A studio chart in the 17 November 1928 Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World cited a starting date of 8 October 1928 for The Desert Song. Elsewhere in the same issue, an article reported that for its production, Warner's new 200 x 300-foot Vitaphone stage at 5800 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, CA, "is being used in its entirety for the first time...The set now housed is the largest ever built for a Vitaphone picture and represents a mountain pass on the edge of the Moroccan desert."
       The 1 December 1928 Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World announced that filming was completed "during the past week....[Director Roy] Del Ruth took his entire company to Arizona to film the desert scenes, which will be in color."
       The January 1929 Photoplay ran photos of the sound stage showing various chorus members grouped around a bank of sound equipment and camera booths. "The cameras are within glass windowed sound proof booths....Look close for the microphones hanging in lines and on stands just above and out of reach of the camera lens. Also behind the camera booths and fronting the orchestra. Thus you get the dialogue, the songs and the background music. A sound film set still is a pretty cramped place—but the talkies are in their infancy."
       The Desert Song opened to "a packed house" at the Warners Theatre in New York City on 1 May 1929, according to the 11 May 1929 Exhibitors Herald-World. A reviewer declared, "Some critics claim that it is unreal and stagey, for it moves like a musical comedy with the same improbable situations and constant breaks in what might be gripping scenes in order to get in the songs presented by Miss Carlotta King, the leading lady." However, sound reproduction "was uniformly good," although at one point the volume was too high and the large chorus numbers "were apt to be a little out of proportion to the size of the theater." Radio station WGBS, Gimbel Brothers, broadcast from the theater lobby, where "Alexis Sanderson sung the songs done by Mr. Boles in the show," and various celebrities spoke.
       The Desert Song was 30-year-old stage soprano Carlotta King's only motion picture. Despite living past her hundredth birthday, she never returned to film.
       The 22 June 1929 Exhibitor Herald-World ran an image from a newspaper in Torrington, CT, where The Desert Song opened at the Palace Theatre on 9 June 1929. An article explained that although Warner Bros. had already made other "all-talking" pictures, "they were confronted with a new problem—the inclusion of a large chorus for the ensemble numbers, with its member grouped all over the settings which constituted the scenes of the play....Many of the singers were soloists who had never before worked in chorus." They were accompanied by "the Vitaphone Symphony Orchestra."
       To stress the film's use of sound and music, a full-page advertisement in the July 1929 Screenland and other magazines announced: "Vitaphone Sings The Desert Song with all its Original Stage Enchantment. Love's Heart Beat...set to the golden notes of the most famous music-play of our generation. Love's immortal melodies—in the enchanting atmosphere of moonlit desert nights." The ad promised a "chorus of 132 voices...109 musicians...exotic dancing girls." The film was billed as "the first Music-Play to be produced as a complete talking and singing picture." The June 1929 Photoplay complained that for the movies' "first all-singing and talking operetta...the screen has not been fully utilized. Most of this picture was made six months ago, and much talkie progress has been made since then."
       For information of other film adaptations of the Broadway operetta, please consult the entry for the 1944 Warner Bros. production of The Desert Song, directed by Robert Florey and starring Dennis Morgan and Irene Manning.