Raymond Hitchcock (actor) two apparently playing firemen. Hitchcock also made several phonograph recordings of which many survive. In 1907, Hitchcock was charged with the sexual abuse of two adolescent girls together with New York magnate William A. Chanler. As Hitchcock's trial progressed, it was revealed that the charges of sexual abuse were fabricated as part of a blackmail scheme. Hitchcock was acquitted by a jury on June 11, 1908, after spending almost nine months in prison. In 1925, Hitchcock appeared in a test film made by Lee DeForest in DeForest's Phonofilm sound-on-film process, in which Hitchcock performed a sketch from his revue "Hitchy-Koo",
Sound film true boundaries of the cinema." Such opinions were not rare among those who cared about cinema as an art form; Alfred Hitchcock, though he directed the first commercially successful talkie produced in Europe, held that "the silent pictures were the purest form of cinema" and scoffed at many early sound films as delivering little beside "photographs of people talking". In Germany, Max Reinhardt, stage producer and movie director, expressed the belief that the talkies, "bringing to the screen stage plays ... tend to make this independent art a subsidiary of the theater and really make it only a substitute for