Another pre-war technology that came of age in the twenties was film. By the mid-1920s movie theaters were selling 50 million tickets each week, a sum equal to roughly half the US population! And the generation that came of age in the twenties learned things at the movie palace that they couldn’t learn in school. “The only benefit I ever got from the movies was in learning to love and the knowledge of sex,” a young woman confided to an interviewer in the mid-20s. “If we didn’t see such examples in the movies,” explain another, “where would we get the idea of being ‘hot?’ We wouldn’t.”
At the beginning of the 1920s, films were silent and colorless. In 1922, the first all-color feature, The Toll of the Sea, was released . In 1926, Warner Bros. released Don Juan, the first feature with sound effects and music. In 1927, Warner released The Jazz Singer, the first sound feature to include limited talking sequences. This release arguably launched the Golden Age of Hollywood, ending the silent era and increasing box-office profits for films as sound was introduced to feature films.
The public went wild for talkies, and movie studios converted to sound almost overnight. In 1928, Warner released Lights of New York, the first all-talking feature film. In the same year, the first sound cartoon, Dinner Time, was released. Warner ended the decade by unveiling, in 1929, the first all-color, all-talking feature film, On with the Show.
"The Jazz Singer" Poster
The movie industry skyrocketed in the 1920s and Hollywood boomed, providing a new and accessible form of entertainment that proved to be the death of vaudeville. Ever-growing crowds surged into new movie theaters, and filmmaking was revolutionized in the second half of the decade as sound synchronized motion pictures, or "talkies," replaced silent films between 1927 and 1929. The first feature-length motion picture with a soundtrack, Don Juan, was released in 1926. The first talking film, The Jazz Singer, was released in 1927, followed by the first all-color all-talking feature, On with the Show, in 1929
Charlie Chaplin
The period saw the emergence of box-office draws such as: Mae Murray, Ramón Novarro, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Warner Baxter, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Bebe Daniels, Billie Dove, Dorothy Mackaill, Mary Astor, Nancy Carroll, Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, William Haines, Conrad Nagel, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Dolores del Río, Norma Talmadge, Colleen Moore, Nita Naldi, John Barrymore, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Anna May Wong, and Al Jolson.