Page 22 - CinemaRecord Edition 3-2002 #37

After I got the State going they moved me to the
Princess. The Princess had been a live theatre but Union
Theatres converted it. The first ‘talkie’ picture was Mary
Pickford in The Coquette. And it was terrible. Mary
Pickford's voice! Oh, she was a pretty woman, but that's
all she had.
It was all synchronized sound then. The reels of film
and the records had to start exactly together otherwise the
sound did not match what was happening on the screen.
Coquette was a poor print, but the worst thing was reels
two and seven kept jumping out of synchronization.
Hal Andrews who was in charge of United Artists was
ropeable. He wanted to get the whole lot of us sacked
because of this damn thing. We found out on the run up
of records two and seven that there was a little bit of a
nick in one of the grooves, and with those dammed heavy
pickups the inertia was so great it caused the needle to
jump a groove and that put it out of sync.
The only way we found we could get out of it was to
put the needle on the start mark and the film on the start
mark then turn it over very slowly by hand until it passed
this place. It left just enough of the run up to get up to
speed before the sound actually started, then it was right.
Afterwards when that picture got into the suburbs I
got phone calls from the boys all over saying, "How do

The first all sound feature at the State.
The Herald 23 May 1929
Source: State Library of Victoria

Jim was too polite to say so but
another problem for this film was
that Mary at 35 was playing an 18
year old.
The Herald Saturday 31 August 1929
Source: State Library of Victoria

you get over reel seven? What do you
do with reel two?" I was a bit soft in
those days, I should have gone up to
Hal Andrew’s office and had it out
with him, but I didn't.
We followed that film with The
Desert Song. It wasn't all in colour
and the opening wasn't synchronized
sound. It was 'wild track', a musical
overture sort of thing while they
showed Arabs tearing around on
horses on a great big screen. The stage
at the Princess was big, they had this
big screen arranged in front of the
normal screen, it was reverse counter
weighted so you had to pull it down.
Bill Lyall came down and put on a
wide angle lens.
Then we cut all that opening stuff
off the first reel and replaced it with
the exact length of white spacing. Now
when we started the show we'd run
both machines at once. All that big
screen stuff that we cut off was on one
machine and it had a start marker on it.

22 2002 CINEMARECORD