DOuG pRATt

10 Comments Add your own

• 1. jeaniebeanie  |  April 15th, 2009 at 2:31 pm

  Please, just one tiny hint!

• 2. DOuG pRATt  |  April 15th, 2009 at 5:40 pm

  That’s Janet Gaynor as the wife, and that’s her name the movie. The Wife.

• 3. Joan Stringer  |  April 15th, 2009 at 5:57 pm

  Hi Doug! Thank goodness for TCM and silent movies! A couple days ago they showed the 1925 “Showboat”, a half-silent, half-talkie film. On Easter Sunday at Midnight they showed the 1927 “King of Kings”. I like silent films in that they allow you to use your imagination. My favorite silent actors are Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Fatty Arbuckle.

• 4. morris  |  April 15th, 2009 at 6:07 pm

  F.W. Murnau’s magnificent academy award winner Sunrise.

• 5. DOuG pRATt  |  April 15th, 2009 at 6:33 pm

  Correct! It’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, a movie that I long regretted not getting on LaserDisc video when I had the chance; because it’s only now, ten years later, that’s it’s been released on DVD. Dark, isn’t it?

  By bizarre coincidence, I happened to be on the scene where and when Janet Gaynor died — Desert Hospital, Palm Springs, California, September 14, 1984. It was my next stop after finishing work at the Naval Hospital in San Diego, during which I had a very memorable night in Tijuana on my birthday, just a few days prior.

  The sound quality for ‘Sunrise’ is exceptionally good, because it used the Fox Movietone system, which was sound-on-film, and not a synchronized disc like Warner’s Vitaphone setup. Optically recorded sound became, of course, the industry standard, and the concept is used to this day for digital sound on analog film in movie theaters, with the Dolby Digital system.

  Movietone was supposedly based on an invention by Lee DeForest, but the more I know about DeForest, the more I feel that as an inventor he was mostly a fake. Anything he did that was worthwhile was either stolen outright, or he took full and fradulant credit for something that one of his assistants came up with.

  An excellent book that deflates the reputation of DeForest is Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, by Tom Lewis, which is a much more complete telling of the story than in the Ken Burns’ documentary of the same name.

• 6. DOuG pRATt  |  April 15th, 2009 at 6:53 pm

  Joan,

  It’s amazing to realize that if ‘The Great Train Robbery’ in 1903 is taken as the beginning of movies as a mass entertainment medium, silents lasted only about 25 years. I think I’m about as young as one can be and still feel a connection to silent movies and old time radio.

  If you’ve never seen the superb 13-part documentary ‘Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film’, you’re in for a treat. I’m hoping to start posting the series next week. If the planned DVD set had come out I wouldn’t dare, but it never saw the light of day, and the series is nowhere to be seen except in VHS copies of individual installments available on Amazon and Ebay. I have the LaserDisc box set.

• 7. jeaniebeanie  |  April 15th, 2009 at 9:18 pm

  Well, at least I was on the right track thinking “Janet Gaynor.” Yes, it was too dark for me to watch.

• 8. DOuG pRATt  |  April 15th, 2009 at 10:21 pm

  Contrast is where LCD’s come up short as a display technology, compared to CRT’s. Shades of the darkest and lightest tones are lost, or “crushed” as the effect is sometimes called.

• 9. tastewar  |  April 16th, 2009 at 7:45 am

  “very memorable night in Tijuana on my birthday”

  you’re such a tease! I expect a full blog post with the details!

• 10. jeaniebeanie  |  April 16th, 2009 at 8:36 am

  Yet you could still see Janet’s luminous beauty!

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