Timeline of Influential Milestones and Turning Points in Film History

Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History

1920s

Herein is a detailed timeline of the key film milestones, important turning points, and significant historical dates or events (organized by decade) that have had a significant influence on the world body of cinema and shaped its development. For more detailed accounts of many items, also see this site's extensive narratives on Film History by Decade, Film Milestones in Visual and Special Effects, and a comprehensive History of the Academy Awards.

Index to Timeline of Greatest Film Milestones and Turning Points

(by decade)

Pre-1900s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

1920s - Part 2

Year	Event and Significance
1926	In New York, Warner Brothers debuted Don Juan, the first Vitaphone film (developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1926) and the first publically-shown 'talkie' with synchronized sound effects and music (but no dialogue) - starring John Barrymore. It was the first mainstream film that replaced the traditional use of a live orchestra or organ for the soundtrack (a recorded musical score of the New York Philharmonic), and successfully coordinated audio sound on a recorded disc synchronized to play in conjunction with a projected motion picture.
1926	Russian director Sergei Eisenstein's classic landmark film Potemkin (1925) (aka Battleship Potemkin or Bronenosets Potyomkin) opened in the US (in New York City in December).
1926	The early death of 31 year-old silent screen star and idol Rudolph Valentino, noted for 14 films (including The Sheik (1921) and the sequel The Son of the Sheik (1926)) in a short seven-year career, caused a frenzy among his fans during his New York funeral.
1926	The oldest surviving feature-length animated film (with silhouette animation techniques and color tinting), The Adventures of Prince Achmed (aka Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed), was released in Germany.
1926, 1928	Flesh and the Devil marked the start of the famous (on and off-screen) romance of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert during Hollywood's Golden Age. The film reportedly had love scenes with the first-ever horizontal-position kiss in American film, and the first Hollywood film with an open-mouthed French kiss between the two stars - who were obviously in love in real-life.
1926	Actor-producer-star Douglas Fairbanks' ultimate pirate film (silent), The Black Pirate, was historically significant - the adventure swashbuckler was the first full-length blockbuster color film. (The two-color process was first introduced in The Toll of the Sea (1922) - see above, and in some sequences of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) - also, see above.) It boasted the use of an early experimental Technicolor (two-color) process, although it was also filmed in black and white.
1926	A newer and better recording system for putting synchronized sound-on-film called Movietone was developed by Theodore W. Case and Earl I. Sponable for William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation. In this system, the sound track was placed onto the actual film next to the picture frames, rather than on a separate synchronized disc as in the Vitaphone system.
1927	Fox released They're Coming to Get Me, a five-minute black and white short that was the first 'talkie' using the Movietone system. The first feature film released using the Fox Movietone system was Sunrise (1927), directed by F. W. Murnau -- the first professionally-produced feature film with an actual soundtrack.
1927	The effective end of the silent era of films came when Warner Brothers produced and debuted The Jazz Singer, the first widely-screened feature-length talkie or movie with dialogue. The musical, starring popular vaudevillian Al Jolson, had accompanying audio (with a sound-on-disc technology) which consisted of a few songs by Jolson and a few lines of synchronized dialogue. In his nightclub act in the film, Jolson presented the movie's first spoken ad-libbed words: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet." The film had about 350 spontaneously ad-libbed words.
1927	Fox's Movietone newsreel, the first sound news film, was produced. The first recording of a news event was the takeoff of Charles Lindbergh's plane from New York on May 20, 1927 on his historic flight across the Atlantic to Paris, the inspiration to create Movietone News.
1927	At the height of his career during the decade of the 20s, comedian Buster Keaton (who equally rivaled silent comic director/star Charlie Chaplin), known as "The Great Stone Face" made many short films and twelve feature films, including his timeless masterpiece The General. His distinctive films were noted for their trademark wit, satire, acrobatic agility and stunt-work, and fantasy. Other well-known works at this time included Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924), Sherlock, Jr. (1924), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).
1927	Director Abel Gance's celebrated epic film Napoleon experimented with wide-screen and multi-screen effects, used rapid-fire editing (influenced by Eisenstein's Potemkin (1925)), free-wheeling camera movement (influenced by Murnau), and a unique multi-projector system. It was the precursor to the wide-screen Cinerama process that debuted in 1952.
1927	Director Fritz Lang's classic dystopian vision of the future, the expressionistic Metropolis exploited massive sets and lavish set design, clever special effects, stylistic shadowing, oblique camera angles and labryinths, and physical effects like realistic miniatures and hydraulically-produced flooding. It was considered a costly box-office disaster at the time and its notorious German producer, the UFA (Universumfilm Aktiengesellschaft) had to be bailed out by U.S. interests. Brigitte Helm served as the film's real Maria (an oppressed working girl) and as the evil robotic doppelganger of herself - cinematic history's first android or robot.
1927	The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was founded. Its president was Douglas Fairbanks, and its first awards ceremony was held in 1929, to honor films in 1927 and 1928.
1927	Motion picture film became standardized at 24 fps.
1927	The Hays Office issued a memorandum, "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," a code of decency telling the studios eleven taboos or things to avoid in the "Don'ts" section (and twenty-six items in the "Be Carefuls" section), including profanity, 'licentious or suggestive nudity,' illegal traffic in drugs, any inference of sex perversion, white slavery, miscegenation, sex hygiene and venereal diseases, scenes of actual childbirth, children's sex organs, ridicule of the clergy, and willful offense to any nation, race or creed.
1927	Grauman's Chinese Theater opened in Hollywood, California, famed for hand and footprints of various film stars and celebrities.
1927	All-American half-back football star Johnny Mack Brown, a future star of B-westerns for over two decades, signed a contract with MGM, thereby becoming the first sports star to sustain a career in motion pictures.
1927	Paramount's film titled It opened, with an early appearance by Gary Cooper and starlet Clara Bow as a lingerie salesgirl, who soon became known as the "It Girl". "IT" referred to sex appeal. She had already been dubbed "The Brooklyn Bonfire" and "The Hottest Jazz Baby in Films." The film was also noted as having the earliest known use of a zoom lens in a US feature film, in its opening shot.
1928	RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Pictures, evolving originally from the Mutual Film Corporation (1912), was created in the merger of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), the Film Booking Office (FBO) and Keith-Albee-Orpheum, a major Vaudeville corporation. It was established as a subsidiary of RCA and joined the ranks of the major Hollywood studios.
1928	The first Mickey Mouse film, Plane Crazy, was debuted on May 15, 1928. Walt Disney also introduced the first popular animated cartoons with synchronized sound later in this year: Steamboat Willie (on July 29, 1928, in limited release) and Galloping Gaucho (on August 2, 1928). Steamboat Willie - Mickey's first sound cartoon, was then re-released on November 18, 1928 with sound and premiered at the 79th Street Colony Theatre in New York - it was the first cartoon with post-produced synchronized soundtrack (of music, dialogue, and sound effects) and was considered Mickey Mouse's screen debut performance and birthdate. It was the first sound cartoon that was a major hit. The character of Mickey Mouse was modified from Disney's earlier character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
1928	The gangster melodrama The Lights of New York was released by Warner Brothers as the first 100% all-talking feature film. This first Warner Bros. gangster film was unexpectedly successful, grossing over $2 million.
1928	Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's startling and influential The Passion of Joan of Arc used minimal sets, extremely oblique and other unusual camera angles, and excruciatingly huge close-ups to create a virtually new visual language soulfully expressive of the martyr's (Maria Falconetti) suffering psychology.
1928	Paramount became the first studio to announce that it would only produce "talkies."
1928	Warners' follow-up film and melodramatic musical, The Singing Fool, was released in both sound and silent versions. It contained the first hit song from a talking movie, Al Jolson's performance of Sonny Boy.
1928	Director Germaine Dulac released the classic The Seashell and the Clergyman) (aka La Coquille et le clergyman, Fr.), the first surrealist film, although many have claimed Un Chien Andalou (1929) by Luis Bunuel (and Salvador Dali) a year later was the first. The latter film, filled with irrational and shocking images, opened with the infamous scene of the slashing of a woman's eyeball with a razor blade.
1929	The first Academy Awards were announced and awarded during a ceremony, with Paramount's Wings (1927) winning Best Picture (based on production). It was the only silent film to win an Oscar for Best Picture. A second 'Best Picture' category for artistic merit (a category dropped the next year), was awarded to Sunrise (1927). Emil Jannings and Janet Gaynor were the first Best Actor and Best Actress winners - for multiple films.
1929	Actress Mary Pickford was the first performer to conduct a marketing campaign for an Academy Award, in the second year of its offering, by inviting all of the judges to her home for tea at her 22-room Pickfair mansion -- her ploy worked and she actually won the Best Actress honor (awarded in 1930) for her overly-emotive performance in her first talkie, the melodramatic Coquette (1928/29). Pickford and Fairbanks also starred together in the box-office flop The Taming of the Shrew - a misguided effort to bolster their stardom.
1929	Hollywood released its first original (backstage) musical. It was MGM's first all-talking picture The Broadway Melody - a Best Picture Academy Award winner and the first musical to spawn a series of Broadway Melody sequels that stretched out to 1940 (the final film starred Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell). The musical film genre was born with the coming of sound films.
1929	In Old Arizona was released -- the first full-length talkie film to be shot outdoors and not in a studio.
1929	Director Erich von Stroheim's last silent film Queen Kelly, starring Gloria Swanson, (partial footage seen in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), also starring Swanson and von Stroheim), was not finished due to its expensive and elaborate production, and disagreements between Swanson and the director. Producers also balked at the idea of completing it - when the demand was increasing for sound films.
1929	The 1925 musical Cocoanuts was made into a film with the Marx Brothers -- their first film, shot at Paramount's Astoria Studios on Long Island.
1929	The first full-length, modern sound ("First 100% Natural Color, Talking, Singing, Dancing Picture") motion picture produced entirely in color (two-strip Technicolor), director Alan Crosland's musical On With the Show, premiered in New York City on May 28, 1929. [Note: Previously, The Cavalier (1928), technically the first feature-length sound film completely in Technicolor, had only music and sound effects with silent title cards.] The second Technicolor 'talkie' film was Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), also from Warner Bros.
1929	The first important, feature-length sound documentary was the German film, Melodie der Welt (aka Melody of the World).
1929	George Eastman demonstrated his first movie in Technicolor in Rochester, NY.
1929	MGM's and director King Vidor's all-black musical Hallelujah!, shot on location, introduced post-synchronization to film-making. It was also the first sound-era film with an all-black cast to be produced by a major studio. The action was originally shot without sound, which was later added in the studio as a separately recorded sound track containing both naturalistic and impressionistic effects.
1929	The enthusiastic public demanded to see more movies with sound. Theaters rushed to install sound equipment. Movie attendance increased to 110 million, almost double the movie attendance in 1927. The independent studios couldn't compete as successfully with the four major studios (Fox, MGM, Paramount, and Warners) in the production of sound films.
1929	Walt Disney Productions was formed.
1929	Mickey Mouse's first words were spoken in his ninth cartoon short The Karnival Kid (1929) when he said the words: "Hot dogs!" [Walt's voice was used for Mickey.]
1929	Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail was his first sound film (and the UK's first full-length talking picture) -- and featured one of his earliest cameo appearances - a custom that would become a regular feature of his films (and the films of many others).
1929	Soviet director Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera - a quintessential experimental, avante-garde film and an excellent example of a "city symphony" documentary, was regarded as "pure" visual cinema. Its views of Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and of Soviet workers and machines contained radical hyper-editing techniques, special visual effects, wild juxtapositions of images, and double exposures.
1929	Rouben Mamoulian's musical drama Applause, one of the earliest Hollywood musicals during the first full year of sound pictures, was a liberating, innovative breakthrough film at a time of 'static' and stultified film-making with bulky immobile cameras on sound stages. He introduced revolutionary camera techniques (including rhythmically moving and inventive shots, and the use of two cameras at the same time) and experiments with sound (use of overlapping or interlacing soundtracks, sound cues, auditory montages, and background noise).
1929	Dorothy Arzner directed The Wild Party - it was 24 year-old star Clara Bow's ("Hollywood's Whoopie Girl") first talkie -- a tale about "Jazz Age" youth in a collegiate picture that was exceedingly popular at the time. In the film, she played the part of a wild and sexy student who became involved with one of her young professors (Fredric March) at Winston College for Women. Clara Bow's sound career as an actress was soon doomed.
By the end of the decade	The film careers of many silent film stars ended due to their voices being unsuitable for the new medium, or due to the fact that their voices didn't match their public image. Others, however, such as Greta Garbo, and the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy successfully adapted to sound.