Here is something that you don’t see every day: a documentary that gets its facts wrong.
Viewers with little knowledge on the history of sound technology in filmmaking are advised to stay away from Midge Costin’s feature, which gives a cockamamie overview of the audio aspects of the cinematic experience. Costin appears to be under the impression that movies were completely silent between Edison’s failed sound film experiments of the late 1890s and the Warner Bros. releases of “Don Juan” and “The Jazz Singer” in the late 1920s – in reality, there were numerous experiments taking place to create the so-called “talkies,” and many of these works still survive and are widely available for review.
