Jack Warner

Jack Leonard Warner (born Jacob Warner; August 2, 1892 – September 9, 1978) was a Canadian-born American film executive, who was the president and driving force behind the Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California. Warner's career spanned over 55 years, surpassing that of any other of the pioneering Hollywood studio moguls.

As co-head of production at Warner Bros. Studios, Warner worked with his brother, Sam Warner, to procure the technology for the film industry's first talking picture, The Jazz Singer (1927). After Sam's death, Jack clashed with his surviving older brothers, Harry and Albert Warner. He assumed exclusive control of the company in the 1950s when he secretly purchased his brothers's shares in the business after convincing them to participate in a joint sale of stocks.

Although Warner was feared by many of his employees and inspired ridicule with his uneven attempts at humor, he earned respect for his shrewd instincts and tough-mindedness. He recruited many of Warner Bros.' top stars and promoted the hard-edged social dramas for which the studio became known. Given to decisiveness, Warner once commented, "If I'm right fifty-one percent of the time, I'm ahead of the game."

Throughout his career, Warner was viewed as a contradictory and enigmatic figure. Although he was a staunch Republican, he encouraged film projects that promoted the policies of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He also opposed European fascism and criticized Nazi Germany well before the United States' entry into World War II, An opponent of communism, after the war Warner appeared as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, voluntarily naming screenwriters who had been fired at the time as suspected communists or sympathizers. Despite his controversial public image, Warner remained a force in the motion picture industry until his retirement in the early 1970s.

Jacob Warner (as he was named at birth) was born in London, Ontario, Canada, on August 2, 1892. His parents were Polish-Jewish immigrants from Congress Poland (then part of the Russian Empire), who spoke mainly Yiddish. He was the fifth surviving son of Benjamin Warner (originally "Wonsal" or "Wonskolaser"), a cobbler from Krasnosielc, and his wife, the former Pearl Leah Eichelbaum. Following their marriage in 1876, the couple had three children in Poland, one of whom died at a young age; another was Jack's eldest brother, Hirsch (later Harry).

In 1888, Benjamin made his way to Hamburg, Germany, and took ship for the United States. In New York City, Benjamin introduced himself as "Benjamin Warner", and the surname "Warner" remained with him for the rest of his life. Pearl Warner and the couple's two children joined him in Baltimore less than a year later. There the couple had five more children, including Abraham (later known as Albert) and Sam Warner.

In the early 1890s, Benjamin Warner decided to move to Canada, following a friend's advice that he could make an excellent living bartering tin wares with trappers in exchange for furs. Sons Jack and David were born in Ontario. David Warner, after contracting sleeping sickness while in the military in WWI which left him an invalid for some 25 years, would die in 1939, at age 45.

After two difficult years in Canada, the Warners returned to Baltimore, where two more children were born, Sadie and Milton. In 1896, they relocated to Youngstown, Ohio, following the lead of the eldest son Harry, who had established a shoe repair shop in the burgeoning steel town. Father and son worked in the repair shop until Benjamin secured a loan to open a downtown meat and grocery store.

Jack spent much of his youth in Youngstown, and wrote of his formative experiences there in his autobiography: "J. Edgar Hoover told me that Youngstown in those days was one of the toughest cities in America, and a gathering place for Sicilian thugs active in the Mafia. There was a murder or two almost every Saturday night in our neighborhood, and knives and brass knuckles were standard equipment for the young hotheads on the prowl." Warner said that he briefly belonged to a street gang in Westlake's Crossing, a notorious neighborhood west of downtown. Meanwhile, he started performing professionally, singing at local theaters and partnering with another aspiring song-and-dance man. During his brief career in vaudeville, he officially changed his name to Jack Leonard Warner. Jack's older brother Sam disapproved of these youthful pursuits. "Get out front where they pay the actors," he advised Jack. "That's where the money is."

In Youngstown, the Warner brothers took their first tentative steps into the entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, Sam formed a business partnership with another local resident and took over the city's Old Grand Opera House as a venue for "cheap vaudeville and photoplays". The venture failed after one summer. Sam then secured a job as a movie projectionist at Idora Park, a local amusement park. He convinced the family of the new medium's possibilities, and purchased a Model B Kinetoscope for $1000 from a projectionist "down on his luck". Jack contributed $150 to the venture by pawning a horse.

The enterprising brothers screened a well-used copy of The Great Train Robbery throughout Ohio and Pennsylvania before renting a vacant store in New Castle, Pennsylvania. This makeshift theatre, called the Bijou, was furnished with chairs borrowed from a local undertaker. Jack, who was still living in Youngstown, arrived on weekends "to sing illustrated song-slides during reel changes".

In 1906, the brothers purchased a small theater in New Castle, which they called the Cascade Movie Palace. In 1907, the Warner brothers established the Pittsburgh-based Duquesne Amusement Company, a distribution firm that proved lucrative until the advent of Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company (also known as the Edison Trust), which charged distributors exorbitant fees. In 1909, Harry agreed to bring Jack into the family business, sending him to Norfolk, Virginia, where Jack assisted Sam in the operation of a second film exchange company. Later that year, the Warners sold their business to the General Film Company for "$10,000 in cash, $12,000 in preferred stock, and payments over a four-year period, for a total of $52,000" (equivalent to $1,900,000 today).

The Warner brothers pooled their resources and moved into film production in 1910. In 1912, they supported filmmaker Carl Laemmle's Independent Motion Picture Company, which challenged the monopoly of the Edison Trust. That same year, Jack acquired a job as a film splicer in New York, where he assisted Sam with the production of Dante's Inferno. Despite the film's box office success, Harry still feared competition from the Edison Trust. He subsequently broke with Laemmle and sent Jack to establish a film exchange in San Francisco, while Sam did the same in Los Angeles. The brothers were soon poised to exploit the expanding California movie market.

In 1917, Jack was sent to Los Angeles to open another film exchange company. Their first opportunity to produce a major film came in 1918, when they purchased the film rights for My Four Years in Germany, a bestselling novel depicting German wartime atrocities, and the film adaptation became a commercial and critical success. The four brothers established a studio, with Jack and Sam as co-heads of production. As producers, the two solicited new scripts and story lines, secured film sets and equipment, and found ways to reduce production costs.

On October 14, 1914, Warner married Irma Claire Salomon, the daughter of Sam Salomon and Bertha Franklin Salomon from one of San Francisco's pioneer Jewish families. Irma gave birth to the couple's only child, Jack M. Warner, on March 27, 1916. Jack Sr. named the child after himself, disregarding an Eastern European Jewish custom that children should not be named after living relatives. Although his son bore a different middle initial, he "has been called Junior all his life".

Warner's first marriage ended in 1935, when he left his wife for another woman, Ann Page, with whom he had a daughter named Barbara (1934-2022) and became the step father to her daughter from her previous marriage named Joy Page. Irma sued her husband for divorce on the grounds of desertion. Harry Warner reflected the family's feelings about the marriage when he exclaimed, "Thank God our mother didn't live to see this". Jack married Ann after the divorce. The Warners, who took Irma's side in the affair, refused to accept Ann as a family member. In the wake of this falling out, Warner's relationship with his son, Jack Jr., also became strained.

An "ardent Republican", Warner nevertheless supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the early 1930s. Later in the decade, he made common cause with opponents of Nazi Germany. In 1947, however, he served as a "friendly witness" for the HUAC, thereby lending support to allegations of a "Red" infiltration of Hollywood. Warner felt that communists were responsible for the studio's month-long strike that occurred in the fall of 1946, and on his own initiative he provided the names of a dozen screenwriters who were dismissed because of suspected communist sympathies, a move that effectively destroyed their careers. Former studio employees named by Warner included Alvah Bessie, Howard Koch, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Robert Rossen, Dalton Trumbo, Clifford Odets, and Irwin Shaw. As one biographer observed, Warner "was furious when Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Paul Henreid and John Huston joined other members of the stellar Committee for the First Amendment in a flight to Washington to preach against the threat to free expression". Lester D. Friedman noted that Warner's response to the HUAC hearings was similar to other Jewish studio heads who "feared that a blanket equation of Communists with Jews would destroy them and their industry".

Warner publicly supported Richard Nixon during the 1960 presidential election and paid for full-page ads in The New York Times "to proclaim why Nixon should be elected". In the wake of Nixon's loss to John F. Kennedy, however, the studio head made arrangements to attend a fundraiser at the Hollywood Palladium in honor of the president-elect. Several weeks later, Warner received a phone call from the new chief executive's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, and within a short time, Warner Bros. purchased the film rights for Robert Donovan's book, PT 109, a bestseller concerning John Kennedy's exploits during World War II. "I don't think President Kennedy would object to my friendship with Dick Nixon," Warner said later. "I would have voted for both of them if I could. You might think this is a form of fence-straddling, but I love everybody." In the late 1960s, he emerged as an outspoken proponent of the Vietnam War.

By the end of 1973, those closest to Warner became aware of signs that he was becoming disoriented. Shortly after losing his way in the building that housed his office, Warner retired. In 1974, Warner suffered a stroke that left him blind and enfeebled. During the next several years, he gradually lost the ability to speak and became unresponsive to friends and relatives. Finally, on August 13, 1978, Warner was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where he died of a heart inflammation (edema) on September 9. He was 86 years old. A funeral service was held at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the synagogue to which many members of the Warner family belonged. He was interred at Home of Peace Cemetery in East Los Angeles, California.

Warner left behind an estate estimated at $15 million. Much of the Warner estate, including property and memorabilia, was bequeathed to his widow, Ann. However, Warner also left $200,000 to his estranged son, Jack Jr., perhaps in an effort to discourage him from contesting the will. In the days following his death, newspaper obituaries recounted the familiar story of "the four brothers who left the family butcher shop for nickelodeons" and went on to revolutionize American cinema. A front-page story in Warner's adopted hometown of Youngstown featured accounts of the family's pre-Hollywood struggles in Ohio, describing how Warner drove a wagon for his father's business when he was only seven years old. The late movie mogul was widely eulogized for his role in "shaping Hollywood's 'Golden Age'".

Several months after Warner's death, a more personal tribute was organized by the Friends of the Libraries at the University of Southern California. The event, called "The Colonel: An Affectionate Remembrance of Jack L. Warner", drew Hollywood notables such as entertainers Olivia de Havilland and Debbie Reynolds, and cartoon voice actor Mel Blanc. Blanc closed the event with a rendition of Porky Pig's famous farewell, "A-bee-a-bee-a-bee–that's all, folks." In recognition of his contributions to the motion picture industry, Warner was accorded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, located at 6541 Hollywood Boulevard. He is also represented on Canada's Walk of Fame (where he was inducted in 2004) in Toronto, which honours outstanding Canadians from all fields.

Warner is portrayed by Richard Dysart in Bogie (1980), Michael Lerner in This Year's Blonde (1980), Jason Wingreen in Malice in Wonderland (1985), Mike Connors in James Dean: Race with Destiny (1997), Tim Woodward in RKO 281 (1999), Len Kaserman in The Three Stooges (2000), Richard M. Davidson in Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001), Mark Rydell in James Dean (2001), Danny Wells in Gleason (2002), Barry Langrishe in The Mystery of Natalie Wood (2004), Ben Kingsley in Life (2015), Stanley Tucci in Feud (2017) and Kevin Dillon in Reagan (2024).