You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story | BOOK REVIEW
February 6th 2009 07:57
Way back in 1923 brothers Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack L. Warner incorporated their new motion picture company which continues to this day to produce major films.
Warner Brothers
Warner Bros. (WB) Studios’ 85th anniversary was celebrated in 2008 and part of the celebration was the release of, You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story, an illuminating new documentary produced, written and directed by award-winning filmmaker and Time magazine Senior Film critic Richard Schickel. Clint Eastwood narrates.
The documentary You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story was broadcast in the USA in three-parts. Now you can have much of the detail on your lap in the form of this beautiful hard cover publication written by Richard Schickel & George Perry, with a Foreword by Clint Eastwood. It's a handsomely covered coffee table book spins-off and ties-in to the five-hour PBS doco that Schickel wrote and produced. Full of essays on the studio's history from its humble beginnings through a variety of changes in corporate ownership.
Insights into characters such as John Wayne, George Cukor, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland and John Ford (to name a few) are quite fascinating. The political piquancy of WB is quite evident as you sort through the hard boiled Detectives and zany crazy comics, the very drunk Elizabeth Taylor (in Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?) who have all featured heavily in one way or another in the company's history.
Warner Bros. like all film production companies tend to reflect edgy or deeply held values of society - they'll swing from one extreme to another; sometimes it's high moral ground other times it's kooky sexy strangeness they explore. Producing films for example like Driving Miss Daisy and The Witches of Eastwick in the 1980's they were not only encouraging great emerging Australian film making talent, they were giving out a vast amount of information about injustice and intolerance, a very worthy thing to do even embedded in a drama or a comedy.
WB sold us Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, Gypsy, Risky Business, and What's Up Doc? and Schickel & Perry cover the studio's entire history with fantastic photographs from many many films.
Poster art from films such as Yankee Doodle Dandy is beautifully reproduced with full page glossy pictures from WB's all time classic, and one of the most remembered WB films of all time Casablanca. More recent films recorded in this great history of the studio include The Matrix and The Polar Express, Sweeny Todd, of course I could go on but I think the best advice for film lovers is go out and find this book, add it to your library. It will be a great coffee table book because it is more than a nice picture book, it's got history, guts and glamor for sure.
For more information about Richard Schickel and his work, visit www.richardschickel.com
David Jobling
Warner Brothers
Warner Bros. (WB) Studios’ 85th anniversary was celebrated in 2008 and part of the celebration was the release of, You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story, an illuminating new documentary produced, written and directed by award-winning filmmaker and Time magazine Senior Film critic Richard Schickel. Clint Eastwood narrates.
The documentary You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story was broadcast in the USA in three-parts. Now you can have much of the detail on your lap in the form of this beautiful hard cover publication written by Richard Schickel & George Perry, with a Foreword by Clint Eastwood. It's a handsomely covered coffee table book spins-off and ties-in to the five-hour PBS doco that Schickel wrote and produced. Full of essays on the studio's history from its humble beginnings through a variety of changes in corporate ownership.
Insights into characters such as John Wayne, George Cukor, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland and John Ford (to name a few) are quite fascinating. The political piquancy of WB is quite evident as you sort through the hard boiled Detectives and zany crazy comics, the very drunk Elizabeth Taylor (in Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?) who have all featured heavily in one way or another in the company's history.
Warner Bros. like all film production companies tend to reflect edgy or deeply held values of society - they'll swing from one extreme to another; sometimes it's high moral ground other times it's kooky sexy strangeness they explore. Producing films for example like Driving Miss Daisy and The Witches of Eastwick in the 1980's they were not only encouraging great emerging Australian film making talent, they were giving out a vast amount of information about injustice and intolerance, a very worthy thing to do even embedded in a drama or a comedy.
WB sold us Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, Gypsy, Risky Business, and What's Up Doc? and Schickel & Perry cover the studio's entire history with fantastic photographs from many many films.
Poster art from films such as Yankee Doodle Dandy is beautifully reproduced with full page glossy pictures from WB's all time classic, and one of the most remembered WB films of all time Casablanca. More recent films recorded in this great history of the studio include The Matrix and The Polar Express, Sweeny Todd, of course I could go on but I think the best advice for film lovers is go out and find this book, add it to your library. It will be a great coffee table book because it is more than a nice picture book, it's got history, guts and glamor for sure.
For more information about Richard Schickel and his work, visit www.richardschickel.com
David Jobling
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