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Post by buckwheatisawesome on Feb 22, 2015 16:22:50 GMT -5
Hi! I'm reading Jackie Cooper's autobiography Please Don't Shoot My Dog. He mentions that he appeared in the Our Gang movies, half of them being talkies and half of them being silents. For some reason, I don't remember Cooper ever being in the Our Gang silents. Am I wrong, or did Jackie Cooper just get his facts wrong writing the autobiography?
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Post by ymymeatemup on Feb 22, 2015 16:41:27 GMT -5
He's wrong, but that's a common thing with former child actors writing about their film careers. What might be causing him to remember it that way is that in at least one film, "Boxing Gloves," some of the footage was shot silent, including footage with Cooper. He's probably remembering that experience as a silent Our Gang episode and expanding it into half of his tenure in the series.
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Post by buckwheatisawesome on Feb 22, 2015 16:49:21 GMT -5
He's wrong, but that's a common thing with former child actors writing about their film careers. What might be causing him to remember it that way is that in at least one film, "Boxing Gloves," some of the footage was shot silent, including footage with Cooper. He's probably remembering that experience as a silent Our Gang episode and expanding it into half of his tenure in the series. Oh.. that's weird, though. Having a episode that has some silent clips and sound clips.. But, they did that in Shivering Shakespeare, right? When some people throw pies at each other? |
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Post by ymymeatemup on Feb 22, 2015 20:21:41 GMT -5
Yeah, that would be another example. It seems to have happened in a lot of the earliest talkies, but it happens chronically in "Boxing Gloves."
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Post by ymymeatemup on Feb 22, 2015 20:22:10 GMT -5
My last message somehow posted twice, and it won't let me delete one of them, so I'll replace the text in this post and just remind everybody that only you can prevent Pauly Shore.
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Post by myhomeo on Feb 24, 2015 17:40:58 GMT -5
If I understand correctly, part of the reason might have been the problems with early sound equipment. In the Marx Brothers' first film, THE COCOANUTS, for example, every piece of paper is dripping wet, even when it's just been pulled out of someone's pocket. This, it turns out, was because the microphones were so sensitive if someone unfolded a piece of paper it sounded like a building collapsing and soaking the papers in water was the only way they could think of to keep it from drowning out the dialogue. So in some cases, it might have just been considered easier to film without sound.
Another tidbit you might not've known about: Before subtitles and dubbing came along, early sound films were filmed in several languages for different markets. The Spanish version of DRACULA is fairly well known, but there were also a number of Spanish-language Rascals shorts, more or less identical to the ones we know, with different secondary actors and the kids doing their best to read their dialogue phonetically off blackboards and the like.
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Post by buckwheatisawesome on Feb 24, 2015 19:26:42 GMT -5
Even though this thread implies I would ask a question about Jackie Cooper, I have a question about Norman "Chubby" Chaney: Did he appear in silent films? Or, was he a new addition to the cast, when Jackie Cooper joined, too?
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Post by mtw12055 on Feb 24, 2015 20:53:19 GMT -5
Chubby wasn't added until the sound era.
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