The Hollywood Melody

Spent most of today at work. It was steady to busy. While the snow originally predicted for tomorrow is now supposed to be just clouds, it is supposed to get very cold on Sunday and Monday (before returning to normal mid-upper 30 degree weather by the middles of the week). I got my paycheck and went grocery shopping after I finished. I tried the new self-checkout registers this afternoon, since the regular lines were crowded with people coming in from rush hour by 4:30PM. Actually, other than appearance, larger font on the screen, and three bag holders instead of two, there isn't much that's different about them.

Having finished The Adventures of Holly Hobbie last week and enjoyed it thoroughly, I decided to read one of my favorite books on another, very different piece of history. A Song In The Dark, by Richard Barrios, details the evolution of the early sound film ("talkie") musicals from the beginnings of the sound film revolution in 1926 to the creation of the Production Code in 1934 that stripped the musical of much of it's early zest.

The book is so well written that, even if you've never seen these films (or never will, as many are now lost), you can imagine what they were like...and what it must have been like for audiences who had only heard amplified sound on their phonographs and radios before to suddenly hear the voices of their favorite movie stars!

I love this era of Hollywood history so much, Lauren and I set one of our Monkee role-play stories, The Mammoth Melody, at a fictional movie studio in 1929.