Anecdotes

This is the first feature-length movie with audible dialogue.

The movie's first spoken dialogue, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothing yet" was voted as the #71 movie quote by the American Film Institute (out of 100), and as #57 of "The 100 Greatest Movie Lines" by Premiere in 2007.

Though the film is widely considered to be the first talking film, there was originally planned to be no spoken dialogue, only singing. Al Jolson improvised all of the dialogue in the talking scenes on spot, and Harry Warner made the call to leave these scenes in the film.

Many documentaries and historians have stated that all of Hollywood switched to sound immediately this film's success. The transition actually took several years. One factor was two competing, incompatible sound systems. The Vitaphone process relied on an electro-mechanical interface between the projector and the turntable. Fox's Fotofilm was a sound-on-film process that allowed for easier editing, but required a costlier projector. Using either sound process nearly doubled a film's budget. Theater chains faced enormous conversion costs. MGM's parent company, Loew's Inc., owned over 1,000 outlets, and took a deliberately slow wait-and-see attitude toward sound. Studio bosses faced a limited amount of sound equipment and qualified sound technicians. Silent films were also easier to market internationally, using translated title cards. Before the advent of subtitles, making a talkie for international distribution usually meant producing completely different foreign language versions simultaneously. The first feature film with all synchronous dialog was Lights of New York (1928). Many studios produced silent and sound versions of their films.

Al Jolson's famous line, "You ain't heard nothin' yet." was an ad-lib. The intention was for the film to only have synchronized music, not speech, but Jolson dropped in the line (which he used in his stage act) after the song "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face", and the director left it in.