Sight, Sound, and Sunshine.: Tampa, Hell Harbor, and the Making of Modern Cinema

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During the last year of the Roaring Twenties, when the use of sound in motion pictures was in its nascent stages, Director Henry King selected Tampa, Florida as the proving ground for an audacious and innovative cinematic experiment. His vision was to film an all-talking adaptation of Rida Johnson-Young’s novel, Out of the Night. This would be the first movie filmed entirely on location, utilizing the latest in sound technology. The end result would be Hell Harbor, a motion picture that defied the conventional norms of filmmaking, broke artistic and cultural barriers, and proved that quality features could be produced on location with audio excellence. While King worked on his celluloid opus, the people of Tampa welcomed the performers; absorbing the glamour and excitement that filmdom’s most notable names brought to their city.

Sight, Sound, and Sunshine tells the story of a film that was ground-breaking in its 1929 production values, but today has been nearly forgotten; eclipsed by the very standards that it set in the use of sound recording and photography. It also recounts a time in Florida when the dream city of Hollywood set up a suburb in Tampa and changed it forever.