Made it, Ma! Top of the world!
[explosion]
[Morgan Freeman] After nearly 50 years, the Warner family was gone.
The studio system had vanished,
and, with it, the Golden Age of Hollywood.
A new generation of leaders would break with custom at Warner Bros...
[explosion]
...and pioneer an age of creative independence.
[Martin Scorsese] The thing about Warner Bros.,
they gave serious filmmakers a real home.
[Matthew Modine] Warner Bros. had the courage and the innovation
to tell those heroic stories...
Don't you understand what you're on to?
...about individuals who spoke truth to power.
[Freeman] While filmmakers pursued their passions...
Action!
[Freeman] ...the studio chased the dollars to bring them to the screen.
[gasps]
Voila!
[George Clooney] Warner Bros. had such bravery.
Just, "Let's try it," you know? "We don't know if it'll work."
[Freeman] A tug of war between art and commerce would drive the company to bigger risks...
- [slaver] What's your name? - Kunta.
[Freeman] ...higher heights...
[Kunta] Kunta Kinte.
[Freeman] ...and steeper falls.
Our stock plunged.
[Keanu Reeves] There's always been a battle
between the studio and filmmakers.
That tension and relationship with Warner Bros...
I feel has made better movies.
What are you, outta your mind?
[Kevin Costner] We can keep making formulaic movies,
but when we take that formula
and we bother to give it edge...
[laughing hysterically]
She's driving us crazy and loving every minute of it.
[Costner] ...and the studio is strong enough to say, "We'll accept that edge,"
it stands a chance to become classic.
[inspirational music playing]
[chanting] Ho, Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!
[man] We have gone on the offensive.
[Robert F. Kennedy] I have some very sad news for all of you.
Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
[people screaming]
We're going to remake this country in the streets!
[Freeman] Against the backdrop of late 1960s culture and politics...
You had all these radical new things coming in.
Drugs, Vietnam, everything colliding all at once.
[Freeman] The Warners' successor, Warner Bros.- Seven Arts,
made daring choices.
[Scorsese] Suddenly you see the savagery of what was happening,
and people wanted to burst out,
and not mince words anymore.
[Jacqueline Stewart] The audiences were not interested in having
the same kind of mainstream entertainment.
Their tastes were changing, values were changing.
What we've got here is failure to communicate.
Fire!
[Freeman] Attentive to the mood on the streets,
Warner Bros. made history
when they signed multitalented artist Gordon Parks,
the first Black director to helm a major studio-financed film.
Action!
[Stewart] Gordon Parks was a incredibly talented photographer
who worked for Life Magazine.
He was a composer. He was a playwright.
He wrote novels and poems.
We don't think of him as an auteur in the space of cinema,
but when a small window opened up,
he was, in many ways,
the perfect person to enter that door.
[Oprah Winfrey] So, 1969, I think the country
was opening itself up to
the possibility of stories from Black creators.
[Freeman] Working from a screenplay he adapted
from his own autobiographical novel,
Parks didn't shy away from bitter truths.
[man] Tuck! Damn it, I'll shoot!
[dramatic music plays]
You didn't have to shoot Tuck.
And now you can see what happens to criminals.
[LeVar Burton] The Civil Rights Movement
was a part of daily life for me as a kid.
And hearing the adults around me talk about the importance of
here's this Black man directing a movie
about a young kid who was really wanting education, wanting to learn,
you know, I heard that.
That penetrated to me.
[Freeman] But the gentleness at the heart of the story
was its own radical act.
It's an incredibly important film to point to because
it's a really tender love story
and representation of Black family and community out west,
based on his childhood in Kansas.
It's a rare picture of Black life with sensitivity and nuance.
[Freeman] Warner Bros. released the film to critical acclaim.
Now, I think because of the success of the film,
I think that it'll allow other Black boys to
aspire to become directors and producers and so forth.
[Freeman] But while filmmaking advanced,
the studio itself was falling into decay.
It wasn't just at Warner Bros., it was all throughout Hollywood.
[Scorsese] The studios were disintegrating,
and that means all their props, all their costumes, everything.
The factory system was breaking down.
[Freeman] Production had moved off the lot.
It was the last nail in the coffin, I think, of the studio system.
It was impossible to have all these people gainfully employed all year long.
[Freeman] Unable to keep up with their overhead,
some of the Big Five began auctioning off their past.
When I got here in 1970, early '70s, everyone was running scared.
It was all very Darwin.
They don't even know if they have a job tomorrow.
The '60s and '70s could have been the death of the studio.
It looked like it was going to be.
[Freeman] Situated on a prime swath of LA real estate
and a treasure trove of intellectual property,
Seven Arts attracted buyers looking to cash in.
Steve Ross, a poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn
who'd made a fortune in car rentals and funeral homes,
was attracted to the glitz and glamor of the entertainment business.
[Steve Ross] I always loved movies.
Oddly enough, in 1969,
that's not the reason we acquired a company called Warner-Seven Arts.
We wanted to be in the record business,
and Warner-Seven Arts had Atlantic Records.
We said, "Let's give ourselves a year and a half
to see if there is such a thing as a movie industry.
If not, we'll sell the film library and we'll sell the real estate."
And then some of the record people came in and said,
"Gee, there's something going on in a small town in upstate New York."
That was Woodstock.
[rock music playing]
[Freeman] Camped out on the festival grounds
was a scrappy pack of independent filmmakers,
documenting the historic event.
I was on the stage for three days and three nights.
The music was transcendent.
There were a number of people hovering around the stage
to pick up the rights for the film
because they realized something special was happening.
And next thing I know, it was a Warner Bros. picture.
I think you people have proven something to the world.
[Scorsese] Success of that film was a major coup...
for the sense of a studio that was looking forward, not backward.
All of a sudden, we said, "Gee, this is a pretty good business
if you have good people running it."
[Freeman] To lead the studio, Ross assembled a team
whose sympathies lay with the counterculture.
[Terry Semel] Steve Ross, when I met him the first time,
as I entered, there were beads on all the doors.
There weren't doors, actually. There were just beads.
And I could smell something like incense or something in the room.
And, as I came in, the key executives,
they were all sitting on the floor, on pillows, in the office.
And I thought, "There's something wrong with these people from New York."
My job, at that point, was to oversee a movie,
and that was Woodstock.
And these guys were, like, living Woodstock.
[Freeman] CEO Ted Ashley was an early adopter
of Zen-inflected New Age philosophy.
Vice Chair Frank Wells, a Beatles-loving Rhodes scholar,
dreamed of scaling the world's tallest peaks.
And head of production John Calley
had spun a first job in an NBC mailroom
into friendships with some of the era's more defiant artists.
[John Calley] I was having breakfast with Tony Perkins.
Then I got a call, and it was Steve Ross and Ted Ashley.
They asked if I wanted to run a studio.
I was astonished.
I said to Tony, "I don't think I can do that."
He said, "How many people have you known that run studios?"
I said, "Lots." He said, "They're schmucks, right?"
I said, "Yeah." He said, "You can do it."
There were no more suits and ties on the studio lot.
And I think Warner Bros. was a lot freer than other studios were at the time
because they were so inspired by all these changes
that had been happening in the culture and in filmmaking.
[Freeman] With Calley as guide, Warner's progressive-minded executives
went after edgy stories, and singular storytellers.
You know what I want? I want ideas. I want one idea.
One idea could get us out of here!
Having been somebody that worked on films a lot,
what you do is work with the filmmakers.
It's their judgment. It's their taste.
It's their vision.
[Ben Mankiewicz] These young filmmakers, they were...
bold. They broke norms
that had existed since sound came to the movies, and probably before that.
[Muller] The new era at Warner Bros. was very much,
"Let's find a hot director,
and let them do their thing."
Which Jack Warner never would have tolerated.
And you got movies that were unthinkable ten or 15 years earlier.
[Freeman] Throughout the early 1970s, the studio turned out films
that exposed and upended the dominant power structures.
Klute at Warner Bros. was a controversial picture.
Oh, my angel!
The emptiness of it and the sadness of it,
I think Klute is just a masterpiece.
Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you can find anything.
[Muller] I always love that story about making Deliverance
where they read the cover.
It's like, "Guys" go on a canoe trip and a kid plays the banjo
and then a guy gets raped in the woods"?
It's like, "We're not making this movie, are we?"
[Scorsese] At that point then, we all looked to Warner Bros.
for films that had a special quality to them and took chances.
[Stone] These were very gutsy films.
[people clamoring]
And gave us, the younger people,
the feeling that things could be made.
- Help! - [gunshot]
And they could be bloody because America makes violent movies.
You've gotta ask yourself a question.
"Do I feel lucky?"
Well, do you, punk?
[whimpers]
[gunshot]
[Freeman] Dirty Harry was a rogue cop who took justice into his own hands.
[Clint Eastwood] There was a few people that thought it was too violent,
but I don't care what anybody else thinks.
[gunshot]
[Freeman] The character played to America's lifelong romance with law and order...
- Halt! - [alarm ringing]
[Freeman] ...and did well with mainstream audiences.
[Eastwood] Dirty Harry is a very romantic film.
I think everybody would like to believe that there's...
a Dirty Harry on every street corner,
the man who would expend himself to that degree on their behalf.
[Freeman] Veering away from the experimental techniques
and revolutionary themes of the era...
Do I come down to the station and tell you
how to beat a confession out of a prisoner?
[Freeman] ...the film introduced a lucrative model to the studio.
The franchise.
Man's got to know his limitations.
[Freeman] Warners had the first bankable movie star of the Ross Age
and a relationship that would endure for decades.
But there was room at the studio for a very different brand of artist, too.
[Christopher Nolan] When you look at the history of Warner Bros.,
I think there are two figures that stand out more than any other.
You have to look at Clint Eastwood's
extraordinary history with the studio,
and then I think, in a completely different realm,
I think you have to look at Stanley Kubrick.
[Freeman] By the time he came to Warner Bros.,
Stanley Kubrick had proved himself an original in every sense.
With a reputation for brilliance
and obsessive attention to detail.
I was very young when I was exposed
to Kubrick for the first time.
And I was completely in awe with him immediately,
because there was always something new.
Kubrick is the ultimate filmmaker that filmmakers love.
You cannot stop watching.
[Freeman] Each movie Kubrick had made at other studios
was a unique story in a different style,
with its own kind of risk.
Stanley was the most provocative, intelligent filmmaker I've ever known.
And we were good friends.
He was intrigued by things that caused him concern.
And as a consequence of it, they would almost, by definition, be troubling.
[Freeman] But his first film greenlit at Warner Bros.
would test all limits.
[woman] There's a young man here.
He says there's been an accident.
He wants to use the telephone.
It's a stinking world because there's no law and order anymore!
[men whooping and cheering]
To this day, Clockwork Orange is a film that challenges people.
I mean, those scenes, the rape scenes and everything,
they're very, very brutal.
[Calley] We fought terribly over Clockwork.
You didn't move in and say, "We're shutting this down,"
because you're making a Kubrick movie.
My colleagues, Frank Wells and Ted Ashley,
would ask me a lot about, "Jesus, is it never going to stop?"
And I'd say, "I don't know, but, you know, that's what you do with him."
[Todd Phillips] There's no bigger control freak, and he chooses Warners.
To me, that basically says everything about Warner Bros.
That inclination to swing for the fences and trust filmmakers.
[Freeman] From that atmosphere of trust,
Kubrick delivered a controversial portrait
of the conflict between society and the individual.
He would make Warner Bros. his home for the rest of his career.
In a sign of Steve Ross' confidence in the future,
he sold off the non-entertainment assets in his business empire
and rebranded as Warner Communications.
Just four years into his tenure,
the studio was going like gangbusters,
stretching the confines of established forms.
[gunshots]
While Clint Eastwood would probe the mythology of the Western,
Mel Brooks roasted the genre,
and the bigotry embedded in it, whole.
[Keanu] Blazing Saddles.
What?
I saw that at the cinema. It's so good.
[Mel Brooks] The only executive that read the script
was probably John Calley.
Well, that's the end of this suit.
[Brooks] And while we were filming, I went up to him,
I said, "John, can I really punch the shit out of a little old lady?"
[groaning in pain]
Calley said, "Mel, if you're going to go up to the bell, ring it."
Have you ever seen such cruelty?
And I never forgot. Boy, and I've been ringing that bell ever since.
[flatulence]
You know, the guys farting around the fire and all that other stuff.
Because you figured that cowboys eat a lot of beans,
so there must have been, you know.
It was like one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
How 'bout some more beans, Mr. Taggart?
I'd say you've had enough.
[band playing]
[Freeman] Just below the surface gags
lay a biting social critique.
[band stops playing]
The insertion of this Black sheriff in town
and the racist response to him,
Mel Brooks is taking a cinematic trope...
to disarm audiences.
To recognize...
the prejudices that they continue to hold.
It's parodying the Western, which is
the most cherished genre in the history of American filmmaking.
Excuse me while I whip this out.
[crowd screams]
[crowd] Oh. [sighing in relief]
They've smashed racism in the face and the nose is bleeding,
but they're doing it while you laugh.
Hey, boys! Look what I got here.
Hey, where are the white women at?
[Freeman] More than a few executives questioned the wisdom
of putting the film out at all.
[Brooks] You know, there were, like, 12 guys in that screening room.
And they were kind of all agreeing that we should shelve the movie,
take the tax write-off and bury it.
We opened in maybe 50 or 60 theaters,
because of John Calley's stubbornness, God bless him.
Come on, let's check out the end of the flick.
Yeah. Gee, I sure hope there's a happy ending.
[Chris Columbus] I had never seen an audience react
to a film like that in my life.
They were literally falling into the aisle with laughter.
Mel Brooks took it to a whole other level.
You were in a Western, but you're in a Warner Bros. backlot
on the set of a musical.
[people clamoring]
[Brooks] I remember when they broke through the scenery, you know,
and came on to Bus Berkeley's stage,
cowboys and horses and everything.
It was true anarchy.
[people exclaim]
[Freeman] Crashing through the boundaries between content and style,
Brooks made every chapter in the studio's own history
fair game for satire...
I feel refreshed.
[Freeman] ...and set an impossibly high bar for comedy in Hollywood.
Has anybody got a dime?
[all clamoring]
[all grunting]
[Freeman] With Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon,
Warners expanded into unfamiliar terrain.
[exclaims]
[Baz Luhrmann] Who could see, like, a kung fu film in the '70s
was going to revolutionize cinema
and kids in Times Square from the Bronx were going to turn it into dance moves?
Here was an Asian actor, kicking ass.
And that's what I wanted to do.
I wanted to be as badass as he is up on the screen.
[eerie music playing]
[Freeman] The movie that followed...
took a well-worn tradition...
and gave it a terrifying update.
[dramatic music playing]
Now, The Exorcist is based on a true story, right?
In actual fact, it's a case history
that took place in 1949, about a 14-year-old boy.
And as a kind of a last resort,
the Catholic Church was called in to see what they could do.
[Freeman] The Exorcist had climbed The New York Times' Best Seller List
before landing on the desk of John Calley,
who pounced on it for Warners.
Director William Friedkin started his career in documentary.
And made his way to an Oscar win for The French Connection.
But, in 1973, he returned to his roots with a film depicting real events.
I never thought of it as a horror film.
I always thought of it as a film about the mystery of faith.
How difficult will it be to cast a 12-year-old girl?
Because it's going to be quite a harrowing experience for her, isn't it?
As a matter of fact, I just cast the girl today.
Her name's Linda Blair. She's 12 years old.
She's really dynamite.
At least I hope she can survive this experience.
[Linda Blair] There were many things that a young girl
would not want to do in this movie.
Let Jesus fuck you!
A lot of the language is not in the screenplay.
Billy Friedkin rewrote a lot of the horrific dialogue.
Motherfucking worthless cocksucker!
- Be silent! - [groaning]
And then they had to deal with what came out of my mouth.
[Friedkin] I shot it almost like a documentary.
I did it as realistically as possible.
And we had tested the effects here,
on the backlot at Warner Bros., for six months,
so that, when we got to the set, we were prepared.
The studio came around occasionally
to watch, and didn't know what the hell we were doing, so they left.
[screaming]
[Friedkin] When I showed it to the executives here at Warners,
they thought we'd get busted and get an X rating.
[Freeman] But the studio beat back its own fear
and released the film anyway,
the day after Christmas, 1973.
What an excellent day for an exorcism.
[reporter] The film business headline could read,
"The devil knocks out the Mafia.
The old box-office champ, The Godfather,
is being flattened by that movie
about diabolical possession, The Exorcist.
It was, uh, a traumatic experience.
I passed out.
I think it's disgusting.
[Friedkin] It was a monster hit all over the world.
People staggered out, throwing up,
lying down on the street outside the theaters.
[chuckling] They were unable to handle it.
Is it over?
No.
[Freeman] For some at the time, the overflow of evil on screen
was a metaphor for the country's own shame and horror.
[Scorsese] This is the time of the Cambodian bombings.
This is the time of newsreels at 6:30,
and suddenly you see the war in Vietnam up close and personal.
The Exorcist had just put it out there.
There's still blood being spilled everywhere
and, for a lot of it, we were responsible.
It's all coming home to roost.
[gunshots]
Johnny! It's me, Charlie.
Hey, watch this. I'm gonna shoot the light on the Empire State Building.
[Freeman] Martin Scorsese,
raised in a neighborhood under the thumb of organized crime,
brought a gritty, self-produced movie to Warner Bros.,
based on the world he knew best.
- Come on. - Don't fucking touch me, scumbag.
- Hey, hey, hey... - Shut up!
Hey, hey...
[Scorsese] Mean Streets came out of my own experiences
growing up on the Lower East Side.
At the street level, there was no sugarcoating anything. Anything.
You dirty--
[Harvey Keitel] I was scared.
I was still in my 20s.
I was trying to learn how to act.
- That's because you're stupid. - I'm stupid?
You should've ran and left safely with me.
I remember Marty one time saying to me, "Harvey, you have to face the camera."
I kept sort of dodging away from the camera,
exactly what I was supposed to not do.
[Freeman] Earlier attempts to shop the movie had not gone well.
[Scorsese] I didn't know, really, if it ever was going to be released.
Paramount just stopped the film and said, "Please leave."
It's like suddenly waking up and realizing "Who the hell do you think you are?
You know, not everybody is going to like this kind of thing,
and don't expect anything from anybody."
[Freeman] Expecting nothing,
Scorsese lined up the next screening.
And we were sitting in this decrepit old screening room,
with John Calley and Ted Ashley,
and about 15 minutes into the film, lunch comes in.
"Who's got the roast beef?
Who's got... No, that's not mine. No, wait a second."
And suddenly they all stopped.
- How much you got there? - Charlie, I'm going to pay him next week.
I'm going to pay him!
You're gonna, you're gonna, and you don't do nothing.
[Scorsese] It was the scene with De Niro and Harvey in the back room,
talking about the card games and everything.
They were locked in.
"Hey, watch the... Watch this part. Watch this part."
[laughing]
And then Teddy turned to me and said,
"I used to live around the corner right..."
[laughing]
They came from there.
They knew it, and they understood that street stuff.
That was it. Picture was bought.
We walked out even more stunned. [laughing]
[Freeman] Mean Streets exploded onto the screen
and launched its director as a central voice in modern cinema.
[Scorsese] One person criticized the film, too, for pointless violence.
I said, "No, there's no such thing. It comes from something."
Marty knew what he was doing.
He knew the world that he was making the movie about.
[Freeman] The film also reached back
to one of the studio's oldest practices.
Faithful representation of harsh reality.
[explosion]
[sirens blaring]
Warner Bros. took risks more than any other studio.
They were the ones that told true stories ripped from the headlines,
and, you know, really put the social realism on the screen.
[people clamoring]
[Sidney Lumet] It seemed to be a worldwide eruption
that makes us dramatists really rather weak by comparison.
We're having a tough time keeping up with reality.
And maybe that's why we're so interested
in doing movies about actual events that did happen.
[Scorsese] Well, even Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon
took on a kind of a cult following at that time.
[man] Come on out!
[Freeman] It was the real-life story of a bank robber
desperate for cash
to fund his partner's gender affirmation surgery.
He wants to kill me so bad, he can taste it.
- [man] Nobody's gonna kill nobody. - Attica! Attica!
[Columbus] Sidney Lumet took documentary footage of New York at the time.
That's exactly the way I felt when I was living in the city and it was August,
and it was 125 degrees.
Someone took their hand and brought me into that world.
[people clamoring]
- [woman] When do we want it? - [crowd] Now!
[Freeman] Demand swelled for movies
that challenged the norms of American life.
Everybody, listen. We got us here a new girl.
And her name is Alice.
[Scorsese] Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore,
it reflects the spirit of the moment.
The 1970 Supreme Court,
sexual discrimination, unconstitutional, '71,
Roe v. Wade, '73,
the Fair Housing Act was a year later.
There was a lot of progress at the time
for women's rights and women's strike for equality.
[Freeman] Warners rocked the country
when it released a film that indicted the nation's leaders,
after it became clear the leaders were liars.
[man] It's an indication of a dimension that has been introduced
in American politics that has never existed in the past.
- Do you think the President should be impeached? - Yes, sir, I do.
No comment at all right now.
[Clooney] It's a masterpiece.
We know how it ends
and you're chewing your fingernails off the whole way,
like maybe they're not going to get them.
[Dickerson] We really feel the danger
that the two reporters put themselves in in investigating what had happened
with the Watergate break-in.
[Mankiewicz] These two long-haired reporters
were just standing up for America.
Right? The idea of America, for the rule of law.
Years later, when you look back,
the applications to journalism school
went up for a decade.
If there's any doubt we can run it tomorrow.
You don't have to. The story's solid. We're sure of it.
[Mankiewicz] It's a movie about truth.
Okay, we go with it.
It definitely created a generation of reporters
who wouldn't accept being lied to.
[Freeman] In the mid-1970s,
Warner movies felt current...
and vital.
- [man] Om! - Isn't there a church where you can do that?
Om!
[Freeman] But on the small screen,
the brand was bogged down in the past.
In 1971, Warners had a single show on TV.
[announcer on TV] The FBI.
A QM production.
[Freeman] Determined to win a spot on primetime,
and rev up production on vacant Warner soundstages,
the studio endowed Warner TV producers with new freedom...
but they had a lot of catching up to do
with shows other studios already had on the air.
Unbelievable. Those television series, like All in the Family,
I don't think you could make them today.
Really something to take on those issues.
[Freeman] In the search for material
that would feel relevant but different,
Warner writers mined the company's publishing library,
and struck TV gold
with a character from its comic division.
[Wonder Woman theme music playing]
A feminist superhero for '70s kids.
I think that's important and necessary. Don't you?
It was perfect time for Wonder Woman to come along.
[Freeman] The tone of the show was earnest and optimistic,
and reframed the idea of what great strength was for.
With Wonder Woman, I was imagining that I was her.
What if you could also be beautiful, yet strong, yet kind?
With the concept of being Wonder Woman,
also comes the concept of being a good person.
Which isn't always synonymous with superheroes.
I thank Warner Bros. for taking a chance on a struggling actress.
There are so many times when characters
didn't take Wonder Woman seriously...
and it was their mistake.
[Freeman] Wonder Woman ran from 1975 to 1979,
but Warners TV hit an even bigger high
with a series about a real-life superhero,
a single mom.
That's clean now.
It ought to be. You just did it last night.
It was about a single working mother,
and a boss who didn't get it.
We really can use your help.
$2.60 an hour is more than I was getting at my last job.
[Lavin] Her boss has hired a guy,
and he names a number that's way above minimum wage.
And Alice says, "You're what?"
And he says, "Why? What are you getting?" And Alice says...
Rooked.
"We're getting rooked."
It may be a few cents, but it's a hell of a big principle.
- Oh, don't give me that women's lib junk. - Junk?
[Lavin] Alice represented the blue and pink-collar women
who make the machinery run
and who go home and make dinner and raise their kids.
So there was a conscious choice to speak up and say,
"We're in television. Once a week, we must reflect society."
The core of the story is,
how do you deal with your daily life...
when it's tough?
And how do we laugh at ourselves?
[Freeman] Warners TV embraced the power of laughter
with funny,
topical sitcoms for teens.
Vinnie, look. Don't look at it like you're getting left back.
Look at it like you're sort of majoring in tenth grade.
[Schneider] Chico and the Man and Welcome Back, Kotter were
young-skewing shows about this new generation
and didn't necessarily look like the kind of sitcoms that we watched in the '60s.
You can't do that!
I'm Vinnie Barbarino!
[Freeman] But in January 1977,
the studio premiered a television event
directed at all Americans.
- Hyah! - [roars]
[Winfrey] You can pass out history books all day long,
but most people in this country didn't grow up hearing about the history
of how Black people came to be in America,
so, to have an entire television series?
It was unheard of.
[Freeman] The TV saga began with author Alex Haley's journey
to trace his own family back seven generations to Africa.
[Alex Haley] I have gone many miles,
researching, and finally was able
to determine that our forefather,
whose name was Kunta Kinte, came from this village.
[Freeman] To bring Haley's vision to the screen,
Warners turned to producer David Wolper.
[Peter Roth] David Wolper, who was an iconic player
and part of the fabric of Warner Bros., specifically,
had this relationship with Alex Haley that enabled him to get the rights
and to bring this story to life.
[Freeman] Wolper's first challenge was to find the actor
who would play Haley's protagonist ancestor.
After more than 150 auditions,
he screen-tested an untried sophomore at USC.
[LeVar Burton] Kunta was everything that my consciousness was about.
Waking and sleeping, that's all I was about,
was this boy and his journey.
Becoming a man
through this process of being captured and enslaved.
[slaver] What's your name?
Kunta. Kunta Kinte.
[LeVar Burton] Roots was the beginning of an enlightenment.
Slave was not our identity.
It was a condition of servitude that was enforced upon us.
You mentioned David Wolper being a genius.
You're damn skippy he was.
David Wolper hired all of America's famous TV dads
to play villains in Roots.
Ed Asner, Lloyd Bridges,
Lorne Greene, Robert Reed, Papa Brady, for God's sake,
played a slave master in Roots, y'all, come on.
The question was, how is America going to respond
to the whites being the villains
and the Blacks being the heroes?
Is America going to watch?
[Freeman] ABC Television wasn't convinced the story
would keep audiences engaged at an episode per week.
[groaning]
[Freeman] At the last minute,
the network decided to broadcast the show on eight consecutive nights.
[LeVar Burton] It was a gamble.
It was a risk.
No one had any clue
how it was going to take this nation by the throat.
I was a street reporter, and that's how I saw Roots.
I watched Roots as a reporter, watching other people watch Roots.
It was a phenomenon.
[reporter] The country went Roots-crazy.
Restaurant business dropped,
bars either closed or showed Roots instead of sporting events.
[Winfrey] People couldn't believe it. White people couldn't believe it.
Black people really couldn't believe it.
[LeVar Burton] It reminds us of what's possible for us.
The idea that we can create and maintain light within ourselves
in the midst of all of that darkness?
That's humanity on display.
[Roth] 110 million Americans stopped their lives
to watch this saga.
Therein lies the greatest example of the Warner Bros. credo.
It entertained, it enlightened, it educated.
[Freeman] The executive team had lifted Warner Television
to the top of the ratings chart.
But back on the lot, they were living under a humiliating compromise.
In 1971, Steve Ross had engineered a deal
that brought Columbia Pictures
to Burbank
as Warner's roommate.
[Bob Daly] The reason why it became the Burbank studio
was they basically decided in order to cut costs,
that Columbia would sell their studios
and come in with Warner Bros.
At that time, it seemed to make sense.
- [cork pops] - [glasses clink]
But, like everything else in the business is concerned,
a lot of times, short-term thinking turns out to be a bad-term loss.
[Freeman] A clash of housekeeping styles
would lead to an unhealthy stalemate.
They didn't put any money into the studio because they needed both sides
to agree on what money would be spent.
And Columbia didn't really want to spend any money.
[Freeman] As a tactical move, however,
the arrangement worked,
freeing up money for new ventures.
By the mid-'70s, far from his beginnings as a down-market wheeler-dealer,
Ross inhabited the role of movie mogul with zest and gusto.
[Daly] Steve Ross always was looking to the future.
He said, "I want to know, what are you gonna do in five years?
What are you gonna do in three years? What are you gonna do in ten years?"
[Freeman] In 1976, Ross saw dollar signs in the arcade craze
taking hold of America's youth,
and put skin in the game, when he acquired a hot new company.
Atari. Well, they may generally be considered kids' games,
but, as Ray Brady reports,
they're taking giant-sized bites out of the holiday season stock market.
[video game beeping]
[Freeman] Meanwhile, Ross' hands-off management style
empowered his studio execs to take creative leaps of their own.
[Daly] Steve Ross set the culture for the company,
but he knew what he didn't know.
See, a really good executive knows what they don't know,
and he wasn't a... He never read a script.
He never greenlit a movie.
The way Steve ran the company,
each division, we ran our own company.
The reason why I love Warner Bros. so much, I felt it was my company.
I mean, I was the boss.
[Freeman] It was a liberating environment,
but it put pressure on Calley, Wells, and Ashley to make hits happen.
[people screaming]
[Freeman] Supersized-hits.
[ Superman theme music playing]
[Freeman] In 1978,
Warner Bros. released the most expensive movie yet made.
[Mankiewicz] We now are living in
a world of superhero movies, superhero franchises,
and that really begins in 1978 with a Warner Bros. film.
[people cheering]
All everyone was saying at the time, you probably remember this, was,
"He really flies.
You believe he can fly."
[Freeman] But getting Superman off the ground
wasn't a hop, skip, or a jump.
After a number of false starts,
John Calley found director Richard Donner,
who would bring the project home.
In the comic books, Superman's origin story was always given short shrift,
but how he got there...
is an amazing story and well told.
One thing I do know, son, and that is you are here for a reason.
[Jenkins] I was seven years old, and my father had just passed away.
And watching Superman go through such a similar loss, twice,
he loses two fathers,
in the beginning...
[explosion]
...but then is very much who you're allied with
as he goes forward into the world and becomes a superhero,
capable of doing the things that he is.
It just changed my life, you know.
It showed me a path forward through hardship,
which is what those stories are meant to do.
This country is safe again, Superman, thanks to you.
Don't thank me, Warden.
We're all part of the same team.
[Freeman] Superman soared at the box office,
banking $81 million in its first year in theaters
and jetting Warners into the blockbuster age.
Yeah, okay. Danny, you gotta listen to Stanley.
He's coming! Come on, scared!
Fast as you can.
[Freeman] Long gone were the days of incense and bead curtains.
As the 1980s dawned,
the producing team geared up to follow Stanley Kubrick once again
into the darkness of the human mind.
[eerie music playing]
You know, what I really love is that The Shining was so dismissed
when the movie came out.
And it's now considered
one of the top five horror movies maybe ever made.
[both] Hello, Danny.
The Shining just gets better and better. It gets more and more frightening.
The way Stanley used the camera,
you always feel like you're being watched.
You always feel like there's a third,
an unseen person is looking at everything.
Those really unnerving silences
from the characters
where you don't really know what's going on.
To me, the best horror
is when you don't know what's going on.
[Freeman] Calley's patience with Kubrick's process
allowed the director to control every facet of the film.
[Dickerson] He basically had a schedule
where he could just kind of figure out how to make it as he went along.
He's re-typing the script,
you know, while everybody's kind of sitting around and waiting for him.
[Calley] He's a genius. I mean, Stanley would never say, "Oh, forget it,
you know, nobody's going to notice."
[Freeman] The result would ultimately be hailed
as a masterpiece of style and precision,
but the intensive, artist-first, producing style took a toll.
Here's Johnny!
Roll video.
[Calley] Everybody was going nuts it went on so long.
Jack, I think, was getting crazy and wanted to come home.
- Let me explain this to you. - Okay.
[Freeman] Back at the studio,
Calley and company had reached the end of the road.
In November 1980, after a decade of firsts,
Calley, Ashley, and Wells announced they would be passing the torch.
[Daly] When I came in, Frank Wells said,
after one year, he was going to leave to go climb
the seven highest mountains of the world.
And he did.
[Freeman] For the outgoing team,
the handover was a return to balance.
For the new guys,
it was like stepping onto a moving roller coaster.
[people screaming]
[Freeman] Bob Daly and Terry Semel were industry insiders
intent on making their mark, following a simple rule.
[people cheering]
[Freeman] More is more.
The name of the business we're in is show business,
so we decided we wanted to make 20 movies a year.
- We can do that. - Fine!
We don't even have to have a reason.
Then do it, man!
Cinema was taking a new jump, quite honestly, at that point.
[Ron Howard] Warners, over the years, has recognized
a range of genres,
from drama through comedy,
into fantasy.
[Costner] Lower budget,
big budget, action movies,
and a lot of coming-of-age movies.
Opportunity makes your future.
Every now and then, say, "What the fuck."
I had come from distribution,
where we normally earn a fee of somewhere between eight and 10%
on other people's movies that we don't have to finance,
but just distribute.
That could be a fabulous business for us.
So we went full speed ahead on more and more content.
Benjamin, you are not fit to wear that uniform!
No shit.
[Freeman] The secret sauce behind
the Daly-Semel duo's success was quality time.
The two commuted together,
lunched together.
We have never had an argument.
- Never. - And that's unusual.
Our rule was, we were equal partners,
and our people knew that you could not divide us.
There was no way
that anybody could come between the two of us.
[Semel] And Steve was like the best cheerleader in the world.
If he liked what you were doing,
he just did everything possible
to help you make it successful.
[Freeman] This didn't mean every choice the studio made
during production helped a picture.
In 1982, Warners came out with a sci-fi detective drama
that captured a gnawing tension behind the consumerism of the moment.
[Nolan] One of the most influential films on me when I was a teenager,
was Blade Runner.
[Roy Batty] I've...
seen things
you people wouldn't believe.
[Edward James Olmos] The reality that Ridley created was overwhelming.
It's a brilliant vision
of what was in store for the world.
Wake up! Time to die.
[Freeman] Revered today by audiences and critics alike,
the movie had a difficult birth.
Director Ridley Scott would have to wait ten years
to see his version on the screen.
The studio cut, with pasted-in voiceover
and a happy ending, flopped.
[Daly] We never pointed a finger at either the filmmakers,
our executives, or our marketing team.
The answer is, when it worked, we all shared in the success.
When it failed, we all took the blame.
[Gaff] It's too bad she won't live!
But then again, who does?
A lot of times, the industry tells itself
what happens on its opening weekend is what a movie is about.
It's not just about that opening weekend.
It's about 30 years from now.
Movies have a chance to change us forever.
[Freeman] The corporate media-saturated world of Blade Runner
looks like a bleaker version of our own increasingly virtual reality.
Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell.
[Freeman] But at the time of the film's release,
the age of the information and entertainment merger
was just getting started.
Steve Ross' talent as a business strategist,
savvy futurist, and nerves-of-steel gambler
showed in the number and variety of pots
his company was stirring all at once.
[Zaslav] Steve Ross just had incredible ambition
in the '80s.
Nobody would have thought that Warner
would have been in the music business,
in the cable business, in the gaming business.
[Daly] We created MTV.
[all] I want my MTV!
We created Nickelodeon.
[man] It's not so bad.
- It's not so bad? - No, it's all right.
[Freeman] Atari, known as the industry leader in home computer games,
generated 60% of company profits in 1981.
You know, new technology is always a big friend
to the entertainment business.
[Jenkins] The world had no limits.
It felt like that everything could go on and on forever.
[upbeat music playing]
[newscaster] This year, Atari is $300 million in the hole.
[Ross] You and I can make many mistakes each day,
but the world doesn't know about most of my mistakes that I've made.
Some others they do. Atari.
[video game beeping]
[Freeman] By 1983, Atari was a victim of its own success.
The company was slow to react
to a horde of new competitors,
but a fatal error at the wheel hastened its demise.
Seeing the phenomenal popularity of Steven Spielberg's E.T.,
Steve Ross moved aggressively to secure the gaming rights to the story,
and committed Atari developers to unmeetable deadlines.
E.T., the game failed to launch.
For Ross and Warners,
it was a massive system crash.
[video game beeping]
Atari went bankrupt and our stock plunged.
[reporter] A one-day paper loss
for them, of around one billion dollars.
So it was a shock.
[Freeman] At a moment when companies were swallowing each other whole,
Ross looked weakened, and Warners looked vulnerable.
The threat of a hostile takeover put the company's ability
to champion creative visionaries in check.
Everybody knew there would be blood.
The only question was, how much?
[closing music playing]