How sound killed high-quality movies, just like the internet killed high-quality sportswriting

This is probably going to sound a little funny but I’ve been watching the old miniseries “Hollywood,” a documentary about the silent film industry, and it struck me that the transition to sound movies has some parallels in the media racket today.

I know. Crazy. Usually if you’re going to draw an analogy to the changes in media wrought by today’s technological innovation, the century-old industry you use involves horses.

A B/R writer who is several years my senior and a veteran of a long newspaper career responded to something I’d written about the modern sportswriting biz in an email by comparing old-school sportswriters to “blacksmiths in the era the horse was replaced by the motor car.” A novel-writing friend who’s feeling like his opportunities for making money are getting more and more scarce posted a plea for advice on Facebook and punctuated it with a warning that he would do violence to anyone using the phrase “buggy whip.”

I’ve been guilty of that one myself.

But “Hollywood” showed me an even better parallel. The series was released in 1980, when many stars, directors and crew members from the silent era were still alive. There are contemporary interviews with them sprinkled throughout. As they spoke, they reminded me of people who today lament the death of quality sportswriting, or journalism generally, which, in this view, has been destroyed by hot takes, social media, GIFs and all the rest of that web 2.0 kinda stuff.

Except for a few of us weirdos who seek out silent movies and love them, people today think of them as silly and primitive: “Jerky and flickering,” as narrator James Mason puts it in the opening moments, “a little absurd, moving at the wrong speed, with that tinkling piano.”

But at the time they were considered a fully developed art form, and many of the most important people in the business thought of the advent of sound as a disaster, the ruination of something sublime.

“I think the great disaster that befell the picture business was sound,” says the famous reporter—and silent-film screenwriter—Adela Rogers St. John. “See, we had a high art of pantomime, at its very peak.”

“When sound started, that’s when popcorn began,” says King Vidor, whose career spanned the silent and sound eras, “because they could turn away and look and talk to your girlfriend and unwrap candy bars and all that, and you wouldn’t miss anything. You could hear it at the same time. In silent pictures, you couldn’t eat popcorn and do drinks because you had to watch the screen all the time, and you had to interpret what was going on.”

Before “talkies” came in, the movies were an international language. The same flick could be shown anywhere. “I don’t think film should have married words,” says Lillian Gish, a great star of the period. “It separates the world. Film and music brings the world together again. They all understand it.”

That was a real loss, as was the audience attentiveness and engagement that Vidor talked about. D.W. Griffith said, “It is my arrogant belief that we have lost beauty.” Charlie Chaplin said, “Talkies are ruining the great beauty of silence. They are defeating the meaning of the screen.”

These people were giants. They knew their business. They were right.

But what they missed, or ignored, was that while some of those great things about silent movies were lost, sound opened up vast opportunities that would have been impossible without it. “The Godfather” wasn’t happening in the silent era, and neither were the Marx Brothers, not to mention, say, “West Side Story.” Or “Toy Story.” But of course, not ALL was lost. Some of the Marx Brothers’ comedy would have worked in the silent era, as would some of the drama in “The Godfather.”

As I told my newspaper-veteran friend, I think those old silent-film artists are a pretty good analogy for old-school sportswriters. They created wonderful work, and found themselves threatened when technological innovation fundamentally changed their industry. Some of their old skills translated, others didn’t, and some new ones were necessary that hadn’t been needed before.

Here’s some good news: You know how all the stars of silent movies had their careers ruined when sound came in? That’s largely a myth. There were casualties—not always attributable to sound coming in—but many of them adapted quite well.

I sometimes wish that silent movies were still a thing, because I love them. But mostly I’m happy to have all of the magnificent work that’s come along since the sound era began. I think future generations will hear early-21st century lamentations over how the internet is killing high-quality writing the way we hear Adela Rogers St. John and Lillian Gish.