Warner Bros.

Since its emergence as a major Hollywood studio in the late 1920s, Warner Bros. has remained at the forefront of the American film industry, proving itself time and again as the boldest innovator among the studios. Warner coalesced as an integrated major studio on the basis of its pioneering role in the coming of "talkies," quickly developing under Harry (1881–1958) and Jack Warner (1892–1978) into a competitive industry force with perhaps the most distinctive house style in Hollywood. After struggling through the early postwar era, Warner Bros. again played a pioneering role when, in the mid-1950s, it led major studios into television series production, which quickly proved to be a more reliable and profitable endeavor than movie production. Once the most factory-oriented of the integrated majors, Warner Bros. eventually came to terms with independent production, and in fact it was a major proponent of the director-driven American New Wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

That movement was soon overwhelmed by the New Hollywood, with its media conglomerates, blockbuster films, and entertainment franchises. Here too Warner Bros. helped shape and define a changing industry—albeit as a subdivision of two successive corporate juggernauts. The first of these parent companies was Warner Communications Inc., which became an American entertainment giant during the 1970s under Steve Ross, and continued to expand in the 1980s despite huge losses incurred by its ground-breaking video-game division, Atari. The second was Time Warner, Inc., whose creation via merger in 1989 spurred a new era of global media conglomerates. The Warner Bros. film studio was a key component of the vast Time Warner empire, even after the 1996 acquisition of Turner Broadcasting, which added extensive broadcast and cable assets, the world's largest media library, and three additional film companies (including New Line) to the mix.

In the twenty-first century the pioneering impulse led to disaster, with the hugely unsuccessful merger of Time Warner with the Internet giant America Online (AOL). Time Warner and its myriad media divisions survived, however, thanks largely to a new breed of global entertainment franchise launched by The Matrix movies (1999–2003), the Harry Potter series (2001–2005), and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003). Meanwhile, other subsidiaries, notably cable movie channels HBO and TCM (Turner Classic Movies), have exploited the vast Time Warner library and kept the Warner Bros. trademark and its movies in continuous circulation. Thus Warner Bros., as a studio and a movie-industry brand, remains enormously successful more than eighty years after its birth.

GENESIS AND RAPID GROWTH

The genesis of the Warner movie empire actually began in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the three older Warner brothers, Harry, Albert (Abe), and Sam, all still in their twenties, went into the nickelodeon business around 1903. (Jack, born in 1892, sang during intermissions and reel changes.) Like many early exhibitors, they soon moved into distribution to ensure a flow of product, only to tangle with the Motion Picture Patents Company. They persisted, however, and eventually reached a water-shed of sorts in 1918 with the release of My Four Years in Germany, a semi-documentary that became an enormous box-office success and enabled the Warners to move into production with a modest operation on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Continued growth accelerated in 1923, when the Warner Brothers West Coast Studio was incorporated as Warner Bros., and operations were expanded substantially. Warner Bros. released fourteen films that year, including Where the North Begins, which launched its successful series featuring the dog Rin Tin Tin. The studio produced several notable films in the next few years—including Ernst Lubitsch's (1892–1947) The Marriage Circle (1924) and Lady Windermere's Fan (1925)—but its most significant efforts involved not film production but film technology as it pioneered the development of "talking pictures."

The impulse behind Warner Bros.' early experimentation with sound, which was the brainchild of Sam Warner, was not dialogue but music. The Warners hoped to bring full orchestral accompaniment to all of their releases, including those in smaller, subsequent-run theaters that could not afford an orchestra. In 1925 Warner Bros. acquired the Vitagraph studio (in New York) and, a year later, founded Vitaphone in a partnership with Western Electric to develop a sound-on-disc system. Early sound programs featured musical and vaudeville shorts and an occasional feature-length film with an orchestral soundtrack—most notably the successful 1926 release of Don Juan, starring John Barrymore (1882–1942). The breakthrough was The Jazz Singer, an October 1927 release starring Al Jolson (1886–1950), the phenomenal success of which not only energized the talkie revolution but secured Warner Bros.' position at its forefront. It also sent Harry Warner headlong into further expansion and theater conversion, but without the assistance of Sam Warner, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage on the eve of The Jazz Singer's premiere.

Shortly after the release of The Jazz Singer, construction was completed on four sound stages at Warner Bros.' Sunset studio, and plans were finalized for complete sound conversion within a year. Work began immediately on a slate of "part-talkies," with efforts made at both Vitagraph and Sunset to produce an "all-talking" feature. That milestone was passed in July 1928 with The Lights of New York, a Vitaphone two-reeler that was expanded into modest feature length (57 minutes) by director Bryan Foy (1896–1977), a veteran producer of Vitaphone shorts. Hollywood's first all-talking feature film was a commercial hit, providing further impetus for Warner Bros.' breakneck expansion. In September 1928 Warner Bros. purchased the Stanley Corporation of America, a chain of 250 theaters, and in October bought controlling interest in a fully integrated company, First National, whose holdings included a massive studio facility in Burbank, north of Hollywood. Harry Warner closed the decade with the November 1929 purchase of the remaining First National stock, thus completing Warner Bros.' rapid climb to integrated major status.

In terms of filmmaking, the most significant developments during this phase involved the company's executive personnel, as Jack Warner assumed control of the West Coast production operations and the role of production chief was gradually assumed by Darryl Zanuck (1902–1979), who had joined the studio as a screen-writer in 1924 (at age twenty-two) and by the late 1920s had become the studio's de facto production supervisor. Another key executive was Hal B. Wallis (1899–1986), who joined Warner's publicity department in 1922 (at age twenty-three) and by the late 1920s was managing First National studio as it was being converted to sound. When that conversion was completed, the Burbank lot became the principal Warner Bros. facility. The newly melded company, known briefly as Warner Bros.-First National, reduced its output from some eighty pictures per year in the late 1920s to about fifty-five per year during the 1930s. Virtually all of Warner's top feature production came under the supervision of Darryl Zanuck, who by 1930 was earning $5,000 per week—a hefty sum by any studio's standards, and indicative of Zanuck's value to the company. During the next few years, operating under Zanuck as "central producer," Warner's studio style began to take shape. The Depression was also a huge factor, in that it forced the studio to reduce output and to operate more economically, which meant tighter budgets, lower-cost contract talent (especially stars), and a heavier reliance on genre—the key ingredients to Warner's emergent studio style.

CLASSICAL-ERA WARNER BROS.

During the early 1930s, Zanuck orchestrated the development of the film narratives, genres, and production trends that would define Warner Bros. for the next two decades, featuring contemporary stories "torn from today's headlines" distinguished by a cynicism and hard-bitten realism in style, tone, and technique. Zanuck also cultivated stables of contract talent who were the key creators of the Warner's style, notably a new crop of stars like Edward G. Robinson (1893–1973), James Cagney (1899–1986), Paul Muni (1895–1967), Dick Powell (1904–1963), and Ruby Keeler (1909–1993), and a cadre of high-speed, no-nonsense directors including Mervyn LeRoy (1900–1987), Roy Del Ruth (1893–1961), Michael Curtiz (1886–1962), Archie Mayo (1891–1968), and William Dieterle (1893–1972). Warner's trademark genres in the early Depression era were the gangster film and backstage musical, spurred by the 1931 gangster classics Little Caesar (starring Robinson) and The Public Enemy (starring Cagney), the prison dramas I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932, with Muni) and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932, with Spencer Tracy), and the backstage musicals 42nd Street (1933, with Powell and Bebe Daniels) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, with Powell, Keeler, Joan Blondell [1906–1979], and Ginger Rogers [1911–1995]). The latter were vigorous urban dramas with the same cynical edge as the gangster films' but were interspersed with lavish musical numbers directed, designed, and choreographed (often with kaleidoscopic routines shot from

MICHAEL CURTIZ
b. Mihaly Kertesz, Budapest, Hungary, 24 December 1888, d. 10 April 1962

Warner Bros.' consummate house director during the classical era, Michael Curtiz was an expert technician who worked in a variety of genres and with a wide range of top studio stars, and like all of Warner's long-term contract directors, he was amazingly prolific. Curtiz directed nearly one hundred features over some twenty-seven years at Warner (1926–1953), including over fifty films during the manic 1930s. Most were routine studio fare, although he occasionally directed prestige productions like the Errol Flynn-Olivia de Havilland vehicles. As Warner's output slowed and its ambitions increased during the 1940s, Curtiz handled many of the studio's top pictures, including back-to-back hits in 1942, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca, two of Warner's signature wartime releases.

Born and raised in Budapest, where he began his film career (as Mihaly Kertesz), Curtiz was directing films in Germany when Warner signed him in 1926. During his first decade at Warner Bros., Curtiz proved eminently adaptable to the studio machinery and the Hollywood idiom, although he was overshadowed by other Warner directors like Mervyn LeRoy, Roy del Ruth, and Lloyd Bacon. His breakthrough came in 1935 on Captain Blood, the first of the studio's romantic swashbucklers co-starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. The film was a hit, and from that point the careers of the frantic, disciplined Curtiz and the dashing, irrepressible Flynn were inexorably entwined—despite the fact that the two men detested one another. From a sword-wielding Brit in Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940) to a gun-toting westerner in Dodge City (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940), and Virginia City (1940), Curtiz and Flynn fashioned a new breed of Warners hero—more athletic, romantic, and gallant than those portrayed by James Cagney, Paul Muni, or Humphrey Bogart and a mythic figure who only made sense in costume or in uniform.

Curtiz eventually severed the alliance with Flynn, whose career and caretaking were handed off to Raoul Walsh. Meanwhile, Curtiz handled projects that signaled his stature at Warners as well as his remarkable range: wartime thrillers like Casablanca, Mission to Moscow (1943), and Passage to Marseille (1944); dark melodramas like Mildred Pierce (1945), The Unsuspected (1947), and Flamingo Road (1949); period comedies like Roughly Speaking (1945) and Life With Father (1947); and musicals like Yankee Doodle Dandy, Night and Day (1946), Romance on the High Seas (1948), My Dream Is Yours (1949), and Young Man with a Horn (1950).

By the early 1950s, however, the studio system was collapsing and Curtiz was losing his edge—scarcely surprising, considering how much the Warner system and Curtiz, the house director, were attuned to one another—and he finally left Warner Bros. in 1953. His next two projects, The Egyptian (1954) and White Christmas (1954), were lavish star vehicles that well indicated his lofty industry stature, but Curtiz was lost once he left the Warners lot and his career was effectively over.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Captain Blood (1935), Kid Galahad (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Dodge City (1939), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), This Is the Army (1943), Casablanca (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945), Life with Father (1947), Young Man with a Horn (1950), White Christmas (1954)

FURTHER READING

Behlmer, Rudy H. Inside Warner Bros. (1935–1951). New York: Viking, 1985.

Robertson, James C. The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael Curtiz. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Thomas Schatz

overhead) by the inimitable Busby Berkeley (1895–1976). Another important early cycle included historical costume dramas and biographies ("biopics") like Disraeli (1929), Alexander Hamilton (1931), and Voltaire (1933), starring George Arliss (1868–1946) and directed by Alfred Green (1889–1960), which were among the studio's more costly and prestigious productions. In terms of sheer efficiency and directing talent, the studio's top filmmaker was Mervyn LeRoy, who was versatile enough to handle Little Caesar, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and Gold Diggers of 1933, and efficient enough to direct twenty-three films from 1930 to 1933.

March 1933 marked a crucial moment for the industry and for Warner Bros. The new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), declared a "bank holiday" and National Recovery campaign, mandating salary cuts throughout US industry. Whereas the studio owners, including the Warners, readily complied, Zanuck insisted that, despite massive losses in 1931 and 1932, Warner Bros. had weathered the Depression and thus the salary cuts were unnecessary. When the Warners stood firm, Zanuck resigned; with Joseph Schenck (1878–1961), he created 20th Century Pictures, an independent production company that would merge with Fox two years later. Zanuck was succeeded by Hal Wallis, a capable administrator who lacked the vision, drive, and creative instincts of his predecessor, but who worked effectively with Jack Warner to further refine the studio's distinctive style. During the Wallis era, Warner sustained its trademark gangster and musical cycles, replaced George Arliss (who left for 20th Century with Zanuck) with Paul Muni as its resident biopic star, and launched several crucial new star-genre formulas as well—notably women's films with Bette Davis (1908–1989) and swashbuckling romances with Errol Flynn (1909–1959) and Olivia de Havilland (b. 1916).

All of these cycles were maintained by production units under the purview of supervisors like Henry Blanke (1901–1981), Sam Bischoff (1890–1975), and Robert Lord (1900–1976), who in 1937 finally began getting screen credit as "associate producers" after years of resistance from the Warners. The key figures in these units generally were a staff director and a contract star, as with the Flynn-de Havilland romances directed by Michael Curtiz and the Cagney crime dramas directed by Lloyd Bacon (1889–1955). The studio's most efficient and accomplished team was the biopic unit featuring Paul Muni, director William Dieterle, and cinematographer Tony Gaudio (1883–1951); under the producer Henry Blanke, this team turned out some of Warner's most acclaimed films of the decade, including The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and The Life of Emile Zola (1937). The Davis melodramas relied less on any one director (or producer) than on screenwriter Casey Robinson, composer Max Steiner, and costume designer Orry-Kelly, who collaborated on Dark Victory (1939), The Old Maid (1939), All This, and Heaven Too (1940), Now, Voyager (1942), and other Davis vehicles. Meanwhile, producer Bryan Foy oversaw Warner's B-picture operation, which cranked out twenty-five to thirty high-speed, low-cost productions per year, most of them urban crime films and melodramas and none of which featured top talent on either side of the camera.

Warner Bros. had a strong penchant for typecasting during the 1930s, which some stars like Errol Flynn preferred while others like Davis, Cagney, and Robinson openly resisted, battling Wallis and Jack Warner for better and more varied roles. Whereas the top stars eventually won greater authority over their films, contract players with less "marquee value" had little recourse besides "suspension"—that is, an unpaid leave with suspended time added to the term of their contract. Warner's suspension policy was challenged in the courts by de Havilland, which cost her two years of her career in the early 1940s but resulted in a historic ruling that ended the studios' entrenched, industry wide suspension system.

Warner Bros.' economic fortunes surged during the war era, when its production operations, market strategy, and house style underwent significant change. The studio phased out B-movie production altogether in the early 1940s, cutting its output in half to focus on A-class pictures for the overheated first-run market. (Warner's output plummeted from forty-eight films in 1941 to only twenty-one in 1943, and averaged twenty per year for the next five years.) Another war-related change involved an emphasis on the domestic market, which brought a shift in narrative and thematic focus from Europe to the United States, especially in its costume dramas and biopics. British-themed Flynn–de Havilland swashbucklers like Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940), for instance, gave way to westerns and American biopics like Virginia City (1940), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), and Gentleman Jim (1942). Meanwhile, other major changes

BETTE DAVIS
b. Ruth Elizabeth Davis, Lowell, Massachusetts, 5 April 1908, d. 6 October 1989

Bette Davis's eighteen-year stint with Warner Bros. (1931–1949) was remarkable for several reasons. As the only top female star at a studio with a predominantly male ethos, she effectively countered the films of James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Errol Flynn, and Humphrey Bogart in a steady output of quality "woman's pictures." Davis lacked the physical beauty and sexual allure that were deemed essential for Hollywood stardom, relying instead on her acting skills and her work ethic (she appeared in some fifty films while at the studio).

Early on, Warner Bros. had no idea what to do with the headstrong, gifted Davis, whose screen persona was crucially shaped in projects that she engineered. In 1934, after two unhappy years with Warner, Davis convinced the studio to loan her to RKO to co-star in Of Human Bondage (1934), in which she delivered a powerful performance in a role that was at once captivating and utterly unsympathetic. Its success improved her status back at the studio, and she won an Oscar^® a year later for her role in Dangerous (1935), an altogether routine Warner crime drama that underscored the studio's perception of her as a "female Jimmy Cagney." Subsequent battles with Jack Warner gave Davis a new contract and increased creative control over her pictures, leading to an agreement to bring in William Wyler (then under contract to Sam Goldwyn) to direct Jezebel (1938), another career-defining role.

Davis's bravura performance in Jezebel as a spoiled, headstrong Southern belle eventually redeemed through suffering won Davis another Oscar^®; even more important, it solidified Warner's commitment to quality women's pictures with suitable roles for Davis. The result was an extraordinary run of pictures over the next four years, including The Sisters (1938), Dark Victory (1939), The Old Maid (1939), All This, and Heaven Too (1940), The Letter (1940), The Great Lie (1941), The Little Foxes (1941), and Now, Voyager (1942). Many were scripted by Casey Robinson, who became Davis's chief collaborator at Warner Bros., and each role was a variation on the contradictory heroine in Jezebel, with Davis cast either as an emasculating shrew or an engaging innocent.

Davis tried lighter fare, including an occasional comedy, but women's pictures remained her métier. Few of her subsequent films matched that extraordinary prewar run, however, and after a succession of lavish postwar disappointments, she left Warner Bros. Davis immediately enjoyed a "comeback" at Fox with All About Eve (1950), but in fact her career as a top star was winding down. In the 1960s she experienced an odd resurgence in a cycle of thrillers and gothic horror films, including two for Warner Bros., What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Dead Ringer (1964), both of which were shrill send-ups of her earlier work for the studio.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Of Human Bondage (1934), Jezebel (1938), Dark Victory (1939), The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), Now, Voyager (1942), Deception (1946), All About Eve (1950), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

FURTHER READING

Chandler, Charlotte. The Girl Who Walked Alone: Bette Davis, A Personal Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Higham, Charles. Bette: The Life of Bette Davis. New York: Dell, 1982.

Leaming, Barbara. Bette Davis: A Biography. New York: Summit Books, 1992.

Thomas Schatz

in studio style had little or nothing to do with the war, as with the transition in Warner's trademark crime films from gangster sagas to "hardboiled" thrillers and film noir. That transition was spurred by the emergence of Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) as a top star in two 1941 films, High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon; he secured his status as Warner's most important wartime star a year later in Casablanca. Bogart's value to the studio was underscored by the departure of both Cagney and Robinson in 1942, although the rise of John Garfield (1913–1952) in war films like Air Force (1943), Destination Tokyo (1943), and Pride of the Marines (1945) also helped offset those losses.

The acute reduction of Warner Bros.' wartime output coincided with a radical change in production management, as the studio relied increasingly on independent producers. This trend began in 1940 with deals involving Jesse Lasky (1880–1958) for Sergeant York (1941) and Frank Capra (1897–1991) for Meet John Doe (1941) and Arsenic and Old Lace (completed in early 1942 but not released until 1944). It accelerated in early 1942 when Warner Bros. signed independent deals with Wallis, Howard Hawks (1896–1977), and Mark Hellinger (1903–1947). The Wallis deal, which committed him to four pictures per year for the next four years, signaled Warner's shift away from a "central producer" system; it was especially significant because Wallis's first independent project was Casablanca, a huge hit that gave Warner Bros. the Oscar^® for best picture but generated a clash with Jack Warner that led to Wallis's departure in 1944. By then Warner had moved completely to a unit-producer system, with top contract producers like Henry Blanke and Jerry Wald (1911–1962) as well as quasi-independent producer-directors like Hawks and John Huston (1906–1987) enjoying unprecedented control over their pictures.

Like all of the studios, Warner Bros. saw its profits surge immediately after the war, although in Warner's case revenues peaked in 1947 (versus 1946 for the other studios) before starting a steep decline. Moreover, Warner's late-1940s fade was not as severe because it was producing fewer pictures and unloading its contract talent and other resources at a rapid rate. Warner Bros. produced very few top hits during the postwar era, although it did sustain its trademark noir thrillers, dark dramas, and women's pictures. Bogart's star continued to ascend with the Hawks-directed film noir masterwork The Big Sleep (1946), and two consummate Huston films, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Key Largo (1948). Davis's star was rapidly falling, but former MGM diva Joan Crawford (1904–1977) came out of retirement to star in several Warner Bros. hits, including Mildred Pierce (1945) and Humoresque (1946). Two especially telling postwar star vehicles were Key Largo, which teamed Bogart and Lauren Bacall (b. 1924) with Edward G. Robinson, and White Heat (1949), a low-budget crime thriller starring James Cagney. More than any of Warner Bros.' other postwar films, these two signaled the end of its classical-era star-genre cycles, as Robinson and Cagney each portrayed a gangster throw-back whose requisite demise at film's end comes in truly spectacular fashion.

THE TELEVISION ERA AND THE
NEW HOLLYWOOD

When the movie industry's postwar collapse caught up with Warner Bros. in 1948, contracts with top stars like Davis, Bogart, and Flynn were phased out, as were many other contract personnel. Conditions became so dire, in fact, that, despite a suspension of production for several months to regroup, the studio still failed to place a single film in the top twenty-five box-office releases in 1949. Deep budget cuts and personnel layoffs offset falling revenues in 1950, when Warner Bros. actually posted net profits of $10.2 million—ironically the highest of any studio that year, and Warner's first-ever finish atop the Hollywood heap. The company continued to struggle in the early 1950s, gradually (and grudgingly) coming to terms with an industry geared to freelance talent, independent production, and a burgeoning blockbuster mentality. Warner's most important films at the time were produced by independents and bore little resemblance to its classical era films—as with Charles K. Feldman's (1904–1968) production of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for instance, or The Searchers (1956), produced by Merian C. Cooper (1893–1973) and directed by his long-time partner, John Ford (1894–1973). Even projects involving former contract talent were distinctly at odds with the filmmakers' earlier work for the studio. Hawks and Huston returned as freelance producer-directors in the mid-1950s, for instance, and their respective productions, Land of the Pharaohs (1955) and Moby Dick (1956), were lavish color spectacles that bore no resemblance at all to their preceding Warner's films, The Big Sleep and Key Largo. Warner Bros. did successfully develop one contract star during the 1950s, James Dean (1931–1955), who shot to stardom in East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause (both 1955), and Giant (1956), but was killed in a car accident just weeks after completing Giant.

Warner's move to "bigger" independent movie productions in the 1950s was a matter of necessity, but its venture into telefilm series production evinced the boldness displayed when the company pioneered talkies three decades earlier. In early 1955, Warner's entered a deal with the ABC-TV network to produce an hour-long series, Warner Brothers Presents, designed to expand three of its feature films, Casablanca, Kings Row (1942), and Cheyenne (1947), into rotating series, with the last quarter-hour of each program devoted to promoting the studio and its upcoming movie releases. After the initial (1955–1956) season only Cheyenne remained, becoming a major hit and a watershed in network television's move to studio-produced hour-long telefilm series—especially Westerns, with Warner Bros. Television generating a remarkable run of hits from 1957 to 1958, including Sugarfoot, Maverick, Colt. 45, and Bronco. By 1959 Warner Bros. was producing over one-third of ABC's prime-time programming, and as Christopher Anderson has aptly noted, the studio managed to adapt its assembly-line, B-picture operation to the requirements of network series production.

Warner's motion picture operation continued to adapt as well, turning out big-budget musical hits in the early 1960s like The Music Man (1962), Gypsy (1962), and My Fair Lady (1964), and then, later in the decade, producing several of the key films in a veritable American new wave—a "director's cinema" that redefined the independent movement and marked yet another significant break with studio tradition. Warner's contribution to the movement was extensive and quite impressive, and it included Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (directed by Mike Nichols, 1966), Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968), The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970), A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), Klute (Alan Pakula, 1971), Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973), and Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973). These auteur films scarcely evinced a consistent studio style, although they did manifest a coherent market strategy and a sustained effort to court a new generation of filmmakers and a younger, hipper, more political and cine-literate audience.

Warner Bros.' changing production and market strategy was directly related to changes in ownership and management. These began when Jack Warner, the last of the original owner-operators, decided to sell his stock to the Canadian company Seven Arts, leading to the studio's brief (1967–1969) incarnation as Warner Brothers-Seven Arts. A severe market slump in 1969 led to another sale, this time to a heavily capitalized, highly diversified conglomerate, Kinney Service Corporation. Kinney's president and CEO, Steve Ross, created Warner Communications Inc. (WCI), which he built over the next two decades into a model media conglomerate, with Warner Bros. as its principal asset. Ross immediately brought in three new top executives to run WCI's movie division: former agent Ted Ashley as chairman and CEO, independent producer John Calley as head of production, and attorney Frank Wells as studio president. In the course of the 1970s, the trio turned massive losses into steady profits, thanks mainly to a few huge hits like The Exorcist (1973), All the President's Men (1976), and Superman (1978), as well as a steady output of more modest successes involving Clint Eastwood (b. 1930), whose partnership with Warner's—mainly via his Malpaso Company—generated literally dozens of hit films in the ensuing decades. Warner's Eastwood hits during the 1970s included Dirty Harry (1971) and its first two sequels, Magnum Force (1973), and The Enforcer (1976); westerns like the Eastwood-directed The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976); and the offbeat Every Which Way But Loose (1978), an action-buddy comedy starring Eastwood and featuring an orangutan, and its sequel, Any Which Way You Can (1980), which were huge box-office hits.

Studio and parent company underwent further changes in the 1980s, as Warner's steadily adapted to the current era of global media conglomerates. Ross began an aggressive campaign to expand WCI's media holdings in the early 1980s, and he also replaced the studio management team with Robert Daly, who became Warner Bros.' chairman and CEO in 1980, and Terry Semel, who was named president in 1981. Daly and Semel took charge of the movie division just as Ross was shifting his focus to WCI's video-game division, Atari, whose fantastic profits led to overly aggressive expansion and, by 1983, record losses for WCI. At that point Ross retrenched, selling Atari and refocusing on more "traditional" media—movies, television, cable, music, and publishing. Soon WCI was back on track, and Warner Bros. resumed its dominant position within the media empire. The studio was generally successful despite it widely diverse output, with the only real consistency coming from Eastwood's male action films, the Superman sequels, and the increasingly inevitable impulse to turn film hits into movie franchises, as with Police Academy (1984), Lethal Weapon (1987), and many others. Moreover, Warner Bros.' evergreen Looney Tunes division—the home of cartoon veterans Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and others, which dated back to the 1930s—was successfully revived in the 1980s, generating additional feature films and cable TV programming, as well as a licensing-and-merchandising operation that by the 1990s fueled a growing chain of Warner Bros. retail stores.

TIME WARNER: THE MODERN
CONGLOMERATE ERA

The year 1989 was a watershed for Warner Bros. on two interrelated fronts. One was the release of Batman, a feat of blockbuster filmmaking that effectively redefined the creation and propagation of the movie-driven global entertainment franchise. Batman reached $100 million in only ten days, a studio record, and went on to become the biggest hit and the most successful franchise in Warner's history to that point. Much of that success was due to the other epochal event in 1989, WCI's merger with Time, Inc., which marked another major stage in Ross's relentless expansion campaign and in the conglomeration of Hollywood as well. The Time Warner merger was actually a $14 billion "takeover" of WCI by Time, Inc., although it was engineered mainly by Ross in an effort to combine Warner's assets with a publishing giant whose holdings also happened to include crucial media assets like HBO. The release of Batman and the Time Warner merger took the studio, the parent company, and the industry at large into another realm, mobilizing an array of merchandising and other tie-ins.

Warner's expansion continued despite Ross's untimely death in December 1992, most notably with the $8 billion acquisition of Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) in 1996. This acquisition added substantially to the Time Warner mix, bringing in further cable holdings (CNN, TBS, et al.), three leading independent film companies (Castle Rock, New Line, and Fine Line), and the world's largest film and television library. Meanwhile, the movie studio surged to unprecedented heights, as Warner Bros. and Disney utterly dominated the movie industry throughout the 1990s in terms of revenues and market share. The studio's success was spurred by the Batman and Lethal Weapon series, as well as its Eastwood films (most notably Unforgiven, 1992) and a steady output of top hits like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), The Fugitive (1993), Twister (1996), and The Perfect Storm (2000).

Time Warner's movie fortunes surged in the early 2000s, thanks largely to the franchises launched by The Matrix, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and The Lord of the Rings. Designed as global entertainment machines, all three added billions to the parent company's bottom line while indicating how complex and multifaceted even the movie division itself had become. Only the Harry Potter films were actually produced and distributed by Warner Bros., while Warner's distributed the Matrix films but had nothing at all to do with the Rings films, which were produced and distributed by New Line.

The success of those three franchises helped offset the truly catastrophic losses that accompanied Time Warner's merger in early 2000 with AOL, the Internet giant that promised to give the media company an insurmountable lead over its competitors in the burgeoning Digital Age. The deal, valued at an astounding—and massively overinflated—sum of $164 billion, was negotiated by Ross's successor, Gerald Levin, and AOL's Steve Case, and it was announced just as the "dot-com bubble" burst and the so-called New Economy collapsed. AOL-Time Warner had a brief disastrous run under Levin and Case, reporting losses of $99 billion in 2002; that same year Case was removed as executive chairman and the corporate name reverted to Time Warner. The conglomerate thrived in the following years under Richard Parsons, and was ranked by Forbes magazine in early 2005 as the world's top media company, with a market value of $79.1 billion. (Disney was a distant second at $57.2 billion.) By then Time Warner could count on Warner Bros. for one or two modest, critically acclaimed hits per year—most reliably from Eastwood-Malpaso, which delivered Mystic River (2003) and Million Dollar Baby (2004).

Given the state of the global entertainment industry and the media conglomerates that dominate and control it, however, Warner Bros.' prime directive is to generate and sustain the blockbuster franchises that now rule the industry. Both Warner Bros. and New Line have accommodated Time Warner on that score—more so, in fact, than any other motion picture subdivisions in Hollywood. The successful regeneration of Warner's Batman franchise with Batman Begins (2005) underscores the studio's (and the parent company's) franchise mentality, although the success and relative value of that now-antiquated series pales in comparison to Time Warner's more recent blockbuster cycles, particularly in terms of box-office performance. Taken together, Warner's first three Harry Potter films and New Line's Lord of the Rings trilogy comprise six of the top fourteen all-time worldwide box-office hits (as of mid-2005), generating $5.56 billion in theatrical release alone—only a fraction of what will be returned in DVD, television, and pay-cable revenues, and the myriad other revenue streams. These films are, for better or worse, the essential studio products in an age of global media conglomerates, and the defining products in terms of Warner Bros.' studio style.

SEE ALSO Star System;Studio System

FURTHER READING

Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood TV. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Bruck, Connie. Master of the Game: Steve Ross and the Creation of Time Warner. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

Higham, Charles. Warner Brothers. New York: Scribners, 1976.

Hirschhorn, Clive. The Warner Bros. Story. New York: Crown, 1979.

Huston, John. An Open Book. New York: Knopf, 1980.

Klein, Alec. Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

Meyer, William R. Warner Brothers Directors. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1978.

Mosley, Leonard. Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Last Tycoon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.

Roddick, Nick. A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1983.

Wallis, Hal, and Charles Higham. Starmaker: The Autobiography of Hal Wallis. New York: Macmillan, 1980.

Thomas Schatz