Yet, despite an intense period of maturation in the teens and twenties that saw the development of silent theatrical films displaying the unique propensities of the film medium, the talking picture revolution that began in the mid-twenties with experiments by Warner Bros. and Fox in America, Gaumont-British in England, and Tobis-Klangfilm in Europe initiated yet another spate of closely imitative theater-film collaborations. In the early thirties in France, many theatrically-oriented theater playwrights and directors, such as René Clair (1898–1981), Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974) and Sacha Guitry (1885–1957), filmed their own plays and/or staged their stories along theatrical models—notably Clair's operetta-like Le Million (1931), Pagnol's Marius-Fanny-César trilogy (1931–1936) and Guitry's Faisons un rêve (Let Us Do a Dream, 1937) and Le Roman d'un tricheur (The Story of a Cheat, 1936). Germany's storied Ufa studios (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) in Babelsberg was the site for numerous early 1930s musical extravaganzas, notably Der Kongreß Tanzt (Congress Dances) in 1931. In America in the late 1920s, Daniel Frohman and Adolph Zukor joined forces again, this time to collaborate on Paramount's Interference (1928), the first all-talking theatrical feature film. In a virtual repeat of their earlier pronouncements, they proclaimed a new era in theater-film cooperation. "No more will our best plays be confined to the few big cities," declared Frohman, speaking from the screen. "These plays, with their stirring drama enhanced by the richness of the human voice, will go to the whole world." By 1930 hundreds of film records of short vaudeville sketches, feature-length dramas, revues, and musical shows were once again flooding the movie houses. Actors with stage-trained voices forsook the stage and flocked to the East and West coast movie studios to face the dreaded "King Mike" (the label alluding to the primitive microphone technology of the day). Variety estimated that more than 205 stage personnel were working in the East and West Coast studios, including fifty-one playwrights, seventeen stage and dance directors, and ninety-five actors.
The most extensive collaborative endeavor at this time was Paramount's construction of sound stages in Astoria, New York, for the purpose of bringing nearby Broadway performers, directors, and producers as various as Fanny Brice (1891–1951), Rouben Mamoulian (1897–1987), and Florenz Ziegfeld (1867–1932) to the screen in their current stage successes. The years 1929 and 1930 saw theater and film directors work side by side in the filming of the Marx Brothers' The Cocoanuts (1929), The Dance of Life (1929, based on the play Burlesque), The Doctor's Secret (1929, based on James Barrie's Half an Hour), and many others. Warner Bros., in addition to bringing Broadway stars like Al Jolson to the screen and constructing a sound stage of its own in New York for theatrical adaptations—of its approximately one hundred talkies and part-talkies released by 1930, fully one-third were theatrically related—went into partnership with the Shubert brothers to finance stage productions in order to acquire advance film rights. This promised a double benefit to Warner—a ready-made supply of theatrical properties and a chain of legitimate houses in which to exhibit them. "An offer nowadays by a picture firm to bankroll a stage producer is very common," Variety reported on September 19, 1928. "The dialogue picture maker calculates it could produce a stage play, erect prestige for it by a Broadway run, and [photograph] the play, sending it on the road, but in the picture houses"(p. 5). (This move was later terminated on legal grounds by the Dramatists Guild.) "I believe that the plays I was doing in the theatre might be looked upon as 'high-brow,"' opined prominent Broadway actor George Arliss (1868–1946), who brought his Disraeli to the screen in 1929; "[and] there is no doubt that a considerable percentage of the people that came to see me in the theatre never went to the movietones [sic] at all.… The Warner Brothers realized that these lost sheep must be collected and brought into the fold.…" (p. 12).
To a significant degree, many of these theatrical shorts and features continued the tradition of close imitation of stage properties that had been seen—and subsequently abandoned—in silent photoplays. Whereas in the silent days this imitation had been largely a matter of intent, now it was a technical expedient. The cramped confines of the early sound stages and the limitations of the primitive microphones led at first to a "canned" product that was static and lifeless. Just as critiques of the silent films had included complaints that dialogue and expository titles retarded the action and that exaggerated acting styles jarred with the intimacy of the camera lens, now foes of the talkie photoplays rejected the audio-visual pleonasm of the synchronous union of image and sound, the "long photographic discussions between characters" and action that "had a repeated tendency to become too talkie and motionless."
Variety's complaint in a review dated 13 March 1929 about The Letter (1929), in which Jeanne Eagels (1894–1929) recreated her stage role, that the film was "entirely a transcription of a stage work and the cinema version does little to make the subject matter its own" (p. 14) was typical. Writing in the New York Times, 28 July 1929, Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) argued that in trying to transform itself into a theatrical event, films could never become more than a "bad photographic and mechanical copy" of a given play. And, as had happened before, several important theoretical works appeared addressing the new challenges to theatrical and cinematic identity. Joining Pirandello were Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) and Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953) in Russia, Abel Gance (1889–1981) and René Clair in France, and Edmund Goulding (1891–1959) and George Jean Nathan (1882–1958) in America.
And, as had happened fifteen years earlier, the ticket-buying public in America again seemed to agree. By 1930 they were turning away from tedious, stage-bound adaptations such as The Letter in favor of films like Mamoulian's Applause (1929), an original screenplay that blended theatrical elements with a more cinematic nonsynchronous conjunction of image and sound. And while they embraced several of the new stage-trained actors, notably Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, Edward G. Robinson, and the Marx Brothers, they dismissed many more, such as Ruth Chatterton and Hal Skelly.