“Experimentations by Our Sound Department”: Playback Stars in 1930s Hollywood

For most Hollywood musicals produced in the 1940s and 1950s, film studios relied on playback to film musical numbers. With playback, performances were not recorded at the same time that they were filmed. Instead, singers lip-synched to an existing music track, timing their motions to fit a performance recorded in pre-production. Despite the loss of musical “liveness” that resulted on the sound stage, playback was preferred because it saved the studios time and money. Yet as pervasive as playb..