Movietone News was a newsreel that ran from 1928 to 1963 in the United States. Under the name British Movietone News, it also ran in the United Kingdom from 1929 to 1986, in France also produced by Fox-Europa, in Spain in the early 1930s as Noticiario Fox Movietone [1] before being replaced by No-Do, in Australia and New Zealand until 1970, and Germany as Fox Tönende Wochenschau from 1930 to 1940 and from 1950 to 1978. [2] An Indian version called Indian Movietone News ran in 1942 and 1943 before getting replaced by Indian News Parade.
Movietone News evolved from an earlier newsreel established by Fox Films called Fox News which was founded in 1919. It produced silent newsreels. When Fox entered talkies in 1928 with Mother Knows Best , the name Fox Movietone was applied to Fox's sound productions.
In the U.S. as Fox Movietone News it produced cinema sound newsreels from 1928 to 1963, and from 1929 to 1986 in the UK (for much of that time as British Movietone News), as well as 1929 to 1975 in Australia. One of the earliest in the series featured George Bernard Shaw Talks to Movietone News, released on June 25, 1928.
One of the known early producers of these newsreels was Abraham Harrison also known as Harry, father of notable black and white photographer Dody Weston Thompson who also found a brief career in film making.
An early conductor of the Movietone News orchestra was Harry Lauder II, nephew of entertainer Sir Harry Lauder, who was contracted by the company for eighteen months before William Fox took him to his Hollywood studio. Sir Harry Lauder also appeared in test sound films made at the Fox Studios in New York City during the winter-spring of 1927.
One installment, Fox Grandeur News, was released on May 26, 1929, in Fox's short-lived widescreen process Grandeur and shown before the feature film Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 .
Hearst Metrotone News initially leased the Case Research Lab patents from William Fox for its sound newsreels. Each of these studios used this system of recording sound film for news items because it was an easily transported single-system of sound-on-film recording.
Fox's first use of recording a news event was on May 20, 1927: Charles Lindbergh's take-off from Roosevelt Field for his historic solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean was filmed with sound and shown in a New York theater that same night, inspiring Fox to create Movietone News. A regular narrator of the newsreels was broadcaster/journalist Lowell Thomas.
After Fox Films merged with 20th Century Pictures in 1935 to form 20th Century-Fox (Later 20th Century Studios in 2020), the name of Fox Movietone News was shortened to Movietone News.
The company's last regular broadcast occurred in 1963, although it existed as a legal entity set to preserve important filmreels until Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the parent company 20th Century Fox and the subsequent liquidation of Movietone in 1984 and 1986 respectively.
In Australia, Movietone and Cinesound were competitors for newsreel coverage, but later combined under the Australian Movie Magazine name.
The University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections [3] has a portion of the Fox Movietone newsreel collection. The rest of it is owned and managed by the Fox Film Corporation's corporate successor (and namesake), Fox News Channel. During its early years, Fox News Channel had a weekend show which played the newsreels.
Licensing for Fox Movietone newsreels owned by the University of South Carolina is handled by the Moving Image Research Collections while licensing for Fox Movietone News is still owned by Fox Corporation and handled by Fox News Channel. British Movietone is owned separately by the films' successor-in-interest, operating under the name British Movietonews Ltd. The licensing of British Movietone newsreels is handled by AP Archive.
In September 2016, it was announced that the British Movietone archive had been acquired by Associated Press. [4] [5] [6]
The Movietone News Australia archive was donated to the National Film and Sound Archive in 1988. [7]
The Academy Film Archive houses the 20th Century Fox Movietone Shorts and Documentaries Series Collection. [8]
In 2015, British Movietone and Associated Press's archival footage were released on YouTube. [9] [10]
The Fox Film Corporation was an American independent company that produced motion pictures and was formed in 1915 by the theater "chain" pioneer William Fox. It was the corporate successor to his earlier Greater New York Film Rental Company and Box Office Attraction Company.
A newsreel is a form of short documentary film, containing news stories and items of topical interest, that was prevalent between the 1910s and the mid 1970s. Typically presented in a cinema, newsreels were a source of current affairs, information, and entertainment for millions of moviegoers. Newsreels were typically exhibited preceding a feature film, but there were also dedicated newsreel theaters in many major cities in the 1930s and ’
Wilhelm Fried Fuchs, commonly and better known as William Fox, was a Hungarian-American film industry executive who founded the Fox Film Corporation in 1915 and the Fox West Coast Theatres chain in the 1920s. Although he lost control of his film businesses in 1930, his name was used by 20th Century Fox and continues to be used in the trademarks of the present-day Fox Corporation, including the Fox Broadcasting Company, Fox News, Fox Sports and Foxtel.
The Movietone sound system is an optical sound-on-film method of recording sound for motion pictures, ensuring synchronization between sound and picture. It achieves this by recording the sound as a variable-density optical track on the same strip of film that records the pictures. The initial version of this system was capable of a frequency response of 8500 Hz. Although modern sound films use variable-area tracks instead, modern motion picture theaters can play a Movietone film without modification to the projector. Movietone was one of four motion picture sound systems under development in the U.S. during the 1920s. The others were DeForest's Phonofilm, Warner Brothers' Vitaphone, and RCA Photophone. However, Phonofilm was principally an early version of Movietone.
Cinesound Productions Pty Ltd was an Australian feature film production company. Established in June 1931, Cinesound developed out of a group of companies centred on Greater Union Theatres that covered all facets of the film process, from production to distribution and exhibition. Cinesound Productions established a film studio as a subsidiary of Greater Union Theatres Pty Ltd based on the Hollywood model. The first production was On Our Selection (1932), which was an enormous financial success.
Pathé News was a producer of newsreels and documentaries from 1910 to 1970 in the United Kingdom. Its founder, Charles Pathé, was a pioneer of moving pictures in the silent era. The Pathé News archive is known today as "British Pathé". Its collection of news film and movies is fully digitised and available online.
Universal Newsreel was a series of 7- to 10-minute newsreels that were released twice a week between 1929 and 1967 by Universal Studios. A Universal publicity official, Sam B. Jacobson, was involved in originating and producing the newsreels. Nearly all of them were filmed in black-and-white, and many were narrated by Ed Herlihy. From January 1919 to July 1929, Universal released International Newsreel, produced by Hearst's International News Service—this series later became Hearst Metrotone News released first by Fox Film Corporation 1929–1934 and then by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer beginning in 1934.
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), known as ScreenSound Australia from 1999 to 2004, is Australia's audiovisual archive, responsible for developing, preserving, maintaining, promoting, and providing access to a national collection of film, television, sound, radio, video games, new media, and related documents and artefacts. The collection ranges from works created in the late nineteenth century when the recorded sound and film industries were in their infancy, to those made in the present day.
Eileen Naseby is the Australian author of Ursula, A Voyage of Love and Drama, a biography of her mother. The book tells the story of Ursula and her mother's escape from the Nazi regime, her closeted upbringing in Palestine, her love affair with the adventurer and writer Laurens van der Post, and her eventual emigration to Australia with Eileen and her two children Diana and Charmian to her new husband Nigel. Ursula and Nigel eventually converted from Judaism to the Baháʼí Faith.
Newsfront is a 1978 Australian drama film directed by Phillip Noyce, and starring Bill Hunter, Wendy Hughes, Chris Haywood and Bryan Brown. The screenplay is written by David Elfick, Bob Ellis, Philippe Mora, and Noyce. The original music score is composed by William Motzing. Shot on location in Sydney, Australia, the film is shot in black and white, and colour, incorporating actual newsreel footage.
Kokoda Front Line! was a full-length edition of the Australian newsreel, Cinesound Review, produced by the Australian News & Information Bureau and Cinesound Productions Limited in 1942, about the Kokoda Track campaign. It was one of four winners of the 15th Academy Awards for best documentary, and the first Australian film to win an Oscar. It was filmed by the Australian war photographer Damien Parer and directed by Ken G. Hall.
Historic Films Archive is a stock footage library operating from New York. It owns the rights to an extensive collection of television and film footage dating back to 1895. Its library includes all genres of American Music on film and video and historic archive footage derived from American Newsreels, Feature Films, Industrial shorts, home movies, out-takes and cartoons.
Hearst Metrotone News was a newsreel series (1914–1967) produced by the Hearst Corporation, founded by William Randolph Hearst.
United Press International Television News, abbreviated as UPITN, was a television news agency, operating from 1967 to 1985. It was the successor to earlier UPI television news film operations United Press Movietone and United Press International Newsfilm. It was at the forefront of international television newsgathering and had a vast network of foreign bureaus around the world with film crews capturing images of the events and people that defined the era.
Fox News was the original newsreel established by movie mogul William Fox. It was eventually replaced by Fox's pioneering sound newsreel, Fox Movietone News, which began regular operations in December 1927.
Walter Sully (1895–1970) was an Australian cinematographer who worked for Cinesound Productions, Frank Hurley and Movietone. He was one of the leading newsreel cameramen of the 1930s.
Ernest Gustav Brandon-Cremer was a New Zealand/Australian moviemaker, newsman, explorer and adventurer. He was a key figure in Australian aviation history, and was especially known for his documentation of Lasseter's Gold Reef as well as his photography of the Solar eclipse of 21 September 1922 at Wallal, Australia.
Leslie Lesser Landau was a British director, film producer, screenwriter, screenplay editor and playwright. He also served as the newsreel editor of British Movietone News from 1929 to 1935 at a time the power of newsreel from a political perspective was first used. He was honoured for landmark film journalism.
Meher Baba Newsreel footage is a series of 1932 newsreels of Meher Baba's Messages to the west and his interviews with media at Croton-on-Hudson, New York, house of American actress Margaret Mayo in the United States, and Russell Square, 32 Russell Road, Kensington, London, England.
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