It was the studio that brought moviegoers Rin Tin Tin and Bugs Bunny, Bette Davis and Lauren Bacall, Bogie and Cagney, Errol Flynn and James Dean, Dirty Harry and Harry Potter.
One hundred years ago, brothers Jack, Harry, Albert and Sam Warner opened up their own movie production studio in Hollywood under the name of Warner Brothers Classics of the Screen. Their first star was an orphaned German Shepherd dog named Rin Tin Tin. Then four years later, the brothers took a giant risk and decided to produce and present movies that not only had synchronized sound, but also its stars talking. Under their Vitaphone brand, Warner Bros. presented Hollywood’s first ever talking picture, The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson. From that momentous day in October of 1927, the motion picture industry changed forever, and Warner Bros. became one of the most popular and dominant movie studios in Hollywood … and still is to this day!
To mark this milestone occasion, a spectacular illustrated history of the studio has just been released called Warner Bros.: 100 Years of Storytelling.
This glorious tome gives a decade-by-decade look – in both words and pictures – to Warner Bros.’ incredible evolution from motion picture distributor (when one of its early pictures was a 1921 comedy called School Days, starring an Alfred E. Newman look-alike named Wesley Barry), to motion picture technical innovator (the Vitaphone system that ushered in sound movies), to powerhouse studio during Hollywood’s golden age (how can one forget the majestic WB shield and the Max Steiner fanfare that began every movie during the 30s, 40s and 50s?), to multi-media empire … and yet through all of this evolution, the one major constant was the Warner Bros. name, which always was associated with quality storytelling in both films and TV.
However, the two major strengths of this book are the multitude of photos that are featured (many of them seen for the first time in decades), and the little known behind the scenes factual tidbits that enhances the Warner Bros. enduring legacy. For example, there is the beautiful Technicolor publicity photo of Errol Flynn and Bette Davis for the 1939 biopic The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex; the all-encompassing photo at stage 21 during the production of the 1943 musical This Is The Army … with life-sized scale models of a galleon and a freighter flanking the stage; a rare photo of Vivien Leigh, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan on the set of the 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire; and an arm-in-arm cast photo on the set of the 1974 disaster epic The Towering Inferno (which included Fred Astaire, who received an Oscar nomination for his performance on this box office mega hit).
And on the factual tidbit side, there is no shortage there to keep film buffs informed. For example, on the day of The Jazz Singer’s premiere in New York in 1927, the Warners weren’t able to attend. That was because their brother Sam (who was a major supporter of the Vitaphone system) died that day from complications of an infection he was diagnosed with; the script for the hit 1993 romantic thriller The Bodyguard was written by Lawrence Kasdan during the 1970s, and was originally meant to star Steve McQueen and Diana Ross; the production of the 1978 hit Superman: The Movie was so large in scale, that it became an international co-production with the UK, Switzerland and Panama as production partners; the 1944 comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, which starred Cary Grant, was filmed in 1941. But because the original play was still going strong on Broadway – and owing to the contract stipulation with the show’s producer that the film couldn’t be released until its stage run was completed — the film version wasn’t released until 1944; and the significance of the 1935 animated short I Haven’t Got A Hat? It marked the debut of Warner Bros.’ first cartoon superstar Porky Pig, which led to the genesis of such subsequent WB cartoon legends as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Tweety Bird.
Warner Bros.: 100 Years of Storytelling, is a commemorative book that is, to quote the advertisements that described The Jazz Singer nearly a century ago, a “supreme triumph”. Whether you liked Rin Tin Tin, Looney Tunes, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, Edward G. Robinson, Olivia de Havilland, Little Caesar, Casablanca, Rebel Without A Cause, My Fair Lady, A Clockwork Orange or Wonder Woman, you can thank the ambitions and vision of Jack, Harry, Albert and Sam Warner for creating a studio that certainly knew how – and still does – tell a great story through the magic of motion pictures.
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