Author Description

Review ''An indispensable and long overdue piece of film history. The Speed of Sound is also a page-turner of a story.'' -- Baltimore Sun ''Eyman is particularly good at conveying the beauty of the fully developed art that was silent cinema... Eyman tells this story with wit and skill, detailing a surprisingly overlooked but crucial period in Hollywood history.'' -- Kirkus Reviews ''Much film writing is either sappy or esoteric, but this book is accessible, well written, humorous and informed.'' -- AudioFile ''Eyman captures the tenor and the terror of the times...A fascinating account of what Eyman terms the destruction of one great art and the creation of another.' '' --Booklist''Eyman combines a historian's zeal for detail and context with a storyteller's talent for the perfect illustrative anecdote... A remarkable book that belongs in every film history collection.'' --Library Journal''Anyone with an interest in accurate film history or a desire to know what really happened in the era of the transition to sound would enjoy this book. You ain't read nothing like it yet.'' --Washington Post Product Description It was the end of an era. It was a turbulent, colorful, and altogether remarkable period, four short years in which America's most popular industry reinvented itself. Here is the epic story of the transition from silent films to talkies, that moment when movies were totally transformed and the American public cemented its love affair with Hollywood. As Scott Eyman demonstrates in his fascinating account of this exciting era, it was a time when fortunes, careers, and lives were made and lost, when the American film industry came fully into its own. In this mixture of cultural and social history that is both scholarly and vastly entertaining, Eyman dispels the myths and gives us the missing chapter in the history of Hollywood, the ribbon of dreams by which America conquered the world. From Library Journal The transformation of