The Jazz Singer

Welcome to our first episode of the new year, which is also our first episode of Season 5. Thank you for continuing to join us on this amazing journey.

On today's episode, we head back to Christmas of 1980, when pop music superstar Neil Diamond would be making his feature acting debut in a new version of The Jazz Singer.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

From Los Angeles, California, the entertainment capital of the world, this is The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.

 

It’s 2023, which means we are starting our fifth season. And for our first episode of this new season, we’re going back to the end of 1980, to take a look back at what was supposed to be the launch of a new phase in the career of one of music’s biggest stars. That musical star was Neil Diamond, and this would end up becoming his one and only attempt to act in a motion picture.

 

We’re talking about The Jazz Singer.

 

As I have said time and time again, I don’t really have a plan for this show. I talk about the movies and subjects I talk about often on a whim. I’ll hear about something and I’ll be reminded of something, and a few days later, I’ve got an episode researched, written, recorded, edited and out there in the world. As I was working on the previous episode, about The War of the Roses just before my trip to Thailand, I saw a video of Neil Diamond singing Sweet Caroline on opening night of A Beautiful Noise, a new Broadway musical about the life and music of Mr. Diamond. I hadn’t noticed Diamond had stopped performing live five years earlier due to a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, and it was very touching to watch a thousand people joyously singing along with the man.

 

But as I was watching that video, I was reminded of The Jazz Singer, a movie we previously covered very lightly three years ago as part of our episode on the distribution company Associated Film Distribution. I was reminded that I haven’t seen the movie in over forty years, even though I remember rather enjoying it when it opened in theatres in December 1980. I think I saw it four or five times over the course of a month, and I even went out and bought the soundtrack album, which I easily listened to a hundred times before the start of summer.

 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves yet again.

 

The Jazz Singer began its life in 1917, when Samson Raphaelson, a twenty-three year old undergraduate at the University of Illinois, attended a performance of Robinson Crusoe, Jr., in Champaign, IL. The star of that show was thirty-year-old Al Jolson, a Russian-born Jew who had been a popular performer on Broadway stages for fifteen years by this point, regularly performing in blackface. After graduation, Raphaelson would become an advertising executive in New York City, but on the side, he would write stories. One short story, called “The Day of Atonement,” would be a thinly fictionalized account of Al Jolson’s life. It would be published in Everybody’s Magazine in January 1922.

 

At the encouragement of his secretary at the advertising firm, Raphaelson would adapted his story into a play, which would be produced on Broadway in September 1925 with a new title…

 

The Jazz Singer.

 

Ironically, for a Broadway show based on the early life of Al Jolson, Jolson was not a part of the production. The part of Jake Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor who finds success on Broadway with the Anglicized named Jack Robin, would be played by George Jessel. The play would be a minor hit, running for 303 performances on Broadway before closing in June 1926, and Warner Brothers would buy the movie rights the same week the show closed. George Jessel would be signed to play his stage role in the movie version. The film was scheduled to go into production in May 1927.

 

There are a number of reasons why Jessel would not end up making the movie. After the success of two Warner movies in 1926 using Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc system that could play music synchronized to a motion picture, Warner Brothers reconcieved The Jazz Singer as a sound movie, but not just a movie with music synchronized to the images on screen, but a “talkie,” where, for the first time for a motion picture, actual dialogue and vocal songs would be synchronized to the pictures on screen. When he learned about this development, Jessel demanded more money. 

 

The Warner Brothers refused.

 

Then Jessel had some concerns about the solvency of the studio. These would be valid concerns, as Harry Warner, the eldest of the four eponymous brothers who ran the studio, had sold nearly $4m worth of his personal stock to keep the company afloat just a few months earlier.

 

But what ended up driving Jessel away was a major change screenwriter Alfred A. Cohen made when adapting the original story and the play into the screenplay. Instead of leaving the theatre and becoming a cantor like his father, as it was written for the stage, the movie would end with Jack Robin performing on Broadway in blackface while his mom cheers him on from one of the box seats.

 

With Jessel off the project, Warner would naturally turn to… Eddie Cantor. Like Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor was a Jew of Russian descent, although, unlike Jolson, he had been born in New York City. Like Jolson, he had been a star on Broadway for years, regularly performing in and writing songs for Florenz Ziegfeld’ annual Follies shows. And like Jolson, Cantor would regularly appear on stage in blackface. But Cantor, a friend of Jessel’s, instead offered to help the studio get Jessel back on the movie. The studio instead went to their third choice…

 

Al Jolson.

 

You know. The guy whose life inspired the darn story to begin with.

 

Many years later, film historian Robert Carringer would note that, in 1927, George Jessel was a vaudeville comedian with one successful play and one modestly successful movie to his credit, while Jolson was one of the biggest stars in America. In fact, when The Vitaphone Company was trying to convince American studios to try their sound-on-disc system for movies, they would hire Jolson in the fall of 1926 for a ten minute test film. It would be the success of the short film, titled A Plantation Act and featuring Jolson in blackface singing three songs, that would convince Warners to take a chance with The Jazz Singer as the first quote unquote talkie film.

 

I’ll have a link to A Plantation Act on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, if you’re interested in seeing it.

 

Al Jolson signed on to play the character inspired by himself for $75,000 in May 1927, the equivalent to $1.28m today. Filming would be pushed back to June 1927, in part due to Jolson still being on tour with another show until the end of the month. Warners would begin production on the film in New York City in late June, starting with second unit shots of the Lower East Side and The Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, shooting as much as they could until Jolson arrived on set on July 11th.

 

Now, while the film has been regularly touted for nearly a century now as the first talking motion picture, the truth is, there’s very little verbal dialogue in the film. The vast majority of dialogue in the movie was still handled with the traditional silent movie use of caption cards, and the very few scenes featuring what would be synchronized dialogue were saved for the end of production, due to the complexity of how those scenes would be captured. But the film would finish shooting in mid-September.

 

The $422k movie would have its world premiere at the Warner Brothers theatre in New York City not three weeks later, on October 6th, 1927, where the film would become a sensation. Sadly, none of the Warner Brothers would attend the premiere, as Sam Warner, the strongest advocate for Vitaphone at the studio, had died of pneumonia the night before the premiere, and his remaining brothers stayed in Los Angeles for the funeral. The reviews were outstanding, and the film would bring more than $2.5m in rental fees back to the studio.

 

At the first Academy Awards, held in May 1929 to honor the films released between August 1927 and July 1928, The Jazz Singer was deemed ineligible for the two highest awards, Outstanding Production, now known as Best Picture, and Unique and Artistic Production, which would only be awarded this one time, on the grounds that it would have been unfair to a sound picture compete against all the other silent films. Ironically, by the time the second Academy Awards were handed out, in April 1930, silent films would practically be a thing of the past. The success of The Jazz Singer had been that much a tectonic shift in the industry. The film would receive one Oscar nomination, for Alfred Cohn’s screenplay adaptation, while the Warner Brothers would be given a special award for producing The Jazz Singer, the “pioneer outstanding talking picture which has revolutionized the industry,” as the inscription on the award read.

 

There would be a remake of The Jazz Singer produced in 1952, starring Danny Thomas as Korean War veteran who, thankfully, leaves the blackface in the past, and a one-hour television adaptation of the story in 1959, starring Jerry Lewis. And if that sounds strange to you, Jerry Lewis, at the height of his post-Lewis and Martin success, playing a man torn between his desire to be a successful performer and his shattered relationship with his cantor father… well, you can see it for yourself, if you desire, on the page for this episode on our website. It is as strange as it sounds.

 

At this point, we’re going to fast forward a number of years in our story.

 

In the 1970s, Neil Diamond became one of the biggest musical stars in America. While he wanted to be a singer, Diamond would get his first big success in music in the 1960s as a songwriter, including writing two songs that would become big hits for The Monkees: I’m a Believer and A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You.

 

And really quickly, let me throw out a weird coincidence here… Bob Rafelson, the creator of The Monkees who would go on to produce and/or direct such films as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, was the nephew of Samson Raphaelson, the man who wrote the original story on which The Jazz Singer is based.

 

Anyway, after finding success as a songwriter, Diamond would become a major singing star with hits like Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon, Sweet Caroline, and Song Sung Blue. And in another weird coincidence, by 1972, Neil Diamond would become the first performer since Al Jolson to stage a one-man show at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway.

 

By 1976, Neil Diamond is hosting specials on television, and one person who would see one of Diamond’s television specials was a guy named Jerry Leider, an executive at Warner Brothers in charge of foreign feature production. Leider sees something in Diamond that just night be suited for the movies, not unlike Elvis Presley or Barbra Streisand, who in 1976 just happens to be the star of a remake of A Star Is Born for Warner Brothers that is cleaning up at the box office and at records stores nationwide. Leider is so convinced Neil Diamond has that X Factor, that unquantifiable thing that turns mere mortals into superstars, that Leider quits his job at Warners to start his own movie production company, wrestling the story rights to The Jazz Singer from Warner Brothers and United Artists, both of whom claimed ownership of the story, so he can make his own version with Diamond as the star.

 

So, naturally, a former Warners Brothers executive wanting to remake one of the most iconic movies in the Warner Brothers library is going to set it up at Warner Brothers, right?

 

Nope!

 

In the fall of 1977, Leider makes a deal with MGM to make the movie. Diamond signs on to play the lead, even before a script is written, and screenwriter Stephen H. Foreman is brought in to update the vaudeville-based original story into the modern day while incorporating Diamond’s strengths as a songwriter to inform the story. But just before the film was set to shoot in September 1978, MGM would drop the movie, as some executives were worried the film would be perceived as being, and I am quoting Mr. Foreman here, “too Jewish.”

 

American Film Distribution, the American distribution arm of British production companies ITC and EMI, would pick the film up in turnaround, and set a May 1979 production start date. Sidney J. Furie, the Canadian filmmaker who had directed Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues, would be hired to direct, and Jacqueline Bisset was pursued to play the lead female role, but her agent priced their client out of the running. Deborah Raffin would be cast instead. And to help bring the kids in, the producers would sign Sir Laurence Olivier to play Diamond’s father, Cantor Rabinovitch. Sir Larry would get a cool million dollars for ten weeks of work.

 

There would, as always is with the case of making movies, be setbacks that would further delay the start of production. First, Diamond would hurt his back at the end of 1978, and needed to go in for surgery in early January 1979. Although Diamond had already written and recorded all the music that was going to be used in the movie, AFD considered replacing Diamond with Barry Manilow, who had also never starred in a movie before, but they would stick with their original star.

 

After nearly a year of rest, Diamond was ready to begin, and cameras would roll on the $10m production on January 7th, 1980. And, as always is with the case of making movies, there would be more setbacks as soon as production began. Diamond, uniquely aware of just how little training he had as an actor, struggled to find his place on set, especially when working with an actor of Sir Laurence Olivier’s stature. Director Furie, who was never satisfied with the screenplay, ordered writer Foreman to come up with new scenes that would help lessen the burden Diamond was placing on himself and the production. The writer would balk at almost every single suggestion, and eventually walked off the film.

 

Herbert Baker, an old school screenwriter who had worked on several of the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies, was brought in to punch up the script, but he would end up completely rewriting the film, even though the movie had been in production for a few weeks. Baker and Furie would spend every moment the director wasn’t actively working on set reworking the story, changing the Deborah Raffin character so much she would leave the production. Her friend Lucie Arnaz, the daughter of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, would take over the role, after Cher, Liza Minnelli and Donna Summer were considered.

 

Sensing an out of control production, Sir Lew Grade, the British media titan owner of AFD, decided a change was needed. He would shut the production down on March 3rd, 1980, and fire director Furie. While Baker continued to work on the script, Sir Grade would find a new director in Richard Fleischer, the journeyman filmmaker whose credits in the 1950s and 1960s included such films as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Compulsion, Fantastic Voyage and Doctor Doolittle, but had fallen out of favor with most studios after a string of flops. In fact, this would be the second film in a year where Fleischer was hired to replace another director during the middle of production, having replaced Richard C. Sarafian on the action-adventure film Ashanti in 1979.

 

With Fleischer aboard, production on The Jazz Singer would resume in late March, and there was an immediate noticeable difference on set. Where Furie and many members of the crew would regularly defer to Diamond due to his stature as an entertainer, letting the singer spiral out of control if things weren’t working right, Fleischer would calm the actor down and help work him back into the scene. Except for one scene, set in a recording studio, where Diamond’s character needed to explode into anger. After a few takes that didn’t go as well as he hoped, Diamond went into the recording booth where his movie band was stationed while Fleischer was resetting the shot, when the director noticed Diamond working himself into a rage. The director called “action,” and Diamond nailed the take as needed. When the director asked Diamond how he got to that moment, the singer said he was frustrated with himself that he wasn’t hitting the scene right, and asked the band to play something that would make him angry. The band obliged. 

 

What did they play?

 

A Barry Manilow song.

 

Despite the recasting of the leading female role, a change of director and a number of rewrites by two different writers during the production, the film was able to finish shooting at the end of April with only $3m added to the budget.

 

Associated Film would set a December 19th, 1980 release date for the film, while Capitol Records, owned at the time by EMI, would release the first single from the soundtrack, a soft-rock ballad called Love on the Rocks, in October, with the full soundtrack album arriving in stores a month later.

 

As expected for a new Neil Diamond song, Love on the Rocks was an immediate hit, climbing the charts all the way to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100.

 

Several days before the film opened in 241 theatres on December 19th, there was a huge, star-studded premiere at the Plitt Century Plaza Cinemas in Los Angeles. Peter Falk, Harvey Korman, Ed McMahon, Gregory Peck, Cesar Romero and Jon Voight were just a handful of the Hollywood community who came out to attend what was one of the biggest Hollywood premieres in years. That would seem to project a confidence in the movie from the distributor’s standpoint.

 

Or so you’d think.

 

But as it turned out, The Jazz Singer was one of three movies Associated Film would release that day. Along with The Jazz Singer, they would release the British mystery film The Mirror Crack’d starring Angela Lansbury and Elizabeth Taylor, and the Richard Donner drama Inside Moves. Of the three movies, The Jazz Singer would gross the most that weekend, pulling in a modest $1.167m, versus The Mirror Crack’d’s $608k from 340 screens, and Inside Moves’s $201k from 67 screens.

 

But compared to Clint Eastwood’s Any Which Way You Can, the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder comedy Stir Crazy, and Dolly Parton/Lily Tomlin/Jane Fonda comedy 9 to 5, it wasn’t the best opening they could hope for.

 

But the film would continue to play… well, if not exceptional, at least it would hold on to its intended audience for a while. Sensing the film needed some help, Capitol Records released a second single from the soundtrack, another power ballad called Hello Again, in January 1981, which would become yet another top ten hit for Diamond. A third single, the pro-immigration power-pop song America, would arrive in April 1981 and go to number eight on the charts, but by then, the film was out of theatres with a respectable $27.12m in tickets sold.

 

Contemporary reviews of the film were rather negative, especially towards Diamond as an actor. Roger Ebert noted in his review that there were so many things wrong in the film that the review was threatening to become a list of cinematic atrocities. His review buddy Gene Siskel did praise Lucie Arnaz’s performance, while pointing out how out of touch the new story was with the immigrant story told by the original film. Many critics would also point out the cringe-worthy homage to the original film, where Diamond unnecessarily performs in blackface, as well as Olivier’s overacting.

 

I recently watched the film for the first time since 1981, and it’s not a great movie by any measurable metric. Diamond isn’t as bad an actor as the reviews make him out to be, especially considering he’s essentially playing an altered version of himself, a successful pop singer, and Lucie Arnaz is fairly good. The single best performance in the film comes from Caitlin Adams, playing Jess’s wife Rivka, who, for me, is the emotional center of the film. And yes, Olivier really goes all-in on the scenery chewing. At times, it’s truly painful to watch this great actor spin out of control.

 

There would be a few awards nominations for the film, including acting nominations for Diamond and Arnaz at the 1981 Golden Globes, and a Grammy nomination for Best Soundtrack Album, but most of its quote unquote awards would come from the atrocious Golden Raspberry organization, which would name Diamond the Worst Actor of the year and Olivier the Worst Supporting Actor during its first quote unquote ceremony, which was held in some guy’s living room.

 

Ironically but not so surprisingly, while the film would be vaguely profitable for its producers, it would be the soundtrack to the movie that would bring in the lion’s share of the profits. On top of three hit singles, the soundtrack album would sell more than five million copies just in the United States in 1980 and 1981, and would also go platinum in Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. While he would earn less than half a million dollars from the film, Diamond’s cut of the soundtrack would net him a dollar per unit sold, earning him more than ten times his salary as an actor.

 

And although I fancied myself a punk and new wave kid at the end of 1980, I bought the soundtrack to The Jazz Singer, ostensibly as a gift for my mom, who loved Neil Diamond, but I easily wore out the grooves of the album listening to it over and over again. Of the ten new songs he wrote for the soundtrack, there’s a good two or three additional tracks that weren’t released as singles, including a short little ragtime-inspired ditty called On the Robert E. Lee, but America is the one song from the soundtrack I am still drawn to today. It’s a weirdly uplifting song with its rhythmic “today” chants that end the song that just makes me feel good despite its inherent cheesiness.

 

After The Jazz Singer, Neil Diamond would only appear as himself in a film. Lucie Arnaz would never quite have much of a career after the film, although she would work quote regularly in television during the 80s and 90s, including a short stint as the star of The Lucie Arnaz Show, which lasted six episodes in 1985 before being cancelled. Laurence Olivier would continue to play supporting roles in a series of not so great motion pictures and television movies and miniseries for several more years, until his passing in 1989. And director Richard Fleischer would make several bad movies, including Red Sonja and Million Dollar Mystery, until he retired from filmmaking in 1987.

 

As we noted in our February 2020 episode about AFD, the act of releasing three movies on the same day was a last, desperate move in order to pump some much needed capital into the company. And while The Jazz Singer would bring some money in, that wasn’t enough to cover the losses from the other two movies released the same day, or several other underperforming films released earlier in the year such as the infamous Village People movie Can’t Stop the Music and Raise the Titanic. Sir Lew Grade would close AFD down in early 1981, and sell several movies that were completed, in production or in pre-production to Universal Studios. Ironically, those movies might have saved the company had they been able to hang on a little longer, as they included such films as The Dark Crystal, Frances, On Golden Pond, Sophie’s Choice and Tender Mercies.

 

Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again soon, when Episode 99 is released.

 

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Neil Diamond and The Jazz Singer.

 

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

 

Thank you again.

 

Good night.