Talking Pictures Season 1

In 1927 Al Jolson sang and spoke in The Jazz Singer and the sound era had officially arrived. Hollywood was in panic. How would the silent stars adapt to the new medium? Broadway actors moved west in droves. For a while the sound man was king. With the primitive sound equipment words dominated the action.

Hollywood in the 30s manufactured dreams on a conveyor belt, each studio turning out up to 50 films a year to a Depression-torn America. They manufactured the stars too: MGM could boast 'more stars than there are in heaven'. But the stars, all-powerful on screen, were in reality in thrall to the studios and the studio bosses: not for nothing was Beverly Hills known as 'the most beautiful slave quarters in the world....' Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, John Huston, Don Ameche, Virginia Mayo, Sylvia Sydney, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Garson Kanin are among those who discuss the 'golden age' of Hollywood that culminated in Gone with the Wind (1939).

At the end of the Second World War American cinema audiences were at an all-time high. The film studios appeared impregnable, but they were about to be the subject of a many-pronged attack. The film industry fought back with weapons ranging from Smellovision to 3-D, but they were not able to prevent, in words coined a generation earlier, the inmates from taking over the asylum. With June Havoc, Richard Widmark, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Greer Garson, John Huston, Richard Zanuck, Samuel Goldwyn Jr, Carroll Baker and Charlton Heston