The Show Of ShowsMovie 1929
The Show of Shows is a 1929 American pre-Code musical revue film directed by John G. Adolfi and distributed by Warner Bros. The all-talking Vitaphone production cost $850,000 and was shot almost entirely in Technicolor.
The Show of ShowsMovie | 1929
The Show of Shows was Warner Bros.' fifth color film; the first four were The Desert Song (1929), On with the Show! (1929), Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929) and Paris (1929). (Song of the West was actually completed by June 1929 but had its release delayed until March 1930). The Show of Shows featured most of the contemporary Warner Bros. film stars, including John Barrymore, Richard Barthelmess, Noah Beery Sr., Loretta Young, Dolores Costello, Bull Montana, Myrna Loy, Chester Conklin, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Tully Marshall, Nick Lucas, and Betty Compson.
The film features nearly all the stars then working under contract at Warner Bros. Virtually all the performers shown would vanish from the studio by 1931, after tastes had shifted owing to the effects of the Great Depression, which began to be felt late in 1930.
On with the Show! is a 1929 American pre-Code musical film produced by Warner Bros. Filmed in two-color Technicolor, the film is noted as the first all-talking, all-color feature length film, and the second color film released by Warner Bros.; the first was the partly color, black-and-white musical The Desert Song (1929).[5][6]
With unpaid actors and staff, the stage show Phantom Sweetheart seems doomed. To complicate matters, the box office takings have been robbed and the leading lady refuses to appear. The cast includes William Bakewell as the head usher eager to get his sweetheart, box-office girl Sally O'Neil, noticed as a leading girl. Betty Compson plays the temperamental star and Arthur Lake the whiny young male lead. Louise Fazenda is the company's eccentric comedian. Joe E. Brown plays the part of a mean comedian who constantly argues with Arthur Lake.[7][8]
The film was a combination of a few genres. Part backstage musical using the now familiar 'show within a show' format, part mystery and part comedy. It featured famed singer Ethel Waters in two songs written and staged for the film. "Am I Blue?" and "Birmingham Bertha" (with dancer Angelus Babe).
Reviews from critics were mixed. Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times wrote that the film was "to be felicitated on the beauty of its pastel shades, which were obtained by the Technicolor process, but little praise can be accorded its story or to its raucous voices....It would have been better if this film had no story, and no sound, for it is like a clumsy person arrayed in Fifth Avenue finery."[9] Variety reported that the film was "too long in running", but was nevertheless "impressive, both as an entertainment and as a talker."[10] Film Daily called it "fine entertainment and a very adroit mixture of comedy, some rather bad pathos and musical comedy numbers."[11] The New York Herald Tribune declared it "the best thing the films have done in the way of transferring Broadway music shows to the screen and, even if the story is bad and the entire picture considerably in need of cutting it is an admirable and frequently handsome bit of cinema exploring."[12] John Mosher of The New Yorker wrote that the film was "completely undistinguished for wit, charm, or novelty, except that it is done in color. Possibly in the millennium all movies will be colored. In these early days of the art, however, not much can be said for it, except that it is not really distressing."[13]
It's 1929. The studio gave the cinema its voice gave offered the audiences a chance to see their favorite actors and actresses from the silent screen era to see and for the first time can be heard in a gaudy, grandiose music comedy revue. But also appear actors and actresses from the first 'talkies', stars from Broadway and of course the German shepherd Rin-Tin-Tin. Frank Fay is the host of the more than 70 well-known stars who show various acts.
Frank Fay plays "host" to Warner's version of the all-star revue, which every major studio was doing when sound came into play and they wanted to show off the "talent" that they owned. As with the other studio revue films, this one here is deadly dull, boring and poorly made but it's still historically important and interesting considering all the talent gathered in one film.
Today, being Sunday, the Coliseum will remain closed. Starting tomorrow, it will be open to the public from 10 a.m. until midnight, and similar hours will be observed through the week until Saturday midnight. Officials of the show management, basing their estimates upon early indications in other years, conclude that the Chicago attendance will be well over a half million. The attendance at the New York show was something over 200,000.
In the last few years the national shows have been developed more and more into attractions of the real show character. People are attracted to it as na artistic, colorful exhibition of something they are interested in.
Setting One of Style.The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, under whose auspices the show is staged, recognizes this. The crude machines of the early days were displayed in virtually bare halls, but the modern motor car requires a setting suited to its style. For this reason the show management has gone further than ever this year in the decoration of the Coliseum, in which the cars are exhibited.
To accomplish his object in the adornment of the building, A. A. Miles, the show manager, called to his assistance a council of experts, including Samuel Asch, director general; Lorenz Kleizer, authority on interior decoration, and Arthur Musson, lighting specialist.
Assurances are already in evidence that the show will be the signal for sales of millions of dollars worth of automobiles. The Chicago exposition is notable for the large orders for motor cars yielded. Interest in new creations from the big plants of the country is active, and every indication is that the public believes its automobile dollar will buy more value, style, safety, quality, and performance this year than at any previous time in the history of the industry.
Since its inception, the Academy Awards has grown in every way, from the number of attendees to the length of the show. Though the first ceremony lasted just 15 minutes, today it is closer to 3 1/2 hours.
Plus, the majority of the show was hosted live from Union Station in Los Angeles for the first time. The Dolby Theatre was also used, and there were venues set up all over the world for nominees to safely attend instead of flying to Los Angeles.
While the theater has a capacity of nearly 3,400, just 2,500 people were invited last year to allow for spacing between seats. Nominees and guests were required to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 and two negative PCR tests, according to The New York Times.
With unpaid actors and staff, the stage show Phantom Sweetheart seems doomed. To complicate matters, the box office takings have been robbed and the leading lady refuses to appear. Can the show be saved?
This early Warner Bros musical clearly did not practice "less is more". The only exception was in the brains department, but the rest was massive stage sets, a ton of actors and show people showing up to make this a grand spectacle. On top of that this was the first all-talkie all-color film made! Unfortunately only a black & white print exists, so it's most luring element is missing, but you still get the feel of how the 1st generation musicals was like and why they quickly fell out of favor. Not that On with the Show! (1929) was the worst offender.
A mostly interminable backstage musical comedy made when sound technology inhibited any attempt at visual grace or dynamism, but it contains two numbers by Ethel Waters, and for the six minutes she's on screen none of the movie's limitations matter, and when during her second number John W. Bubbles - the man who taught Fred Astaire how to tap dance - shows up, it briefly becomes one of the most electrifying movies ever made.
This early sound film from Warner was actually the first full sound musical to be show in color but sadly the color version (2-strip Technicolor) is now lost. What remains is the B&W version, although recently one-minute worth of color footage was found.
Show organizers, including chairman Watt L. Moreland, collected themselves and came up with a plan for the event to continue for the remaining days through March 10. What was left was moved to the Shrine Auditorium with a small army of tow trucks and volunteers, and the show went on, albeit on a much smaller scale. According to the New York Times, President-elect Herbert Hoover decided to attend the 2.0 version of the 1929 Los Angeles Auto Show as a speaker.
A few months after the fire, the stock market crashed, kicking off the Great Depression. Automobile sales tanked, but the L.A. Auto Show kept going until the start of World War II. (For more history on the show and tons of fantastic photography, check out the auto show's site as well as the Homestead Museum's blog.)
And later this week, after a one-year hiatus, the show is back starting with media day on November 17, 2021. We'll be reporting from there, so stay tuned. And fortunately, modern fire standards and technology are in place to prevent 1929 from happening again.
Barris made game show history right off the bat, in 1966, with "The Dating Game," hosted by Jim Lange. The gimmick: a young female questions three males, hidden from her view, to determine which would be the best date. Sometimes the process was switched, with a male questioning three females. But in all cases the questions were designed by the show's writers to elicit sexy answers.
After the show became a hit on both daytime and nighttime TV, the Barris machine accelerated. New products included "The Newlywed Game," ''The Parent Game," ''The Family Game" and even "The Game Game." 041b061a72