Warner Brothers Should Remain True To Its Artistic Roots
The merger with Netflix will hopefully preserve the WB tradition
In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart never says, “Play it again, Sam!”
He says, “Play it!”
But those words, like the film and Bogey himself, will resonate forever, one of the most famous lines in one of the best films ever made and delivered by arguably the greatest icon in the history of cinema.
Casablanca was a Jack L. Warner production, a classic WB film from the 1940s.
And those lines were written by Julius and Philip Epstein, two of the best screenwriters of that era or any era.
I was reminded of all this a few days ago after reading the news that Warner Brothers Discovery had accepted an $83 billion offer from Netflix for the Warner film studio, as well as HBO and its streaming service.
The offer, which is subject to regulatory approval, does not affect CNN or TNT and other cable networks at Warner Brothers Discovery.
CNN and the other cable stations will be spun off into a separate company.
Later, in this essay, I will come back to the business side of this merger, which will be reviewed by antitrust regulators in the U.S. and Europe. And it is possible that there will be competing bids from other companies, including Skydance Media and Comcast, whose earlier offers were rejected by Warner Brothers Discovery.
For now, though, I would like to focus on the importance of film as an art form, one of the greatest art forms of the past century and one that, like all art forms, aspires to music.
Indeed, some of the best films, such as Casablanca, integrate music, like the song, “As Times Goes By,” into the storyline; some of the best films also feature dialogue that itself has a musicality, a timelessness and a beauty to it, such as the words of the Epstein brothers, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
Without sounding too religious, we probably all recall some of the verse from the Bible and other holy texts.
Verse, chanted by Bar Mitzvah boys and Bat Mitzvah girls, catechism students and children of all religious backgrounds and ages, was first sung generations ago.
Yes, long before it was written down, the Bible was cantillated.
One of the most famous passages from the Bible is this one from the New Testament: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
There are Kabbalists who believe that God created the heavens and the earth with language itself, and He did so by reciting the Torah and the Word.
This is another way of saying that we all come from the oral tradition.
Perhaps, the greatest thing that anyone of us can do, the most Godly thing that we can do, is to create our own secular scripture through the arts.
It goes without saying that you cannot do so without love, for God is love.
In the thousands of years since God gave us the Torah and the Word, humans have transcribed the Bible and other holy texts, as well as new works of poetry and prose on papyrus, on rocks, in caves, and in codices.
At one time, it was thought that writing down scripture, Greek tragedies, epic poems and other works of religious and literary art would detract from the power of memory, the cognitive strength of bards and troubadours to retain and recite the Word or secular traditions.
Fortunately, the early scribes did write down the Torah, the Word, the plays of the Greek dramatists, and all the works in the canon, secular or ecclesiastic.
This has been a blessing for mankind because very few bards or troubadours still exist, and even fewer can retain and recite passages of the Bible, poetry or the works of Shakespeare, who was mocked when he wanted his 37 plays to be published.
We can thank God that Shakespeare’s friends did indeed compile the Bard’s works in the First Folio, a development that has enriched humanity ever since.
It is fair to say that we would not have as much wisdom or inner serenity as homo sapiens without the publication of the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, and the works of other prophets, literary novelists, playwrights and poets over the millennia.
Again, I write all of this, following the news that Warner Brothers Discovery has accepted an offer of $83 billion from Netflix for the acquisition of the WB studio and library, HBO’s streaming service, and other components of a company that has gone through many ownership changes over the past few decades.
That company, Warner Brothers, like many studios, dates back in essence to the early 1900s, when a number of Jewish immigrants and first-generation Americans basically invented the film business.
The Warner Brothers, a Jewish family, moved their operation to the Los Angeles area a little more than 100 years ago, when they set up their studio at a Burbank lot in the 1920s. I went on a tour of the fabled lot recently on my birthday in October.
It is a lot that has seen a great deal of history.
The first talkie, The Jazz Singer, was a Warner Brothers production in 1927.
Warner has long been an innovator in the movie business, in introducing sound as well as Technicolor and other advances to the art form.
But, while Warner Brothers has evolved with the times, adapting to new technologies, the WB crest means something else to me.
Warner Brothers was never per se about technology.
To me, Warner Brothers was always about the beauty of the art form.
Yes, there have been other classic studios over the past 100 years.
MGM will always be associated with musicals such as The Wizard of Oz. Disney will always be known for its animation.
And some other studios have had a bit of a brand identity in recent decades.
But I will always think of Warner Brothers for its films from the 1930s and ‘40s, films to which I was introduced by my father in late 1971, when I was six years sold.
Long before the existential threat of artificial intelligence, long before the Internet and social media and the information superhighway, which in the mid-1990s was as popular a phrase as rage bait, long before satellite and cable TV, and even before the concept of pay TV stations such as HBO had fully taken off, there was the pre-1950 Warner Brothers library, which I watched as a little boy.
I did not do so in movie theaters.
Nor did I watch those films on Turner Classic Movies, a network that did not begin until the 1990s, if memory serves.
And, needless to say, I did not watch the Warner Brothers classics on Netflix, for streaming was not a known entity in the early 1970s.
No, I watched the pre-1950 Warner library on channel 5, Metromedia TV, an independent station based in New York.
Metromedia TV had a deal with Warner Brothers to show its classic films, starring actors like Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson.
And so, there I was, just a little boy, glued to the TV screen in our home in Hamden, Conn., a suburb of New Haven, watching gangster pictures and Westerns, war movies and swashbucklers.
None of this would have been possible, had it not been for the stroke of genius by my father, who ushered the imaginative realm of Warner Brothers into my life in late 1971, after we bought our first color TV, a Sony, on sale at Caldor’s.
Yes, my father did a beautiful thing for me, for I was a depressed child, who had stopped reading, who had stopped getting pleasure from books.
Neither my father nor I could understand what had happened to me, a kid, who had been reading and reading with joy since my mother had taught me to do so on my 3rd birthday.
This is not the space to dwell on the evil of my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Crawley
(yes, that was her name), who abused me after I missed school for the Jewish High Holy Days in October 1970, right around the time of my 5th birthday.
As I have written elsewhere, I dissociated for decades due to the savagery of Mrs. Crawley, who dragged me to what she called the “dunce corner” because I, the only practicing Jewish student in my class, missed school for Yom Kippur.
Rather than focus on that trauma in this column, I would rather discuss the brilliance of my dad, who, as I say, brought me into another dreamscape, different from that of books.
It was the world of fast-talking cabbies and shoe-shines, boxers and hoods, a world of adventure and wisecracks that often was set on the Lower East Side of New York, a set that Warner Brothers still uses for its New York films.
It has used that set since the days of Public Enemy, a gangster picture that made James Cagney a star.
I know that there are many younger people, who associate Warner Brothers with superheroes and Harry Potter.
It is a wonderful tribute to Warner that it has continued to develop new characters and properties in recent decades.
But, for me, Warner Brothers will always be the studio that gave us Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, White Heat, Dark Passage and so many other classics of the 1930s and ‘40s.
Not one of these pictures may quite reach the artistic genius of Citizen Kane, which was not a Warner film, but I would argue that the films of Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, John Huston and others at WB in the 1930s and ‘40s constitute a body of work that is unequaled by any other studio at that time or any other.
There is only one Bogey. There is only one Cagney. There is only one John Garfield, who has been mostly forgotten by many people.
But I have not forgotten John Garfield and his films, like The Sea Wolf and They Made Me a Criminal, which were some of the best movies of the late 1930s and 1940s.
And I have not forgotten Bogey and Bacall, Jimmy the Gent, as well as the Warner Brothers supporting players, like Alan Hale and Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, and other stars such as Olivia de Havilland and Ann Sheridan.
No, I have not forgotten those films and those actors.
They helped me heal when I was a little boy, traumatized by my kindergarten teacher, a sadist.
Movies, as I say, are one of the great art forms of the past century, and the Warner pictures I watched on Saturdays and Sundays, along with Bugs Bunny cartoons, played a major role in nurturing me when I was a child.
They gave me friends, like Bogey, Cagney, Garfield and the others, whom I would see just about every weekend, for I viewed those movies nearly every Saturday and Sunday throughout my years in elementary school in the 1970s.
It was only later, in the mid-1980s, that Murdoch bought a series of TV stations, including channel 5 in New York, which became the flagship for Fox.
And it was only some time after that when distribution pipelines began to change more significantly.
In the mid-1990s, no one knew which device would win in the fight for control of the information superhighway.
Would the winner be the personal computer? The wireless phone? Cable systems? TV? Satellite?
Lost in this debate was the larger issue, with which I began this essay.
And the larger issue revolved around the nature of so-called content.
Art is not fungible.
The stories that fill the airwaves, the screens and the streaming devices are not all created equal.
Content is not just something that you plug into a TV, a cable device, a satellite dish, a computer screen, a movie palace.
No, films and novels and TV shows, at their best, rise to the level of art, rise to the level of poetry, of the Word.
I do not claim to know much about Netflix and its business model.
My wife and I do use some streaming services. And it strikes me that the fear that streaming services will wipe out the movie business is probably overstated, as was the case decades ago with the fear that VCR’s would wipe out exhibitors.
For that matter, there were those who feared that the invention of film itself would stop people from reading books.
Many people may be losing their stamina for reading long novels, but all of us crave wisdom and art. And we are not going to find the sublime on social media, whose algorithms are designed to feed grievances or provoke so-called rage bait.
No, we are far more likely to find the sublime in books and movies, plays and poems that have a beauty, a musicality, to them.
All art forms do aspire to music.
This reminds us once again that God originally chanted the Torah and the Word.
It is also true that He has always wanted us to retain and recite scripture back to Him.
We may no longer have so many bards and troubadours, but we can still appreciate the blessings of a well-told story.
And we are more likely to find those stories at a studio like Warner Brothers so long as it maintains its commitment to the art form.
We don’t want corporate people or politicians interfering with movies, just as we don’t want suits firing CNN anchors, which, according to The Guardian, Trump wanted the Ellisons to do, had Skydance Media, which owns Paramount, acquired Warner Brothers.
For now, we can all rejoice that Trump and Skydance have failed.
The Ellisons, who own the latter, wanted to acquire CNN as well as TNT and other cable networks owned by Warner Brothers Discovery, in addition to the film studio and HBO.
We can all be grateful that Netflix’s $83 billion offer will not involve CNN and the cable division, which, as I noted earlier, will be spun off as a separate company.
Incidentally, Paramount had a successful run as a studio in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the Robert Evans era.
Some remember movies like Love Story.
But I have never taken to that film or novel.
Love means never having to say you’re sorry is not only a cliché; it is a line devoid of merit, devoid of truth.
I will gladly take, Here’s looking at you, kid, or any of the classic lines from Casablanca.
Julius and Philip Epstein might indeed have been channeling God when they wrote those lines, lines that do have a timelessness to them and that resonate with the truth.
Yes, there is a musicality and a beauty to the verse of great writers, whether those writers pen Casablanca, Hamlet, or the Psalms, among other sublime works of art.
We should remember once again that God is the Word.
I know that not everyone believes in God, but I am convinced that the great writers are prophets, who receive the love of the Lord.
Yes, I will take Casablanca over Love Story any day.
And I will never forget watching those Warner Brothers classics from the 1930s and ‘40s.
There is a snappiness to the dialogue and an optimism that runs through those pictures.
Those movies cheered me up and blessed me when I was a little boy.
As Humphrey Bogart would say, “Play it!”
Yes, play that music forever.