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Title: Kings of the Talkies
Author: Johnston, Alva (1888-1950)
Date of first publication: 1928
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: The New Yorker,  22 December 1928
   [Profiles]
Date first posted: 24 July 2010
Date last updated: 24 July 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #579




Kings of the Talkies

by Alva Johnston

22 December 1928


The men who murdered the silent drama are the four Warner
brothers--Harry, Albert, Jack, and the late Sam Warner.
History will hold them equally guilty.

They were not the first to make the pictures talk. Years
before, Edison, de Forest, and others had caused the screen
to soliloquize in empty houses, but the Warners were the
first to make the public listen.

The modern talking-picture mechanism was developed in the
laboratories of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company
in 1925. The telephone engineers, who saw the motion-picture
industry revolutionized overnight and "Hamlet" in the
talkies by Christmas, called in the biggest man in the
movies to witness the birth of a new art. The headliner at
that premire of the modern talkie was a full-length talking
portrait of a gentleman with an impediment in his speech.
Immediately after the performance the biggest man in the
movies left without making any comment and was never heard
from again.

That was in February, 1925. In March another man was the
biggest man in the industry. The apparatus was tuned up
again and the new biggest man was invited to see and hear.
He said, "Gentlemen, this is horrible."

The show was then strengthened by a comic act, written and
staffed by two telephone engineers and a physicist, but the
April and May crop of biggest men in the motion-picture
industry were still unimpressed, By this time every big
concern except Warners had decided that the public would
never like talkies. The Warners--and this is no idle
figure--bet their shirts they would make the public like
talkies, and mortgaged everything down to their personal
belongings to launch the Vitaphone. The heads of the other
big companies had made fortunes gambling against the
fickleness of the public, but they did not want to risk
their winnings. "Stabilize" and "standardize" were their
watchwords, and they hated the thought of experiments and
innovations. They had everything to lose by a revolution in
the industry; the Warners had everything to gain.

* * * * *

The history of the Warners explains everything, From the
start they had to be enterprising to live. Their father came
here from Poland and set up a cobbler's shop in Baltimore,
but it would not support a family of twelve. The boys had to
sell papers as soon as they were old enough; before
high-school age they were all working. When he was twelve
years old, Sam was running a portable gambling hell in a
street fair. The customer put a nickel down and spun an
arrow. He could not win less than one cigar for the nickel
and he might win any number up to seven. Nevertheless, there
was a cruel percentage against the public, because Sam
bought the cigars for a cent apiece. The combination of a
moral wave and grafting local authorities ruined this
enterprise. At the age of thirteen Sam was barking for an
egg-dodger, and at fourteen he was managing an intemperate
snake-eater. He later ran a bicycle-repair shop, had a brief
career as a boxer, and became a locomotive fireman on the
Erie.

Harry went on the road with meat products, and developed
charm in the course of making himself agreeable to the
delicatessen and retail-butcher trades. Later he sold apple
vinegar, and perfected a deferential and courtly bearing in
making his contacts with the grocers of Western
Pennsylvania. A few years on the road is a great finishing
school in manners, and Harry Warner could easily win a
competitive examination for one of his own usherships. All
the brothers have mellow ringing voices--the late Sam Warner
spoke as melodiously as Caruso sang.

* * * * *

Back in 1903, when Harry Warner was twenty-one years old and
Sam was sixteen, they decided to go into the pictures. They
happened to be together in Pittsburgh and dropped in at a
nickelodeon, where they saw a one-reel Western. They were
overcome. Hardly able to speak, they silently clasped hands
and cast their lot with the silent films. Albert Warner,
twenty years old at the time, quit selling soap and joined
them.

They began by putting a projection machine and a screen in a
warehouse at Newcastle, Pennsylvania. At the start they were
embarrassed by a scarcity of chairs when they were showing a
popular feature, but next door was an undertaker, who was
similarly embarrassed when he was holding important
obsequies. This situation was a set-up for the combining and
consolidating talent of the Warners. They merged the
bereavement and amusement interests of the town. The chairs
were pooled, and it was agreed that when there was a good
film, the funeral must wait, and vice versa. The Warners
rented a piano, which Rose, a sister, played. Jack, then
twelve or thirteen years old, sang illustrated songs.

Sam Warner went an tour with that epoch-maker, "The Great
Train Robbery," which he showed in barns and halls all over
Pennsylvania. The brothers roadshowed other films in the
same manner, and by 1910 had built up one of the most
profitable agencies in the industry. In 1910, however, the
industry was in the grip of an octopus. There were no films
but the General Film Company's films. The octopus decided to
run its own agencies, and it put the Warners out of
business.

* * * * *

"If you break us, you'll break yourselves," Harry Warner
told the head of the General Film Company. This was
prophetic. The Warners and other independents began making
their own pictures, and in five years the General Film
Company hid failed. The Warners' first picture was "The
Covered Wagon" with only one wagon. They called it "'The
Peril of the Plains." They made several other successful
four and five-reelers, but in their haste to expand, went
outside of the family to take in partners. The new partners
knew copartnership law. The Warners did not, and one day
they found that they were no longer connected with Warners.
Their company was doing beautifully, but the four brothers
had signed away everything but the debts. They not only sold
their homes, but called in the old-clothes man. After
discharging their own obligations, they raised eighteen
thousand dollars to pay off the losses of friends who had
invested in the wrong issue of securities, but they
compelled the new owners to change their title by giving up
the name of Warners.

When their affairs were wound up, the four Warners had one
dollar and sixty-five cents left. They soon found a backer,
however, and started to distribute foreign-made pictures,
making money with the French film "Redemption," but losing
everything in 1917 in a futile effort to educate the public
to appreciate "The Glass Coffin."

Then they began to look about for a new start. Passing a
bookstore window, Sam saw a picture of a fly with the face
of Ambassador James W. Gerard in a web surrounded by spiders
with the faces of the Kaiser, Bethmann-Hollweg, Hindenburg,
Ludendorff, and others. It was an advertisement for "My Four
Years in Germany." Sam and his brothers were never greatly
interested in reading matter. They did not stop to inquire
what was inside the book, but wired the Ambassador an offer
of twenty per cent of the profits in return for the film
rights. The Ambassador agreed, but remarked that he did not
believe his book would make a successful film. He was right.
His book would not have made a successful film, but it was a
great war-time title. Harry Warner and Charles Logue, the
scenarist, wove in a corking romance in which pure affection
and guilty love were contrasted, greatly to the detriment of
the latter. A backer put up forty thousand dollars, while
Sam and Jack went to Hollywood and built a studio and print
laboratory with their own hands, and Albert Warner began to
sell the picture in advance as the greatest ever made. First
exhibited while the war was still on, "My Four Years in
Germany" was a sensation, grossing eight hundred thousand
dollars. The Warners followed it with their great morality
film, "Why Girls Leave Home."

Jack Warner stayed at Hollywood in charge of the
picture-making, while Sam shuttled from Hollywood to New
York and toured the country as the field marshal of the
picture-selling campaigns. Albert and Harry remained in New
York to oversee the distribution and to hold the bankers'
hands. They built homes in Westchester, took Thursday boxes
at the Metropolitan, subscribed for the Hundred Neediest
Cases, and otherwise regularized themselves. The brothers
are heavy subscribers to Jewish charities, and no theatre in
New York gives as many benefits as Warners. Jack has been in
Hollywood so long that, at thirty-eight years of age, he is
one of the patriarchs.

* * * * *

The Warners are equal partners in the business. Not only
that, but they have all had the same bank accounts, and
their possessions are pooled absolutely. When Sam Warner
died a year and a half ago, he provided for his wife, Lina
Basquette, and his child, with trust funds, leaving the
residue of the estate, including his interest in the
company, to his brothers. Their confidence in each other is
complete. According to Jack Warner, the greatest advantage
of their company has been its entire freedom from jealousies
among executives and from inside politics. He says that the
other companies are handicapped because the big executives
waste too much time in worrying about what their fellow
executives are doing.

In spite of their successes, the Warners have always been
troubled by a scarcity of capital, a sore embarrassment to a
rapidly expanding company. They have been saved several
times by the quick administration of oxygen by New York
bankers, but their fundamental difficulty was the fact that
the big motion-picture houses in the large cities were
nearly all in the hands of rivals. They tried to rush the
theatres of their competitors with "Main Street," "Babbitt,"
"Brass," and other popular titles. Then they tried to force
their rivals to open their houses to "The Marriage Circle,"
"Lady Windermere's Fan," and other Ernst Lubitsch
masterpieces. Their one consistent money-maker, however, was
Rin-Tin-Tin, who is still the one star which thousands of
small-town motion-picture houses can not do without. That
splendid animal has performed many heroic rescues on the
screen, but his greatest has been that of leaping over
rivers of red ink with the Warners on his back.

* * * * *

Their position in the industry was again precarious in 1925
when they took up the talking pictures. Sam heard about them
in Hollywood and telegraphed Harry, who reluctantly
consented to inspect the telephone company's talkies. Like
the other moving-picture men, he found the sounds terrible,
but he was the first to appreciate their possibilities.

A congress of all the Warners was called. Their method is to
hold unlimited debate, but to leave all decisions to Harry.
In this case they were unanimous in favor of going into the
talkies. After the humiliations suffered at the hands of
other picture men, the telephone company let the Warners
have the device on terms which are said to have been
equivalent to giving them a Christmas present.

Harry still has a violent prejudice against such words as
"talkies," "speakies," and "talking films," and, according
to employees, it is almost a firing offence to use such
phrases in his presence. He wants the world to join him in
adopting the elegant Graeco-Roman word "Vitaphone," and the
Warners are now spending one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars a month in advertising for that end.

* * * * *

Earlier talking-picture devices had been killed at the start
by timorous showmanship. They had been used to reproduce
third-rate vaudeville acts, equally objectionable in canned
or human form. The Warners threw all their resources into
their first show, which opened in New York on August 6,
1926. Martinelli, Elman, Anna Case, Zimbalist, Bauer, and
the Metropolitan Opera chorus were on the first program; Al
Jolson, Eugene and Willie Howard, George Jessel, and Elsie
Janis on the second. Otto Kahn said, "If Martinelli could
sing like that at the Met, he would be a greater star than
Caruso." As the New York success was duplicated in Atlantic
City and Chicago, Warner common stack jumped from eight to
sixty-five.

Then came bad news: The Vitaphone not only flopped in St.
Louis and Los Angeles, but nearly ruined the houses that
introduced it. The response elsewhere was spotty. In some
communities Vitaphone bill-posters had the power of smallpox
signs in quarantining theatres, and Warner stock receded
from sixty-five to nine.

The talkies were making gradual progress when the
sensational success of Al Jolson in "The Jazz Singer" won
the fight. In less than a year Warner stock jumped from nine
to one hundred and thirty-two. All the other big producers
had to fall in line, and seven out of eight of them are now
paying royalties to the Warners, who recently bought the
Stanley and several chains of theatres and obtained control
of First National, the film-producing organization. They
were on the market with ten talking features before their
competitors could enter the field. For the next two or three
years, anyway, they are the reigning kings of the talkies.




[End of "Kings of the Talkies" by Alva Johnston]
