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A brief overview of the prehistory of sound film, from Thomas Edison through the work of Lee DeForest, noting that most of these early films were marked by musical performance. The origins of the Warner Bros. studio and, ultimately, its marketing of the Vitaphone sound system. Early sound films: Don Juan and Vitaphone, Giovanni Martinelli, Al Jolson, George Jessel. The rival studios begin work of their own. The culmination of this early period with Warners' The Jazz Singer, the success and impact of which have sometimes been misunderstood.

Carl Stalling's work as a composer for Hollywood cartoons was apparently headed for the same fate as practically all film music: heard but never widely recognized for its creativity and originality. That changed two decades after his death in 1972, when Greg Ford and Hal Willner produced The Carl Stalling Project (1990–95), two CDs of Stalling's music taken from his time at Warner Bros. (1936–1958). The discs sold surprisingly well for a niche release; the first of the two discs actually appeared briefly on the Billboard album chart. As a result, a new interest in cartoon music began to emerge in the early 1990s. Through the CDs, Stalling suddenly became visible to animation fans who had never before thought about him or his work for the cartoons. This chapter examines how the two sides of Stalling's personality as a composer—the humorous side and the practical side—came together in each score through his use of precomposed or popular music. It also looks at how, during his twenty-plus years at Warner Bros., Stalling's approach to musical scoring naturally evolved.

Kim Owczarski takes us in a slightly different direction, exploring the Joker as a marketing tool in Warner Bros. 2008 distribution of The Dark Knight. Already a rich case study in its use of paracinematic, ludic appeals to audiences, this campaign was made even more notable with the death of Heath Ledger just prior to the film’s release. Suggesting that Warner Bros.’ prolonged use of the Joker as synecdoche for the film was unconventional as an approach to marketing a tentpole film, Owczarski outlines the process of the campaign’s unfolding, taking a case study approach to one of the most ambitious promotional efforts Hollywood had yet seen. In particular, Owczarski argues that The Dark Knight benefited from a campaign that was the “culmination of several successful lessons about contemporary film promotion” that had begun with the largely Internet-driven success of The Blair Witch Project.⁵⁶

Jack Warner and Raoul Walsh kept it going for 30 years. In Jack's native Yiddish, they were beshert, two people who were “intended,” who found that they were “meant to be.” Walsh liked to say that he was one of the few men who got along with Warner; but he and Warner enjoyed a long friendship and mutual respect. Signing with Warner Bros. provided an immediate end to the slump into which Walsh's career had fallen during the past five years. Warner Bros. gave him the chance to work with a studio that had a consistent style all of its own. The deal could not have been more serendipitous—not only did Walsh salvage what would have been an abbreviated, albeit stellar, career, but at the age of 52, he was about to enter into what would be, hands down, his golden period. The studio assigned him The World Moves On, whose title later became The Roaring Twenties. Walsh also directed John Wayne in the western Dark Command. The chapter discusses how Miriam Cooper, his ex-wife, drained Walsh's emotional energy.

Raoul Walsh prepared to direct They Drive by Night. This film offers one of the best demonstrations in his body of work of how effortlessly and naturally he segues between hope and hopelessness, humor and pathos. The film also became one of the most noneventful shoots Walsh had encountered in a long time, the easiness of his work at the studio standing in direct contrast to the chaos swimming around him in his personal life. Moreover, High Sierra was his riskiest film of the early Warner Bros. period. It advances pictorially, be it the chase, the face of a character, the language in his or her demeanor. The dialogue is surpassed by the film's physical, visual language. Furthermore, The Strawberry Blonde was Walsh's favorite of all the movies he directed during the sound era. His problems dealing with Wallis during The Strawberry Blonde were not serious enough to curb his enthusiasm—which quickly doubled when he learned that he would work with Bogie again on another Warner Bros. tale from the dark side of life, Manpower. Jack Warner sent Walsh his most brilliant and difficult star, Bette Davis, who had been finishing up In This Our Life.

Another distinctive trend was the all-star revue film, as produced by most of the major studios. Each would serve as a guidepost to its company's reigning aesthetic as it addressed the new world of sound films. With The Hollywood Revue, MGM triumphed through a wise use of stars and production knowhow. With Show of Shows, Warner Bros. failed through a misspent budget and indifferent material. While Fox's Happy Days was tepid, Paramount on Parade was witty and resourceful. Universal's King of Jazz, by far the most spectacular of the revues, found artistic success at the expense of diminished audience favor. Seldom, after 1930, would such work ever be tried again.

This chapter discusses Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons, which seemed almost invariably to stake out a very different territory from that of the Disney works. The Warner Bros. cartoons play far more freely at the fringes of the real and explore many of the potentials of a form wherein nearly everything in the animated world comes from the same stuff. The works of Chuck Jones, the most lauded director of the animation unit, show a repeated concern with narratizing space, with shifting the terms of interrogation from animation style to what is termed style-in-action.

By the 1920s, jazz permeated the collective musical culture of America, from recordings and live performances to films focusing on the nature of jazz itself. Cartoons became an especially potent site for spreading the sound of jazz nationwide. Jazz would have a featured role in hundreds of Hollywood cartoons, inspiring stories and enlivening performances in shorts from every studio. This chapter examines the different workings of jazz in cartoon musical scores, touching on the issue of race and representation—and the deplorably racist effect of the imagery. Primitivism was a theme running through much early writing on jazz, for it seemed to explain both the essential attributes of the music and what made it so desirable. A take on primitivism and jazz is offered by the Warner Bros. short The Isle of Pingo-Pongo (Avery, 1938). The chapter also discusses early impressions of jazz as film music, the Fleischer brothers' unusual approach to jazz in the late 1920s and the 1930s, Warner Bros.' use of jazz and popular music in cartoons, and the use of swing music in cartoons.

This chapter describes the relationship between Hitchcock and Jack L. Warner. Warner Bros. had agreed to serve as a distributor for pictures made by Transatlantic films with the proviso that Hitchcock direct one Warner’s film for each Transatlantic film. When Transatlantic floundered, Jack L. Warner restructured the deal so that Hitchcock would direct four films for Warner Bros., receiving $3,000 a week as his own producer and points on those films that turned a profit. The deal worked out well for Hitchcock, earning him roughly $250,000 per film, a considerable increase over the $50,000 Selznick had paid him for Rebecca and making him one of the best-paid directors in Hollywood. Subsequent chapters discuss the impacts of censorship on each of the four films Hitchcock made for Warner Bros.

While Raoul Walsh was still shooting The Man I Love in the fall of 1945, he rekindled his interest in Cheyenne. Cheyenne is far more interesting as a sexual farce than it is as a western action story. Moreover, Pursued turned out to be one of the most complex and controversial in his body of work, not only because of its haunting visual imagery, but also because it embraces so many psychological conceits thought by many to be uncharacteristic of Walsh. Silver River, on the other hand, has hardly been viewed as one of Walsh's or Errol Flynn's greatest efforts. He also became involved in a story he convinced Jack Warner to make, Colorado Territory, a remake of Walsh's High Sierra. In Walsh's hands, White Heat moves to the rhythm of bullets, each one shooting out from the frame as if the entire scenario, with its psychotic, mother-loving killer and its trigger-happy anger, wants to rouse postwar American society in even newer ways than Warner Bros. had already managed to with nearly two decades of the gangster genre.

The musical resurgence was spearheaded by the election of Franklin Roosevelt and by Warner's 42nd Street, both of which indicated that better times were ahead. Busby Berkeley's dance spectacles became a symbol of the new optimism even as Gold Diggers of 1933 mirrored Depression woes. Backstage films made a comeback as musical genres became more standardized, and at the end of the year Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in Flying Down to Rio, indicated a new direction for screen dance.

Directing the General George Custer picture opened and then deepened Raoul Walsh's friendship with the picture's star, Errol Flynn, who became a lifelong friend—mishpocha, in fact. They Died with Their Boots On materialized in the same way as many other male-driven Warner Bros. projects of the late 1930s and early 1940s—as a possible vehicle for James Cagney, still the studio's biggest box-office draw. Warner Bros. was not alone in thinking that Custer had box-office potential. The film follows the life of George Custer from the time he enters West Point to his death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Walsh and Flynn found a common thread in creating characters seeking to look heroic, men who above all else wish to leave a legacy of uncommon valor (suggestive of Flynn–Walsh films to come) and dignity. This began with Boots, and continued on with Gentleman Jim and their cycle of war films. Moreover, Walsh directed Desperate Journey.

This chapter focuses on Yankee Doodle Dandy, the Warner Bros. movie about George M. Cohan's life. It is but one of dozens of Hollywood biopics purporting to tell the story of the great American popular songwriters, from Stephen Foster to the tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley and the Broadway musical show. Filmmakers, sometimes assisted by the composers themselves, could recast them into any desired shape and construct a weave of fact and fiction, sacrificing biographical detail to the glory of the music itself. From the 1930s to the late 1950s, these pictures came in a flood, boasting big budgets, glossy production values, lots of music, and major stars. If the prestige of the classical pantheon had been and continued to be a factor in its marketability, the allure of the Tin Pan Alley composers—success and money—was even more potent.

This chapters shows how the Warner Bros. movie, Footlight Parade, part of a trilogy of Great Depression made in 1933 and also featuring 42^nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, epitomised the studio’s support for Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and the New Deal programme of the first Hundred Days. It also marked James Cagney’s break from being typecast as a gangster to present him as a FDR-figure overcoming a crisis. The chapter further explores how Jack and Harry Warner forsook FDR shortly after the filming of Footlight Parade to join other moguls in opposition to the National Recovery Administration’s efforts to promote the interests of organized labour. Thereafter the pro-New Deal message in the studio’s productions became muted and it reverted to escapism in its post-1933 musicals.

Chapter Three examines the representation of jazz music by three major studios during the conversion era. It argues that Warner Bros., Paramount, and MGM each appropriated jazz in its own way to promote particular qualities of its film style while suggesting that its own sound technologies might be a means of controlling the reception of the music. The chapter focuses particularly on those moments where the voice fails to signify, discussing the relationship between vocal techniques like scatting, groaning, and humming, and jazz images, pictorial fragments that will not assimilate to the narratives of conversion-era jazz shorts and that acknowledge the music’s racial history. How these images appear in the studios’ output exposes their unique commercialization of the music and the differences in how they expected spectators to react to it.

The biggest challenge of Raoul Walsh's career was the massive production of Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N., a picture that took four months to complete and severely tested the mettle of the 63-year-old Walsh. Confronting unpredictable weather conditions, soaring production costs that had to be held in check and the staging of naval equipment both huge and small, he would call it the most difficult film he had ever directed. Horatio Hornblower provided Walsh with one of his greatest pleasures—to give in to his wanderlust. Right after The Enforcer, and before Hornblower, he was at work directing another western for Warner Bros.—a curious, middle-of-the-road psychological drama in western dress originally called The Travelers but released as Along the Great Divide. Distant Drums gave Walsh the opportunity to work with his good friend, Gary Cooper. The Lawless Breed departed just slightly from his more simplified view of western male–female relations and from that of the western hero himself. Walsh clearly mismanaged the relationship he had with his first two adopted sons, Robert and Jack; he seemed to do better with Marilynn, as the two stayed in touch for the remainder of his life.

Chapter Two explores the visual and musical changes in the opera short as it evolved throughout the conversion era primarily by looking at the prolific output of Warner Bros. and its intensified attention to the tenor. Although Warners’ “high-culture” experiment was primarily conducted on sound-on-disc technology, it nevertheless had an enormous impact on how Hollywood envisioned the purpose of both film music and the body on screen. By attending to the gendered representation of the operatic singing body, the chapter argues that the legacy of the castrato influenced the promotion of the tenor at the expense of the soprano. Thanks to the stardom of Metropolitan Opera singer Giovanni Martinelli, “opera” on film was increasingly defined by what the tenor could sing.

This chapter discusses the renewed promise of Ann’s career in 1935 with higher-budget, higher-profile Warner films like Sweet Music with Rudy Vallee and “G” Men with James Cagney, only to have this momentum halted by illness and dissatisfaction over a loan-out to another studio. Also detailed is the battle of wills between Ann and her studio after she refuses to visit an approved studio doctor, and Warner Bros. refuses to lift a suspension until she does so.