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Warner Bros.

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Warner Bros. (an abbreviation of Warner Bros. Entertainment) is one of the world's largest producers of film and television entertainment. It is currently a subsidiary of the Time Warner conglomerate, with headquarters in Burbank, California, U.S.A..

Warner Brothers includes several subsidiary companies, among them Warner Bros. Studios, Warner Bros. Pictures, WB Television, Warner Home Video, Castle Rock Entertainment, Turner Entertainment, Dark Castle Entertainment, and Cartoon Network Studios.

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The WB Shield used from 1998 to present day


History

The corporate name honors the four founding Warner brothers, Harry Warner (1881-1958), Albert Warner (1883-1967), Sam Warner (1887-1927) and Jack L. Warner (1892-1978). The three elder brothers began in the exhibition business in 1903, having acquired a projector with which they showed films in the mining towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Within a few years this led to the distribution of pictures across a four-state area. By the time of World War I they had begun producing films, and in 1918 the brothers opened the Warner Brothers studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Sam and Jack Warner produced the pictures, while Harry and Albert handled finance and distribution in New York. In 1923, they formally incorporated as Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc.

The first important deal for the company was the acquisition of the rights to Avery Hopwood's 1919 Broadway play The Gold Diggers from theatrical impresario David Belasco. However, what really put Warner Brothers on the Hollywood map was a dog, Rin Tin Tin, brought from France after World War I by an American soldier. Rinty was so popular that he starred in 26 films, beginning with The Man from Hell's River in 1924, and is credited with making the fledgling studio a success.

As the studio prospered, it gained backing from Wall Street, and in 1924 Goldman Sachs arranged a major loan. With this new money Warners bought the pioneer Vitagraph Company which had a nation-wide distribution system, and as a bonus got an experimental synchronized-sound process called 'Vitaphone'. They also plunged into radio, establishing several radio stations, among them KDWB in Minneapolis, KEWB in Oakland, and KFWB in Los Angeles. Warners also joined the mad race to buy and build theaters.

At the urging of Sam Warner, the company committed to develop Vitaphone, and in 1926 began making films with music and effects tracks. When this proved popular, they took the next step and offered, in October 1927 a picture with dialogue, one that would revolutionize the business, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. The movie was a sensation, launching the era of "talking pictures" and banishing silent movies.

Thanks to the success of The Jazz Singer, Warner was flush with cash, and used the money to buy the Stanley Company, a major theater chain. This gave them a share in rival First National Pictures, of which Stanley owned one-third. In a bidding war with William Fox, Warner bought more First National shares, and gained control in 1929. The Justice Department agreed to allow the purchase if First National was maintained as a separate company. But when the depression hit, Warner asked for and got permission to merge the two studios; soon afterward Warner Brothers moved to the First National lot in Burbank. Though the companies merged, Justice required Warner to produce and release a few films each year under the First National name until 1938. And for the next thirty years, certain Warner productions were identified (mainly for tax purposes) as 'A Warner Brothers - First National Picture.'

Under production head Darryl F. Zanuck, Warners in the 1930s became known for gritty, 'torn from the headlines' pictures that some said glorified gangsters. Warner stars tended to be tough-talking, working-class types, among them James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Edward G. Robinson and Barbara Stanwyck. After Zanuck was succeeded by Hal B. Wallis in 1933, the studio tried for a more sophisticated style, offering melodramas (or 'women's pictures'), swashbucklers, and expensive adaptations of best-sellers, with stars like Bette Davis, Olivia de Haviland, Paul Muni, and Errol Flynn.

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Bosko and Honey in Hold Anything (1930).

Warner's cartoon unit began modestly in 1930 as a free-standing company owned by Leon Schlesinger. Several former Disney animators, including Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, Jack King, and Friz Freleng offered tame cartoons starring Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid and Buddy. However, with the arrival of Tex Avery and the birth of Termite Terrace, the unit developed a fast-paced, irreverently insane style that made them immensely popular world-wide. Warner bought Schlesinger's cartoon unit in 1944, and in subsequent decades characters such as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck became central to the company's image.

The record attendance figures of the World War II years made the Warner brothers rich. The gritty Warner image of the 1930s gave way to a glossier look, especially in women's pictures starring Davis, de Haviland and Joan Crawford. The 1940s also saw the rise of Humphrey Bogart from supporting player to major star. And in the post-war years Warners continued to create new stars, like Lauren Bacall and Doris Day.

On January 5, 1948, Warner offered the first color newsreel, covering the Tournament of Roses Parade and the Rose Bowl.

Warner was a party to the U.S. vs Paramount Pictures, et al. anti-trust case of the 1940s. This was an action brought by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to prove that the five integrated studio-theater chain combinations acted to restrain competition. The Supreme Court heard the case in 1948, and ruled for the government. As a result Warner and four other major studios were forced to separate production from exhibition. Early in 1953, the Warner theater holdings were spun off as Stanley Warner Theaters. Now with no more theaters to fill there was no need to produce thirty pictures a year, and no need for expensive contract-actors or for costly staff. The Warner brothers, in the business for fifty years, saw the end approaching and agreed to sell out to a bank-led syndicate. Only after the deal was completed in 1956 did elder brothers Harry and Albert Warner learn that the leading investor in the bank's syndicate was youngest brother Jack. Even in an argument-prone family like the Warners, this was too much, and led to a rupture in family relations. For the rest of their lives the brothers did not speak to one another. But Jack was now solely in charge at Warner Brothers Pictures.

For a time Warner Brothers rebounded, specializing in adaptations of popular plays like The Bad Seed, No Time for Sergeants and Gypsy. There was also a successful television unit, offering popular series like 77 Sunset Strip and Maverick. Already the owner of extensive music-publishing holdings, in 1958 the studio launched Warner Brothers Records. But by the 1960s, the company was winding down. There were few studio-produced films and many more co-productions (for which Warner provided facilities, money, and distribution), and pickups of independently made pictures. In 1967, Jack gave in to advancing age and the changing times, selling control of the studio and its music business for $78 million to Seven Arts Productions, run by the Canadian investors Elliot and Kenneth Hyman, whose Associated Artists Productions had once owned the pre-1948 Warner film library. The company, including the studio, was renamed Warner Bros.-Seven Arts.

Two years later the Hymans accepted a cash-and-stock offer from a curious conglomerate called the Kinney National Company. Originating in a chain of funeral parlors, Kinney had grown by buying a string of service-businesses like parking lots, office cleaners, and a Hollywood talent agency, Ashley-Famous. It was Ted Ashley who led Kinney-head Steve Ross to the purchase of Warners, and Ashley became the new head of the studio, again called Warner Brothers Pictures. Although the movie-going audience had shrunk, Warner's new management believed in the drawing-power of stars, signing co-production deals with the big names of the day, among them Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood. This star-driven policy carried the studio successfully through the 1970s and 1980s. Abandoning the mundane parking lots and funeral homes, the re-focused Kinney renamed itself in honor of its best-known holding, Warner Communications.

To the surprise of many, the flashy, star-driven Warner Communications merged in 1989 with the white-shoe publishing company Time, Inc. Though Time and its magazines claimed a higher tone, it was the Warner Brothers film and music units which provided the profits. The takeover of Time-Warner in 2000 by the then high-flying AOL did not prove a good match, and following the collapse in "dot-com" stocks, the AOL name was banished from the corporate nameplate.

In 1995, Warner and station-owner Tribune Company of Chicago launched The WB Network, fiding a niche market in teen-agers. The WB's early programming included an abundance of lightweight fare like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Seventh Heaven and Dawson's Creek.

In the late 1990s, Warners obtained rights to the Harry Potter novels, and released the first one in 2001 the second one in 2002 and the third one in 2004.

Film library

Over the years, a series of mergers and acquisitions have led Warners (the present-day Time-Warner subsidiary) to acquire a diverse collection of movies, cartoons, and television programs.

In 1956, in the aftermath of the 1948 anti-trust suit and the uncertain climate led Warners to sell its early films and cartoons (pre-1948) to a holding company which became Associated Artists Productions (AAP). Two years later AAP sold its holdings to United Artists (UA), which kept them until 1983, when MGM bought UA. Three years later Turner Broadcasting System, having failed to buy MGM, settled for ownership of the MGM/UA library. This included all pre-1985 MGM feaures as well as the pre-1948 Warner material. Ownership of the classic Warner films came full-circle when Time Warner bought Turner, although technically they are held by Turner Entertainment while Warner is responsible for sales and distribution.

These acquisitions, among others, mean that Warner owns almost every film they've made since inception (excepting certain films Warner merely distributed, such as the United States Pictures catalog, owned by Paramount/Republic, selected John Wayne films now owned by Batjac (Wayne's company), and My Fair Lady, owned by CBS). They also own all pre-1985 titles from MGM, as noted; a majority of the RKO Radio Pictures library; and a portion of United Artists material (most of this under its Turner subsidiary). In addition Warner has acquired the Hanna-Barbera Productions television cartoons; Lorimar's television and film holdings (including the Allied Artists / Monogram library, but not The Choirboys, Tank, and The Last Starfighter, held by Universal Pictures); most ancilliary rights to Castle Hill Productions' library (which also includes early UA material); and other films released by other companies, such as the 1956 version of Around the World in Eighty Days; most of the Saul Zaentz film library; the post-1974 Rankin-Bass library; and all Castle Rock Entertainment films made after the Castle Rock/Turner merger (except The Story of Us).

UA donated pre-1949 Warner Bros. nitrates to the Library of Congress and post-1951 negatives to UCLA's film library.

Notable WB movies

The following is a partial list of films that Warner Bros. has produced, co-produced, and/or distributed:

1920s

1930s

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A scene from WB's 1942 film Casablanca.

1940s

1950s

1960s

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Blazing Saddles, a 1974 film.

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s


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