Was Hollywood mogul Jack Warner a sustainability pioneer?
Think sustainability in the movie business is just another 21st century, woke hashtag? Afraid not. 70 years ago, some of the most ruthless, hard-bitten moguls in the business were pulling their hair out over studio energy consumption.
In 1955, Jack Warner, legendary head of Warner Bros. studios, between shuffling mistresses and naming names at HUAC, managed to fire off this discontented memo (the studio was just about to release East Of Eden):
March 23rd. 1955
To: E. de Patie – T.C Wright – E. Stacey
B. Matthews
There should be an immediate complete checkup on lights being turned off throughout the entire plant when they are not necessary.
About 5.30 last night the basement of the Dining Room was lit up and no one was there. The George Stevens bungalow was completely illuminated as late as 8:00 last night but no one made any effort to turn the lights off.
This must be happening on the stages, in the laboratory and everywhere else on the set. It is not necessary for us to be spending money for lights and power when they are not being used.
See to it that instructions are issued to turn off all lights when they are not being used. You know what I mean as I have been telling you this for twenty years but somehow or other, it just doesn’t seem to happen.
Jack Warner
Dated but not read
Jack Warner new how to make money, and he knew that burning electricty costs you money.
The Warner Brothers were pioneers of American movies. Early adopters of media tech, the eldest three, Harry, Albert and Sam toured Ohio and Pennsylvania mining towns showing movies. By 1910 they were making their own productions, and a decade later they were running a film studio on Sunset Boulevard with brother Sam and Jack, the baby of the team, handling production.
Warner Bros. showed a great reverence for the natural world. Warner Bros. Studios’ first breakout star was a dog – the (French) German Shepherd and World War One combat veteran Rin Tin Tin. Rin Tin Tin’s 26 hugely successful silent films – in which he would occasionally be obliged to play a wolf – kept the studios lights on for years.
In these early days of Hollywood, Warner Bros. was the scrappy underdog, looking for ways to outsmart the big studios like Paramount, MGM and First National. One way they did that was by releasing the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, in 1927. The studio then used its Jazz Singer money to acquire a majority interest in First National and began to move into First National’s newly built, 62-acre studio lot just over the hill in Burbank. The lot is still there today, burning electricity – at a much more efficient rate probably – than it did a century ago, though it’s total carbon footprint is probably much larger.
The early studios were fortress-factories with everything a studio needed to churn out a steady supply of pictures all in one place. No one was flying to make movies back in the early days of the studios. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall have plans to play bridge with Howard Hughes and Kate Hepburn tonight. They’re not going to start interrupting their social schedules for unnecessary work trips. One of the things they like about this cushy studio job is the short commute.
Materials were reused on studio lots. If you wanted to build a Roman Forum set, you’d better have a plan for how it was going to be repurposed in other movies – maybe it’s not a Roman Forum at all, maybe it’s just some fluted columns and that we can use for the City Hall scene in that crime picture.
The early studios were run by people who were both dedicated entertainers and ruthless businessmen. Jack Warner had no issues cutting away waste. When Rin Tin Tin, stopped being hit, the faithful pooch Jack fired him. The early studio heads were, almost to a man, immigrants or children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, usually Jewish and starting from scratch in America. One thing they had in their bones – and had probably been there for generations – was a phobia of waste. Or to use that now out of fashion, but necessary word, thrift.
Sustainability for our industry can’t be built on tree-hugging and whale-rescuing. It has to be built on its legacy of doing more with less – creativity – aka thrift.
