This photo from Good News depicts a sound stage set-up from 1930. (That's director Nick Grinde on the left and Bessie Love on the right.)

On Thursday, September 15, the Academy’s Science and Technology Council brings Robert Gitt, Preservation Officer at UCLA Film and Television Archive, to the Linwood Dunn Theater to present an illustrated talk on the early history of sound in motion pictures. Informative and highly entertaining for professional and general audiences alike, the lecture will be punctuated with rare still photographs and dozens of fascinating film extracts . Among these are rare examples of turn-of-the-last-century pioneering developments such as the Gaumont Chronophone, Edison's Kinetophone, Kellum Talking Pictures and the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system introduced in the 1920s with its famous "All-talking, All-singing, All-dancing" productions. Rival American sound-on-film processes such as DeForest Phonofilm, Fox Movietone and RCA Photophone also will be discussed and demonstrated along with the many advances made in optical soundtracks in the 1930s and 1940s.

The program also will include various types of optical soundtracks, Hollywood studio sound department "in-house" demonstration reels, and theater sound tests of the 1930s and 1940s. An extraordinary, revealing and original evening.