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.
Eugene Augustin Lauste
He joined the American Biograph Company in 1896 and remained there for four years before moving to Brixton, England. In 1904 he prepared his first sound-on-film model. On August 11, 1906 he (along with Australian Robert R. Haines and Briton John S. Pletts) applied for a British patent; their application was granted patent No. 18057 in 1907 for "a process for recording and reproducing simultaneously the movements or motions of persons or objects and the sounds produced by them," i.e., a strip of 35 mm celluloid film containing both image frames and a sound strip. In 1911 he exhibited a sound film in the United States, possibly the first-ever American showing of a movie using sound-on-film technology. Before he could market his system more widely, though, World War I intervened.