Jack L. Warner

• 1. Introduction

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  Jack Leonard Warner ran Warner Bros. Studios for more than half a century, longer than any other pioneering Hollywood mogul. His career began with a pawned horse and a borrowed chair, and it ended with an estate valued at $15 million and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6541 Hollywood Boulevard. Along the way, he outmaneuvered his own brothers, defied a sitting president's censorship request, and personally raced onstage at the Academy Awards to claim a trophy that was not his to take.

  The questions worth asking about Jack Warner are not simply how he built one of Hollywood's great studios. They are darker and more interesting: how did a man feared by his employees and ridiculed for bad jokes sustain that kind of power for so long? How did a lifelong Republican become the champion of New Deal social dramas and anti-fascist films? And what do you do with a man who named suspected communists before Congress, then spent lavishly to honor two rival presidents at the same time?

  Those contradictions did not undermine Warner's authority. In a strange way, they were the source of it. His story begins not in Hollywood, but in a shoe repair shop in Youngstown, Ohio, with a family of Polish-Jewish immigrants trying to survive in a steel town that was, by one account, one of the toughest cities in America.

• 2. From Cobbler's Son to Showman

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  Benjamin Warner arrived in Baltimore carrying a new surname and very little else. He had been born with the name Wonsal or Wonskolaser in Krasnosielc, a town in Congress Poland that was then part of the Russian Empire. He introduced himself as Benjamin Warner upon landing in New York City, and that name stayed with the family for every generation that followed.

  The family's route to the movie business ran through an Ohio steel town. In 1896, they relocated to Youngstown, following the eldest son Harry, who had already opened a shoe repair shop there. Jack was among the children born in Ontario during a short and difficult Canadian interlude, and he spent his formative years in Youngstown's rough streets. He later recalled in his autobiography that J. Edgar Hoover had told him Youngstown was one of the toughest cities in America and a gathering place for Sicilian thugs. Warner said he briefly belonged to a street gang in a neighborhood called Westlake's Crossing, west of downtown.

  While still a teenager, he began performing professionally, singing at local theaters and partnering with another aspiring song-and-dance man. His older brother Sam had blunt advice about where the real money was: "Get out front where they pay the actors." Jack took a different lesson from the exchange. He changed his name formally to Jack Leonard Warner and looked for a way into the business side of entertainment.

  Sam had already spotted the opportunity. He acquired a Model B Kinetoscope for $1,000 from a projectionist who was down on his luck. Jack contributed $150 toward the venture by pawning a horse. The brothers screened a well-used print of The Great Train Robbery across Ohio and Pennsylvania, then rented a vacant storefront in New Castle, Pennsylvania. They furnished their makeshift theater, which they called the Bijou, with chairs borrowed from a local undertaker. Jack arrived on weekends to sing illustrated song-slides during reel changes, earning his place in the family operation.

• 3. Building the Studio

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  In 1907, the brothers established the Duquesne Amusement Company in Pittsburgh, a distribution firm that thrived until Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company began charging distributors exorbitant fees. By 1909, they sold their interests to the General Film Company for $10,000 in cash, $12,000 in preferred stock, and additional payments spread over four years, totaling $52,000. That capital let them move into production.

  The studio's early years turned on a series of lucky bets. In 1918, the Warners purchased the film rights for My Four Years in Germany, a bestselling novel about German wartime atrocities. The adaptation was a commercial and critical success, and it established the family's taste for stories with sharp political edges. Their next breakthrough came in 1923, when the studio discovered a trained German Shepherd named Rin Tin Tin. Jack's initial doubts about the project dissolved when he met the dog, who, according to one biographer, seemed to display more intelligence than some of the studio's comedians. Rin Tin Tin became Warner Bros.' most important commercial asset until sound arrived.

  Screenwriter Darryl F. Zanuck produced several scripts for Rin Tin Tin vehicles, and during one year wrote more than half of the studio's features. From 1928 to 1933, Zanuck served as Jack's right-hand man and executive producer. Despite that productivity, Warner Bros. remained a poor cousin to Hollywood's so-called Big Three: Paramount, Universal, and First National.

  The gamble that changed everything was Sam Warner's idea. Sam urged Harry to sign with Western Electric to develop talking short films using the new Vitaphone technology. That decision led directly to The Jazz Singer in 1927. From an investment of only $500,000 in the film, the studio reaped $3 million in profits. Sam died of pneumonia just before the premiere, and Jack became sole head of production. The following year, the studio produced twelve sound films in a single calendar year, and the newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized Warner Bros. for revolutionizing the industry with sound.

• 4. The Art of Ruthlessness

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  Bette Davis, who fled to England at one point to escape her contract, later wrote of Warner: "No lecherous boss was he! His sins lay elsewhere. He was the father. The power. The glory. And he was in business to make money." That tension between warmth and cruelty ran through nearly every account of the man.

  Film director Gottfried Reinhardt claimed that Warner derived pleasure from humiliating subordinates, and he compared Warner unfavorably to two other studio heads: "Harry Cohn was a sonofabitch, but he did it for business; he was not a sadist. Mayer could be a monster, but he was not mean for the sake of meanness. Jack was." Comedian Jack Benny, who once worked at the studio, put it more drily: "Jack Warner would rather tell a bad joke than make a good movie."

  And yet Warner's talent-scouting record was formidable. In 1929, he persuaded British actor George Arliss to take the title role in a remake of the 1921 film Disraeli, which became a box-office hit. In 1930, he spotted James Cagney, Joan Blondell, and Frank McHugh in a New York play called Penny Arcade and signed all three. Cagney turned out to be Warner's greatest prize and his biggest professional headache. According to a 1937 Fortune magazine article, their contract disputes were the studio's most intense; Cagney had grown sick of being typed as what the article described as a girl-hitting mick and of making five pictures a year instead of four.

  In 1935, Warner personally selected an unknown actor named Errol Flynn for the title role of Captain Blood. Flynn later earned Warner's affection and gratitude. The following year, after the success of The Charge of the Light Brigade, Warner tore up Flynn's existing contract and signed him to a long-term deal that doubled his weekly salary. Davis, for her part, said that after the birth of her child, Warner told her she did not have to return to work until she felt ready. "We became father and child, no question about it," she said. "He was a thoughtful man. Not many nice things were said about him."

• 5. War, Propaganda, and the Red Scare

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  In 1939, the studio released Confessions of a Nazi Spy, starring Edward G. Robinson and based on the real-life experiences of FBI undercover agent Leon G. Turrou. The project had been recommended to Jack by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself. The German ambassador responded by issuing a formal protest to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Adolf Hitler, who watched the film at Berchtesgaden, was outraged. Critic Pare Lorentz wrote plainly: "The Warner brothers have declared war on Germany with this one."

  U.S. Congressman Martin Dies Jr. sent the studio stern warnings about defaming what he called a friendly country. Under pressure from the Roosevelt Administration, the Hays Office, and isolationist lawmakers, Jack announced that the studio would release no more propaganda pictures and shelved several anti-Nazi projects. That restraint did not hold. Warner Bros. eventually produced more war-related pictures than any other studio, covering every branch of the armed services. The studio also produced patriotic musicals such as This Is the Army and Yankee Doodle Dandy, as well as short films documenting the German bombing of London.

  The studio's wartime output produced its most notorious backstage moment in 1943, when Casablanca won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Producer Hal B. Wallis rose to accept the award, only to watch Warner rush onstage with a broad, flashing smile and seize the trophy. Wallis later recalled: "I couldn't believe it was happening. Casablanca had been my creation; Jack had absolutely nothing to do with it." The two men's professional relationship never fully recovered.

  Also in 1943, at President Roosevelt's advice, Warner produced Mission to Moscow, a film intended to support the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. The Republican National Committee later accused him of making New Deal propaganda. When Warner testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on the 27th of October 1947, he named a dozen screenwriters on his own initiative, including Ring Lardner Jr., Dalton Trumbo, and Alvah Bessie, among others. Those names effectively destroyed the careers of the people attached to them. Warner felt that communists had been responsible for a month-long studio strike that fall of 1946.

• 6. The Brother Betrayal

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  Studio employees claimed they had witnessed Harry Warner chase Jack through the studio with a lead pipe, shouting that he would kill him. That image captures the nature of their relationship with some accuracy. What finally broke it was money and secrecy.

  In February 1956, Harry learned that Jack had sold Warner Bros.' pre-1950 films to Associated Artists Productions for $21 million. "This is our heritage, what we worked all our lives to create, and now it is gone," Harry said. Separately and more damagingly, Jack had also quietly sold all 400 of the studio's pre-1948 cartoons for $3,000 apiece. As biographer Bob Thomas noted, those films had since earned millions, but not for Warner Bros.

  That summer, all three brothers announced they were putting the company on the market. Jack secretly organized a syndicate to purchase control before Harry and Albert understood what was happening. By the time they found out, it was too late. Jack appointed himself company president as the studio's largest stockholder.

  Harry never spoke to Jack again. When Harry died on the 27th of July 1958, Jack did not attend the funeral. He departed instead for his annual vacation at Cap d'Antibes. Asked to comment on his brother's death, Warner said, "I didn't give a shit about Harry." He simultaneously took satisfaction in the fact that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had sent him a letter of condolence. That combination of indifference and vanity said nearly everything about his character that needed to be said.

• 7. The Final Decade

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  In February 1962, Warner paid an unprecedented $6.5 million for the film rights to the Broadway musical My Fair Lady. The deal's terms, set by CBS director William S. Paley, included fifty percent of the distributor's gross profits plus ownership of the negative at the end of the contract. Despite those conditions, the deal yielded $12 million in profits for the studio. Warner drew sharp criticism for casting Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle rather than Julie Andrews, who had played the role on both Broadway and in London. The 1964 Academy Award for Best Actress went to Andrews, for Mary Poppins. Hepburn was not even nominated. The film, however, won the Best Picture Oscar for 1964.

  In 1965, Warner purchased the rights to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee's play about a destructive marriage. The project challenged the U.S. film industry's Production Code so directly that Jack Valenti, who had just assumed leadership of the Motion Picture Association of America, recalled leaving a meeting with Warner feeling deeply uneasy. Warner ultimately forced the issue by requiring theaters to post an adults-only label and restrict ticket sales, framing it as a marketing device. The MPAA gave in and approved the film as a special exception, which opened the door for other filmmakers to challenge the Code more aggressively. The film secured thirteen Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture of 1966.

  On the 14th of November 1966, Warner sold a substantial portion of his studio stock to Seven Arts Productions. His wife Ann had long pressured him to slow down, and the sale followed shortly after he produced the film adaptation of Camelot. After capital gains taxes, the sale yielded approximately $24 million. Warner quipped eight months later: "Who would ever have thought that a butcher boy from Youngstown, Ohio, would end up with twenty-four million smackers in his pocket?" He officially retired from the studio in 1969, though he remained active as an independent producer into the early 1970s. Among his last productions was a film adaptation of the Broadway musical 1776, released through Columbia Pictures. Before its release, Warner showed a preview to President Richard Nixon, who recommended removing a song Nixon felt contained veiled criticism of the Vietnam War. Warner ordered the film re-edited without consulting its director, Peter H. Hunt. Those cuts were later restored in most television showings and in the DVD release.

• 8. Death and What Remained

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  By the end of 1973, those close to Warner noticed he was becoming disoriented. He lost his way in the building that housed his own office. A stroke in 1974 left him blind and gradually stripped him of speech. On the 13th of August 1978, he was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where he died on September 9 of a heart inflammation. He was 86 years old. A funeral service was held at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. He was interred at Home of Peace Cemetery in East Los Angeles.

  Warner left an estate estimated at $15 million. He bequeathed $200,000 to his estranged son, Jack Jr., a figure that some observers read as a calculated attempt to discourage him from contesting the will. The two had not reconciled since the 30th of December 1958, when Jack Jr. was informed by his father's lawyer that he had been released from the company, and studio guards turned him away at the gate the next morning. Jack Jr. is not mentioned in his father's 1964 autobiography, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood.

  Newspaper obituaries reached for the familiar story: four brothers who left the family butcher shop for nickelodeons and changed American cinema. A front-page story in Youngstown described how Warner had driven a wagon for his father's business at the age of seven. Several months after his death, a tribute event called "The Colonel: An Affectionate Remembrance of Jack L. Warner" was organized by the Friends of the Libraries at the University of Southern California. Cartoon voice actor Mel Blanc closed the evening with Porky Pig's famous farewell. The Beverly Hills mansion Warner had purchased in 1937 was eventually sold by his widow Ann's estate in 1990 to David Geffen for $47.5 million, a record price for a single-family home at the time. That record itself was broken in 2020 when Jeff Bezos bought the estate from Geffen for $165 million, the same property where Warner had once held court over a studio empire built on a pawned horse and borrowed undertaker's chairs.