Movies - The King of Jazz

Home > Listing Index > Movies > The King of Jazz

	Movies - The King of Jazz

The King of Jazz is a motion picture, starring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra (Paul Whiteman's nickname was the King of Jazz, hence the film's name). It premiered on April 20, 1930, at the Criterion Theater. Receipts from the film were below expectations within the first 2 weeks.

The grand premiere of the film was held on May 2, 1930 at the Roxy Theater in New York. At the Roxy Theater premiere, the Whiteman Orchestra, together with George Gershwin and the 125-piece Roxy Symphony Orchestra, put on a stage show. This show featured the Rhapsody in Blue and Mildred Bailey backed by the Roxy Chorus. This stage show was performed five times a day, between showings of the movie. The stage show ran for only one week, and the movie showings continued at the Roxy for only one additional week. There were at least nine foreign language versions of the film. Reportedly, the Swedish version has at least some different music.

The movie was originally 105 minutes long, but was shortened to 93 minutes after the following production numbers were cut from the film:

A. A sketch (William Kent) about a suicidal flute player, with the Whiteman Orchestra performing Caprice Viennois as background music.
B. A specialty number featuring Nell O'Day, with music unknown and set in a cabaret lobby.
C. A sketch featuring Grace Hayes singing "My Lover."

The film was distributed by Universal Pictures and was produced by Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal.

One scene in the film is an animated segment created by Walter Lantz, who later became famous for creating the characters Andy Panda and Woody Woodpecker. The animation was the first to be photographed in Technicolor, but by the time this film was released, only two-tone Technicolor was available, using only the red and green portions of the sequence. This was entirely different from the successful three-strip Technicolor process that Walt Disney would make a three-picture deal with in 1932. It was also the first sound color cartoon ever made, predating Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney, and marked the first film appearance of the popular crooner, Bing Crosby, who was the voice of the lion in the animated scene.

The film won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction by Herman Rosse, out of nominees Bulldog Drummond, The Love Parade
, Sally and The Vagabond King.

The Movie

The King of Jazz was the second all-talking motion picture filmed entirely in 2-color Technicolor (not just color sequences). The first one was the 1929 Warner Brothers motion picture On With The Show!. At the time, Technicolor was a 2-color process incorporating red and green, with no blue. Lamps with colored projection were used, mainly side lighting through red and green gelatin spots on a white background. For the missing blue color (as in Rhapsody in Blue), set director Herman Rosse and director John Murray Anderson came up with an ingeneous solution. Tests were made of various fabrics and pigments, and by using an all gray-and-silver background, they arrived at a shade of green which gave the illusion of peacock blue. Filters were also used to simulate the blue color, resulting in pastel shades rather than bright colors.

The Cartoon

The movie included the first Technicolor animated cartoon segment by animators Walter Lantz (later famous for Woody Woodpecker and other characters) and William Nolan. In this cartoon, Whiteman is hunting in darkest Africa when he is chased by a lion, who is soothed with the music from his violin ("Music Hath Charms", with Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang). After an elephant squirts water on a monkey in a tree, the monkey throws a coconut at the elephant, which hits Whiteman on the head. The bump on his head forms into a crown. As Charles Irwin then says, "And that's how Paul Whiteman was crowned the 'King of Jazz'". One of the characters making a brief appearance in the cartoon was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the star of the Universal cartoon studio led by Lantz. Additionally a black-and-white sound cartoon featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit titled "My Pal Paul", that was released in 1930 by Universal, promoted The King of Jazz by including songs from the movie and the cartoon Paul Whiteman character.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The King of Jazz ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article The King of Jazz; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay