<P> Buster Keaton was eager to explore the new medium, but when his studio, MGM, made the changeover to sound, he was quickly stripped of creative control . Though a number of Keaton's early talkies made impressive profits, they were artistically dismal . </P> <P> Several of the new medium's biggest attractions came from vaudeville and the musical theater, where performers such as Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Jeanette MacDonald, and the Marx Brothers were accustomed to the demands of both dialogue and song . James Cagney and Joan Blondell, who had teamed on Broadway, were brought west together by Warner Bros. in 1930 . A few actors were major stars during both the silent and the sound eras: John Barrymore, Ronald Colman, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Norma Shearer, the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and the incomparable Charlie Chaplin, whose City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) employed sound almost exclusively for music and effects . Janet Gaynor became a top star with the synch - sound but dialogueless Seventh Heaven and Sunrise, as did Joan Crawford with the technologically similar Our Dancing Daughters (1928). Greta Garbo was the one non--native English speaker to retain Hollywood stardom on both sides of the great sound divide . Silent film extra Clark Gable, who had received extensive voice training during his earlier stage career, went on to dominate the new medium for decades . The new emphasis on speech also caused producers to hire many novelists, journalists, and playwrights with experience writing good dialogue . Among those who became Hollywood scriptwriters during the 1930s were Nathanael West, William Faulkner, Robert Sherwood, Aldous Huxley, and Dorothy Parker . </P> <P> As talking pictures emerged, with their prerecorded musical tracks, an increasing number of moviehouse orchestra musicians found themselves out of work . More than just their position as film accompanists was usurped; according to historian Preston J. Hubbard, "During the 1920s live musical performances at first - run theaters became an exceedingly important aspect of the American cinema ." With the coming of the talkies, those featured performances--usually staged as preludes--were largely eliminated as well . The American Federation of Musicians took out newspaper advertisements protesting the replacement of live musicians with mechanical playing devices . One 1929 ad that appeared in the Pittsburgh Press features an image of a can labeled "Canned Music / Big Noise Brand / Guaranteed to Produce No Intellectual or Emotional Reaction Whatever" and reads in part: </P> <P> Canned Music on Trial This is the case of Art vs. Mechanical Music in theatres . The defendant stands accused in front of the American people of attempted corruption of musical appreciation and discouragement of musical education . Theatres in many cities are offering synchronised mechanical music as a substitute for Real Music . If the theatre - going public accepts this vitiation of its entertainment program a deplorable decline in the Art of Music is inevitable . Musical authorities know that the soul of the Art is lost in mechanization . It cannot be otherwise because the quality of music is dependent on the mood of the artist, upon the human contact, without which the essence of intellectual stimulation and emotional rapture is lost . </P>

Early filmmakers were forced to move the camera in order to add which of the following to the film