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.
Stefano Pittaluga
Pittaluga's power grew in 1926 when he acquired the traditional leading production outfit Cines from the conglomerate Unione Cinematografica Italiana. Following on the heels of the development of sound film in America, Britain and Germany, Pittaluga had the Cines Studios in Rome fitted for sound production. Cines produced the first Italian sound film "The Song of Love" (1930), although another of the company's films "Resurrection" (1931) was actually made earlier but released later. Cines became the dominant force of the early sound era.