Chris Yogerst
UW-System Fellow (2021-2022)
Arts and Humanities, UW-Milwaukee
The Warner brothers (Harry, Albert, Jack, Sam) were more than a film studio. Groucho Marx once referred to the brothers as helming “the only studio with any guts.” The brothers used their position as social and political influencers to engage, criticize, sympathize, motivate, and, when necessary, wage war with their surrounding culture. Nobody did more in 20th Century Hollywood by using both film and public oration to educate, entertain, and enrage. Warner Bros. used nearly every genre to critique society from the gangster (The Public Enemy) and musical (Gold Diggers of 1933) to adventure (The Adventures of Robin Hood), drama (Black Legion), and war (Casablanca). Harry Warner always billed the studio’s motto as “combining good citizenship with good entertainment.” The brothers survived patent attacks from Thomas Edison, pioneered synchronized sound feature films, and survived the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, before leading the charge against Nazis in the early 1930s to become the most socially conscious studio in Hollywood. Their anti-Nazi filmmaking landed the studio at the center of a US Senate investigation (pushed by “America Firsters”) that was largely defused by Harry Warner. Their World War II films and bond drives landed the brothers military ranks. Jack’s anti-Communist fear, in part, hastened the collapse of Hollywood’s Golden Age. This talk will offer a cross section of my book while discussing new archival tools that have made revisiting the Warner brothers story a valuable venture.
Chris Yogerst, a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, is an associate professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Chris is the author of two books, From the Headlines to Hollywood: The Birth and Boom of Warner Bros. and Hollywood Hates Hitler! Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures. His work can also be found in The Hollywood Reporter, The Washington Post, The Journal of American Culture, and Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.