King of Jazz

King of Jazz
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	John Murray Anderson
Written by	Charles MacArthur Harry Ruskin
Produced by	Carl Laemmle Jr.
Starring	Paul Whiteman John Boles Laura La Plante Jeanie Lang Jeanette Loff Bing Crosby Al Rinker Harry Barris William T. Kent Eleanor and Karla Gutöhrlein
Cinematography	Jerome Ash Hal Mohr Ray Rennahan (Technicolor)
Edited by	Robert Carlisle
Music by	James Dietrich Billy Rose Milton Ager George Gershwin Mabel Wayne Jack Yellen Ferde Grofé
Production company	Universal Pictures
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release date	April 19, 1930 (1930-04-19)[1]
Running time	105 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$2,000,000 (estimated)[2]

King of Jazz is a 1930 American pre-Code color musical film starring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. The film title refers to Whiteman's popular cultural appellation. At the time the film was made, "jazz", to the general public, meant jazz-influenced syncopated dance music heard on phonograph records, on radio broadcasts, and in dance halls. In the 1920s Whiteman signed and featured white jazz musicians including Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang (both are seen and heard in the film), Bix Beiderbecke (who had left before filming began), Frank Trumbauer, and others.

King of Jazz was filmed in the early two-color Technicolor process and was produced by Carl Laemmle Jr. for Universal Pictures. The film featured several songs sung on camera by the Rhythm Boys (Bing Crosby, Al Rinker and Harry Barris), as well as off-camera solo vocals by Crosby during the opening credits and, very briefly, during a cartoon sequence. King of Jazz still survives in a near-complete color print and is not a lost film, unlike many contemporary musicals that now exist only either in incomplete form or as black-and-white reduction copies.

In 2013, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".^[3][4]