Re: AFI\'s 100 movie quotes
And with all due respect to AFI, that isn't quite true, either, given that The Jazz Singer was basically a silent film with a couple of sound sequences. I don't know what the AFI considers "full length". At a guess I'd say anything over 75 minutes or so would qualify, while something in the 10 minute to 40 minute range would definitely qualify as a "short". Where the line falls between those ranges, I don't know.
I agree that 40 minutes would definitely qualify as a short, but in the 30s, and even later, 55 - 65 minutes wasn't uncommon for a so-called feature length film. It was usually a matter of the number of reels. Reels were 8 minutes long, so, most cartoons were 8 minutes at the longest. A few were two-reelers, and theater shorts were usually two-reelers, with a few three-reelers, under 24 minutes. 7 - 8 reels, say under 56m to under 64m, was generally considered a feature, at least in the last days of silents, and the talkies. Very few films were made in the 4 - 6 reel range, but one of my two favorite Laurel and Hardy films,
Beau Hunks, 1931, at 37m is a 5-reeler, and considered a short. But, another L&H favorite, 1940's
A Chump At Oxford, an 8-reeler at 63m long, is considered a feature.
Joe's right,
The Jazz Singer 1927, had only a bit of poorly synchronized sound, talking and singing, from a record, which was the way most early talkies provided sound. WB's "Vitaphone" was their trademarked method of synching the record to the film. I forget which film
was the first true feature length talkie. In 1926, WB released
Don Juan with a fully synchronized music track, but no speech.
Perhaps the biggest common fallacy is that Disney's
Steamboat Willie 1928, was the first talking cartoon. At least ten years before that, maybe 15, the Fleischer Bros., of Koko the Clown, Betty Boop, and Popeye, made a couple of cartoons using Lee DeForest's 'sound on film' method, which is what we use today. These were probably the first talking films of any kind, except what DeForest did in the way of experiments in his lab, and possibly a demo by an Edison employee.
