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.
Laurel and Hardy
In 1929 the silent era of film was coming to an end, and many actors saw their careers decline with the advent of sound. Many silent film actors failed to make the transition because they decided their prime duty was to tell stories in words or they overemphasized their speech. Laurel and Hardy avoided this pitfall because they continued making primarily visual films. They did not ignore sound but were not ruled by it. As a team they proved skilful in their melding of visual and verbal humor and made a seamless transition to the talking era in their first sound film "Unaccustomed As We Are" from 1929. The title took its name from the familiar phrase "Unaccustomed as we are to public speaking". In the opening dialogue, Laurel and Hardy began by spoofing the slow and self-conscious speech of the early talking actors which became a routine they would use regularly.