In 1927, the first film with sound was made, directly effecting the entertainment industry, and forever changing the movie goers experience. This box office hit, "The Jazz Singer", starring Al Jolson was a story about a young man whose dreams of being a jazz singer were shadowed with the disapproval of his orthodox Jewish father. On the night of his Broadway opening, the night his dreams would eventually come true, he returned home to sing "Kol Nidre" to his dying father. The movie was based on the story, "The Day of Atonement", by Alfred Cohn.

"The Jazz Singer" won a Special Academy Award for "the pioneer talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry." The film was called a "Talkie" since it was the first to feature actors with spoken lines instead of the written narratives of the past. Although previous films may have outshone "The Jazz Singer" in terms of running time, the eighty-nine minute masterpiece by Alan Crosland surpassed its predecessors by replacing much of the orchestral accompaniments with actual verbal dialog.

Before the 1920's, movies were primarily dramas, romances, slapsticks, or comedies that silently ran across the screen with the only audible enhancements coming from an orchestral recording. As the movie goers watched the plot unfold in front of them, they hastily had to keep up with the moving underscore on the bottom of the screen in order to grasp the story-line.

The transition from silent films to "talkies" was fast, but studios struggled with the advance in technology. Microphones were not mobile, so the actors had to stay in place while they were speaking, and sounds on the set had to be eliminated in order not to be picked up on film. Later better microphones were developed and so was a method of sound proofing motors on cameras, and noise-suppression devices. In 1929, a motorized camera was developed to run twenty-four frames a minute to help eliminate other stage sounds.

Another big problem that the industry faced was finding actors who could act. In the silent films they didn't need to speak, and they were used mainly to fit the look of a character. In "talkies" actors had to have a voice to fit their character. They also needed to learn how to memorize their lines. Because the film actors never had to do this before, they were beginning to be replaced by stage actors.