The speed of sound1997

For the first time ever, here is the epic story of the transition from silent films to talkies - that moment when movies were totally transformed and the American public cemented its love affair with Hollywood. In the Speed of Sound, author Scott Eyman, whose biography of filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch was hailed as "resoundingly wonderful," has created a mixture of cultural and social history that is at once both scholarly and vastly entertaining.

Here is the first and last word on the missing chapter in the history of Hollywood, the ribbon of dreams by which America conquered the world.

Myth has it that it happened overnight, that Al Jolson said a few words in The Jazz Singer and the talkies were born, that stars with weak or inappropriate voices either killed themselves or went into...