Peter Bart: Jack Warner Presaged Trump, Hated Roosevelt, And Might Have Voted For ‘Oppenheimer’ At The Oscars
07.03.2024 - 23:17
/ deadline.com
“That movie was the President’s idea, not mine, but it was a demand, not a suggestion.”
The speaker was Jack Warner in a 1947 foreshadowing of his Donald Trumpian style. I recalled his remarks this week as I drove onto the Warner Bros lot, the fabled arena where Warner long reigned.
In his heyday, Warner was a Trump pre-clone in terms of temperament and rhetoric – a man who boasted about his mental acuity yet, to Hollywood’s power players, seemed occasionally unhinged.
I was visiting Warner Bros this week to spend some time with David Zaslav, a figure who, in temperament and politics, is the mirror opposite of Warner but whose empire is nonetheless a product of Warner’s erratic vision. Some believe that Zaslav’s studio – Hollywood in general – might still glean some insight from its founder’s idiosyncrasies.
A career maverick, Warner promoted gangster movies like Public Enemy or Little Caesar to his Depression-era ticket audience and fostered Casablanca in 1942 when moviegoers wanted to forget war. He bought the rights to My Fair Lady in 1964 when movie musicals were dying (it worked) and, early on, built Rin Tin Tin into a blockbuster though he hated dogs.
He might even have voted for Oppenheimer (see below).
A stalwart Republican, Jack Warner often quarreled with President Franklin Roosevelt, called Winston Churchill “foolish” and cheerfully put up $40,000 in lawyers’ fees to rescue Errol Flynn (star of Captain Blood) of rape charges.
Warner’s frequent speeches at banquets inspired his friend Jack Benny to observe: “He must be ad libbing because no professional writer would ever create that sh*t.” On at least two occasions Warner delivered acceptances for awards he hadn’t won.
Jack Warner never met Zaslav but would