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.
Arthur Edeson
When sound came in, Edeson experimented with camouflaging the microphones in exterior shots. "In Old Arizona" (1929), the first sound film to be shot outside a studio, provided evidence to Hollywood executives that talking pictures need not be confined to the sound stage. The western "The Big Trail" (1930), starring John Wayne in his first starring role, was also filmed by Edeson in the 70mm widescreen process, known as "Fox Grandeur".