An idea about radio and talkie films

Thande

Donor
Looking at the history of the two media, it seems that commercial radio broadcasting only started a few years before films received audio in the 1920s. So it's not surprising that what I'm about to propose did not take place in OTL (waits for EdT to find an obscure example of it actually having done so). Anyway, let's imagine that radio broadcasting becomes mainstream a decade or so earlier - a few years before the Great War. Ignore the butterflies from this for a moment.

What I am suggesting is that silent films could be made without any dialogue cards, and instead dialogue would be broadcast (live, due to the initial lack of recording media) over the radio. Radio sets might well be too expensive for individuals at the time, but each cinema would have its own big radio receiver to receive the broadcast and play it, synched with the film as a dub, to the viewers. As broadcasts would be made live, presumably they would be done with different actors to the ones in the films - and you might need several simultaneous performances for large countries considering the likely state of the broadcast network at the time. That's an interesting thought - imagine a situation where Charlie Chaplin is suddenly voiced, but people in Los Angeles know him with a different voice to people in New York.

Putting this before the Great War means that that conflict might accelerate the use of the technique for newsreels and patriotic films, as well as building up the radio broadcast network for wartime service.

Any huge logical or technical flaws here I'm not seeing?
 

Sachyriel

Banned
So you're saying everything will be a badly dubbed Kung Fu film, only earlier? I mean the sync won't be perfect. And other languages?
 

Thande

Donor
So you're saying everything will be a badly dubbed Kung Fu film, only earlier? I mean the sync won't be perfect. And other languages?

People wouldn't really see it as bad dubbing at the time because they wouldn't be used to anything else. Other languages would be interesting. In early talkies in OTL, they often just made the actors do the scene five times in different languages for the different versions - if they didn't speak the others, as was usually the case, they would have to try and pronounce the words phonetically (and inevitably put the emphasis on the wrong bits). I'm told that Laurel and Hardy were popular in Spain because of their hilariously bad pronunciation rather than their actual humour, and when the films switched to dubbing with fluent Spanish actors there was a public outcry.

In this scenario, as everyone is used to watching dubbed films that aren't perfectly synchronised, there will be no real barrier for foreign dubs compared to the original language.
 
Syncing the dialog, particularly with live broadcast, will be exceedingly difficult. Record recordings are far more feasible.

Plus early film running speeds were far from uniform, hense (IIRC) why it took so long to make "talkies" to begin with.

Interesting idea, though. :)
 
Well it doesnt seem to hard to have happen, I've heard that it wasn't a lack of technology that caused radios to be a twenties phenomenon in place of a odds one, but copyright or some such thing.
 

Sachyriel

Banned
I think it would be easier to have the radio broadcast a vague musical soundtrack instead of live voices to sync up with the faces on the screen. Maybe they start experimenting with that instead? I mean, the action on screen can be given a soundtrack that's not totally in sync and it will work, but the voices off just a little bit pulls you from the illusion.
 

Thande

Donor
I think it would be easier to have the radio broadcast a vague musical soundtrack instead of live voices to sync up with the faces on the screen. Maybe they start experimenting with that instead? I mean, the action on screen can be given a soundtrack that's not totally in sync and it will work, but the voices off just a little bit pulls you from the illusion.
Possibly. I'm thinking of those Doctor Who reconstructions that just use still images and the voiceover track.

One consequence of this is that it may be more accepted for characters to have an internal monologue and we can hear their thoughts.

I was thinking the people doing the voiceover would be watching a projection of the film along with the cinemas, but Geekhis Khan's comment about irregular film speeds means some desynch would be inevitable I guess...

I also like the idea of pirate radio operators breaking into a broadcast and riffing on the film to do a Mystery Science Theatre 1900, if you will :p
 

Sachyriel

Banned
I also like the idea of pirate radio operators breaking into a broadcast and riffing on the film to do a Mystery Science Theatre 1900, if you will :p

So basically Steampunk hackers? Activists break into the cinema to mess with the radio for anti or pro-war propaganda?
 
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