Kept: 6 October
6 October 1927. The Jazz Singer opened at Warner's flagship theater in New York, after sunset, on the eve of Yom Kippur.
It wasn't the first film with sound. It was the first feature that kept a person's voice and not just an orchestra. About seventeen minutes in, Al Jolson's face came up close and said: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet.”
Those words weren't new. He'd been saying them on stage for years, and had even said them in a short the year before. What was new was that the film kept them. A face could speak, and the speaking stayed.
The audience, hearing someone speak from a screen for the first time, applauded each song and then, by one account, went hysterical. One reviewer wrote that the end of the silent drama was now in sight.
The man who pushed hardest for the sound system, Sam Warner, died of pneumonia the day before the premiere. His brothers had gone back to California for the funeral. None of the four were in the room.
Kept line: the thing that changes everything still needs someone in the room to hear it.