You may have gathered from the rather long-winded title of this book that you are about to be told a story, an old and familiar one. The story of how the four sons of a Jewish cobbler from Poland created one of the most successful companies in the USA during the twentieth century has been told many times. 1 The Warner Brothers story is one of the best stories to come out of Hollywood. As with all good stories, it can be retold in different ways by different people. This book is an attempt to retell that story by concentrating specifically on how this film studio maintained close links with Broadway theatre from 1923. This story is less concerned with Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner, the four brothers behind the company, than with the actors they brought from Broadway in the 1920s and 1930s to make motion pictures based on stage plays.
The idea behind this book was to examine a relatively short and already well-documented period in the history of a Hollywood studio to see how it could be written differently and how a brief timespan can produce a rich and wide-ranging account. Interwar Hollywood seemed to be a particularly fertile period in terms of both industrial and social transformation, namely the transition to sound and the Depression. Having decided to focus specifically on Warner Bros., the period from 1923 to 1939 appeared to be the most logical timeframe. 1923 was not only the year that Warner Brothers ceased to trade under this name and became Warner Bros. Pictures Incorporated, but it also marked the beginning of its association with leading Broadway producer David Belasco and, under this arrangement, the company produced its first picture based on a Broadway stage play, Avery Hopwood’s The Gold Diggers (1919) . Meanwhile, December 1939 seemed to be an appropriate point at which to conclude, simply because it represented the end of an era (the 1930s). This timespan certainly offers the chance to explore the impact of a series of substantial changes (industrial, technological, economic and social) on a sector of the American film industry (Warners) over a relatively short period (just 17 years). As such, it places a greater emphasis on depth than breadth, and does so in the knowledge that numerous existing published histories of Hollywood provide extensive coverage of the American film industry from 1895 to the recent past, surveying a broad cross-section of major and minor studios over the many decades.
But why focus a book on the links between Broadway and Hollywood exclusively on Warner Bros.? Compared to other major Hollywood film companies, particularly Paramount Pictures , it might seem that Warners’ connections with Broadway were rather tenuous, especially during the 1920s and 1930s. This is a studio largely associated with the production of genre pictures, which hired no-nonsense workmanlike directors such as William Wellman , Mervyn LeRoy and Lloyd Bacon to make gangster films and backstage musical comedies. If this is a common assumption, then the extent to which the company remained dedicated to building up a large stock company of actors and stars who could perform regularly in prestige pictures may come as a surprise to many readers. The desire to surprise was, admittedly, a motivating factor here. In order to achieve this, When Warners Brought Broadway to Hollywood, 1923–1939 details how actors trained for the Broadway stage contributed to the ongoing development of screen acting at Warners during the late silent and early sound eras. In so doing, it explores the links between stage and screen rather than distinguishing film from theatre or the cinematic from the theatrical. Theatrical films, often denigrated as both uncinematic and middlebrow, lie at the heart of my project. The focus on theatrical films highlights the ways in which evolutions in film form and, more specifically, film acting involved the transfer of styles and methods from the theatre (from which the vast bulk of Hollywood’s personnel was drawn during this period) to cinema.
In Theatre to Cinema, Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs explore the interconnections of stage and screen during the first two decades of the twentieth century. 2 Here, they argue that the advent of realism and naturalism in theatre at the close of the nineteenth century did not mark the demise of pictorial and histrionic styles of acting on screen. My book further suggests that the pace of silent feature films in the 1920s enabled stage–trained actors to more accurately recreate naturalistic theatrical performances for the cinema, as in general the films were much slower than the short films of the 1900s and early 1910s. Brewster and Jacobs have explained that the faster pace of short films prior to 1920 forced many screen actors to employ more emphatic and extended gestural styles, often involving pantomime or “dumbshow,” particularly when appearing in early one- or two-reel silent photoplays . 3 While this style largely disappeared from American cinema in the early to mid-1920s due to technological improvements and longer narratives (see Chap. 3 for more details), it resurfaced in the late 1920s as a result of early sound film practices (see Chap. 5). By having a timeframe from 1923 to 1939, it can be seen how the advent of talking pictures once again required actors to use emphatic posturing, physical gestures, movements and facial expressions to compensate for the relatively primitive sound technology of the late 1920s. Thereafter, refinements in sound technology in the early 1930s enabled actors to use their voices with greater subtlety and to restrict their body language once again to more subtle and nuanced details (see Chap. 5). My book suggests, therefore, that film acting evolved in fits and starts rather than progressing in a straightforward fashion from pictorialism and histrionics to realism and subtlety, moving back and forth between different modes over time. It also suggests that even when naturalism became the norm in the mid- to late 1930s, histrionic acting survived in Hollywood and was even regularly praised by influential reviewers and critics.
Many of the terms used to describe acting styles in the paragraph above recur throughout this book. Before proceeding further, it is perhaps necessary to clarify the meaning of each of these: namely, pictorial, histrionic, pantomime, classical, romantic, expressionist, realist and naturalist acting. Although hard and fast meanings seldom pertain to these terms across the diverse literature on acting in theatre and cinema, I am working with particular conceptions of each term. So, for instance, “pictorial” acting is used to describe actors’ adoption (consciously or otherwise) of postures and poses reminiscent of famous paintings and sculptures. 4 The term “histrionic,” on the other hand, is used to denote a screen acting style that conjures up a sense of the theatrical, giving audiences a vivid impression of how the same scene might have looked and/or sounded when performed on stage. 5 Both pictorial and histrionic acting involve the use of “pantomime,” which denotes an emphatic gestural style that seeks to express meaning clearly to an audience without the use of words, speech or voices. 6
Classical acting is used in this book to refer to a style of performance associated with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 7 This was an idealized style that involved highly controlled and codified gestures, which later generations of actors such as Edwin Forrest and Richard Mansfield emboldened with more robust movements and actions in order to generate stronger emotions in what became referred to as either the heroic style or romanticism in the nineteenth century. 8
Closely linked to romanticism is expressionism, which is associated largely with actors working with the director-producer Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theatre in Berlin in the first two decades of the twentieth century, as well as the silent German cinema of the early 1920s. This style was heavily influenced by the modernist (avant-garde) work of several groups of artists working in Berlin, Dresden and Munich prior to World War I (such as Der Sturm, Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter). It was characterized by an intense and prolonged concentration on hands and eyes (involving the tensing of muscles), along with distorted and exaggerated postures, often with highly artificial (indeed, painterly or graphic) makeup and costume. By such means, the emphasis was shifted from realism, naturalism and objectivity to the fantastic, the psychological and subjective. 9
In stark contrast to classicism , romanticism and expressionism are realism and naturalism, two largely inseparable terms that are hard to distinguish definitively. I use these to refer to the same thing: namely, a concern on the part of actors, writers and directors to simulate an everyday reality as accurately as possible. In regard to the theatre, these terms commonly evoke a style of acting adopted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century for performances of plays by the likes of Henrik Ibsen and Edward (Ned) Sheldon . Actors such as Mrs. Minnie Madden Fiske , for example, developed a more nuanced and intimate acting style that used small and subtle gestures to create more lifelike and psychologically complex characters. 10 In her concern to reproduce quotidian gestures, movements and expressions based on observations of life, Mrs. Fiske became an early proponent of “Modern act...