Classical Hollywood cinema
The beginning of the sound era itself is ambiguously defined. To some, it began with "The Jazz Singer", which was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films, as sound was introduced to feature films. To others, the era began in 1929, when the silent age had definitively ended. Most Hollywood pictures from the late 1920s to 1960s adhered closely to a genre—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, and biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films; Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years; Cecil B. DeMille's films were almost all made at Paramount Pictures; and director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth Century Fox. Similarly, actors were mostly contract players. Film historians and critics note that it took about a decade for films to adapt to sound and return to the level of artistic quality of the silents, which it did in the late 1930s.
The Sound of Music (film)
The first American television transmission of "The Sound of Music" was on February 29, 1976 on ABC, which paid $15 million for a one-time only broadcast that became one of the top-rated films ever shown on television to that point. The movie was not shown again until NBC acquired the broadcast rights and telecast the film on February 11, 1979. NBC continued to air the film annually for twenty years. During most of its run on NBC, the film was heavily edited to fit a three-hour time slot—approximately 140 minutes without commercials. The thirty minutes edited out of the original film included portions of the "Morning Hymn and Alleluia" sung by the nuns, part of the dialogue between Mother Abbess and Maria in the abbey, part of Liesl and Rolfe's dialogue preceding "Sixteen Going on Seventeen", Liesl's verse of "Edelweiss" sung with the Captain, the Captain and Baroness waltzing at the party, and minor dialogue cuts within existing scenes.