- Born
- Died
- Birth nameSamuel Louis Warner (née Szmuel Wonsal)
- Nicknames
- Father of Talking Pictures
- Mr. Warner
- Sam Warner could rightly be called "The Father of Talking Pictures". Of the four Warner brothers, Sam was the most in favor of using synchronized sound with movies. He was the driving force behind the studio's partnership with Western Electric to create Vitaphone. At first, he only wanted to use Vitaphone to provide music and sound effects. (This was intended as a cost-saving device, allowing local theaters to dismiss their house musicians.) When Don Juan (1926) -- the first Vitaphone feature -- debuted, it was not nearly as well received as two of the Vitaphone shorts that immediately preceded it. One was of MPPDA president Will Hays giving a short introductory speech, the other was of an opera tenor singing a selection from "Il Pagliacci." Realizing that people wanted to hear movie actors' voices, Sam pushed his brothers to the next level: talkies. The result was The Jazz Singer (1927). Originally, Al Jolson was only supposed to sing. There was to be no dialogue. Jolson insisted on ad-libbing between songs. Sam convinced his brothers to include the ad-libbed scenes and, in fact, it is those few talking scenes that made the movie the sensation it was. Ironically, Sam never saw the revolution he started. He died the day before The Jazz Singer (1927) had its world debut in New York City.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Steven W. Siferd <ssiferd@aol.com>
- Benjamin and Pearl Warner were both born in the Polish town of Krasnashiltz, Poland in 1857. Being Jewish meant suffering at the hands of an oppressive government that denied them both a chance at a formal education and guaranteed second-class status. Benjamin, a cobbler by trade, sought out a better life and left his wife and 2 children, Anna and Harry behind to make his way in America around 1880. His goal was to work hard and earn his family's passage over behind him. On a friend's advice, he settled in Baltimore and living in poverty, he saved enough within a year to make it happen. A son Albert was born in 1884, followed by Henry, Samuel, Rose and Fanny. Henry and Fanny died in childhood. Benjamin proved quite entrepreneurial, hitting upon an idea creating a novel shoe repair-while-you-wait shop. He enlisted his growing family to add to the family's bottom line by hawking newspapers and establishing shoe shine stands.
Soon, Benjamin became a traveling salesman selling kitchen ware. That venture turned into an abortive attempt at fur trapping in Canada and an unfortunate encounter with a crooked business partner. While living in poverty in Canada two more children were born; Jack L. in 1892 and David the following year. The brood returned to Baltimore in far worse financial straits than when they'd left, Benjamin returning to the shoe repair trade, resurrecting instant service. Still harboring a burning desire for success, their father moved the family to Youngstown, Ohio in 1896 and expanded his business into a grocery store/shoe repair shop. Competition was tough in the working-class Polish neighborhood and Benjamin dropped shoe repair and added a butcher shop. Two more children, Sadye and Milton completed the now enormous family - totaling 9 children, and as always, each was expected to contribute financially as soon as they were able.
Son Jack demonstrated a degree of singing talent at a young age, and was in high demand for performances at clubs, lodges and church benefits. Son Albert became a soap salesman. Son Harry became a traveling salesman, hawking everything from soap, meat to bicycle parts; his business acumen was unmistakable and he eventually ended up returning to work for his father. Sam was perhaps the most restless; he developed a reputation as a showman that grew out from one of his earliest jobs as a carnival barker... and it was Sam who first encountered a device that changed his family's fortunes forever. A friend had shown Sam an Edison Kinetoscope and, fascinated, taught him how to operate the primitive projector. After some weeks of demonstrating the new-fangled device to audiences at Chicago's White City Park, Sam was convinced that there was a real future in movies, and people would pay to see them. He returned to Youngstown and convinced his father to pawn a watch and his horse for a new projector and a copy of Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903). He then rented out an empty storefront in nearby Niles, Ohio and enlisted his family in the new business venture.
Although he only had one 800-foot movie to show (the experience was padded by singing performances by Jack with their Mom on the piano), Sam was able to consistently sell out each showing. His little theater raked in $300 the first week. Brother Harry, even more entrepreneurial than Sam, literally ran with the idea: he convinced Sam and Albert to hit the road with the projector when the lease expired on their makeshift theater. Their little movie projection circuit ran across Pennsylvania and Ohio - unusually high receipts in the city of Newcastle, convinced them to drop anchor and open up a theater there in 1903. Christened the Cascade, this was the beginning of an entertainment empire now extending into its second century. By 1907 the brothers realized that fortunes were to be had quicker in film distribution and they decided to tackle the film exchange business in Pittsburgh. By 1908, they were servicing theaters throughout most of Western Pennsylvania and set their sights on creating exchanges up and down the eastern seaboard. The popularity of movies was raging across the country and nearly every town seemed to sprout a motion picture hall.
By 1909, The Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas A. Edison, grew tired of seeing what he saw as his invention (in truth, he was one of many inventors) usurped by others without renumeration - he convinced 8 other companies (including Essanay, Vitagraph, Selig, Pathe and Biograph) to band together to fight the unlicensed film production and the logical way to attack this was through their distribution network. Edison's group became known as The Motion Picture Patents Company, or simply The Trust. And The Trust could be ruthless. The Warner Brothers, who were in no position to fight Edison's gang of hired thugs, sold their film exchanges and returned to Ohio. A few months passed and Sam returned from a trip to New York with a print of Dante's Inferno (1911) and proposed a return to the exhibition circuit. It was during this tour that Harry suggested they begin making their own films. They made two dismal short films starring themselves, then moved to California where Carl Laemmle was battling The Trust from a far safer geographical distance. There in 1912 they began 2 new film exchanges, Sam focusing on Los Angeles and Jack working San Francisco. They made and lost small fortunes buying the rights to a few films when Harry green-lighted another home-grown production, Inherited Passions (1916) [produced in 1913 as Passions Inherited and released several times under alternate titles], which was so fraught with problems that it barely recouped it's cost.
While success as film producers proved elusive, the brothers were nothing if not persistent. In 1918 they finally hit gold with their first attempt at a real feature, My Four Years in Germany (1918). Made for $50,000, it grossed $1.5 million and netted the boys $130,000. Warner Brothers remained a relatively small studio throughout most of the 1920s, relying heavily on the crowd pleasing Rin-Tin-Tin stories and their costly #1 human star, John Barrymore, who was reserved for their relatively few "prestige" productions. As the 20's progressed, the brothers became increasingly dependent upon Darryl F. Zanuck who rose rapidly through the managerial ranks of the studio. Sam, easily the most visionary of his brothers, literally dragged his brothers into the age of sound with his faith in the Vitaphone - which he saw as both a way to put Warner Brothers firmly on the map and (oddly) as a economizing move. He envisioned it allowing even the smallest theaters to project music without the cost of orchestras. Strangely, Sam never envisioned sound pictures to actually talk. The Vitaphone itself was a cumbersome device, recording an audio track onto a record for playback using an electro-mechanical device timed to the projector's motor. Although fraught with problems (high conversion costs, fragile records and film that was nearly impossible to edit), the Vitaphone proved to be ironically both a triumph and technological failure (quickly surpassed by the vastly superior Fox Movietone sound-on-film system) but Sam never lived to see it. Sadly, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage the night before the triumphant premiere of The Jazz Singer (1927), a $500,000 production that went on to gross $3,000,000. Although the system was ultimately (and quietly) abandoned completely by 1931, Sam's faith in the Vitaphone allowed Warner Brothers to thrive, allowing it to purchase Fox's valuable First National theatrical and production network and helped to insulate it against huge losses the studio would incur from 1931-35.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Jack Backstreet
- SpouseLina Basquette(July 4, 1925 - October 5, 1927) (his death, 1 child)
- RelativesJack L. Warner(Sibling)Harry M. Warner(Sibling)
- Father of Talking Films
- Sam's death resulted in the surviving three Warner brothers missing the premiere of The Jazz Singer (1927) (they were on a train headed to Los Angeles for the funeral), which would have been the greatest night of their professional lives.
- Co-founder of Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc., along with older brother Harry M. Warner (president of the company) and younger brothers Albert Warner (treasurer) and Jack L. Warner (executive in charge of production). Sam was the studio's chief executive officer until his death.
- Father: Benjamin Warner (née Wonsal); Mother: Pearl Leah Eichelbaum.
- Uncle of Jack Warner Jr.
- Of all the Warners, Sam was the studio's driving force behind technological innovation, literally dragging his reluctant brothers into the future of film. Somewhat ironically, however, he never envisioned the Vitaphone process being used for dialog. By all accounts he saw it as a cost-saving device to theaters that would enable them to eliminate live orchestras (or, in rural theaters, a piano player) that typically accompanied silent movies. He saw the Vitaphone as a means to distinguish Warners from the more prominent studios in Hollywood. Al Jolson's brief synchronized talking bits in The Jazz Singer (1927) as much as his singing proved sensational to audiences, Sadly, Sam would not live to see the full promise of talkies realized, and his fragile Vitaphone disc process would be quickly surpassed by the vastly superior Fox Movietone sound-on-film system.
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