Introductory Speech by Will H. Hays

1926
4m

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Introductory Speech by Will H. Hays (1926)

This was the first in a program of shorts that accompanied the premiere of Don Juan (1926) in which Will H. Hays, President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, intro... Read allThis was the first in a program of shorts that accompanied the premiere of Don Juan (1926) in which Will H. Hays, President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, introduces the audience to the Vitaphone sound system.This was the first in a program of shorts that accompanied the premiere of Don Juan (1926) in which Will H. Hays, President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, introduces the audience to the Vitaphone sound system.

Star
- Will H. Hays

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

4.9/10

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Star
- Will H. Hays

3User reviews

See production info at IMDbPro

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Trivia
Will H. Hays was the first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, serving from 1922 to 1945. Under Hays' leadership, the MPPDA adopted the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930 and began strictly enforcing it in 1934. The Production Code was the set of industry moral guidelines that spelled out what was acceptable and unacceptable content for films produced for a public audience in the United States. Because of his leadership role in the MPPDA, the Production Code was also popularly known as the "Hays Code." From 1934 to 1954, the code was closely identified with Joseph Breen, the administrator appointed by Hays to enforce the code. In 1968, after several years of gradually declining enforcement, the Production Code was replaced by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) film rating system.

Quotes
[first lines]
Will H. Hays: My friends, no story ever written for the screen is as dramatic as the story of the screen itself. Tonight, we write another chapter in that story.

Connections
Featured in Hollywood: End of an Era (1980)

User reviews3

Featured review

8/10

"The man never met a hand gesture he didn't like!"...

... or so says a youtube poster on the subject. This short film of Mr. Will Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America at the time this film was made, is simply a speech introducing Don Juan (1926) and a series of short subjects shown as an intro to that film, all using Warner Brothers' Vitaphone sound on disc system.

Mr. Hays makes it clear that Warner Brothers originally saw Vitaphone as a way to bring musical accompaniment and musical acts to small theaters and really had no intention of making "talking" pictures. There is, in fact, very little speech in "The Jazz Singer" made over a year after this short introductory speech.

This short does show one rather ponderous effect of early sound in film - the halting speech and wide gestures that people, often very accustomed to speaking in public, would be given to. Maybe it was like in "Singin In the Rain", maybe it was the diction coaches. But it was a widespread and persistent problem until about 1930.

I'm giving this an 8/10 for its importance in film history. If you want to see it, the short is widely available on youtube and other online video services.