Jack Warner pawned a horse to help buy his family's first projector
Long before he ran a Hollywood studio, a teenage Jack Warner put up 150 dollars from a pawned horse so his brother Sam could buy a secondhand Kinetoscope. The Warner brothers then toured one worn print through Ohio and Pennsylvania, seating their first audiences on chairs lent by an undertaker.
He was born Jacob Warner on August 2, 1892, in London, Ontario, the fifth surviving son of Benjamin Warner, a Yiddish-speaking cobbler from Krasnosielc in Russian-ruled Poland, and his wife Pearl. Benjamin had adopted the surname Warner on reaching New York in 1888. The family bounced between Baltimore and Canada, where Benjamin tried trading tinware to trappers for furs, before settling in 1896 in the steel town of Youngstown, Ohio, where the eldest son Harry ran a shoe repair shop.
Jack's Youngstown was rough. He later claimed his neighbourhood saw a killing almost every Saturday night, and he briefly ran with a street gang. He also sang in local theatres and tried vaudeville, adopting the name Jack Leonard Warner. Sam urged him to move from the stage to the box office, where the money was. After Sam's first venue, the Old Grand Opera House, failed within a summer, he found work as a projectionist, talked the family into film, and bought the 1000-dollar machine. Their makeshift cinema in New Castle, Pennsylvania, was called the Bijou.
As co-head of production, Jack worked with Sam to obtain the sound technology behind The Jazz Singer in 1927, the industry's first talking picture. After Sam died, Jack feuded with Harry and Albert. In the 1950s he persuaded them to join a sale of company stock, then quietly bought their shares and took sole control.
Employees feared him and mocked his clumsy jokes, yet respected his instincts. He boasted that being right 51 percent of the time kept him ahead. A Republican, he still backed films supporting Roosevelt's policies, and he attacked Nazi Germany before America entered the war. After the war he testified willingly to the House Un-American Activities Committee and named screenwriters as suspected communists. His career stretched over 55 years, longer than any other founding mogul, and he died on September 9, 1978.
Source: Jack L. Warner
