填空题 .The First Talkies
    Motion pictures were invented late in the nineteenth century, yet it was not until the 1920s that they featured sound. Prior to then, movies were silent but were usually accompanied by printed words or subtitles on the screen to serve as dialogue or descriptions. Many theaters additionally employed a piano player or music record player to provide live music during the showing of a film. Silent film actors were famed for their ability to show expressive emotions rather than to recite dialogue, such as what was done during staged dramatic performances. When the first sound motion pictures—talkies—came out, however, the landscape of the motion picture industry changed forever.
    Since motion pictures were invented, people desired to include sound along with the moving images. Some early devices utilized sound discs, which were similar to record albums, to produce sounds for short films; however, the difficulty was getting the sounds and images to synchronize. This was a problematic task because both had to be started at precisely the same moment for the sounds and images to match. Due to this problem, the motion picture industry searched for a way to put sounds and images onto a single medium. By 1920, several European inventors had experienced minor success in putting sound waves on celluloid film strips, but the technology was deemed inadequate for large-scale motion pictures.
    Meanwhile, in the United States, inventor Lee de Forrest strived to perfect recording sound on celluloid, and, by the mid-1920s, he had solved the problem. He started producing short sound films for public exhibition. At the same time, other inventors successfully worked on sound on disc technology, which synchronized sounds on a record disc with the images in a film. The first major motion picture to take advantage of this system was Don Juan, which premiered in August 1926. It used recorded music and sound effects, yet it had no recorded dialogue, so it is usually not considered the first talkie. That honor went to The Jazz Singer, which was released in October 1927. It was the first major motion picture with prerecorded music, effects, and, in some scenes, singing and dialogue. The Jazz Singer used sound on disc technology, but the standard soon became sound on celluloid, or film, due to the better synchronization between sounds and images that it provided.
    At first, the big Hollywood studios resisted changing from silent movies to talkies. A major issue was that theaters, which were owned by many of the major studios then, were unequipped to project talkies, so converting them would be expensive. There were also difficulties on movie sets as directors and actors struggled with the new sound recording technology. Nevertheless the success of The Jazz Singer and other talkies changed their minds. In July 1928, Lights of New York, the first film with all its dialogue recorded and played for the audience, became a smash hit. Audiences were amazed by the new technology and clamored for more as they wanted to see their favorite stars singing and talking on the silver screen. For the next few years, studios continued to produce both silent movies and talkies. However, by the mid-1930s, most studios were only producing talkies as silent movies practically disappeared.
    *subtitle: words in a film that are printed at the bottom of a screen
    *synchronize: to match; to coordinate
    *smash hit: a huge success; a bestseller36.  Vocabulary
    ______=to repeat something from memory