The Jazz Singer had its premiere at Warners' Theatre in New York on October 6, 1927, and it is the film usually blamed or credited with ending the silent era. The feature ran 89 minutes. Al Jolson sang six songs, and roughly two minutes of it carried live recorded sound. The rest was silent, with intertitles and a recorded orchestral score, which puts the story in proportion even if it spoils the legend.
What made it a turning point was the business behind it. Warner Bros. was the smallest of the big studios, with a thin chain of cinemas and no money to compete with Paramount and MGM for stars, so it bet on a novelty: Vitaphone, a system that recorded sound onto wax discs played in step with the projector. The studio had already used it in August 1926 for Don Juan, a silent feature with a full orchestral score, but Don Juan had no talking and few people remembered it. For The Jazz Singer the camera was shut inside a soundproof box because the microphones picked up the motor, and Jolson was recorded live on set.
The mechanism was clumsy. A projectionist had to start the disc by hand and keep it in step with the film, and when a needle jumped the picture went on talking to the wrong scene. Sound on film, where the audio was photographed onto the edge of the print, was plainly the better method, and Warner Bros. itself had given up discs by 1930. Even so, the public reaction forced every other studio to follow. Around 50 million dollars went into rewiring cinemas between 1928 and 1929. By 1929 Hollywood had stopped making silent features.
Careers were wrecked by the change. Actors with heavy foreign accents, or with voices that did not match their faces, lost their contracts within a year, while Broadway performers who had been ignored by the studios were suddenly in demand. Chaplin kept making silent pictures into the 1930s and got away with it, but almost nobody else did. Sound-on-film, the method the industry settled on in 1930, is still the basis of the audio track carried on a cinema print today.