Warner bros, p.6
Warner Bros, page 6
The film was certainly noticed, but it would be another five years before Warner Brothers had their name on a movie that might match this. There is a sequel noted in some of the flimsy records (it does not seem to exist as anything to be seen), called Beware! (also known as Germany on Trial), in which Gerard warns of the abiding dangers of Germany. (Don’t forget, this man lived long enough to see Anschluss, Auschwitz, and The Big Sleep.) Logue and Nigh apparently worked on the follow-up, and that film is said to be a Warners production. That was nearly a hundred years ago, and we don’t know enough about the actual work done. We never will—even if anything about the picture business had taught us to trust credits.
My Four Years in Germany was an awful, ambitious picture, stupid and noisy as only silent pictures could be, high-minded and low-down, too long yet too short (it assesses the war in 108 minutes), but it was carried all the way to the precious screen. Certainly the Warners were involved on it, and the film can be seen still. But it was actually distributed by First National, and not by a series of exchanges belonging to Warner Brothers. First National was an amalgamation of theatre chains, begun in 1917, that became a distribution company and then a production studio in its own right. In 1928, it would be taken over by Warners, a sign of how rapidly the brothers had started to develop by the late twenties.
But that was not yet, and it was before the dog.
7
Rinty
WHEN IT COMES TO a straightforward chronicle of Warner Brothers and its advance on fame and glory, you may well sigh at reaching 1920 and say, well, really you haven’t heard anything yet—or not nearly enough. So stay open to at least a dash of the unexpected. If I were to say that in the rough-and-tumble of the motion picture business before 1920, the Warner boys had let time pass them by, you could hardly argue. All too many short-lived film enterprises had been launched in those years on a press handout and an uncertain piece of machinery—and perished.
The Warners were all for one, and one for all (at least in Harry’s mind), but they hadn’t made a mark beyond dithering about in the business, thinking of buying theatres and film exchanges, and getting used to calling themselves Warner. I don’t want to be unkind to them (there were so many others in the same business who could do that with more bite and accuracy), but even their famous breakthrough, My Four Years in Germany, is not what the books say it is, and not something you really wish to spend the 108 minutes watching.
You could have written them off, as many of their rivals must have done. More or less, they’d been knocking their heads against the wall for twenty years without even getting their name on their one hit film. So perhaps they made a little money out of the film, in an age when a little went a long way, especially if you had never given up on shoes, meat, soap, or bowling alleys.
Nothing but a sense of wonder will carry us from the embarrassing pomp of My Four Years in Germany to the way, in just a few years, Warners made it to the big show, this low-down, stumbling outfit that somehow blundered into an unlikely trifecta—Ernst Lubitsch, John Barrymore, and a charming German shepherd—and then capped it off with an invention they hardly understood. What explains this upheaval of luck? Maybe it was Darryl Zanuck.
While still in the military, Zanuck had been writing lively, imaginative letters home to his grandfather about being in Belgium as the war ended. No one said the letters were models of fact or modesty—what does a grandfather expect? But an officer saw some of them and got them published in Stars and Stripes. The idea of being a writer germinated in the furiously ambitious kid (he was still only eighteen), and after a few days in the Midwest he moved himself out to California. A director, Frank Lloyd, saw him on the street—handsome, short but pale—and asked him to test for the lead in a film of Oliver Twist ( Jackie Coogan got the part).1
In the next few years, Zanuck did everything and anything he had to—his industry is in marked contrast with the languid Warner brothers. Zanuck boxed a little; he was a riveter in a shipyard; he exulted in his physical prowess; and he wrote. An obvious target for that enterprise was the movie business, with its relentless need for story. There is even a legend that the young Zanuck sought an interview with Jack Warner and was turned away because Jack was “busy.” So Darryl thought he would write a book. To that end, he persuaded one of his employers—Yuccatone Hair Restorer—to have him write a story that was also an advertisement for Yuccatone. Product placement began early, and Zanuck came up with the selling line, “You’ve Never Seen a Bald-Headed Indian.”2
And so Zanuck became a published author, in 1923—Habit: A Thrilling Yarn Where Fiction Ends and Life Begins. I am not making this up—even if he was. As a Zanuck biographer, Mel Gussow, would write, with appealing restraint: “In these stories life ends and fiction begins. All are concerned with the moral regeneration of people corrupted by ‘liquor, hop and women.’ Actually the degradation is far more exciting and even appealing than the regeneration, which must say something about Zanuck’s divided allegiances in matters of morality.”3
Here is the spirit of My Four Years in Germany: a vein of preaching that somehow strays into the lurid bad things people do. We are getting closer to a model for the gangster pictures that Zanuck would do so much to launch.
Habit the book vanished, not helped by the discovery that bottles of Yuccatone were beginning to explode in customers’ bathrooms—largely because the product was actually a cover for alcohol. It was at about this time, in his pursuit of fitness, that Zanuck sought to join the Los Angeles Athletic Club. He was declined, and when he asked his grandfather how this could be, the report came back that the club believed Zanuck was Jewish.
Undaunted, and unceasingly athletic in body and spirit, he pushed his way into writing episodes for run-of-the-mill movie serials—notably The Telephone Girl and The Leatherpushers. Some remarked that in the material he wrote, Zanuck sometimes copied himself, or other stories he had read. But the movie business was already a duplicating machine in which there were few unique narrative structures. Zanuck pushed them out as fast as he could type. If you were making a movie of this life of his—and why not, didn’t he deserve it?—you could cut from a photograph of Zanuck at his typewriter, surrounded by scripts, to one of a German shepherd dog gazing down at the keyboard. The two were made for each other, and together they would alter the status of Warners in Hollywood.
Corporal Lee Duncan had found his Rinty in France, though this dog was probably being trained for the German army. Duncan had cared for two lost puppies and brought them home. He had become attached to his dog, and seen intense character and physical prowess combined in the animal. He saw a hero. Then at a dog show in California, Rinty jumped a wall that was nearly twelve feet high, and a friend had filmed the leap. It wasn’t just a dog doing a dog thing, it was an event on film, a heroic vault and a scene. Duncan sent the film clip to a newsreel company on spec, and one day a check for $350 came back. This heroism was negotiable. Strangers would buy it, just to marvel at the grace and the surprise.
There were other such heroes in films: there was a dog called Strongheart, and most cowboy heroes had horses with names. We easily find Rin Tin Tin comic, or charming, but that loses sight of his nobility on film, just as it risks forgetting how far film was waiting to achieve that trick with any image, animal or human. As Susan Orlean puts it in her book Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend:
Dogs, in fact, were perfect heroes: unknowable but accessible, driven but egoless, strong but tragic, limited by their muteness and animal vulnerability. Humans played heroes in films, too, but they were more complicated to admire because they were so particular—too much like us or too much unlike us or too much like someone we knew. Dogs, on the other hand, have the talent of seeming to care and understand about humans in spite of not being human and perhaps are better at it because of that difference. They are compassionate without being competitive, and there is nothing in their valor that threatens us, no demand for reciprocity. As [Duncan] knew very well, a dog could make you feel complete without ever expecting much in return.4
A dog in a silent film needed no intertitles, not just because he said nothing but because his entire being was so fully expressed and removed from the unfathomability available to us in life, but so often missing from silent pictures. Its poetry was in having nothing to say. A dog in silent motion was a hymn to the brimming emotional simplicity that urged it along.
This is going beyond what the Warners or Zanuck felt, but it is also on the brink of identifying the phenomenal achievement of sound. Rin Tin Tin established the clumsy, awkward studio held back by lack of enterprise or instinct. Jack Warner called the dog “the mortgage lifter.” The studio paid him $1,000 a week on top of what it paid Duncan as a trainer—and the dog never complained or got a lawyer or an agent in the way Jimmy Cagney or Bette Davis would in just a few years. Greta Garbo asked to have a puppy. Zanuck took one himself, if only to be obliging. Warners soon had thousands of requests for pictures of Rinty signed with a paw print and a written line from Lee Duncan, “Most faithfully yours, Rin Tin Tin.”5
The first Rinty film was Where the North Begins. Duncan had submitted a crude script, and footage of the dog’s great jump. Harry Warner said, why not? Harry Rapf was put in charge. The film was so cheap to make at an hour and it grossed over $300,000 in a weekend. That’s when Zanuck appeared, as the writer for more Rinty films—notably Find Your Man and Lighthouse by the Sea. The films built amazingly. Rinty and Duncan went on a tour of public appearances, and soon Zanuck was supervising his pictures. This was 1923 to 1925. There would be twenty-seven of the films, before sound and old age killed Rinty off. Along the way, there was a big write-in vote for the dog getting the first acting Oscar. But the humorless Academy was set on respectability. They foresaw a bad precedent and gave the prize to Emil Jannings instead, an actor who couldn’t wag his tail without labored forethought.
8
Mama, Darlin’
OCTOBER 6, 1927, at the Warner Theatre on Broadway at 52nd Street—it was a Thursday—is a turning point in motion picture history, the moment at which a raw display of mime, archaic sentiment, pretensions of Art, and a lantern show turned into a complete illusion that would release the fantasy that has altered our ideas about ourselves. That October 6 surpasses the opening of The Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind. It is when B.C. becomes A.D. It is also when something Jewish passes into the American bloodstream and dissolves, as if recognizing that it can’t be just “Jewish” anymore.
With that burden of cultural history, it mattered not at all that the picture opening that night—The Jazz Singer—was pretty bad. Its import was clearer that way. The lesson had to be learned, that the technology was more important than its messages. Never mind the faithful agility of Rin Tin Tin, the sultry self-mockery of John Barrymore, or the passing wit of Ernst Lubitsch; sound was what made Warner Brothers and how they transformed an understanding of understanding as surely as if they had been Freud or Einstein. So it’s a nice irony that not one of the brothers was present that evening.
Only three of them could have made the opening of the picture, but they were elsewhere. Harry, Albert, and Jack were at Sam’s funeral, in Los Angeles. The doctors at the California Lutheran Hospital ascribed the death to pneumonia, but Jack Warner had no doubt—“The Jazz Singer killed him,” because of the way Sam had been in charge of that production and its struggle toward synchronized sound.1
Late in September, when Sam had thought of taking the train east for the New York première, he had been short of energy and complaining of terrible headaches. Jack was worried (he wrote later): “Sam looked wan and listless. I knew he had worked day and night for weeks, losing weight and deepening the hollows under his eyes.”2 Sam was unsteady on his feet at times. The Jazz Singer had taken an enormous effort—though it’s not clear how much of the technical detail Sam understood. But not understanding machinery can wear you out. Nor is it certain that Jack was there to see the hollows under Sam’s eyes.
The doctors determined that Sam had several badly infected teeth. He had tried to have them extracted at the dentist’s, but complications had set in, and he was taken into hospital. There was talk of an acute mastoid infection and a cerebral hemorrhage. He had several operations. Albert was at his bedside, with Sam’s wife, Lina. Harry and Jack were hurrying to California by train. Sam died at 3:22 a.m. on October 5, a matter of hours before The Jazz Singer was set to open. In that movie, the father, the cantor expires once he has heard his once-lost son, Jackie, return to sing Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur. The tangle of fact and fiction is uncanny, but most of the moguls felt their life was a movie.
Every folkloric cliché about sound’s role in silent cinema is justified. For twenty years, audiences had shouted out what they thought characters were saying. Anything from a piano player to a full orchestra provided live accompaniment to a film, and the audience was ready to add sound effects: a “bang!” for a shot, plaintive weeping for sorrow, and feet drumming on the theatre floor for scenes of pursuit. But those sounds were labored and physically produced. Above and beyond that, there lay the possibility of magical sound, accompaniment that needed no effort, and had the fluency of the picture.
When sound came to the movies, it was in a rush, as if nothing mattered more than audience excitement. There was also a laborious technological revolution, and that led to radical alterations in the business of film and its quality as a fantasy narrative. Credit has to go to Sam Warner and to a couple of technicians he had working for him. Some goes to Darryl Zanuck, the most acute showman involved on The Jazz Singer. Still, it’s hard to envisage the change without the panache of a performer, Al Jolson. For the public, the inventive process didn’t matter—it was Jolson giving utterance. It was his mouth.
On April 25, 1917, a young man just out of the University of Illinois, Samson Raphaelson, went to see the musical Robinson Crusoe, Jr.3 It starred Al Jolson, as a dreaming chauffeur, done in blackface. Jolson was Jewish, born in Sprednik, Lithuania, as Asa Yoelson, and arriving in America when he was eight. Jolson never knew his birthdate for sure, and he was probably a few years older than he admitted. But he had become the outstanding performer on Broadway, a singer with pathos and zest in his voice, a dynamo of sentiment and sympathy, with large begging eyes in a face and a head that seemed to grow larger as his hair receded.
Jolson specialized in blackface routines, and he was surely drawn to the emotional appeal of black blues singers. He was even called “a jazz singer,” but that was in an age when few people had much understanding of jazz, or how it expressed black experience. How many white people believed blacks had experience? So Jolson traded on an archetype that is offensive today, and which makes The Jazz Singer nearly as hard to stomach as The Birth of a Nation.
Raphaelson was bowled over by Jolson in Robinson Crusoe, Jr.—“I shall never forget the first five minutes of Jolson—his velocity. The amazing fluidity with which he shifted from tremendous absorption in his audience to a tremendous absorption in his song.”4 Raphaelson felt that the jazz singer Jolson was playing had the dramatic passion of a Jewish cantor, and that was close to the dynamic in Jolson’s American career as a young man. The son of a cantor, Al had gone show business (against his father’s wishes) to the point of being the top star in variety. As movies soared as a trade, Jolson was a model for the Jewish impulse celebrated by show business and a heroic figure to George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, as well as the Warner brothers. In his intense being and his need for attention and command, Jolson personified Jewish storytelling for a universal audience. You can’t see Barbra Streisand in Yentl without feeling Jolson’s heritage.
Raphaelson was so moved that he wrote a short story, “Day of Atonement,” about a character torn between the synagogue and Broadway. And then nearly a decade later he turned that into a play, The Jazz Singer, that opened on Broadway in September 1925, with George Jessel as Jackie Rabinowitz who becomes Jack Robin, a star on Broadway, and who goes home to sing Kol Nidre for his dying father, a cantor—and resolves to give up show business. The play was straight melodrama; the singing it required was all heard offstage. Harry Warner was moved by the play, and he bought the film rights fast for $50,000, agreeing to pay Jessel thirty thousand to repeat his performance on screen. Harry was heard to tell the actor, “It will be a good picture to make for the sake of racial tolerance, if nothing else.”5 But Harry saw this as just a silent movie.
In those mid-1920s, Warners was not yet in the first rank of movie studios, though it was getting there, thanks to the Lubitsch comedies, the unpredictable arrangement with John Barrymore, and that steadfast Rin Tin Tin. There are claims, from competing sources, that Warners was flourishing yet often on the point of collapse—chances are both stories had substance, varying from week to week, or day to day.
The Lubitsch films—Kiss Me Again (1925), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925), So This Is Paris (1926)—were sophisticated and even exquisite comedies that did poor business. Lubitsch knew this, and wanted out; he telegraphed Harry, “You have always been complaining of being unable to make money with my pictures. And my own earnings certainly far below amount I could get everywhere else. Am very skeptical regarding your plans of bigger pictures because they require different facilities and acting material from what you have. Fully realize what world expects from me and therefore repeat proposal of separating after next picture.”6
