King of Jazz
| King of Jazz | |
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| Directed by | John Murray Anderson |
| Produced by | Carl Laemmle Jr. |
| Written by |
Charles MacArthur Harry Ruskin |
| Starring |
Paul Whiteman John Boles Laura La Plante Jeanette Loff Bing Crosby Al Rinker Harry Barris William T. Kent |
| Music by | James Dietrich Billy Rose Milton Ager George Gershwin Mabel Wayne Jack Yellen |
| Cinematography | Jerome Ash Hal Mohr Ray Rennahan |
| Edited by | Robert Carlisle |
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Production
company |
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| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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105 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $2,000,000 (estimated) |
King of Jazz is a 1930 American color film starring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. The film title was taken from Whiteman's controversial, self-conferred appellation. Although using the word to describe Whiteman's music may seem absurd today, at the time the film was made, "jazz", to the general public, meant the jazz-influenced syncopated dance music which was being heard everywhere on phonograph records and through radio broadcasts. Lending his title a measure of legitimacy is the fact that in the 1920s Whiteman signed and featured great white jazz musicians including Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang (both are seen and heard in the film), Bix Beiderbecke (who had left before filming began), Frank Trumbauer and others still held in high regard.
King of Jazz was filmed entirely in the early two-color Technicolor process and was produced by Carl Laemmle Jr. for Universal Pictures. The movie featured several songs sung on camera by the Rhythm Boys (Bing Crosby, Al Rinker and Harry Barris), as well as off-camera solo vocals by Crosby during the opening credits and, very briefly, during a cartoon sequence. King of Jazz still survives in a near-complete color print and is not a lost film, unlike many contemporary musicals that now exist only either in incomplete form or as black-and-white reduction copies.
In 2013 the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
King of Jazz is a revue. There is no story, only a series of musical numbers alternating with "blackouts" (very brief comedy sketches with abrupt punch line endings) and other short introductory or linking segments.
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Wikipedia