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Mark Hellinger Theater (Former Hollywood Theater), Midtown, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States

The Mark Hellinger Theater survives today as one of the few intact grand movie palaces in Manhattan, as well as one of the historic theaters that symbolize American theater for both New York and the nation. Built for Warner Brothers in 1929 as the Hollywood Theater, it showcased movies and then vaudeville until 1934, when it was first converted for use as a legitimate theater.

Warner Brothers was one of the great studios dominating American filmmaking in the 1920s. Having successfully developed sound movies, the company in 1928 embarked on a campaign to buy or build theaters in which to exhibit its new sound productions. In 1929, Warner Brothers hired Thomas Lamb to build a Broadway/Times Square showcase, the Hollywood Theater, to compete with the rival Paramount and Roxy theaters. The Hollywood was the last of the great movie palaces erected in the Times Square area during the 1910s and 1920s, and the only one there surviving intact today.

Thomas Lamb was New York's most prolific designer of movie theaters. Although active also in legitimate theater design, Lamb is best known for his more than 300 movie theaters, built all over the world. Of the enormous movie palaces he designed in New York, the Hollywood is one of the few surviving intact. Lamb's design for the Hollywood, one of his last before the Depression put an end to the building of movie palaces, is extravagant within and most unusual without. Inside, the theater exhibits a lavish display of Baroque-inspired gilded plaster statuary and wall and ceiling paintings, in the tradition of the great movie palaces. The Hollywood's exterior, however, is an unusual combination of modernistic elements.

Warner Brothers and the Talkies

One of the handful of giant studios dominating the young movie industry in the years after World War I, Warner Brothers Pictures was incorporated in 1923. The company had begun making films, however, in 1912,and its history dated back to 1906, when the four Warner brothers,

Harry, Albert, Sara and Jack, began exhibiting silent films in a storefront in New Castle, Pennsylvania. The Warners' first important full-length feature film, My Four Years in Germany, was released in 1918.

In 1925, two years after its incorporation, Warner Brothers undertook several major changes which had a profound impact on its future. First, the company became a publicly owned corporation. Second, it changed its distribution policy, discarding the former "state rights franchise" system, in which individual distributors in each state held monopolies on Warner Brothers distribution rights, and opting instead to handle its distribution directly. Rather than creating a new company for this purpose, Warner Brothers acquired the Vitagraph Company, the oldest and best-known such company in the country. The third major change was a commitment by Warner Brothers to the development of sound movies.^

In 1924-25, Western Electric had experimented with techniques for synchronizing silent films with taped speech and music. Warner Brothers began experimenting along the same lines. In 1926, as work progressed, Warner Brothers formed the Vitaphone Corporation to continue the development of sound movies. On August 26, 1926, at the Warner Theater in New York, Vitaphone presented Don Juan, a silent film with synchronized sound starring John Barrymore. Just over a year later, on October 26, 1927, Al Jolson premiered in The Jazz Singer, described by Warner Brothers as "the first Vitaphone feature length picture to include singing and talking sequences." Sam Warner, who had nurtured Warner's commitment to sound and the creation of The Jazz Singer, died in Hollywood on the evening of its premier, apparently of exhaustion.

With the success of The Jazz Singer, film exhibitors around the country, who had been reluctant to invest in the expensive technology required for the presentation of sound movies, began to convert, and the rush to sound was on. Warner Brothers followed up on its lead in July 1928 by presenting what it called the first "all - talking feature motion picture," The Lights of New York. This film was followed by Al Jolson in The Singing Fool.

Later that same year, Warner Brothers moved to become a major exhibitor of its own new sound films, by purchasing the Stanley Company of America. In one stroke the company acquired control of over 225 Stanley theaters in the mid-Atlantic states, which it could then move to equip for sound. From 1928 until 1931, adding to the Stanley chain, Warner Brothers built many more theaters to exhibit its new sound films. In New York, Warner Brothers built a major movie palace, the Hollywood, to showcase its new sound movies in the Broadway theater district.

The novelty of sound movies, and the great success of The Jazz Singer, helped make Warner Brothers a major force in the industry, an

Tsuki from 2008. At that time we still had really old vertical blinds that did not work properly. Last year we switched all of them out to regular horizontal blinds (which are much better). But now I cannot get effects like this anymore because they are horizontal now ^^ Unfortunately.

I think if I were to take this same photo now under the same circumstance, it would look much better than this because I have improved a lot since then. This one here is not very good quality. TăT