Downton Abbey: A New Era

[Frank Cox]

The first Downton Abbey movie had the King coming to visit, so a story that could have been covered in about ten minutes was extended to two hours. Yawwwn... oh, it's over now?

I expected much the same thing in this movie (and got it to some degree) but this time they actually ran two parallel stories so they didn't have to stretch to the same degree as the first movie.

The first storyline is that the family goes to a villa in France where they do pretty much the same thing they do at home in Downton Abbey, but they do it in France. Tea with the Marquis of something-or-other, and so forth.

The second storyline is, in my view, a lot more interesting. A production company shows up and the people who didn't get to go on the trip get involved with making a movie at the Downton Abbey. The movie starts off as a silent movie but they ultimately decide to make it into a "talkie", and they explore one of the issues that I've previously read about when the switch-over from silent to sound happened -- the main actress in the movie has the most awful, nasal sounding voice and accent imaginable. So how do you make a talkie and work around that?

Now we're into the interesting stuff. Hand-cranking the cameras. Setting up the microphones and cutting a (wax?) platter for the sound. Even an old movie projector with a shutter in front of the lens (just like the one John posted a picture of a while back) to screen the rushes. And of course the solution to the voicing issue with the star actress, which I won't give away here.

So half of the movie is something that I sat through, and the other half is pretty good.

If I was an old lady I'm sure I'd think both halves were wonderful.

[Frank Cox]

Downton Abbey definitely has its fans.

Three old ladies came to tonight's show and told me they drove here from Flin Flon (about 375 miles/600km). They booked a hotel room here for tonight and will drive back tomorrow, apparently.

On the way out they told me it was worth it.

[Leo Enticknap]

...and cutting a (wax?) platter for the sound.

That's a serious blooper. Sound-on-disc was never used on any significant scale for production in British studios. RCA Photophone, licensees of De Forest, and Tri-Ergon had a near monopoly from around 1928-1933. Because the first variants were single system (the pix and optical audio negative were both exposed onto the same strip of film), editing was almost as difficult as with Vitaphone, and the deterioration of the signal-to-noise ratio through duplication severely limited what you could do in post-production, hence Anny Ondra having to be dubbed live, off camera, in Blackmail (she had an even bigger challenge than an actress with a nasty voice: she was Czech and spoke almost no English, which wasn't a problem for the silent version, but when the producers decided to re-shoot it as a talkie midway through production...).

Vitaphone was almost near impossible to use for location recording, because the cutting lathes needed a solid concrete plinth weighing almost literally half a ton to dampen vibrations. They used a very soft wax lacquer compound to enable the very light tracking force needed for mastering to take place at 33.3 RPM and still capture a reasonable dynamic range (the Blumlein cutter had not been invented yet, and ironically it was just as sound-on-disc for movies was falling into obsolescence). That is why so many Warners early talkies are so studio-bound. Sound-on-disc was used extensively for distribution and theater projection in the UK, but not for origination in studios.

So if location shooting had been taking place at Downton Abbey in 1929-30, it would almost certainly have been using the RCA-modified and heavily blimped Bell-and-Howell 2709s, for single system sound-on-film.

[Martin McCaffery]

Nobody watches Downton Abbey for real history, they are too wrapped up in their fantasy version;>

The movie is a one hour tv show stretched out for two hours. The only hopeful moment in the whole thing is when [spoiler alert- one down, 27 to go] we see the funeral procession marching off as if they are headed toward the guillotine. No such luck.

[Jim Cassedy]

Several of my friends have suggested I watch the new Downton Abby flick, especially for the old film
production aspect of the plot. As Leo points out, disc recording (Vitaphone) was not really used as a
production format in British film studios, and certainly it would most likely never have been used for
location work.

In past years I've worked as projectionist (35mm) at several "British Noir" festivals. The sound system
credits on most of those 35mm prints was almost always "RCA" - - I rarely saw a "Western Electric"
sound credit on an English print. The other two systems I often saw credited on Brit films from the 1930's
were the "British Acoustic Film" sound system, and "Visitone" Visitone used a very odd looking track.
It was a 'bargain basement' sound system used almost exclusively by the smaller studios, or
occasionally by a large studio on a very low-budget release. I think Visitone tried marketing their
system in the USA. I vaguely recall seeing advertisements for it online in old issues of AMERICAN
CINEMATOGRAPHER. But I don't think it ever caught on here in the US, and I think, generally, it
was considered to be the most inferior of all the available systems back then. (But it was dirt cheap...)

[Frank Cox]

Historical accuracy aside, I was pleasantly surprised to see old movie making equipment in use during a movie that I fully expected to be a 100% snoozer.

[James Wyrembelski]

I'm a fan of the show and thoroughly enjoyed it. This is a show that's spanned 12 years now if you include the films and after this long it's nice to see everyone back on the screen again. I'm surprised by how many will show up to these films having no previous knowledge of the show at all and walk out not getting it. Of course you don't.....there are six seasons of content before the films....you have no connection to the cast. Kind of reminds me of Marvel. With so many of those after the past couple decades you would understand maybe 1/4 of what's going on while reference after reference just goes right over your head.

It's doing extremely poor here so far with a whole 5 coming in tonight to see it.
I don't care. I'm glad I was able to bring it here.

[Leo Enticknap]

The other two systems I often saw credited on Brit films from the 1930's were the "British Acoustic Film" sound system, and "Visitone" Visitone used a very odd looking track. It was a 'bargain basement' sound system used almost exclusively by the smaller studios

British Acoustic Film was a rebadging of the Danish Petersen and Poulsen system (in Danish, sorry, but Google Translate will give you the gist of it). Visatone-Marconi appears to have had quite a colorful back story. According to Rachael Low's History of the British Film (vol. 7, 1997 reissue, p. 78), it was developed out of early SONAR technology used in British submarines in World War I! I cannot say for certain, but during my days researching this stuff I was never able to find a surviving V-M sound camera, preamp, or mixing equipment; but I have examined surviving V-M release prints, and the unilateral variable area tracks on them look identical to ones exposed using RCA Photophone sound cameras of the same period (i.e. before RCA started to use shuttered unilateral, then bilateral, then the single bilateral "RCA Duplex" track shot on a UV-sensitized negative stock). I strongly suspect that Visatone-Marconi ripped off some RCA patents, but that its inventors had to be subtle and careful as to which ones and to what extent, in order to avoid lawsuits. In the early 1930s, licensing fees for Photophone were GBP 10 per 1,000ft reel of final mix negative ($1,807 in 2020 USD), and a smaller, though unspecified, fee per release print struck (figures given by Low). To my knowledge, Visatone-Marconi was only ever used in the studios of two "quota quickie" impressarios, Joe Rock and Julius Hagen (roughly the British equivalent of Hollywood "poverty row" studios, e.g. Monogram and Republic), and a government propaganda organization, the GPO Film Unit.

The autobiography of a GPO filmmaker, Harry Watt, reveals some tantalizing details: for example, it was possible to mix four input channels onto one output negative, but the signal-to-noise ratio was so terrible if you did that they tried to avoid any more than two, and to avoid any dubbing of location recordings in post if possible. And unlike most variable area systems, it required very precise densitometry control in the lab, with the result that many processed reels of sound negative were unusable.

From the limited information I was able to find, I'd speculate that Visatone-Marconi ripped off the RCA light valve and oscillator ribbon in the sound camera, but used their own preamps and mixing circuits. That would explain why, as a general rule, it sounded OK as long as a given recording hadn't been mixed and dubbed in post, but seriously bad if it had been. I'd be very interested to learn more if there was a serious attempt to market Visatone-Marconi in the USA.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Bring the Buckets back... Er I mean Bouquet's....