page_title: Jack L. Warner
section_title: Depression era
hierarchical_section_title: Jack L. Warner / Professional career / Depression era
caption_attribution_description: Studio publicity photo of actor James Cagney.
context_page_description: Jack Leonard Warner was a Canadian-American film executive who was the president and driving force behind the Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California. Warner's career spanned some 45 years, its duration surpassing that of any other of the seminal Hollywood studio moguls.
  As co-head of production at Warner Bros. Studios, he worked with his brother, Sam Warner, to procure the technology for the film industry's first talking picture, The Jazz Singer. After Sam's death, Jack clashed with his surviving older brothers, Harry and Albert Warner. He assumed exclusive control of the film production company in the 1950s, when he secretly purchased his brothers' 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."
context_section_description: The studio emerged relatively unscathed from the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and produced a broad range of films, including "backstage musicals," "crusading biopics," "swashbucklers," and "women's pictures." As Thomas Schatz observed, this repertoire was "a means of stabilizing marketing and sales, of bringing efficiency and economy into the production of some fifty feature films per year, and of distinguishing Warners' collective output from that of its competitors". Warner Bros. became best known, however, for its hard-hitting social dramas, whose production Jack Warner tended to support. These included gangster classics such as Little Caesar and The Public Enemy as well as the critically acclaimed I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, starring Paul Muni. Some of these films reflected a surprising (albeit temporary) shift in Warner's political outlook. By 1932, despite his longstanding association with the Republican Party, he openly supported Democratic presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, staging a "Motion Picture and Electrical Parade Sports Pageant" at L.A. Stadium in Roosevelt's honor. This development foreshadowed an "era in which Warner would recruit the most New Deal-ish (often simultaneously the most left-wing) writers".
  During this period, Warner took an active role in recruiting talent. To furnish Warner Bros. with much needed "star power", he raided contract players from rival studios, in some cases offering to double their salaries. This strategy yielded three leading stars from Paramount Studios – William Powell, Kay Francis, and Ruth Chatterton. In 1929, Warner persuaded British stage and screen actor George Arliss to play the title role in a remake of the 1921 United Artists film Disraeli, a project that turned out to be a box-office hit. Then, in 1930, he spotted future stars James Cagney, Joan Blondell, and Frank McHugh in the cast of a New York play called Penny Arcade. Although Cagney turned out to be Warner's greatest prize, he was also the studio executive's biggest professional challenge. During his frequent arguments with Warner, Cagney often resorted to screaming the Yiddish obscenities he learned during his upbringing in the Yorkville district of New York City. According to a 1937 Fortune magazine article, Warner's most intense contract disputes involved Cagney, "who got sick of being typed as a girl-hitting mick and of making five pictures a year instead of four."
  The studio's executive producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, resigned during a contract dispute with Harry Warner in 1933. According to a 1933 letter that Jack wrote to Will H. Hays, then president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Zanuck requested a higher salary and "indicated his desire to raise the salaries of the actors and personnel in the motion pictures we were producing". That year, Zanuck established Twentieth Century Pictures, which merged with Fox Film Corporation in 1935. Longtime producer for the studio, Hal B. Wallis, took over as the studio's executive producer. Warner, however, denied Wallis the sweeping powers enjoyed by Zanuck, and the result was a decentralization of creative and administrative control that often created confusion at the studio. Under the new system, each picture was assigned a supervisor who was usually plucked from the ranks of the studio's screenwriters. Although Warner Bros. maintained a high rate of production throughout the 1930s, some pictures showed an uneven quality that reflected "not only the difficulty of shifting to a supervisory system but also the consequences of dispersing authority into the creative ranks".
  Meanwhile, Jack Warner's role in production became somewhat limited. After acquiring a creative property, he often had little to do with a film's production until it was ready for preview. Nevertheless, Warner could be heavy-handed in his dealings with employees, and he was "merciless in his firings." Film director Gottfried Reinhardt claimed that Warner "derived pleasure" from humiliating subordinates. "Harry Cohn was a sonofabitch," Reinhardt said, "but 
caption: James Cagney made 38 films with Warner Bros., cementing its position as a major studio[71]
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