Warner Bros. 100 Years of Storytelling
During Hollywood’s golden age, Warner Bros. was ranked least among the big studios, but its influence was greater by many measures than the competition. Warner Bros. led the shift from silent to talking pictures, and while trafficking in musicals, it tended toward movies that rang true. Warner was the studio of Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis, The Public Enemy and Casablanca. Although its founders are long dead and the studio subsumed into larger corporations, the Warner Bros. name remains and has been attached to impressive projects in recent years. Dune, a Warner release, won six Oscars in 2021 and at that same Academy Awards ceremony, Will Smith walked away as Best Actor in another Warner film, King Richard.
Warner Bros. 100 Years of Storytelling is an impressive coffee table book offering a tour of the studio’s highlights. Organized by decade, profusely illustrated and accompanied by yearly Academy Awards sidebars, the book’s text by film historian Mark A. Vieira summarizes the studio’s internal politics as well as its movie production line.
Or maybe lines would be more accurate. The studio hired glamorous actresses for “women’s pictures” (working-girl stories, romance) and tough guys for gangster movies. Before the censorship regime of the Hollywood Production Code was fully implemented in 1934, Warner ran loose and wild with frank stories that often drew the ire of state and local censorship boards. They also had an animation department whose Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny were wisecracking competition for Disney.
In his forward to 100 Years of Storytelling , TCM host Ben Mankiewicz cites Warner’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) for exposing “the barbaric treatment of prisoners in the American South” and Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) as “the first movie made by a major Hollywood studio to specifically identify the danger that Hitler’s Germany presented to the world.” He ticks off other milestones, including Casablanca (1942), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Candidate (1972), All the President’s Men (1976) and Unforgiven (1992).
The present decade posed unanticipated challenges. Warner had 12 releases scheduled for 2020 but only one was on big screens before the pandemic lockdown shuttered cinemas. Home streaming subscriptions rocketed to new heights and dismal predictions on the viability of moviegoing were in the air. Warner touched off a whirlwind of arguments by announcing that in 2021, its entire slate of films would open on HBO Max the same day as their theatrical debut. With COVID receding, streaming declined and old-fashioned box office revenue rose “as Americans left their homes to seek entertainment for the first time in two years.”
Corporate politics continued. In 2021, WarnerMedia merged with Discovery, Inc. to form Warner Bros. Discovery. The new CEO, David Zaslav, “an aficionado of classic Hollywood,” vowed to restore the studio “to its full glory.”
