Nearly 40 years later, the admonishments of my second-grade teacher at Thomas Jefferson Elementary in Anaheim still ring in my ears. “Messy! Messy!” I was a precocious 8-year-old, placed in a ...

It’s quaint to read how common it was in the late 1920s, when sound had just come to the movies, to assume it was just a fad. More than a few people thought films had been better without sound — that ...