In the final "Bye Bye Life" number, Scheider and Vereen are holding what appear to be wireless microphones. But they are not. These are Electro-Voice 635's, a popular and indestructible broadcast mic from the 1970s. Looks like the prop department rigged up something to keep the XLR connector on the mics from showing. There were few if any wireless handheld mics being used in 1978, BTW.
shareThat's not a goof.
The number is happening in a dream / hallucination.
Gideon is dreaming a familiar microphone shape, but idealized so as to not have a chord that he had to worry about having underfoot.
That's an interesting hypothesis. It would be fascinating to know what prompted the actual decision to make the props that way, since as I've mentioned wireless mics may not even have been invented when the film was made.
These things get done for reasons we can never know. If you watch Letterman (at least up until last year), there sat on the desk what appears to be an RCA 77DX velocity mic, which was a standard in broadcast work in the 1930s though the fifties. But he wears a wireless lapel mic, and as I remember prior incarnations of late-night TV, boom microphones were used.
Chalk it up to artistic license.
"...wireless mics may not even have been invented when the film was made. "
Wireless mics started to be developed post-War and were in reasonably common use in the theatre and film by the end of the 1960s at least.
Films tended to minimise the use of wireless mics as far as possible, partly because it was generally easier to get a better-quality wired mic closer to the action that it would be in the theatre plus they suffered from interference, particularly from taxi cab radios.
Long story short, Fosse would have been familiar with them for at least a couple of decades before the film was made.
Nevertheless, there has never been a wireless version of the EV 635.
And I'm not convinced that there were commercially available wireless mics as early as you have said. Taxi cab radios operated in either the 27MHz "citizen's band" during that era, or in the VHF "low" band between approximately 50 and 100 MHz. In those frequency bands the antenna for a wireless mic would have to be so long that it would be as cumbersome as a microphone cable. To say nothing of the size of the electronic components and batteries.
FWIW, I am a licensed commercial radio operator, and worked both in broadcasting and land mobile communications during the 1970s. I'm pretty certain that I know what was technically possible and what was not.
You are welcome to your hypothesis, but I don't agree. However, if you can cite specific manufacturers and equipment in support of it, I will eagerly stand corrected, and I'd like to know this bit of history if it exists.
I'm not questioning your comment that there was no wireless version of the EV 635. But there were definitely wireless mics in common use first in theatre and then in film long before All That Jazz was shot.
From the Shure (microphone manufacturors) website:
"1953
First wireless microphone system for performers, called the Vagabond. Powered by two hearing aid batteries, the system could transmit within a “performance circle” of approximately 700 square feet."
On http://www.georgegroves.org.uk/warners3.html , is an account of the difficulties of recording Rex Harrisons songs on My Fair Lady (1964) with a bulky radio mic.
From the Sennheisser UK website:
"1968 The MK 12, the first professional condenser clip-on microphone for RF wireless transmission."
The Sennheisser MK 12 was a microphone small enough to be easily concealed on an actor and so was routinely used for feature film work especially for the long lens exterior shots which were very common at the time and where it would often be difficult to get a conventional mic close enough even for a good guide track for post synching.
You can hear the distinctive clothes-rubbing sound, which was then a big problem, in many such shots of the period. e.g. in numerous early Columbo episodes.
That's the best of all possible worlds: we are both right. :)
Thanks for the research you did on this detail. I wonder if it matters to anyone except the two of us.
Quite aside from all of the technological history, ......
I'm still not really convinced that there's any such thing as a "goof" or "error" in continuity or historical accuracy within the confines of a hallucination sequence. By definition, what it contains is explicitly not part of any reality.
Wireless mics were around in the early 1970's. The original Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971 tried to use wireless mics for the production, but the new mics did not have all the bugs worked out and kept getting interference to the point where the wireless mics were changed out for the then standard corded mics.
shareI will defer to your interpretation on that. It's a little abstract for me. ;-)
99.9 percent of the people in the world recognize the object in his hand as a "microphone." Only a small fraction of people have any working experience with wireless mics and only a small fraction of those people would notice the fact that he is holding what is simply a generic microphone. Perhaps the director was shown a technically correct mic with transmitter and decided to go with a simplified design as to not draw attention to the prop.
The OP's statement goes in the category of anal attention to unnecessary detail that, if you've ever attended a film festival or a movie panel discussion or a Q&A by a filmmaker, you'll recognize as the once in a while question that gets a dead silent response followed by the moderator saying something along the lines of "OK, moving on."
In the movie version of My Fair Lady (1964), Rex Harrison "talk-sang" in a way that it would have been impossible for him to lip-sync to a pre-recorded performance, so they rigged up one of the earliest wireless mics and hid it under his tie.
http://www.ScripTipps.com/