America's First Talkie Film

America’s first Talkie film

(Feature film with sound)

Don Juan is a 1926 American romantic adventure/drama film directed by Alan Crosland. It is the first feature-length film to utilize the Vitaphone sound-on-disc sound system with a synchronized musical score and sound effects, though it has no spoken dialogue. The film is inspired by Lord Byron's 1821 epic poem of the same name. The screenplay was written by Bess Meredyth with intertitles by Maude Fulton and Walter Anthony, Screenplay by Bess Meredyth.

Don Juan stars John Barrymore as the hand-kissing womanizer. The film has the most kisses in film history, with Barrymore kissing (all together) Mary Astor and Estelle Taylor 127 times.

The music of the film is given by William Axt David Mendoza, Cinematography by Byron Haskin under the productiion and distribution of Warner Bros. Pictures, the film was released in August 6, 1926 (NYC) with a running time of 112 minutes. The film was produced with a budget of $789,963 and in return made a total box office collection of $1,258,000.

The first recorded instance of photographs capturing and reproducing motion was a series of photographs of a running horse by Eadweard Muybridge, which he captured in Palo Alto, California, using a set of still cameras placed in a row. Muybridge's accomplishment led inventors everywhere to attempt to make similar devices that would capture such motion. In the United States, Thomas Edison was among the first to produce such a device, the kinetoscope.