As I initiated this discussion, here are some quotes I have
dug up from various sources (I'm writing a book on a
copyright infringement lawsuit involving Warner Brothers,
Knopf, CBS, Dashiell Hammett and others in the late
1940s/early 1950s). These have nothing to do with what I am
writing except as a bit of background I have found.
Billy Wilder: "The had different kinds of ambitions and
different methods of achieving them. Warner Brothers, let us
say, was a little tougher on its writers. You had to clock
in. Not at Paramount. Not at MGM I came. I went. But Harry
Warner would go around and kill the lights in the toilets
because that was the kind of boss he was." (An Empire of
Their Own, Neal Gabler, p. 189)
In the same book, a Warner Brothers executive, Milton
Sperling, is quoted: "MGM was a studio that spent. It was a
studio of white telephones. Warners had black telephones."
(p. 189)
Gabler adds the economizing is what made the style. "Warners'
pictures were blunt and tough and fast. Their miseen-scene
was flat and cold; their visual cadences clipped. One
producer remembers cutting individual frames of film from
each scene to quicken the pace." (p. 190)
As a result, Warners' went after stories, not stars. The
Warners' in-house slogan was "t - t - t: timely, topical, and
not typical."
Quote from Cagney: "It seemed as if the Warner boys were
confusing their actors with their racehorses. The pace was
incredible. I think I did about six pictures in the first
forty weeks...This kind of pressure the studio put on us
because they wanted to get the thing done as cheaply as
possible. At times, we started at nine in the morning and
worked straight through to the next morning." (p. 191)
Douglas Gomery in The Hollywood Studio System writes, "Harry
Warner ran a low-cost operation, and stars hated to work for
him because of his penny-pinching." He notes the only three
Warners' stars in the top 25 salaries in the late 1930s to
early 1940s were Cagney, Bette Davis and Bogart. Gomery
continues, "Harry Warner had a simple vision. He sought a
cut-rate movie factory, which would produce the required
number of features and shorts for Warners' theatres each
year. Warners operated on a volume basis, trying to make a
small profit on every film." (p. 131)
Ethan Mordden in _The Hollywood Studios_ writes, "No wonder
Cagney lived in a permanent state of war with his studio. No
other lot remotely approached Warners' record for
disciplining and even suing its own top breadwinners." (p.
244)
One of the reasons Jack Warner was pleased with the third
adaptation of The Maltese Falcon (by Huston) is that it
finished two days early and $54,000 under budget.
Bill Harker
At 12:38 AM 11/17/2006 +0000, you wrote:
>I am not sure that those films were that cheap. I
remember that years
>ago Cagney was asked about "cheapness" in an
interview. He said that
>they didn't squander money but that he, Robinson,
Bogart and the rest
>of the boys did pretty well for themselves. Of
course, they didn't
>make the kind of money that is (mostly) wasted
nowadays on stars. I
>can't imagine that a movie like White Heat was made
on the cheap. It
>doesn't look cheap. Neither does D.O.A. look or feel
cheap. The
>cinematography was almost uniformly excellent: it is
a character in
>this whole genre.
>
>Best,
>
>MrT
>
>
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