties. By 1930, 22,000 movie-house musicians had lost their jobs – just in time for the depression that would cast its shadow over the whole country, even, eventually, Hollywood.