Warner Bros Essay Research Paper The Warner

Warner Bros. Essay, Research Paper

The Warner family immigrated from Poland to Baltimore in 1883 and for several years traveled around the United States and Canada before finally settling in Youngstown, Ohio. Of the twelve children, Harry was born in Poland in 1881; Jack, the youngest, was born in London, Ontario, in 1892. In 1903 the family purchased the 90-seat Cascade Theatre, a nickelodeon in Newcastle, Pennsylvania (where Jack sang for the audience during intermissions). By 1905, Jack, Harry, and brothers Albert and Sam were also in film distribution, and started film exchanges in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Compelled to sell out to the Patents Company not long after, they resumed working in exhibition and by 1913 were producing films with Warner Features. By 1917 they had a hit with the wartime biopic My Four Years In Germany, based on Ambassador James W. Gerard's book, and in 1923 they incorporated a company and started a Hollywood-based studio called Warner Bros. Harry, the president, and Albert, the treasurer, managed the New York headquarters, while Sam, the chief executive, and Jack, production chief, ran the California studio. They released over a dozen films that year, and soon had their first big star: a German shepherd called Rin Tin Tin. Darryl F. Zanuck was skilled at scripting these popular adventure films, and wrote such Rin Tin Tin hits as Find Your Man (1924) and The Lighthouse By The Sea (1925). He was also adept at comedy and drama, and among his many '20s writing credits are slapstick comedies starring Charlie Chaplin's brother Sydney, including the 1926 hits Oh! What A Nurse! and The Better Ole. Warners also had John Barrymore under contract and had starred him in Beau Brummel (1924) and the "Moby-Dick" adaptation The Sea Beast (1926). German director Ernst Lubitsch signed a five-picture deal with Warners in 1924, and made such memorable comedies as The Marriage Circle (1924), Lady Windermere's Fan (1925), and So This Is Paris (1926). In 1925 the studio acquired the production company Vitagraph along with its network of exchanges. The following year Warners teamed with Western Electric to form a subsidiary called Vitaphone, which developed a system of prerecorded sound played on discs, to accompany silent films. They tested this technique for adding music and sound effects in some musical shorts as well as their celebrated adventure feature, Don Juan (1926) with John Barrymore. Sam Warner, who helped invent this sound process, died in 1927, the day before the studio released the first feature with synchronized songs and dialogue: The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. The film's spectacular success, and the revolution in talking movies that followed, made Warner Bros. one of Hollywood's most powerful film studios. Warners had also been buying up theaters in the 1920s, which gave them control of the market for first-run releases; by the begining of the 1930s they were one of the five big "integrated major" studios, along with Fox, MGM, Paramount, and RKO. In 1928 Warners released the first all-talking film, the hit gangster movie The Lights Of New York, a two-reeler that they had expanded into an hour-long feature. Zanuck was appointed studio manager that same year, and soon thereafter became head of production. Warners then further expanded by buying out First National Pictures — and reaping their vast distribution system and huge studio facility in Burbank. Zanuck stayed at Warners until 1933, when he left to form his 20th Century company (later to merge with Fox as 20th Century-Fox); but during the early '30s he supervised many of the films that launched highly profitable genres for Warners. The studio's greatness at making tough gangster movies began with the Zanuck productions Little Caesar (1930), directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring Edward G. Robinson, and The Public Enemy (1930), directed by William A. Wellman and starring James Cagney. Warners' fame in social-protest dramas started with Zanuck's Five Star Final (1931) and I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (1932), both directed by LeRoy. Zanuck also supervised Disraeli (1929), starring George Arliss, which began Warner's successful cycle of historical biopics, and the classic musical 42nd Street (1933), starring Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. The crime or gangster picture became almost a Warners signature in the '30s, thanks to stars Robinson (The Hatchet Man, 1932), Cagney (Lady Killer, 1933), and, by the mid 1930s, Humphrey Bogart (The Petrified Forest, 1936; Dead End, 1937). As Robinson and Cagney became big stars, their parts became more sympathetic, even in crime films — with Bogart as the bad bad-guy, getting his lumps from Robinson in Bullets Or Ballots (1936) and The Amazing Doctor Clitterhouse (1938), or from Cagney in Angels With Dirty Faces (1939) and The Roaring Twenties (1939). Warners' grittiness also paid off in incisive social dramas, most notably Wellman's Wild Boys Of The Road (1933) and LeRoy's They Won't Forget (1937), and in several hard-boiled prison films, including 20,000 Years In Sing Sing (1933) and San Quentin (1937). Historical biographies worked well with Arliss (Alexander Hamilton, 1931; Voltaire, 1933), until he moved on to work at Fox in 1934. The studio kept up its commitment to the genre with director William Dieterle and actor Paul Muni: The Story Of Louis Pasteur (1935), The Life Of Emile Zola (1937), Juarez (1939).