The talkies began with a line Al Jolson had used for years

On October 6, 1927, Warner Bros. premiered The Jazz Singer at its main theater in New York. For most of its 89 minutes it played like any silent film. The actors' lines appeared on title cards, and the music came from records played in step with the picture.

Warner had already released features with a recorded score and sound effects, starting with Don Juan in 1926. The Jazz Singer added songs, and in a few places, speech. The whole film holds barely two minutes of synchronized talking, and much or all of it was improvised.

The first talking comes about 17 minutes in. Jolson, as a young singer called Jack Robin, finishes a song in a cabaret. Then he speaks to the crowd and to the piano player: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet."

Jolson had been saying some version of this for years. At the Winter Garden theater in New York, he told audiences "You ain't heard nothing yet" before going on to more songs. In November 1918 he was on the bill at a concert celebrating the end of World War I. The crowd was still applauding the opera tenor Enrico Caruso when Jolson ran on stage and said, "Folks, you ain't heard nothin' yet." The next year he recorded a song with that title.

Later in the film, Jack talks with his mother in the family parlor. His father, a cantor, walks in and says one word: "Stop!" It is the last spoken line in the film.

The film was a large bet for a studio short of money. While it was being made, Harry Warner, the eldest of the brothers, stopped taking a salary, pawned his wife's jewelry and moved his family into a smaller apartment. The premiere was a risk of its own. Each of Jolson's songs sat on a separate reel with its own sound disc. The whole film came to fifteen reels and fifteen discs, and the projectionist had to cue every record in time.

None of the Warner brothers was there. Sam Warner, who had pushed hardest for the sound system, died of pneumonia the day before, and the others had gone to California for his funeral. Harry's daughter Doris attended. When Jolson said his line, the audience answered with shouts and applause, and at the end they chanted "Jolson, Jolson, Jolson!"

By mid-1929 Hollywood was making almost nothing but sound films. For the first Academy Awards, held that May, The Jazz Singer was ruled out of the two top prizes, as unfair competition for the silent films. It got a special award instead.