March 10, 1929
The Daily Journal Capital
Microfilm Roll: MN00278
Merely two years after the release of The Jazz Singer, the second successful talking picture, films with sound, or “talkies”, arrived at Pawhuska’s very own State Theater. An advertisement sponsored by Western Electric Company appeared in The Daily Journal Capital on March 10, 1929, welcoming the new technology to the theater announcing “our screen now sings and talks.”
State Theater before remodeling, 1928. Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Courtesy of Cinema Treasures
Beginning in the early twentieth century motion pictures became an immensely popular form of entertainment. According to The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, it was around the time of Oklahoma statehood, the year of 1907, that movie theaters began to appear around the nation. In fact, it was in the same year of statehood that the Oklahoma’s first movie theater was created by a man named Lawrence William Brophy, “one of Oklahoma’s significant pioneers in the early-twentieth-century film industry” (Carney). The town of Pawhuska, founded by an Osage Agent in 1872, welcomed the newly remodeled State Theater in the summer of 1928, only about a year before the arrival of their first “talkie.”
The technology behind this new phenomenon was the Vitaphone, a sound processing system which was brought to life by Bell Labs. The Vitaphone was a mechanism that used, “one motor to drive both the projector and the turntable holding [a] 16” soundtrack disk,” which when paired with “newly developed loudspeakers” spread in comparable sound throughout a theater (Hutchinson).
Morgan M. Guzman
“State Theater, Home of the Talkies.” The Daily Journal Capital. March 10, 1929, p. 14. Microfilm roll number MN00278. Sequoyah National Research Center, Little Rock, Arkansas.
Further Reading
Carney, George O. “Recreation and Entertainment,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, http://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=RE002 (date accessed February 2, 2018)
Hutchinson, Ron. “The Jazz Singer.” Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/programs/static/national-film-preservation-board/documents/jazz_singer.pdf (date accessed February 2, 2018)
“New Sound Process for Films Announced.” History. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/new-sound-process-for-films-announced (date accessed February 2, 2018)
