 This is the SF Productions Podcast Network. That's Warner Brothers, folks! From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mindy. And I'm Mark. You can check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife to Read Comics on iTunes, or on our website, SFPodcastNetwork.com. Now, we continue our history of the movie studios with Warner Brothers. There were actual Warner Brothers! Actually, Juan Scholaser, before their family name was anglicized after emigrating from what is now Poland, brothers Harry, Albert, and Sam, Jack would join later, went into the nascent movie theater business in 1903, chipping in for the cost of a projector and films that would be shown in Pennsylvania and Ohio mining towns. They spent $150 to present two films, Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery, using the profits from that, to form the Duquesne Amusement and Supply Company to distribute films. By World War I, they were producing their own films, opening their first studio in Hollywood in 1918. Sam and Jack produced the movies, while Harry and Albert handled the finances. Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc. was officially created in 1923. Their first star was a dog. Rintin Tin, a German Shepherd, brought back by an American soldier in World War I, starred in a long line of Warner Brothers films. Jack called the dog The Mortgage Lifter, for saving their finances. Daryl Ebsanik produced the films and would later become the Warner Brothers' top producer before moving to Fox. Meanwhile, Ernst Lubick gave Warner Brothers some credibility, if not a lot of money, doing sophisticated comedies such as The Marriage Circle, 1924. By the mid-20s, Warner Brothers was considered the largest of the independent studios, First National, Paramount, and MGM, were considered to be the big three. At Sam Warner's urging, Warner Brothers experimented with sound in films as early as 1926. They established Vitaphone, in partnership with General Western, for these productions. Don Juan, with John Barrymore, was the first to include music and effects tracks, but lost so much money, that Warner Brothers almost went under. They were forced to open what was an exclusive agreement for sound film with the other studios. Despite this, they soldiered on and produced The Jazz Singer with Ile Jolson in 1927, which included his singing tracks, but not sound dialogue. It was an enormous success, and was the death knell of the silent film era. It also was Sam Warner's time to end, as he died the night it premiered. Jack Warner took over production. Warner Brothers took the money generated from The Jazz Singer and pushed it into full sound films, such as Lights of New York, as well as a new studio in Burbank. They also bought out First National and multiple theater chains. Their first all color, all talking feature, was On With The Show in 1929, kicking off a series of color musicals. Brother Harry invested their money in music publishing, forming Warner Brothers' music. The Great Depression had an enormous impact on Warner Brothers, losing $8 million in 1931 and $14 million the next year. Warner Brothers and First National formally merged in order to save money, although the Justice Department required them to make First National pictures through 1938. So when you see credits of old movies on TCM, you might see references still to First National. They survived on the profits of Busby Berkeley musicals, such as Gold Diggers and 42nd Street, the classic Let's Put on a Show film with ridiculous musical numbers. Eventually, the market for musicals abated, MGM would later take up the cause and Warner Brothers shifted to gangster films, Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, all from the pre-code era of films when there was little censorship of violence and sex in films. A studio fire in 1934 which saw the loss of 20 years of early films did not help the bottom line. Contracts, especially for silent stars, were dropped and a new era of stars came up. Cagney and Reggie Robinson, Barbara Stanwick, Humphrey Bogart. The petrified forest in 1936 was a huge hit, but the same year, an offer by Harry's daughter to buy the rights to Gone with the Wind was vetoed by Jack, who expected correctly that it would be an expensive production. The haste code caused another shift at Warner Brothers moving to historical dramas and swashbucklers with Errol Flynn, of course. By the latter part of the 30s, Warner Brothers started to lose its cluster as many of its stars balked at contracts and conditions as well as their treatment by Jack Warner. Cagney left to form his own company. Betty Davis tried to escape to the UK, but both would come back. A bright spot for WB began in 1930 where producer Leon Schlesinger sold the earliest WB cartoons to the studio. Harmon and Issing, Fritz Freeling, Tex Avery, Bob Plampett, Chuck Jones and Robert McKimson all were involved in Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies. Warner Brothers would later buy him out in 1944. The resulting company would continue making cartoons until 1969. Prior to WWII, the head of Warner Brothers German sales was murdered by the Nazis and the studio went all in on anti-Nazi and pro-war films. Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1942, This is the Army and Mission to Moscow, 1943 are representative of the era. In fact, they made war films even after public response turned on them. After the war, profits began to drop. Like most studios, WB got caught in the Supreme Court case that forced them to divest of their theater chains just as television began to eat at their revenues. The studio jumped into 3D but was never successful at it. Jack Warner temporarily closed the animation studio assuming it would be switched over to all 3D which never happened. Cinema scope films were made to combat the rise of TV such as The High and the Mighty which provided the studio with a profit in 1954. In 1956, Warner Brothers sold their pre-1950 film library to associated artists which would later be purchased by United Artists and even later by Turner Broadcasting which is how we have TCM today. As you'll see later Warner Brothers would get it all back. They also sold the company itself that year although it ended up being controlled by a syndicate which made Jack Warner its new president. In that same period, WB was the first studio to heavily invest in the new TV industry while the others avoided it like the plague. An agreement with ABC resulted in a lot of westerns, Maverick, Bronco, the Alaskans, and Private Eyes 77 Sons at Strip, Hawaiian Eye, Surfside Six. By the 1960s, Warner Brothers was diversifying. Their records division bought out Frank Sinatra's reprise records. Sinatra would end up as part owner of that division and the soundtrack to Warner Brothers' film My Fair Lady made them profitable. As the movie industry moved away from the classic studio system, Warner Brothers began running out their studios to independent productions. In 1966, Jack Warner sold the company to Canadian investors and the company became Warner Brothers Seven Arts. Only two years later was sold again this time to Kinney National Company which started as a parking concern. They had just expanded into entertainment buying out national periodical publications, a.k.a. DC Comics, in the Ashley Famous Talent Agency and Panavision. Due to issues in owning both a studio and a talent agency, plus a financial scandal involving their old parking business, the non-entertainment divisions were spun off and the remainder was renamed Warner Communications in 1972. Jack Warner had already moved on by that point and died the next year. As Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Barbara Streisand, and Clint Eastwood got Warner Brothers through this period and kept them profitable. Their record division continued to snap up competitors such as Electra and Atlantic. They also bought out a small company making a home video game system, Atari, and the Six Flags amusement parks. In 1973 Warner Brothers did a co-production, The Towering Inferno with 20th Century Fox. Both had burning skyscraper films based on different books in pre-production and decided wisely to go with a single film. This started a wave of profitable disaster films. Warner Brothers used their recent ownership of DC Comics to produce the Christopher Reeve Superman films and the Linda Carter Wonder Woman TV series and would later repeat that success with Batman. The 80s saw a retrenchment for Warner Brothers. Their huge profits from the Atari subsidiary reported a one-third of Warner Communications' total revenues at its peak crashed after the video gamer didn't invest in New Tech, lapped by Nintendo, pushing Warner's stock price from $60 to $20. The studio created a new company, the Burbank Studios, to co-own their actual lot with Columbia. Due to infighting, very little production was actually completed there. They would later buy out Lorimar, who owned the old MGM studio lot, which would then be sold again to Sony just a year later. That year, 1989, saw Warner merge with Time Incorporated. The resulting company would later be swallowed up by AOL at the height of the dot com boom. In 1995, WB started up their own TV network, the WB, partly as a response to Paramount's UPN. They would later merge those networks into the CW. Warner Brothers bought out Turner Broadcasting in 1996, which brought the film catalog they had sold in the 50s back into the fold. The studio would finally find a franchise outside of comic books when they acquired the Harry Potter books, with films starting in 2001 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, their highest-grossing worldwide film ever. The Dark Knight remains the largest US gross for the studio. In 2018, Time Warner, since renamed from AOL Time Warner, was gobbled up by AT&T and renamed Warner Media. All the various divisions were reorganized, while HBO, which came in as part of the Time Inc. merger, would become a major part of the upcoming HBO Max streaming service, along with all the content that WB brings to the party. Wow! Yeah, a tangled web here, making us getting all the way from the great train robbery at the turn of the 20th century, showing them in mining towns to this huge classes of a company bought out over and over and over, and one time by a company that made their money in parking lots. Well, what do you judge for parking these days? That day! All right, you can check out our radio podcast, how I got my way to read comics on iTunes or on our website, asifpodcastnetwork.com From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mindy. And I'm Mark. Thanks for watching.