Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story.

HOLLYWOOD BE THY NAME - The Warner Brothers Story by Cass Warner Sperling and Cork Millner, with Jack Warner Jr. (Prima Publishing 365 p.) is 'must' reading for any cinema historian and a riveting tome to boot. You probably can't get much closer to the beginnings of the Warner Brothers Studio

What comes out of it is the astonishing fact that the brothers were able to make it all work in the first place and that, despite their disparate characters, the studio grew and produced some of the greatest films ever made.

This, after all, was the studio that came up with The Jazz Singer which started sound in movies, and the great gangster cycle, and Casablanca and all the rest. Behind it were the brothers and, as the years passed and Sam and Albert died, more and more Harry and Jack, the battling siblings.

One of the best things about this book is its arrangement. The brothers are dealt with one by one, and the stories are either told historically or else related by relatives, like Jack Warner Jr., Jack's son, Barbara Warner, Ronald Reagan, producer Milton Sperling (Jack's son-in-law), Richard Gully and others. They all make revealing comments.

There are some great stories, like the time when Jack Warner turned down Clark Gable for a role in Little Caesar because the actor's ears were too big. "He'll never make it," Jack Warner is quoted as saying.

Oddly enough, it is this very episode which was told to this reviewer by Darryl F. Zanuck who, at that point was working for Warner Bros. and who, in a moment of candor admitted that he had made the "stupid mistake" of turning down Gable, who then became a big star at MGM. (Zanuck also refused a role to a beautiful youngster who happened to be his daughter's friend. Her name was Elizabeth Taylor and she became a star in National Velvet.)

The Warner brother who comes out the worst from this history is Jack, an often rude, crude, and utterly unpredictable man who was the prototypical Hollywood executive, power-mad, very rich, spoiled cruel, ill-mannered and opinionated, and given to making vulgar jokes in public.

There is that memorable incident when a furious Harry Warner chased Jack down the studio street with an iron bar, and eventually threw it at him. Harry felt Jack had betrayed him and the family (which indeed was what he had done, having convinced all the brothers to sell their shares and having made a behind-their-back arrangement to buy back his own stocks and to continue as studio head after they had bowed out). It was a Machiavellian move and the brothers - particularly Harry - never forgave him.

In his foreword, Jack Warner Jr., Jack's son, writes: "His (Jack Warner's) was the anguished story of a man driven by fear, ambition and the quest for absolute power and control - the little brother telling the big boys he saw as his tormentors to go to hell."

Jack was totally different from his brothers who were very much in the Jewish immigrant tradition. Harry, particularly was a moralist, who felt movies should uplift and educate. It was Harry who raised hell - or at least tried to - when the married Jack started having mistresses all over the place and eventually left his wife to marry the beautiful Ann Warner.

When Harry remonstrated with him about having Ann as his mistress, Jack told him to "go to hell" in so many words. As Milton Sperling writes: "As far as Harry was concerned, Jack was a first-class screw-up" and he gives ample examples of Jack's foul-mouth language and offensive jokes, preferably told in company.

In 1964, Jack Warner locked out his son from the studio and in his My First Hundred Years in Hollywood biography, he devoted a lot of space to his masseur, but never mentioned Harry or the manipulation of the 1956 Warner studio stock sale, which tore the family apart and left Jack in charge.

The book tells how at a Screen Producers Guild dinner Jack Warner called for an industry war on the film critics, which he called "downbeat bums". Toastmaster George Jessel shook his head and asked: "How the hell did you become the head of a great studio?"

When Harry died, Jack, who was vacationing with Zanuck on the Riviera (and losing and winning heavily at the casinos every night) refused to return for the funeral.

On Oscar night, when Casablanca won and producer Hal Wallis walked up to receive the award, Jack sprinted ahead of him and took hold of the statue. Later Wallis would state publicly that Jack had virtually nothing to do with the film.

During the war, Warner Bros. Backed off from musicals and made a series of flag-waving movies like Yankee Doodle Dandy and Mission Moscow (which landed the studio in a lot of hot water with Congress and brought out the worst in the right-wing-oriented Jack Warner).

Gradually, the end came for the flamboyant Jack. He barely survived a terrible car accident on the Riviera. In 1948, the government forced the studios to divorce themselves from their theater chains (an event inaccurately reported in the book, with the authors making the astonishing mistake of writing that "the Supreme Court sued the studios").

In 1957, when the Harry Warners celebrated their gold wedding anniversary, Jack suddenly drove up, grabbed a glass of champagne and asked: "Where's Harry? I'm busting my balls at the studio and he's living the good life." Embarrassment all around and a final, cold encounter of the brothers. Later, widow Rea Warner would say: "Harry didn't die. Jack Killed him."

Eventually Jack Warner left the studio and made a couple of independent movies ending up with the disastrous Camelot. Jack Warner died in 1978.

HOLLYWOOD BE THY NAME is aptly titled and, to those who don't know the history of the Warner brothers, it will come as a revelation. Whether Jack Warner would have been the arrogant, unpleasant and cruel person he was if he had been in the shoe business instead of the motion picture industry is open to question. Certainly, others in his position - like Columbia's Harry Cohn - exhibited similar characteristics. The fact remains that, lousy character or not, he still presided over a studio that, one way or another, contributed enormously to the entertainment of America and, scoundrel or not, he deserves much of the credit for that. - F.H.