Douglas Shearer, a pioneer of motion picture sound, was born in Montreal in 1899. He left high school early, worked as a machinist, travelled for an industrial power plant, and learned signalling, photography, and flying.

At age 26 he journeyed to Hollywood not long after his actress-sister Norma joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. He and Norma improved a system linking actors’ voices, broadcast over radio, with a theatre screen, and his “movieola” used punch holes to indicate spoken words on strips of paper.

Jack Warner invited him to Warner Brothers studio where he worked in props but in 1927 he returned to MGM as an assistant cameraman. When Norma married studio boss Irving Thalberg, Douglas championed talking pictures, even to Louis B. Mayer. As its competitors moved to sound, MGM enlisted Shearer’s assistance. “No longer were disks going to be used,” he recalled in 1970. “Instead it was going to be done with a couple of ribbons that oscillated and a beam regulating the amount of light that reached the film, which, in turn, produced the sound change. So off I went to Bell Labs and learned about sound.”

Shearer and a crew that he “stole from every which where” gave the famous MGM lion an audible roar and added sound (a thief cracking a safe) and dialogue to Alias Jimmy Valentine. They put music to film “in a church auditorium of the Victor Phonograph Company in Camden, New Jersey” and a music track on the documentary, White Shadows in the South Seas. Their work culminated in MGM’s first musical, The Broadway Melody, which was named best picture of 1928-29 by the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
 

Douglas Shearer won the first Academy Award for sound recording for The Big House, 1930. Born in Montreal, the older brother of Norma Shearer also devised Tarzan’s famous electronic yell and solved the problem of Jeanette MacDonald’s tendency to go flat on her high notes by adjusting the soundtrack frame by frame and “retouching” her voice. By the time he retired in 1968, he had won a total of seven Academy Awards. He also won an additional seven Academy citations for scientific and technological advances within the movie industry. In all, Douglas Shearer was nominated for 20 Oscars and his screen credits total some 1,400. This photo shows Douglas Shearer, on the right, at the 1935 Academy Awards dinner, March 1936, holding the award for sound recording for Naughty Marietta from presenter Hunt Stromberg. [Photo, courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences via National Film Information Services]

At MGM’s studio in Culver City, just outside Hollywood – where John Arnold ran the photography department, art director Cedric Gibbons reshaped the MGM backlots, and Thalberg “always wanted to know what was going on with the sound, costumes and photography” – Shearer set up and ran the sound department and recorded films. He accepted the first Academy Award given for sound for The Big House (1930) and worked on films that earned Oscars for Norma Shearer in The Divorcee (1930) and for Canadian-born actress Marie Dressler in Min and Bill (1931). He created the famous yell for Tarzan the Ape Man and took equipment up in his own plane to get realistic sound for Night Flight. And he recorded the films that brought Thalberg best-picture Oscars – Grand Hotel (1931-32) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).

His proudest accomplishment did away with the sound distortion troubling the MGM-controlled Loew’s theatres. The two-element “Shearer horn” – tried out first at Loew’s theatres in Montreal and New York in 1936, and used at the opening of Romeo and Juliet (Thalberg’s last completed production involving both Shearers) – helped earn Douglas Shearer and the MGM sound department a scientific/technical award from the Academy’s Board of Governors.

For improving the production and projection of motion picture sound and photography, Shearer and colleagues received six other scientific/technical awards. The first was for 1935 and the last for 1963, including one for 1959 for developing a method for producing and exhibiting 65-mm film which was used in MGM’s film, Ben Hur, which swept the Oscars that year. For his work on individual films (some 1,400 in all, he estimated) Shearer received 20 Oscar nominations and accepted 7 Academy Awards (the last one for 1951) by the time he retired in 1968.

Shearer died in 1971 in Culver City. He had worked with many of the most able people in motion picture arts and sciences and earned enormous respect for his work that helped shape movie sound and photography worldwide.