[man 1] Quiet, please!
[man 2] Hold it!
[man 3] Action.
[Matthew Modine] When you enter the lot,
you can't help but be overwhelmed
by the generations of actors and filmmakers, writers,
costume designers...
[man 1] Put a single on number eight.
[man 2] Quiet down, boys.
[man 3] Scene 26, take three.
[Modine] Everything that the studio embodies that happened here,
on this land, on this lot...
[woman] You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?
You just put your lips together and blow.
[Modine] ...there's something magical about it.
It feels like there's something in the air.
[Hagrid] You're a wizard, Harry.
[Modine] You know, ghosts or something.
[Blanche] I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.
[Modine] The excitement that you feel
knowing that you're going to be walking down the streets
that those incredible filmmakers and those incredible actors walked down,
it's quite powerful.
It's a magical place.
[man 1] Wait a minute, wait a minute.
You ain't heard nothing yet.
[fanfare playing]
[Oprah Winfrey] From the very first day I walked onto the set,
and, you know, that big WB...
[exhales] Wow. It felt like having made it.
Welcome to Sherwood, my lady.
Warner Bros., to me, was Hollywood.
The variety of films, the movie stars...
With all my heart, I still love the man I killed.
[Harvey Keitel] You don't even have to see a logo.
You say the name, and you understand
it's one of the powerhouses of Hollywood that gave us the cinema.
[Morgan Freeman] Founded at the beginning of the motion picture age
by a family of high-rolling visionaries...
I think those guys were just the right side of crazy.
[Freeman] ...and jealous rivals...
You don't hear many stories of kindness
involving Jack L. Warner.
You're tearing me apart!
[Freeman] ...Warner Bros. built a legacy on celluloid...
Here's looking at you, kid.
...that holds a mirror to our souls.
Mainstream films always try to reflect society to some degree.
- Attica! Attica! - [people cheering]
[Nolan] You see that in Warner Bros. productions over the decades.
- I am... - [crowd] I am!
A revolutionary!
That's what I think about when I think of Warners.
Very daring, artistic achievements to great success.
Whoo! Road trip!
Warner Bros. is a steward of stories
to not just America, but the world.
[Freeman] One hundred years later,
Warner Bros. is still pushing the boundaries of the medium...
And here we... go.
...with passionate storytelling across all platforms...
Yes!
...shaping who we are...
All my life, I had to fight.
...and what we might become.
We're in for one wild night.
I think television needs to show the rainbow of what's out there.
Bazinga!
What's up, Doc?
Go ahead, make my day.
What a day! What a lovely day!
- We're going ahead! - [all screaming]
Warner Bros. has endured 100 years because of the original mission.
Move the culture forward by telling good stories.
They've been in the battle,
and, for that, I think respect must be paid.
[David Zaslav] We all go to the movies.
And we go with the idea that we want to be entertained
and we want to be told a story.
And stories are powerful.
And when you tell a great story, you can change minds.
And the Warner brothers understood that.
Jack Warner had a policy, which is, if you worked on a movie,
you had to come meet him in this office.
All the great stars came through here.
This is the famous Maltese Falcon.
It has special meaning to me because,
at the end of the movie, they ask Humphrey Bogart what this is,
and he said...
The stuff that dreams are made of.
Huh?
[Zaslav] And that's what we get to do every day.
It's the stuff that dreams are made of. So, the Maltese Falcon.
Here they are, the original Warner brothers.
These were the guys that built this place,
telling great stories.
Not just to entertain,
but to have a real impact,
is where the Warner brothers made a difference
when you look back at the last 100 years.
It's an incredible American story.
[swing music playing]
[Freeman] At the top of the 20th century,
Tinseltown was a boomtown.
The American public,
accustomed to new movies every week,
clamored for more.
Anyone with a camera and enough gumption wanted in on the action.
At that point, I think Hollywood was barely the Hollywood we know now.
The streets were still dust.
They were not only creating an art form, but also an industry.
[Freeman] By 1918, successful companies
that would become studios like Paramount, Universal and MGM,
were gobbling up independent shops
and building walled cities within the city.
Newly arrived,
a scrappy band of brothers named Warner
were fighting to get their business off the ground.
[Scorsese] You got to understand that
these men who were there at the very beginning,
it's brutal, clawing to success.
And you had to be tough. I mean, they were tough street guys.
Absolutely ruthless.
They were sort of not considered the classy
studio in the beginning. It was all MGM.
[Freeman] Without star talent in a stiffly competitive market,
the Warners were on the verge of folding
when fate threw them a bone.
Famous Hollywood screen star, Rin Tin Tin.
[Clooney] They were in real trouble,
and Rin Tin Tin was really the movie that saved the studio.
An unlikely hero that you don't see coming who does something incredible.
That's a classic movie! We love dogs,
and we love stories of underdogs.
[Freeman] As thousands of fan letters
and hundreds of thousands of dollars poured in for every movie...
Rinty's adventures padded the brothers' bottom line.
[announcer] Rin Tin Tin, animal idol of America.
[Freeman] It was a major milestone in a family story
that started a world away from the glitter of Hollywood.
Harry, Abe, Sam, and Jack were children of Jewish immigrants
who fled persecution in Poland in the 1880s.
They were dirt poor as kids.
They sold newspapers, shined shoes.
They didn't graduate from school.
But their father had sat them down very young and said,
"Look, as long as you stick together, you'll be strong."
[Andy Garcia] America has always been a place where people come
sometimes escaping political repression.
The Warner brothers came out of that tradition.
You have the opportunity to work hard, to have a dream,
no matter how crazy it is.
[Freeman] The brothers' dream came to them on a flickering beam of electric light.
[Cass] They're in Pittsburgh, working in a clothing store.
Sam heard about nickelodeons.
Grabs Harry, they go and watch The Great Train Robbery.
They sit and watch it three times until they're asked to leave.
They go outside, they look at people putting their nickels on the plate.
And they shake hands and they go, "We're in the business."
[Freeman] The Warners' road from PA to LA
was paved with risky bets.
They bought a movie projector and parlayed it into a theater.
They borrowed money to get into distribution,
and used that success to start making films.
[Cass] Harry was the financial wizard,
Abe was in charge of exhibition and distribution,
Sam was the visionary,
and Jack was in charge of production.
[Leonard Maltin] Jack was the baby of the siblings,
and Harry was the eldest,
and so he sort of took a leadership position early on.
And that set the stage for many fireworks to come,
but, initially, it seems they worked very well together.
[Freeman] In 1923, they incorporated as Warner Brothers Studios.
The gang of outsiders
finally had a place in Hollywood to call their own.
But they were on the cusp of something even bigger.
You have to understand, talkies at the time were a disaster.
[unintelligible dialogue]
[Freeman] Sound on film, which had only been attempted for newsreels and shorts...
was plagued with problems.
People were going to the theater and throwing tomatoes at the screen
because, you know, the people's mouths weren't
moving in sync with the sound coming out of it.
[Jacqueline Stewart] Sam Warner was quite passionate about sound.
He really believed that this sound technology could revolutionize cinema,
and he felt that it was integral
to creating a really immersive cinematic experience
and to get Warner Bros. out ahead of its competitors.
Sam was the one who saw the possibilities of sound.
No one else was looking for sound.
Everybody was very happy showing and watching silent films.
[Freeman] The Warners' first attempt at synchronized sound
featured a full orchestral score and sound effects.
A landmark achievement, but only a taste of things to come.
♪ Wonderful pals are always hard to find ♪
Next, they upped the ante with a story that was already a hit on Broadway,
and a performer who was famous around the world.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
You ain't heard nothing yet.
Al Jolson was probably the most popular entertainer in America at that time.
[Freeman] Jolson's own life had inspired The Jazz Singer,
the tale of a Jewish cantor's son
who goes against the traditions of his family to perform the music he loves.
But when people see The Jazz Singer now, they're often shocked and appalled
to see that Al Jolson performs in blackface.
It was not unusual, certainly not shocking at the time,
to any Al Jolson fans because
that's the mode of performance that he was engaged in.
♪ Mammy! ♪
[Stewart] Blackface on stage was incredibly common.
It was always controversial.
Black audiences had problems, many times,
with the ways that blackface caricatured
their identities and cultural practices.
But this is a more complex story than I think people recognize
when they decontextualize it.
In fact, there are posters
that show Jackie Robin in his normal face,
and then the character that he plays in blackface,
because that signified the split
between his real identity as a cantor's son,
and the emotional trajectory that he had
in trying to decide what to do with his life,
and then this stage persona.
[Freeman] By featuring blackface in their riskiest bet to date,
the Warners profited from the popularity of racial caricature.
In the light of today... The Jazz Singer is problematic,
but it doesn't mean that, at the time, it wasn't revolutionary.
Didn't do a whole lot of good for the respect of Black people.
In fact, the damage
that the storytelling of the era did...
to cultures and culture around the world...
is pretty embarrassing.
[Freeman] Despite its deeply-troubling content,
The Jazz Singer also established the Warner brothers as innovators
whose vision and courage would change moviemaking forever.
With Jolson on the marquee,
the brothers knew they would sell tickets.
Everything else was riding on the tech,
which was expensive and finicky.
[Alan Rode] Western Electric Corporation
were developing a technique for putting sound and film together,
named Vitaphone.
The person that really pioneered sound on disc was Sam Warner,
and he worked almost to the point of exhaustion.
[Freeman] To pull off Sam's dream,
the Warners had leveraged themselves to the teeth.
Sam got excited about the technology,
and Harry raised the money.
He mortgaged the house on Rossmoor to pay for the production.
These guys were gamblers.
They gambled everything.
[announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, Warner Brothers' supreme triumph,
Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.
Warner Brothers' Theatre is sold out for many weeks in advance.
[Freeman] On opening night, Sam's labors bore fruit.
[announcer] How do you like that?
Well, you ain't seen nothing yet.
[Freeman] The brothers had made history...
...but none of the Warners attended the premiere.
Sam had died the night before.
[Maltin] Sam was so consumed by wanting to perfect the Vitaphone process
and wanting to make sure The Jazz Singer was as good as it could be,
but he drove himself and drove himself
into an early grave.
[Gregory Orr] Sam Warner was the great Warner.
He was the one who got the Warners into the movie business.
It's too bad he died so soon.
Jack's lowest low was when his brother Sam died, who was his closest friend.
The fact that Sam died the night before the film premiered,
it's a tragedy.
But it also seems as though these brothers
really understood the project that they were engaged in
as being bigger than themselves.
They were really invested in a larger mission.
[Freeman] Sam's death left a hole in the family,
but his legacy was plain to see.
[man] Al Jolson, whose picture, The Jazz Singer, had started the talkie revolution
brings bride, Ruby Keeler, to Hollywood.
[Freeman] The Jazz Singer cost $500,000 to make
and raked in three million,
catapulting Warner Bros. firmly into the majors.
[announcer] The rush begins.
As more and more theaters become wired for sound,
frantically, producers struggle to finish silent films
still in production before it is too late.
[Freeman] In 1928 alone, they made 36 movies with synced sound,
leaving the other studios gasping to keep up.
The idea of bringing sound to movies
was as big as introducing the Internet to our society.
It caused Hollywood to have to almost reinvent itself.
Cameramen and technicians had to relearn their business
to accommodate a microphone.
[Freeman] Actors whose voices didn't match their looks
found themselves out on their ears.
[Maltin] What took their place
was talent from the stage.
Vital, brash personas.
What kind of a break you ever given us?
Outside of kicking us around every chance you could get.
If I find that I've got a chance to crash my way out of here,
and I have to rub somebody out to do it,
I'd just as soon rub you out as the next guy.
You're going to be in on this, and you'll like it.
Ever since I was 14, what's it been?
Nothing but men. Dirty, rotten men!
[Maltin] As well as writers who could write dialogue.
Sharp, snappy dialogue.
Outside, countess!
As long as they have sidewalks, you've got a job.
Of course, I know for some women, men are a household necessity.
Myself, I'd rather have a canary.
[Freeman] Awash in cash, the brothers went on a spending spree,
snapping up theater chains, and acquiring a rival.
First National Studios and its giant movie lot in Burbank.
But competition for top talent was fierce
because of the pressure to build brand loyalty.
A devoted audience who would
keep coming back for more of their favorite stars.
To control labor costs,
Jack Warner and execs from the other studios devised the contract system.
A golden handcuff that locked actors, writers, and directors to studios
for exclusive seven-year stints.
People in the '30s and '40s that went to movies,
they didn't look at reviews for the plot.
It was like...
"I want to see a Humphrey Bogart picture."
"I went to see a Clark Gable picture."
Warner Bros. really understood the star system.
[Freeman] Though some may have chafed at the restrictions,
no one wanted to be out of work,
especially after 1929.
[reporter] October 29th, Black Tuesday.
Stocks collapse in 16 million share day.
You know, this was a seminal decade in American history.
Something I don't think any of us can relate to now.
The extent of the economic destruction
that most families faced in the 1930s.
[Freeman] At the beginning of the Great Depression,
the pictures remained relatively cheap entertainment
and a welcome break from the misery for the masses.
But to the Warners, who knew poverty personally,
movies were also a way to connect with viewers' lives.
[Scorsese] The thing about Warner Bros. too,
it was like the working-class studio.
That's not to say that other studios were staying away
from working-class life,
but, at Warner Bros.,
it was the banner that they waved. It was their identity.
Well, it's bad news for you.
We're cutting down, and the new men will have to go.
I took to walking the ties when my Rolls-Royce broke down.
At least we don't have to wait in line for a bowl of soup like they do outside.
[man] Why do we stay in this racket?
We ain't going to make enough out of it to buy ourselves decent coffins.
[Freeman] To write and produce, the Warners turned to Darryl F. Zanuck,
a working-class upstart like themselves
whose sharp story instincts
had made him the brothers' chief lieutenant for more than a decade.
Darryl Zanuck had his ear to the ground, so to speak,
about what would motivate an audience to go and spend their 10 cents,
25 cents for a movie ticket when money was scarce.
Business is pretty good, huh?
Yeah, pretty good.
How good?
[indistinct dialogue]
Warner Bros. came up making controversial pictures.
And they were willing to go outside the norm.
And they just started with gangster films.
Very gutsy movies that, let's say, MGM would never touch.
I wish you was a wishing well,
so that I could tie a bucket to ya and sink ya!
[Scorsese] The gangster as hero.
People vicariously want to see the rise,
but they also want to see the fall.
The Public Enemy had no sentimentality.
It was the most uncompromising ending I had ever seen.
It's just as truthful as possible to that world.
The flamboyance, the swagger,
the exhilaration of accumulating so much power and money...
and then things fall apart, which it always does.
Warner Bros. films became more daring
than anyone had ever envisioned.
They dealt with drugs.
They dealt with prostitution.
Domestic abuse.
[Freeman] Warner Bros. wasn't just making movies.
They were changing them.
In contrast with the glossy musicals coming out of the other big studios,
they introduced a brash, new form.
A mash-up of their trademark tough guys
and a heady dose of spectacle and song.
♪ Naughty, bawdy Gaudy, sporty ♪
♪ 42nd Street! ♪
[Freeman] The legendary backstage drama 42nd Street,
set behind-the-scenes intrigue at a Broadway show,
against a picture of New York ripped from the city crime sheets.
- All right, I'll tell him. - Yeah, well...
[woman exclaims]
[Baz Lurhmann] You take a film like 42nd Street.
I mean, they're a bit gangster-ish,
you know, in their DNA, the brothers.
You know, like, "Whatever it takes, let's smash some walls down
and hit the audience between the eyes."
I was really inspired by a lot of those early musicals.
♪ Islands, diamonds ♪
♪ Trips round the world ♪
♪ Don't mean a thing if I ain't your girl ♪
♪ A little party ♪
♪ Never killed nobody ♪
Gatsby is a very musicalized gangster movie.
Like, a lot of that theatrical cinematic language
comes from that period, comes from the golden era
of where Warners was doing both musicals and gangster movies.
[Freeman] Warner Bros. would continue to explode
and remake the musical form through the end of the 1930s.
The studio's not-so-secret weapon
was choreographer and director Busby Berkeley.
[man] Let's look in on one of the stages and see a chorus in rehearsal.
Here's Busby Berkeley, famous dance director
and creator of some of the screen's greatest dance spectacles.
[upbeat dance music playing]
The moment you start to see those Busby Berkeley things,
you go like, "What the-- How do you achieve that?"
The kind of layering, and the scale and the precision,
like, how do you do it?
[Freeman] Born in Los Angeles to a pair of Vaudeville actors,
Berkeley honed his craft
in an entirely different kind of theater.
[announcer] Beginning on April 25th, 1915,
the battle for Gallipoli and the Dardanelles had begun in earnest.
[Freeman] As an infantry lieutenant in World War I,
he ran drills with a thousand soldiers at a time,
practicing intricately synchronized maneuvers.
The thing about Bus was that he had the gift
of both being a great choreographer, of course,
but he's a really great mathematician,
so his ability to work out the mathematical equation
of both how the dancers move
and the mechanics of the camera,
like, that was on another level.
[Freeman] To show off shapely legs,
Berkeley patented a revolving stage.
In picture after picture, he one-upped himself
with kaleidoscopic feats engineered to make a splash.
[Busby Berkeley] I rehearse very meticulously
so that everything suits me
and I know that they've got it just right,
then I tell them I'm going to start to shoot tomorrow.
And I used to have to think and think and think and think
and try to create something
that would be better than what I had done before.
And I'd done some pretty good things before.
[Freeman] But while Warner musicals wowed audiences,
the strain on performers mounted.
Say, Mr. March, they've been going all night long.
I'll keep them here till they get it if it takes a week.
You know, in those days, the dancers would sleep on the set.
They had cots on the set, like in your soundstages.
They'd do the numbers and they'd go over and sleep for like three hours on cots
because that's how hard it was to do that.
I mean, that's the level of physical demand
it took to get that right, take after take, working that out.
[Freeman] Still, not all talent was easy to keep in line.
George!
[Freeman] Bette Davis was a relative newcomer
churning her way through B-grade roles
when she first rebelled against working conditions at the studio.
I've never taken orders from anyone.
As long as I live, I'll never take orders from anyone.
I'd like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair. Bye!
[Freeman] Decades later, well into her reign as Hollywood royalty,
she described her early battles with Jack Warner to director Ron Howard.
[Ron Howard] As I got to know Bette Davis,
you know, I talked about how much I yearned for the studio contract days.
Because a director could be under contract and make two or three movies a year.
And there was something that I romanticized about that.
And she said, "Don't be foolish.
Independence is something to be cherished.
It took me 14 years to work off my seven-year contract
because they kept putting me on probation because I was refusing to do roles
that Jack Warner would insist that I should take."
I know all the angles,
and I think I'm smart enough to keep one step ahead of them.
[Howard] She said, "One day they threatened suspension if I passed on a movie,
so I went to Jack Warner's office
and I stopped at the secretary's desk
and she said, 'No, Mr. Warner's busy,
we'll have to set an appointment, Miss Davis.'"
She said, "Nonsense."
And went bursting by the secretary, went into the office,
and pulled the door open on his private bathroom.
And he was sitting there on the toilet, pants down,
reading the newspaper.
[chuckles] And she said,
"I need to talk to you about this lousy script that you want me to do."
And he just said, "Suspended!"
There's only one kind of a break we want from you.
And that's to leave us alone
and let us make our living in our own way.
Or is that asking too much?
[Freeman] Jack Warner's fights with his stars made for juicy tidbits
in the Hollywood trades.
Morning.
[Freeman] But there was a lighter side to life on the lot.
Hey, you! Come back here!
Oh, hello.
Who do you think you are driving through here like that?
Why, I'm Porky Pig.
♪ You ought to be in pictures ♪
♪ You're wonderful to see ♪
[Freeman] Since their earliest days in the business,
the Warners' strategy for dealing with economic dry spells was cross-marketing.
They had purchased a record company in 1930,
then launched an animation department to help sell hit songs.
♪ I love to sing-a about the moon-a and the June-a and the spring-a ♪
♪ I love to sing-a ♪
[Freeman] And promote Warner movies at the same time.
♪ I love to sing-a ♪
♪ About the moon-a and the June-a and the spring-a ♪
♪ I love to sing-a ♪
♪ How about a little celebration ♪
♪ To the jingle of a wedding bell? ♪
♪ This will put you wise that you get service ♪
♪ In the Honeymoon Hotel ♪
[Freeman] But when they saw Walt Disney's success across town...
I am a wabbit!
...Warner animators got serious about the funny business.
They took out full-page, double-page ads in the trades,
hyping it that this is the funniest thing, the greatest music.
Strangely enough, they weren't lying.
[Freeman] Cartoons employed not just an army of visual artists,
but entire symphony orchestras.
[Hans Zimmer] These guys knew what they were doing.
There's not just an amazing craft in there, there's art in it.
There's so much anarchy in this music and so much wit,
and, at the same time, so much knowledge.
I mean, encyclopedic knowledge of classical music.
For me, Warner Bros. cartoons were the thing.
I mean, they were more irreverent.
They were funnier.
They just had a much more of a anarchic sort of feel to them.
[Freeman] Looney Tunes kept America laughing to keep from crying
as the Great Depression deepened.
The hard times hit Hollywood in 1933 with a wave of theater closings
that knocked out movie screens across the country.
The big five studios, including Warners,
announced a 50% pay cut across all departments.
Pushback from top talent was swift.
James Cagney helped form the Screen Actors Guild.
Darryl Zanuck, the Warners' right-hand man,
learned the pay cuts didn't extend to the brothers themselves,
and left to found a new competitor,
soon to be known as 20th Century Fox.
Then, on a breezy evening in March 1934,
a spark got loose...
in a machine shop on the Warner backlot.
A lot of the vaults were stocked with nitrate,
elements, which, of course are incredibly flammable.
And before the fire even got to the film vaults,
the nitrate elements inside, started to catch fire and burn
just from the heat.
[objects crashing]
[Freeman] The blaze took the life of the Warner lot's fire chief
and consumed more than 20 years of silent era films.
Of Rin Tin Tin and the Warners' earliest work,
only fragments remained.
But across the globe,
a catastrophe was underway
that would put the brothers and all of Hollywood to the test.
[orating in German]
[people cheering]
[in English] Harry was the spokesperson for the company,
so he traveled to Europe.
He witnessed the evolution of Hitler.
Concentration camps were beginning,
and they were calling them labor camps.
[Zaslav] Germany had changed the rules to say that
no American film company can do business in Germany
if there are any German Jews in the film studio.
Jack Warner and Harry made the decision
that they were going to pull out of Germany.
At the time, the other moguls, including Louis B. Mayer,
did not want to lose the German market,
and Harry Warner said...
"There's things that are more important than money."
[Freeman] Jack's new second in command, producer Hal Wallis,
set out to deliver well-crafted stories in many genres
and wake Americans up to the danger rising abroad and at home.
Wallis cast an almost boyish Humphrey Bogart as a factory worker
seduced by the violent rhetoric of white nationalist thugs.
[man] You don't have to be pushed around by no foreigners.
There are a lot of guys in this town,
Americans who feel just like you and me.
There was a lot of hate for people that were Black in America,
for people that were Jewish in America,
for a lot of the immigrants that had come to this country.
But they fought through it and they fought against it,
to try and stand up for the values of America.
All right, my hearties! Follow me!
[Gregory Nava] Even in their so-called escapist swashbucklers,
they always had a social edge to them.
Captain Blood deals with slavery, it deals with tyranny.
It deals with bandits and pirates
overthrowing corrupt places.
Break out those sails,
and watch them fill with the wind that's carrying us all to freedom!
[Freeman] Warner movies were pulling in audiences,
but Americans seemed reluctant to act on the underlying message.
[Charles Lindbergh] We believe that the security of our country
lies in the strength and and character of our own people,
and not in fighting foreign wars.
To say that the majority of Americans were isolationist is an understatement.
Most people who read the paper
knew that there was an obvious aggressor in Europe.
Still, most Americans are unmoved.
The other studios placated Germany,
which had a consul here in Los Angeles,
who demanded to read scripts
and make sure there was nothing unflattering said
about Hitler or Nazism in general.
[Freeman] Germany's inside man
reported directly to Joseph Goebbels,
giving the Nazi Minister of Propaganda
final cut on Hollywood movies.
Well, the Warner brothers weren't going to have it.
And so, in 1939,
they went ahead and did a film called Confessions of a Nazi Spy.
[Francis Lederer] Warner Bros. was so secretive about that script
that they wouldn't send it to the actor
or give it him on the set.
No, he had to come to the studio,
read the script in the office of the producer.
It was turned down by several actors
who didn't have the courage to do that.
- [interviewer] But why? - Why? Because it was anti-Germany.
[Freeman] And they had reason to be afraid.
It is only by knowing who our enemies are do we know whom to destroy.
[Freeman] Actor Edward G. Robinson,
director Anatole Litvak,
and the Warners themselves
were all targets of death threats during and after production.
[Zaslav] When they opened that film,
within the same few weeks,
Madison Square Garden was sold out
with over 20,000 American Nazis.
[Freeman] German influence reached all the way to the Senate floor.
Harry was accused of making movies that incited Americans to go to war.
His statement back to this accusation was,
"No one will ever accuse me of being anti-American.
I am definitely anti-Nazi.
And no one's going to tell me what movies I can make."
[sirens blaring]
[Freeman] On December 8th, 1941, the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor,
a script analyst in Hal Wallis' office
picked up a story about a pair of lovers,
reunited by chance in a city full of refugees.
♪ You must remember this ♪
♪ A kiss is just a kiss ♪
♪ A sigh is just a sigh ♪
[Freeman] In November 1942,
less than a year later, the Warners released a film
that captured the fundamental question of its time.
My dear Rick, when will you realize that, in this world today,
isolationism is no longer a practical policy?
♪ And when two lovers woo ♪
♪ They still say I love you ♪
♪ On that you can rely ♪
Casablanca, it's the greatest studio film ever made.
It's not close. There's no... Second place is way behind.
Here's looking at you, kid.
[Howard Koch] I always looked upon Casablanca a little mystically,
that it had its own reason for being.
It was a picture the audiences needed.
What it said was that there were values
that were worth making sacrifices for.
And it said it in a very entertaining way.
You despise me, don't you?
If I gave you any thought, I probably would.
[Freeman] Fresh from High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon,
and after years of playing hard-boiled detectives
and hard-bitten gangsters,
Humphrey Bogart was not the obvious screen partner
for the divine Ingrid Bergman.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,
she walks into mine.
[Freeman] But the biggest gamble was the script itself.
[Ingrid Bergman] It's remarkable because, when we did it,
we had no faith in it at all because the script was so bad.
And it was written day by day.
There was nothing clear about it,
and I didn't know which man I was supposed to really love.
So they say, "Can't you do the love scenes
just a little in between? Don't put too much seriousness in it
because we really don't know with which man you're going to end up."
In the end, they said, "We're going to shoot it both ways."
You're saying this only to make me go.
I'm saying it because it's true.
Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble,
but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people
don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
[Koch] If Casablanca had ended with Bogart going off with Bergman,
the romantic ending,
there wouldn't be any legend today.
I think that people go back again and again
to find values they don't find very easily today.
Are you ready, Ilsa?
Yes, I'm ready.
[Freeman] But for director Michael Curtiz and many actors on the set,
the story was personal.
When you see that opening scene
and there's this wonderful tracking shot,
where you can see the waiters moving around in the cigarette smoke,
this kind of choreography of bustle...
- To America. - To America.
To America.
[Rode] The people who played all those parts were Jewish refugees.
Dan Seymour, the really massive actor who played the doorman,
he was on set when Paul Henreid,
as Victor Laszlo, tells the band
to play La Marseillaise...
Play La Marseillaise. Play it.
And all the French sing it to drown out the Germans.
[singing in French]
[Rode] And he looked and the people were crying
and it was real tears.
They were really refugees.
To me, Casablanca...
Get away from that phone.
I would advise you not to interfere.
I was willing to shoot Captain Renault, and I'm willing to shoot you.
...really epitomized what it meant to be on the right side...
in a world so distinctly divided between good and evil.
Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
[Freeman] Hal Wallis and Michael Curtiz turned out other popular
patriotic movies throughout the war...
but none garnered more glory
than Casablanca.
The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards,
proving the brothers had arrived at Hollywood immortality.
Commercial success was not enough for the Warner brothers.
They also wanted prestige,
and that came in the form of Academy Awards and other citations.
[Freeman] But Curtiz and the cast
credited Hal Wallis for the film's success,
rankling Jack Warner's pride.
[Rode] And this whole thing reached critical mass
at the 1944 Oscars,
when Casablanca won the Best Picture Oscar.
Hal Wallis goes to accept his Oscar,
and he's sitting in a row with the Warners,
and they put their legs out and blocked him from going up there.
And Jack Warner ran up and took the Oscar from Jack Benny.
Hal Wallis said, 25 years later, he could still feel the rage.
Jack really should have let Hal Wallis accept the Oscar.
And you know what Hal Wallis would've done?
He would've thanked his boss, Jack Warner.
The youngest Warner was fixated on
promoting the family brand,
specifically his own.
Jack Warner is my step-grandfather.
He was a grandfather to me.
I never used the word step-grandfather.
And I knew him till he died when I was about 24.
He was a ringmaster.
Whenever you were around him,
he would hold court and take up all the oxygen.
[man] Are you interested in the men who make your films?
Well, here's a whole plane full of them arriving from America.
Mr. Clifford Work of Universal,
Mr. Harry Cohn of Columbia, and Mr. Jack Warner,
being emphatic at the end of the line.
[Freeman] On top of his medal from the Academy,
Jack got his stripes as a lieutenant colonel
after Warner Bros. trained
and launched the first US Army Motion Picture Unit.
And in the darkest days of the war,
Colonel Warner and his brother Harry were summoned to Washington,
where President Roosevelt himself tasked them with a serious mission.
Make a movie that would help Americans trust their Soviet allies.
Here, Russian soldiers keep up the year-old fight
against the despised Nazi.
[Freeman] Based closely on the memoir of former Ambassador Joseph E. Davies,
Mission to Moscow painted a flattering picture of life in Russia.
What do you think of today's demonstration?
I'll tell you how I feel. That at least one European nation
with no aggressive intentions is ready for anything that comes.
And I say thank God for it.
Hear, hear!
[man] Jack Warner looked at it as, "Hey, this is just a pro-Allied,
pro-America movie that we're making here...
...because we want to win the war."
[Freeman] Service to their country
became the official Warner brand in 1944,
with the new company motto,
"Combining good citizenship with good picture making."
But just a few years later, Mission to Moscow
would prove to be a political landmine.
[announcer] The growing menace of communism arouses
the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee.
[Freeman] In October of 1947,
with a new administration in the White House,
the Warners were again called to Washington.
Meeting will come to order.
This time, to testify,
before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
[Rode] When the Red Scare started,
Mission to Moscow was used as exhibit number one
that Hollywood is infiltrated by communists.
[Freeman] Harry Warner rejected the committee's claims
and refused to appear.
While Warner stars gathered outside to protest proceedings,
Jack Warner cooperated.
My brothers and I will be happy to subscribe generously
to a pest removal fund.
We are willing to establish such a fund to ship to Russia
the people who don't like our American system of government.
Now, the other thing about HUAC is you had people on that committee
like Representative Rankin
who were out-and-out anti-Semites.
And many of the studio heads, such as the Warners, were Jewish.
And so there was a fear factor.
"The government could take away everything that we built."
Jack's reaction to that was I think, politely put, cowardly.
[Freeman] Among the writers Jack named were Philip and Julius Epstein
and Howard Koch, authors of Casablanca.
Blacklisted in Hollywood and unable to find work in America,
Koch moved to England, where he wrote under a pseudonym
for the next five years.
[Cass] That was an ugly, ugly time.
The golden years of Hollywood, kind of disappeared after that
because people couldn't trust each other.
[Freeman] Jack's reputation was already in the dirt with many in the industry.
Jack Warner was the dictator,
and he wanted actors to be in the movies that he wanted 'em to be in.
[Freeman] Years before, Bette Davis had sued the studio for breach of contract
and lost.
But another icon had Jack in her sights.
[Rode] Now, Olivia de Havilland was so depressed
at batting her eyes at Errol Flynn all the time.
She wanted to do more meaningful work.
She couldn't.
So she sued Warner Bros.,
on the basis that she had signed a seven-year contract.
But every time she refused a picture,
and didn't go to work...
...they added that amount of time onto the seven years.
[interviewer] How did you fight?
I went to court and I got free from the contract.
That was the first thing.
She won the case I had in England in America.
And she is totally responsible for the seven-year limitation
on every actor's contract today.
Olivia did this in America.
[Freeman] The de Havilland case ended mandatory contract extensions
and would lead to an exodus of top stars from the lot.
Among them, Lauren Bacall...
Thanks.
...and Humphrey Bogart.
At the same time,
the Justice Department struck at the architecture
of the Hollywood system itself.
What really cracked the studio system
was the lawsuit predicated on the Sherman Antitrust Act,
where the studios were controlling the making of movies,
and also the exhibition of movies with their theater chains.
[Freeman] Forced to spin off more than 1,000 theaters
and confronted with the widening hole in their revenue,
the Warners could not hide from the grim truth.
Their studio was no longer on top.
The difference between what Warner Bros. made between 1946 and 1952 is stunning.
[Freeman] The brothers were increasingly at odds.
I mean, Harry was 11 years older than Jack,
which is almost a generation difference.
Jack liked wine, women and song.
Harry was," You need to stay home at night
and be with your family. Family's everything."
The two of them could not coexist.
[Freeman] And they were face to face with a competitor
that could break the world as they knew it.
[man] One day, through television,
the entire world will stream into our living rooms
with the velocity of light.
[Freeman] In 1950, 3.8 million American families had television sets.
[man] Well, it's quite a story, the story of television.
[Freeman] By 1955,
the number had grown to 30 million.
When TV came, they tried to pretend that TV didn't exist.
Mr. Warner, you're quoted as saying the cinema industry had nothing to fear
from television. Now, do you still hold that view?
Yes, I positively do.
He hated television so much,
he refused to have a TV in his own house or in his office.
Television was a threat.
And now I'd like to show you several scenes,
from our CinemaScope pictures already completed.
They tried every means imaginable
to lure people back into movie theaters.
CinemaScope, stereophonic sound,
3D.
[Freeman] Warner Bros. tested new talent, too.
With better results.
♪ I'm in love, I'm in love ♪
♪ I'm in love ♪
Hey, Stella!
Brando was real,
and you felt a real feeling from him.
He had tapped into something personal.
You could connect to it more.
It looks to me like you've been swindled, baby.
And when you get swindled, under Napoleonic Code, I get swindled too.
And I don't like to get swindled.
When he came along, everybody thought he was the cat's rear end.
And he was. He was good.
[announcer] Produced for television by Warner Bros.
[Freeman] Though Jack would eventually give in to TV,
and find a lucrative income stream
with serialized westerns,
the brothers still believed in the magic of the big screen.
Their hopes rested on a blazing young actor
who touched a nerve to a growing generational divide in the mid-'50s.
- Eight. - You have no repentance.
You're bad. Through and through bad.
[Scorsese] James Dean, widescreen color.
The struggle between the father and the sons.
Stop it now!
The mother.
- I was very beautiful once. - Yes, ma'am.
East of Eden was a film that I revisited constantly,
and lived through because I was living through it myself.
I can't keep to myself anymore.
Well, you just get it off your chest, son.
That's it. That is not what I mean.
[Freeman] East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause
left indelible marks on the cinema.
But Dean would die tragically before his third Warner movie was complete.
[gunshot]
Box office hits were few and far between.
To the elder Warners, it seemed the time had come to move on.
Jack did not want to retire,
and it was Harry and Albert who were getting older.
And people were always coming to the studio saying,
"We want to buy out your stock."
And so Harry and Albert were happy to retire if all of them retired.
Jack knew he could not be president.
Harry would not allow that.
I think it was a family thing.
They grew up with a mandate,
"All for one and one for all."
Harry was very dedicated to that.
And Jack didn't like it.
[Jack] My brothers and I have been in the cinema industry for about 50 years.
Jack devised a very clever way
to finally gain complete control of Warner Bros.
If the Lehman Brothers, or Louis Lurie, are listening,
we're still open for an offer, but this time, with money.
[Muller] He found an outfit that he could sell the studio to.
I think I'll blow by this.
It's something to do with selling the joints.
He told Harry, "Let's get out. We're done.
The business is changing," and so forth.
And they said, "Well, we'll do that as long as you sell your shares as well."
Not unless you want to break your neck.
[Muller] So they were all going to sell and get out,
but Jack betrayed them
by making a deal with the buyer under the table.
He gave the guy a million bucks,
and the guy sold the studio back to him.
Next thing Harry knew is that he read in the trades
that Jack was going to be president.
Him reading that in the trades
gave him a heart attack and a stroke.
It literally... It broke his heart
because he trusted Jack so much.
Jack's name was mud.
You could not talk about Jack.
[Maltin] What can you say about that transaction?
The ultimate shell game
that not only betrays your older brother,
but sends him to an early grave.
[Freeman] Jack didn't attend the funeral.
Albert Warner never spoke to Jack again.
[Zaslav] In the end, the family fell apart.
Everything's possible in Hollywood here,
and they had incredible success,
and sometimes it can be corrupting, that kind of success.
Jack, he got a chance to be the guy that got to run it all,
but he broke his promise to his dad.
[Freeman] It was 1958,
and Jack had all the power.
But the lot was a ghost of its former self.
In a bid to recapture better days,
and refill the company coffers,
he put his faith in an old Warner standby.
♪ We got trouble! Right here in River City! ♪
[Freeman] Musicals.
♪ Let a woman in your life ♪
♪ And your serenity is through ♪
♪ She'll redecorate your home from the cellar to the dome ♪
♪ Then go on to the enthralling fun of overhauling you ♪
♪ How goes the final hour ♪
♪ As he sees the bridal bower ♪
♪ Everything's coming up roses ♪
♪ For me and for you ♪
[Freeman] There was some notable high points.
The best picture of the year is My Fair Lady.
Jack L. Warner.
I am indeed gratified to be here tonight to accept this high award.
It's something we will always be proud of.
Thank you.
[Scorsese] The last flowering of the old studio system
was happening with these big-budget musicals.
And some of these pictures were very beautifully made,
but they had a kind of decorum
that was a holdover from an earlier era.
Have you jousted with humility lately?
[Jack] Our films are great, and they still are great, and they'll be greater.
I think the American producers have learned to stop aping
the Italian and the French and the Spanish,
and other undesirable films that have art and all that hokey-pokey.
[Freeman] All alone at the top,
Jack felt the ground shifting underneath him.
And the country was really changing.
I mean, you're talking mid-'60s.
The Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War,
student opposition and the growing presence of rock music.
This kind of moviemaking looked old and past its time.
[Gregory] Jack's without the support he had in the '30s and '40s.
He doesn't have the great production executives,
who ran the place for him.
He doesn't have the movie stars under contract like he had before.
He makes deals with these independent producers who come to him,
but he doesn't have the same involvement or the power to oversee it.
[Freeman] When a hungry, young actor-producer named Warren Beatty came to the lot
to shoot a rags-to-riches gangster film set in the 1930s,
Jack could not relate.
Sheriff!
[Maltin] When he got wind of Bonnie and Clyde,
and the level of violence,
he was not happy.
Okay.
[Tony Gilroy] You just read about how difficult it was
for them to get it to the screen,
but when they finally do, it became this cultural phenomenon.
When you're a 12-year-old kid, it's just everywhere. I mean, it's...
It's not just the Mad magazine parody.
It's on the cover of everything,
and every girl at school is trying to look like Faye Dunaway.
It just was everywhere.
[Freeman] The movie was the stuff the Warners' dreams were once made of.
But Jack could not see himself in the renegades on screen,
or the rebels behind the camera.
The memos from Jack Warner in his later years are full of frustration.
"No one ever listens to me. I told you not to do it this way.
Don't go off the lot. Don't do this. Don't do that."
And people just shrug
and keep doing what they're doing 'cause they're trying to make their movie.
[Freeman] In 1967, he struck a deal to sell his shares
to an ambitious production company
trying to make it to the big leagues.
Seven Arts.
The story of the studio had rolled past the family that founded it.
The day my grandfather's leaving the studio,
Francis Ford Coppola was on the lot,
shooting Finian's Rainbow.
And standing with him
was a young guy named George Lucas helping him.
So it really was a transfer of generational moviemaking.
You almost wonder if they figuratively or literally
passed each other in the gate like two big ships.
One going off into the sunset and one going into the sunrise.
Kind of the end of the first act of Hollywood history
and the beginning of the second.
[Freeman] The old power structure had crumbled.
What took its place would decide the fate of the company...
Action!
...and the future of the industry.