Blame it on climate change, the Californian weather could not be more unpredictable. At the end of March, a torrential rain, never seen at this time of year, fell on Los Angeles. The route, usually very simple, between Hollywood and Sun Valley, a Hispanic district of the city, at the foot of the Verdugo mountains, becomes complex and incredibly perilous. We cross roads with cracked ground, in which the rain rushes. You have to drive slowly and hope that the vehicle is also amphibious. Finally, we arrive in front of a gigantic hangar.
In these 12,000 square meters, in Sun Valley, are stored the archives of the Warner studios: costumes, accessories, paper archives, drawings, storyboards, i.e. the entire history of this prestigious company, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this spring. 2023. A photo exhibition will thus be presented in the streets of Cannes, during the Festival, which will screen in the “Cannes Classics” section the documentary 100 years of Warner, by Leslie Iwerks, which traces the history and evolution of the studio.
Guarded by a handful of security guards, the hangar is a fortress that rarely opens but which, thanks to the anniversary, welcomes some hand-picked visitors. The place is a paradise for movie buffs. Admittedly, Warner’s main wealth, namely its catalog of 8,000 titles – the largest in the world, the most prestigious too, since it includes the films of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, One American in Paris, Singing in the Rain…) and those of RKO Pictures (including Citizen Kane And The Splendor of the Ambersons, of Orson Welles) –, is stored elsewhere, in Burbank, where the headquarters of the studios and the film sets are located. But here, in Sun Valley, the doors that open are a delight for the fetishist, as the company’s history has shaped the imagination of movie buffs.
The studio was the poorest
On April 4, 1923, the Warner Brothers, four Polish-Jewish naturalized Americans, established Warner Brothers Pictures, Incorporated. A few years, therefore, after Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures, respectively founded in 1912 and 1916. But if its two eldests immediately marked the spirits by the opulence of their productions, Warner was the poorest.
Until the late 1920s, the joke was that the studio’s biggest star was the dog Rintintin. The advent of talkies, which the Warner brothers imposed on the rest of the industry with The Jazz Singer (1927), changed the situation. From the 1930s, the studio’s three dominant genres became adventure films, with Errol Flynn at the top of the bill, musicals, and gangster films, with a strong social tone, denouncing corruption, brutality of the police and racial prejudice.
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