Live Vocals in Hollywood Musicals, when did it start, when did it end?*

I watched "Gold Diggers of 1933" last night and noticed that the actresses seemed to be singing "live" in at least two of the production numbers.

In the opening "We're in the Money," Ginger Rogers vocal track appears to be undubbed. Also, in the final sequence, "Remember My Forgotten Man," Joan Blondell, seems to be singing live.

In movies of the 40s, 50s, and 60s the musical vocals always appear to be dubbed in.

Am I wrong about these, apparently live, vocals or was this the way it was done before dubbing became the normal practice?

 

Here's an article about dubbing, however it doesn't really answer your question:
Reel Classics: Tech Talk: The Recording of Musical Numbers for Musical Films »

Another article:
On Movie Musical Dubbing and Les Miserables : Substantially Similar--A Blog on IP Issues, Writing and Film »

I do know that Peter Bogdanovich shot live vocals for At Long Last Love. From that film's Wiki page:

The film is unique in being the first since the early 1930s in which all of the musical numbers were recorded live, without the actors lip-synching to a previously recorded soundtrack. (This method was also used by Rex Harrison for his songs in My Fair Lady and by Barbra Streisand for the climactic "My Man" in Funny Girl).​

 

The only Beatles film that had live singing was Let It Be. Every other film had the boys lip-sync to their pre-recorded vocals.

 

He did, and famously, the week after the movie bombed, Bogdanovich put out a full page ad in Variety where he apologized to all the technicians who advised him not to try to have the actors actually sing live on set. It wound up making the production take two or three times longer to do, and none of it helped the film become a success.

All vocals are typically pre-recorded for Hollywood musicals because it's too much of a strain to have the performers sing the song dozens of times a day. They also have to remember where to walk, when to turn, what their emotion is supposed to be, and the technicians have to move the cameras in the right position, change focus at the right time, hit lighting cues (if necessary), and so on. It's also not easy to avoid picking up the music playback from the on-set speakers.

There are always exceptions. The biggest one was Les Miserables, where they did an impeccable job sewing wireless microphones into the actors' costumes, rehearsing the actors with vocal coaches for weeks to give them the stamina to sing the same song many times a day, using wireless earphones for the actors so they could hear the musical background track without it being picked up on their microphones, and using a couple of dozen recording tracks so that all the actors could sing simultaneously while still giving them mixing flexibility for the final film. It worked well enough that Les Miserables deservedly won the Oscar for best sound that year.

The only other major "old Hollywood" film I can think of where they sang some of the songs live was My Fair Lady, where Rex Harrison had so many problems performing the same song twice (in his famous "talk/singing" style), they opted to wire him up with an early wireless microphone and let him do it slightly differently each time. It worked but was an enormous amount of trouble.

I have one quite a few playback-on-set projects for music videos, and it's an interesting technical thing to pull off. For big shoots, they provide vocal-only and instrument-only tracks so that you can provide different mixes for them to hear on set, and you also have the ability to play just the "boom" track for a subwoofer to pound into the floor. That allows the dancers to feel the beat but not have the song actually picked up by microphones. This is typically how loud nightclub scenes are done, so they can dub in the music afterwards while the actors pretend to shout over loud background sounds. This was done to perfection in The Social Network.

 

As is being discussed in another thread, while the singing is live, in many cases it is not synced to the actual film of them singing that take, but rather dubbed onto a series of video takes, some of them not even performing the same song.

 

A lot of the vocals in Across The Universe are Live as I recall.

 

That is very standard practice for concert films. It sometimes drives the musicians crazy, because they can see they're not playing the same notes or hitting the same beats. The editor just needs to fill a moment to make the scene work.