THE BROTHERS WHO GAMBLED ON A NEW SYSTEM

Table of Contents

WARNER BROTHERS

Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner grew up above their father's shoe-repair shop. Sons of Benjamin Wonsal, a Polish-Jewish immigrant cobbler who had anglicized the family name to Warner after arriving in America. The brothers scraped together enough to buy a projector and a print of "The Great Train Robbery" in 1903, touring it town to town before opening a nickelodeon in New Castle, Pennsylvania.

They incorporated Warner Bros. Pictures in 1923, the smallest and least funded of what would become Hollywood's "Big Five" studios, perpetually the scrappy underdog next to giants like Paramount and MGM. That underdog position is what made the gamble that followed possible, they had far less to lose by trying something reckless.

By the mid-1920s, engineers had built workable sound-on-disc technology, but every major studio treated it as a gimmick not worth the enormous cost of retrofitting theaters. Sam Warner disagreed, and convinced his brothers to sink roughly three million dollars, a sum that could have sunk the studio outrightly into Vitaphone, a system that synchronized a film reel to a phonograph disc played in the projection booth.

Sam Warner never saw the triumph. He died of complications from a mastoid infection on October 5, 1927, one day before "The Jazz Singer" premiered. His brothers reportedly left the premiere early to attend to his funeral arrangements.

In 1934, a Warner Bros. sales representative in Germany, Joe Kauffman, was murdered by Nazi brownshirts. Harry Warner shut down the studio's German operations in response, years before most of Hollywood, which continued doing profitable business in Nazi Germany well into the late 1930s. Warner also barred Nazi officials and organizations from studio premieres and events.

The studio the Warners built went on to release "Casablanca" in 1942 and, across the decades since, has remained one of the handful of companies still standing from Hollywood's founding generation. But the more durable inheritance is structural; the conversion to synchronized sound they forced on the entire industry in 1927 is the single sharpest technological break in film history, more disruptive to how movies were made and watched than colour, than television, arguably than digital projection.

They were immigrants' sons who ran the company like a family business because it was one, prone to both real moral courage and real ethical compromise depending on which decade and which pressure they were under. What survived them was not a clean legacy but an industry permanently reshaped by a bet the bigger studios were too cautious to make.

365 men who changed the world.

Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.