Musical Short - Vitaphone

Vitaphone

The nearly 2,000 Vitaphone short subjects produced by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1930 included vaudevillians, opera singers, Broadway stars, dancers, bands and popular vocalists. One and two-reel short musical films were valuable to the movie studios as springboards for new talents. Performers who made their film debuts in short films include Joan Blondell, Humphrey Bogart, Burns and Allen, Sammy Davis, Jr., Judy Garland (as Baby Gumm), Cary Grant, Bob Hope, Bert Lahr and Ginger Rogers.

Ruth Etting sang "My Mother's Eyes" (by Abel Baer and L. Wolfe Gilbert) and "That's Him Now" (by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen) in the Paramount Movietone Ruth Etting in Favorite Melodies (1929), filmed in a single take at the Astoria Studios in Queens, New York. Astoria Studios was built by Paramount in the early days of sound films to provide the company with an audio-capable facility close to the Broadway theater district. Many features and short subjects were filmed there between 1928 and 1933, including the 16-minute St. Louis Blues (1929), the only film of Bessie Smith.