Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio
David Thomson
Yale University Press (2017)

A major film studio that had such a “unique impact on our cultural dreams, on us, that is alarming because it is enormous”

Briefly, Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc. was founded by four brothers, Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack Warner, sons of Benjamin Eichelbaum, an immigrant Polish cobbler and peddler. The brothers began their careers showing moving pictures in Ohio and Pennsylvania on a traveling basis. Beginning in 1903 they started acquiring movie theaters, and then moved into film distribution. In about 1913 they began producing their own films, and in 1917 they shifted their production headquarters to Hollywood. They established Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc., in 1923. Harry was the president of the company and ran its headquarters in New York City, while Albert was its treasurer and head of sales and distribution. Sam and Jack managed the studio in Hollywood.

At one point, Sam Warner persuaded his brothers to collaborate in developing a patent on a process (Vitaphone) that made the “talkies” possible. The studio’s Don Juan (1926) opened with a completely synchronized musical sound track, and The Jazz Singer (1927) had both synchronized music and dialogue. (Sam died only 24 hours before the latter’s premiere.) Warner Brothers then made Lights of New York (1928), the first full-length all-talking film, and On with the Show(1929), the first all-talking color film.

The enormous financial success of these early sound films enabled Warner Brothers to become a major motion-picture studio. By the 1930s Warner Brothers was producing about 100 motion pictures a year and controlled 360 theaters in the United States and more than 400 abroad.

This is a brief background – from various sources — to the lively and rambunctious narrative that David Thomson provides as he examines – his words — “the making of an American movie studio.” He explains how and why Warner Bros had “unique impact on our cultural dreams, on us, that is alarming because it is enormous.” Its impact was also unique in ways and to an extent unlike any other of the major studios from the mid-1920s through the 1960s.

As Thomson explains, from the beginning, there were East/West conflicts of various kinds in which Harry and Jack were the principal antagonists. In 1958, Harry died of a cerebral occlusion. At his funeral, wife Rea observed, Harry didn’t die. Jack killed him.” Jack died 20 years later after strokes had left him blind and helpless. “If there were bodies left in the streets, there always had been in Warner pictures.”

I agree with him that Warners made most of the best gangster films (1931-149). They include:

Smart Money (1931)
The Public Enemy (1931)
Little Caesar (1931)
Lady Killer (1933)
G Men (1935)
The Petrified Forest (1936)
Each Dawn I Die (1939)
High Sierra (1941)
Key Largo (1948)
White Heat (1949)

Most of these films featured James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart. Others were awarded an Oscar for Best Film (1929-1975):

The Broadway Melody (1929)
Cimarron (1931)
Grand Hotel (1932)
Mutiny on the Bounty (1936)
The Great Ziegfield (1936)
The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Mrs. Miniver (1942)
Casablanca (1943)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
An American in Paris (1951)
Around the World in 80 Days (196)
Gigi (1958)
Ben Hur (1959)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

The abundance of information and insights that Thomson provides enables his reader to “go behind the silver screen” — or if you prefer, down a rabbit hole — and into a culture of genius that is “collective as well as individual.” Carl Sandburg once described Chicago as “America with the lid off” and the same be said of the Warners organization, roughly between 1927 and 1967.

I am grateful to David Thomson for allowing me and countless others to explore a major film community that had such a “unique impact on our cultural dreams, on us, that is alarming because it is enormous.” For four decades, Warner Bros illustrated the best and worst of the nation that attracted so many immigrants and it is also true that that same nation continues to illustrate today the best and worst of Warner Bros in its prime.