ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO TOMORROW

The first movie studio I ever got to drive onto because I was “on the list” was Warner Brothers. I’d been invited to come talk to Tom Gray, the Unit Publicist for “the Right Stuff,” and I knew so little about things in Hollywood, I had to ask a friend about how to get from Glendale, where I was living at the time, to the studio. (Take the 134 West, get off at Hollywood Way, drive down to the main gate, give them your name because you’re “on the list” and then drive into Wonderland)

One hundred years ago tomorrow, Warner Brothers Studios was founded by four semi-literate Russian Jewish immigrants whose father had brought the family to America because “there was no right to work where we lived then,” as Jack L. Warner, the youngest and most controversial of the four brothers, said in an interview at the end of his career at the studio.

The Ladd Company was quartered in The Writers Building. That was where most of the great Warner Brothers movies were created, where writers came and worked in a “writing factory.” Jack Warner used to walk past the building on his lunch hour and if he didn’t hear typewriters clacking away, he’d yell “I hear you not working in there!” And the typewriters would start clacking.

Amazingly enough, I got asked if I’d like to work as Tom’s assistant. He said “I need someone like you who knows why these people (the Edwards test pilots and the astronauts) are important, would you like to work here?” After I picked myself up off the floor, I said yes (that only happened in my head for the hour that was actually 30 seconds it took me to reply). The offices in the building had little signs by the door, noting who had worked in that room and what movies they had written. The sign beside the door of my office noted that John Huston and Dashiell Hammett had written “The Maltese Falcon” there.

A few years later, I was one of those writers who went on the studio to pitch projects. Warners was always my favorite. I think it was because the kind of movies I like to watch, and write, are what used to be “Warner Brothers movies.” Almost all the scripts I wrote for movies I wanted to see, that got sold, were sold to producers working at Warner Brothers. I don’t think that was a coincidence.

The German Jews, who were the dominant group in the American Jewish community in the early 20th century when the Russian Jews first showed up at Ellis Island, refugees from the pogroms of Czar Nicholas II, looked down on the refugees. They were mostly illiterate and uneducated where the German Jews were the opposite. The Russian Jews didn’t get a lot of help from their religious relatives. They took the jobs they could get, mostly selling this and that, and they looked for things that illiterate uneducated people could do that had some chance of possibility.

In 1903, the four Warner brothers realized lots of the people in their neighborhood there on the Lower East side like to go see those new things, the movies. They bought a projector and showed movies in the mining towns of Pennsylvania, making enough money set up a theater of their own in an abandoned building in New York City in 1904 and made so much money at a nickel a person that when the first real “movie” - “the Great Train Robbery” - came out in 1914, they were the operators of more “nickelodeons” than anyone else in the city and were able to make a deal to be the exclusive distributor in New York City, pawning their father’s gold watch to get the money to double the number of theaters they had. The movie was so successful they repaid the loan and retrieved the watch five months later.

They were already interested in making movies themselves. The first was a movie about German wartime atrocities, “My Four Years in Germany,” based on a book by American Ambassador to Germany James W. Gerard, released in 1915. It established what became a tradition of making movies full of “social realism” about controversial current events.

In 1918, pursued by Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Trust, the brothers took a train to southern California where they were so far away the Trust stopped chasing them and there wasn’t any winter so they could make movies outdoors year-round like the other pioneers, and they settled in Hollywoodland, California. They opened their first studio on Sunset Boulevard, in what was known as “Poverty Row” - the studios run completely by Jews, making low budget movies. Oldest brother Sam and youngest brother Jack produced their movies, while second and third brothers Harry and Albert took care of business.

On April 4, 1923, they formed Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc.

Through the early 20s, they made their money with “Rin Tin Tin” movies; the third movie, “Where the North Begins” was so successful that Jack made a contract to pay the dog that played Rin Tin Tin $1,000 a week. Jack named him The Mortgage Lifter,” since the dog and his movies paid off their original mortgage for the studio in two years. The movies made a career for their producer, Darryl F. Zanuck.

The brothers made a deal with Goldman Sachs in 1924 to get capital to make movies. In 1926, they invested nearly every penny in a new thing called Vitaphone, a process to use synchronized sound to make “talking movies.” They took the money they didn’t spend on buying the technology and paid the country’s leading entertainer, Al Jolson, to star in a movie they wanted to make.

“The Jazz Singer” actually has only 2 minutes and a few seconds of sound dialogue in it, but half of that is Jolson singing “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet,” and it made the studio and revolutionized Hollywood. They made more money with more musicals, “On With the Show!” was the first all-color, all-talking and singing movie, the next year.

By the early 1930s, the market for musicals was dying. With Harry as President, Warner Brothers made realistic gangster movies, starting with “Little Caesar.” That made Edward G. Robinson a star for 50 years (his last movie was “Soylent Green”). The next movie, “the Public Enemy” made James Cagney a star. I interviewed Cagney in the 80s and he said that his success with gangster movies made it so hard for him to do what he really wanted to do, which was musicals - “I was always just an old hoofer” - that he had to reduce his pay by half to make the first one.

In 1934, Warners wanted to make an anti-Nazi film to follow up to “I Was A Prisoner on a Chain Gang,” which was so successful it led to major prison reform in the country. “Concentration Camp” was stopped by the Motion Picture Code Authority because it was “against a foreign government.” In 1937 “The Life of Emile Zola” took on anti-Semitism. In 1938, they made “Confessions of a Nazi Spy”the first explicitly anti-Nazi movie that got around the Hays Code restrictions by telling a story based on the FBI takedown of a German spy ring in America. The other studio heads hated Warners for doing this, because the Nazis banned all US films from Germany as a result.

In 1941, the studio made “Sergeant York” which took on American isolationism in telling the story of the best-known American hero of World War I, the pacifist Alvin York.

In 1942, they didn’t hire Ronald Reagan and Ann Southern, and instead gave their contract player Humphrey Bogart and an unknown Swedish ingenue the leading roles in “Casablanca,” the greatest movie ever made in the minds of many (including yours truly), directed by my best buddy in Hollywood’s grandfather.

At the same time they did “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” written by Dalton Trumbo, the greatest screenwriter ever. All the Warner Brothers World War II “war movies” were a cut above the “propaganda movies” they were. “Yankee Doodle Dandy” raised $15 million in war bonds sales from the audiences.

And of course they created the best animation ever when they started “Merry Melodies” and then hired Chuck Jones. Bugs Bunny and the rest of the characters are still the stars of the best animated shorts ever.

Jack Warner took control of the studio after the war in a controversial move. The quintessential “mogul,” he made a movie that was the first to have a major effect on a young moviegoer in Denver, “Attack!” directed and written by Robert Aldridge and starring Eddie Albert, Jack Palance and Lee Marvin, a World War II movie in which the “enemy” is a cowardly American officer. In 1955, I can tell you that was “controversial.” I lied to my parents about what movie I was going to go see and went to see it. It was a major influence on “In The Year of the Monkey,” my Vietnam screenplay that made my reputation.

It would be easy to go on about Warners, but that’s enough. Warner Brothers was the place I always liked working, because the producers who worked there and hired guys like me also thought they were “working in a tradition.”

Four semi-literate brothers looking for a business they could get in with that background, sons of a father who came to America seeking “social justice.” They did more to promote that value than anyone else in “Duh Biz.” Even when they thought they weren’t.

A hundred years, tomorrow.

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