Jack Warner

Formation of Warner Bros.

The Warner brothers pooled their resources and moved into film production in 1910. In 1912, they supported filmmaker Carl Laemmle's Independent Motion Picture Company, which challenged the monopoly of the Edison Trust. That same year, Jack acquired a job as a film splicer in New York, where he assisted Sam with the production of Dante's Inferno. Despite the film's box office success, Harry still feared competition from the Edison Trust. He subsequently broke with Laemmle and sent Jack to establish a film exchange in San Francisco, while Sam did the same in Los Angeles. The brothers were soon poised to exploit the expanding California movie market.

In 1917, Jack was sent to Los Angeles to open another film exchange company. Their first opportunity to produce a major film came in 1918, when they purchased the film rights for My Four Years in Germany, a bestselling novel depicting German wartime atrocities, and the film adaptation became a commercial and critical success. The four brothers established a studio, with Jack and Sam as co-heads of production. As producers, the two solicited new scripts and story lines, secured film sets and equipment, and found ways to reduce production costs.

In 1919, the fledgling Warner Bros. Studios followed up the success of My Four Years in Germany with a popular serial titled The Tiger's Claw. That same year, the studio was less successful in its efforts to promote Open Your Eyes, a film on the dangers of venereal disease that featured Jack's sole screen appearance. During this period, the studio earned few profits, in 1920 the Warners secured a bank loan to settle their business debts. Shortly thereafter, they relocated the film studio from Culver City, California, to Hollywood, where they purchased a lot on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Bronson Avenue, known today as Sunset Bronson Studios. The new location and upgraded facilities did not significantly improve the studio's image, which remained defined by its low-budget comedies and racy films on declining morality.

In 1923, the studio discovered a trained German Shepherd named Rin Tin Tin. The canine made his debut in Where the North Begins, a film about an abandoned pup who is raised by wolves and befriends a fur trapper. According to one biographer, Jack's initial doubts about the project were quelled when he met Rin Tin Tin, "who seemed to display more intelligence than some of the Warner comics." Rin Tin Tin proved to be the studio's most important commercial asset until the introduction of sound. Screenwriter Darryl F. Zanuck produced several scripts for Rin Tin Tin vehicles and, during one year, wrote more than half of the studio's features. From 1928 to 1933, Zanuck served as Jack's right-hand man and executive producer, with responsibilities including day-to-day production of films. Despite the success of Rin Tin Tin and other projects, Warner Bros. was still a poor cousin to Hollywood's "Big Three" – Paramount, Universal, and First National studios.

In 1925, the studio expanded its operations and acquired the Brooklyn-based theater company Vitagraph. Later that year, Sam urged Harry to sign with Western Electric to develop a series of talking short films using the new Vitaphone technology.

Sam died of pneumonia in 1927, just before the premiere of the first feature-length talking picture, The Jazz Singer, and Jack became sole head of production. Sam's death left Jack inconsolable: "Throughout his life, Jack had been warmed by Sam's sunshiny optimism, his thirst for excitement, his inventive mind, his gambling nature. Sam had also served as a buffer between Jack and his stern eldest brother, Harry." Without his brother and co-producer, Jack ran the Warner Bros. Burbank studio with an iron hand, and became increasingly demanding and harsh with his employees.

As the family grieved over Sam's sudden passing, the success of The Jazz Singer helped establish Warner Bros. as a major studio. From an investment of only $500,000 in the film, the studio reaped $3 million in profits. Hollywood's other five major studios, which controlled most of the nation's movie theaters, initially attempted to block the growth of "talking pictures". In the teeth of this opposition, Warner Bros. produced twelve "talkies" in 1928 alone. The following year, the newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized Warner Bros. for "revolutionizing the industry with sound".

Despite Warner Bros.' new prosperity, Jack kept a tight rein on costs. He placed the studio's directors on a quota system and decreed a flat, low-key lighting style to smooth out the defects of cheap film sets.

Depression era

The studio emerged relatively unscathed from the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and produced a broad range of films, including "backstage musicals," "crusading biopics," "swashbucklers," and "women's pictures." As Thomas Schatz observed, this repertoire was "a means of stabilizing marketing and sales, of bringing efficiency and economy into the production of some fifty feature films per year, and of distinguishing Warners' collective output from that of its competitors". Warner Bros. became best known, however, for its hard-hitting social dramas, whose production Jack tended to support. These included gangster classics such as Little Caesar and The Public Enemy as well as the critically acclaimed I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, starring Paul Muni. Some of these films reflected a surprising (albeit temporary) shift in Jack's political outlook. By 1932, despite his longstanding association with the Republican Party, he openly supported Democratic presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, staging a "Motion Picture and Electrical Parade Sports Pageant" at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Roosevelt's honor. This development foreshadowed an "era in which Warner would recruit the most New Deal-ish (often simultaneously the most left-wing) writers".

During this period, Jack took an active role in recruiting talent. To furnish Warner Bros. with much needed "star power", he raided contract players from rival studios, in some cases offering to double their salaries. This strategy yielded three leading stars from Paramount – William Powell, Kay Francis, and Ruth Chatterton. In 1929, Jack persuaded British stage and screen actor George Arliss to play the title role in a remake of the 1921 United Artists film Disraeli, which turned out to be a box-office hit. Then, in 1930, he spotted future stars James Cagney, Joan Blondell, and Frank McHugh in the cast of a New York play called Penny Arcade. Although Cagney turned out to be Jack's greatest prize, he was also the studio executive's biggest professional headache. During their frequent arguments, Cagney would scream the Yiddish obscenities he learned as a boy in Yorkville, New York City. According to a 1937 Fortune magazine article, Jack's most intense contract disputes involved Cagney, "who got sick of being typed as a girl-hitting mick and of making five pictures a year instead of four."

Zanuck resigned during a contract dispute with Harry Warner in 1933. According to a 1933 letter that Jack wrote to Will H. Hays, then president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Zanuck had demanded more pay and "indicated his desire to raise the salaries of the actors and personnel in the motion pictures we were producing". That year, Zanuck established Twentieth Century Pictures, which merged with Fox Film Corporation in 1935. A longtime Warner Bros. producer, Hal B. Wallis, took over as executive producer. Jack, however, denied Wallis the sweeping powers enjoyed by Zanuck, and the result was a decentralization of creative and administrative control that often created confusion at the studio. Under the new system, each picture was assigned a supervisor usually plucked from the ranks of the studio's screenwriters. Although Warner Bros. maintained a high rate of production throughout the 1930s, some pictures showed an uneven quality that reflected "not only the difficulty of shifting to a supervisory system but also the consequences of dispersing authority into the creative ranks".

Meanwhile, Jack's role in production became somewhat limited. After acquiring a creative property, he often had little to do with a film's production until it was ready for preview. Nevertheless, he could be heavy-handed with employees and "merciless in his firings." Film director Gottfried Reinhardt claimed that Jack "derived pleasure" from humiliating subordinates. "Harry Cohn was a sonofabitch," Reinhardt said, "but he did it for business; he was not a sadist. Mayer could be a monster, but he was not mean for the sake of meanness. Jack was."

Jack's management style frustrated many studio employees. Comedian Jack Benny, who once worked at Warner Bros., quipped, "Jack Warner would rather tell a bad joke than make a good movie". Jack frequently clashed with actors and supposedly banned them from the studio's executive dining room, with the explanation, "I don't need to look at actors when I eat."

The studio executive did, however, win the affection of a few film personalities. Among these was Bette Davis, one of the studio's leading stars, who once fled to England to secure release from her contract. In later years, Davis defended Jack against rumors of sexual impropriety when she wrote: "No lecherous boss was he! His sins lay elsewhere. He was the father. The power. The glory. And he was in business to make money." Davis revealed that, after the birth of her child, Jack's attitude toward her became warm and protective. "We became father and child, no question about it." she said. "He told me I didn't have to come back to work until I really felt like it. He was a thoughtful man. Not many nice things were said about him." Warner also earned the gratitude and affection of Errol Flynn. In 1935, the studio head personally selected Flynn for the title role of Captain Blood, even though he was an unknown actor at the time. In 1936, following the success of another costume epic, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Jack tore up Flynn's contract and signed him to a long-term deal that doubled his weekly salary.

The prewar and war years

As the 1930s came to an end, both Jack and Harry Warner became increasingly alarmed over the rise of Nazism. As Bernard F. Dick observed, the Warners, "as sons of Polish Jews who fled their homeland because of antisemitic pogroms... had a personal interest in exposing Nazism." Moreover, the attraction to films critical of German militarism had a long history with the Warners that predated their production of My Four Years in Germany in 1918. In 1917, while it was still in distribution, the Warners had secured the rights for War Brides, a movie that featured Alla Nazimova as "a woman who kills herself rather than breed children for an unidentified country whose army looks suspiciously Teutonic." While other Hollywood studios sidestepped the issue, fearing domestic criticism and the loss of European markets, Warner Bros. produced films that were openly critical of Nazi Germany even before the war.

According to Jack Warner, Jr., in 1931, Albert Einstein visited the studio and "my father--who would speak up to anyone even when he didn't know what he was talking about--said, 'Doctor, you have your theory of relativity and I have mine. Never hire a relative.' I always wanted to add, 'Where would you be, Pop, if your brothers hadn't hired you?.' "

In 1939, the studio released Confessions of a Nazi Spy, starring Edward G. Robinson. The project, which was recommended to Jack by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, drew on the real-life experiences of Agent Leon G. Turrou, who had worked as an undercover agent. Despite legal ramifications preventing the use of actual names, the studio aimed for an "aura of authenticity" and Wallis initially recommended eliminating credits to give the film "the appearance of a newsreel." Confessions of a Nazi Spy was widely criticized. The critic Pare Lorentz wrote, "The Warner brothers have declared war on Germany with this one." The German ambassador responded by issuing a protest to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, who watched the film at Berchtesgaden, was outraged. Meanwhile, the studio received stern warnings from U.S. Congressman Martin Dies Jr. about defaming a "friendly country".

Initially, the studio bowed to pressure from the Roosevelt Administration, the Hays Office, and isolationist lawmakers to desist from similar projects. Jack announced that the studio would release no more "propaganda pictures" and promptly ordered the shelving of several projects with an anti-Nazi theme. In time, however, Warner Bros. produced more films with anti-Nazi messages, including Underground and All Through the Night. In 1940, the studio produced short films that dramatically documented the devastation wrought by the German bombing raids on London. Meanwhile, the studio celebrated the exploits of the Royal Canadian Air Force with films such as Captains of the Clouds. In 1941, Warner also produced the influential war film Sergeant York.

Contemporary reports that Jack had banned the use of the German language throughout the company's studios were denied by studio representatives who indicated that this move would have prevented scores of studio employees from communicating with each other.

After the American declaration of war against the Axis powers, Jack, like some other studio heads, was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

In 1943 the studio's film Casablanca won the Academy Award for Best Picture. When the award was announced, Wallis got up to accept, only to find Jack had rushed onstage "with a broad, flashing smile and a look of great self-satisfaction" to take the trophy, Wallis later recalled. "I couldn't believe it was happening. Casablanca had been my creation; Jack had absolutely nothing to do with it. As the audience gasped, I tried to get out of the row of seats and into the aisle, but the entire Warner family sat blocking me. I had no alternative but to sit down again, humiliated and furious.... Almost forty years later, I still haven't recovered from the shock."

Also in 1943, Jack, at the advice of President Roosevelt, produced a film adaptation of the controversial book Mission to Moscow, a film intended to inspire public support of the uneasy military alliance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Later, while testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on October 27, 1947, Jack dismissed allegations during the Cold War that this film was subversive, and he argued that Mission to Moscow was produced "only to help a desperate war effort, and not for posterity." After the film's lackluster response under distribution, the Republican National Committee accused him of producing "New Deal propaganda."

In line with the Warner brothers' early opposition to Nazism, Warner Bros. produced more pictures about the war than any other studio, covering every branch of the armed services. In addition, the studio produced patriotic musicals such as This Is the Army and Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Postwar era

Warner responded grudgingly to the rising popularity of television in the late 1940s. Initially he tried to compete with the new medium, introducing gimmicks such as 3-D films, which soon lost their appeal among moviegoers. In 1954, Warner finally engaged the new medium, providing ABC with a weekly show, Warner Bros. Presents. The studio followed up with a series of Western dramas, such as Maverick, Bronco, and Colt.45. Accustomed to dealing with actors in a high-handed manner, within a few years Jack provoked hostility among emerging TV stars such as James Garner, who filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. over a contract dispute. Warner was angered by the perceived ingratitude of television actors, who evidently showed more independence than film actors, and this deepened his contempt for the new medium. Following his deal with ABC, Warner also made his son, Jack Jr., head of the company's new television department.

During this period, Warner showed little foresight in his treatment of the studio's cartoon operation. Animated characters such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig, while embraced by cartoon lovers, "were always stepchildren at Warner Bros." As biographer Bob Thomas wrote, "Jack Warner...considered cartoons no more than an extraneous service provided to exhibitors who wanted a full program for their customers." In 1953, during a rare meeting between the Warners and the studio's cartoon makers, Jack confessed that he didn't "even know where the hell the cartoon studio is", and Harry added, "The only thing I know is that we make Mickey Mouse," a reference to the flagship character of a competing company, Walt Disney Productions. Several years later, Jack sold all of the 400 cartoons Warner Bros. made before 1948 for $3,000 apiece. As Thomas noted, "They have since earned millions, but not for Warner Bros."

Jack's tumultuous relationship with his brother Harry worsened in February 1956, when Harry learned of Jack's decision to sell Warner Bros.' pre-1950 films to Associated Artists Productions (soon to merge with United Artists Television) for the modest sum of $21 million. "This is our heritage, what we worked all our lives to create, and now it is gone," Harry exclaimed, upon hearing of the deal. The breach between Jack and Harry widened later that year. In July 1956, Jack, Harry, and Albert announced that they were putting Warner Bros. on the market. Jack, however, secretly organized a syndicate that purchased control of the company. By the time Harry and Albert learned of their brother's dealings, it was too late. Jack, as the company's largest stockholder, appointed himself as the new company president. Shortly after the deal was closed, he announced that the company and its subsidiaries would be "directed more vigorously to the acquisition of the most important story properties, talents, and to the production of the finest motion pictures possible".

The two brothers had often argued, and earlier in the decade, studio employees claimed they saw Harry chase Jack through the studio with a lead pipe, shouting, "I'll get you for this, you son of a bitch" and threatening to kill him. This subterfuge, however, proved too much for Harry. He never spoke to Jack again. When Harry died on July 27, 1958, Jack did not attend the funeral, and he departed for his annual vacation at Cap d'Antibes. Asked to respond to his brother's death, he said, "I didn't give a shit about Harry." At the same time, Jack took pride in the fact that President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent him a letter of condolence.

The Sixties

In the 1960s, Warner kept pace with rapid changes in the industry and played a key role in developing films that were commercial and critical successes. In February 1962, he purchased the film rights for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, paying an unprecedented $6.5 million. The previous owner, CBS director William S. Paley set terms that included fifty percent of the distributor's gross profits "plus ownership of the negative at the end of the contract." Despite the "outrageous" purchase price, and the ungenerous terms of the contract, the deal proved lucrative for Warner Bros., securing the studio $12 million in profits. Warner was criticized for choosing a non-singing star, Audrey Hepburn, to play the leading role of Eliza Doolittle; indeed, the 1964 Academy Award for Best Actress went to Julie Andrews, who had played Eliza in both the Broadway and London productions of the musical, for Mary Poppins, while Hepburn wasn't even nominated. However, the film won the Best Picture Oscar for 1964.

After Warner Bros.

Warner remained active as an independent producer until the early 1970s to run some of the company's distributions and exhibition division. Among his last productions was a film adaptation of a Broadway musical, 1776, which was released throu