You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story (2008)

One of my all time favorites.

just watch it!

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

but I think it split the difference between being entertaining to those casually interested in film history and those that are professional students of such material.I first saw this documentary on PBS, and it is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in film history and the history of the most successful entertainment empire today - Warner Brothers. It's much better than "Here's Looking At You", the documentary made in the 90's on the studio. For one, there is one consistent narrator - Clint Eastwood, rather than a series of personalities as there was in "Here's Looking at You". In "Here's Looking at You" it seems like these series of narrators are there to show themselves off rather than talk about studio history. Eastwood keeps the focus on the studio, its product, and its strategy.Of course, as the studio moves into the era of special effects the documentary can't help but show off a little bit with some of their superhero and fantasy films, but I'll grant them that. Because so many of the directors that were around when Warners transformed from an upstart playing with sound to a major studio have passed on, they have interviews from the 60's and 70's with directors such as Mervin Le Roy talking about what it was like in the early days. Of course, there is a big focus on Jack Warner who turned out to be a much shrewder studio head than his nemesis Louis B. Mayer over at MGM. It shows how Warner made the decisions that got the studio through the depression, the war, and the competition of television.I might have missed it, but I don't think the documentary talked too much about a very bad move that Jack Warner made that only the good fortune of the future managed to rectify. At one point Jack Warner sold the pre-1949 Warner film library to raise capital. Warner Bros. would today remain a studio with the finest part of its legacy no longer under its control had it not been for Ted Turner purchasing the RKO/pre-1949 WB/pre-1986 MGM film library in the 80's and then reuniting it under Warner Bros. control at the turn of the century when Ted Turner sold his interests in his cable network and film library back to Time-Warner. This is mentioned in "When the Lion Roared", the sister documentary on MGM, also recommended.In conclusion, this is a very good documentary on the history of Warner Bros. and its lasting film legacy. Highly recommended.

I was really looking forward to seeing this three part special, however I was really kind of let down. The first part was the best, with most of the old classics represented, then it started to fall apart about half way through the second part, and by the third part I thought I was watching a tribute to Clint Eastwood. I know that Warners was known as the rough and tumble studio that would'nt pull any punches, but my God, does each clip have to push you over the edge? About the time I saw Ginger Rogers getting whipped, I was asking myself, gee didn't they do any comedies or musicals. Lots of down and out people, people getting shot, even the KKK! Then from Dirty Harry on, I thought I was watching a tribute to Clint Eastwood, with some Steven Spielberg thrown in. What happened to A STAR IS BORN -1954, 2001-A SPACE ODYSSEY, and NETWORK ??? It was also very boring, basically just a clip show, with very little inside information. Nothing about how each studio had their own theaters, until Uncle Sam told them to break them up and sell them, very little about the break up of the studio system, and how they took on television. All in all, very little imagination went into this, as I said, besides the tribute to Clint Eastwood feel of it, it was basically just five hours of clips. If you are interested in the history of Hollywood I would suggest these better titles to watch for; GOLDWYN: THE MAN AND HIS MOVIES, 2001; MGM: WHEN THE LION ROARS, 1992; Hollywood THE GOLDEN YEARS: THE RKO STORY, 1987, 6 parts.

Richard Schickel's decision to tackle the entire history of the Warner Bros. studio was an ambitious undertaking. Schickel's track record on such projects varies wildly. His "The Men Who Made the Movies" series was a valuable historical record of some of the finest directors of the first half of the 20th century. More recently, however, his documentaries have alternated between one-on-one interviews with people like Spielberg and Scorsese, and larger projects such as "Charlie: The Life and Art of Charlie Chaplin" from 2003, which unfortunately offered little new insight into the work of that creative genius. The worst I can say about Schickel's recent effort is that they feel like promotional pieces, and this Warner Bros. documentary is no exception.That said, it's hard to complain when you're treated to clips of Al Jolson singing, or the great gangster films with Cagney and Robinson, or the hard-boiled social dramas of the early 30s, and of course the Busby Berkeley musicals. Part One covers the years from the beginning of the studio, through the pivotal year of 1950, just as the studio system was really starting to collapse, and film forever relinquished its title to television as America's first choice in entertainment.Part Two covers the period of 1950-1989, and in many ways is just as interesting as the first part, even though we've seen many of these clips before. From the studio's grappling with television, to its cutting-edge films of the 60s (Warners was one of the key studios in the American New Wave, with films like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", "Bonnie and Clyde", and "Mean Streets"). The segment takes us through the 70s and 80s, with entirely too much time spent on Clint Eastwood, and not nearly enough on Stanley Kubrick, whose work remains some of the most intensely personal and unique to ever come out of a Hollywood studio.Part Three is essentially a re-hash of Warners' biggest hits over the last decade-films like "The Matrix" and "Harry Potter". Half the episode is devoted to Clint Eastwood, one of our finest filmmakers (and I felt his inclusion here, as the director of films like "Bird" and "Unforgiven", was far more justified than spending so much time on the Dirty Harry films in part two). Considerable time is also spent on George Clooney, who remains something of an anomaly in 21st century Hollywood-a star with great taste in selecting intelligent projects, and who is able to alternate between well-produced entertainments like "Ocean's Eleven", and more serious-minded films like "Good Night and Good Luck".The good news is that the documentary includes many clips (all restored) that help to give a really good view of the changing trends in cinema over the last century. The bad news is that too little time is spent on the actual workings of the studio. We hear surprisingly little about the Warners themselves, for instance, in the first episode (although more time is given to Jack L. Warner in part two, which covers the years when he essentially took control of the studio.) It was especially good to see the early years covered. It's important to remember that Warners' biggest earner in the silent days was Rin Tin Tin, even though they also had prestige director Ernst Lubitsch under contract, who made some of his best films there in the 1920s. A real treat was the clip from "My Fours Years in Germany", the first film produced by Warner Bros. in 1918, and one of the real classics of its time.A fair amount of time is spent on some of the major directors, such as Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock (who worked briefly but memorably at Warners in the early 50s).Ultimately, though, even at five hours, the documentary leaves viewers hungry for more. This is perhaps an inevitable problem when trying to cover an entire studio's history. It's good to see this update of Warners' history, which was previously tackled in the 1992 documentary "Here's Looking at You" (also hosted by Clint Eastwood).The history of the great studios of Hollywood's golden age is a subject that is of great importance to the history of American show business, and world cinema in general. MGM, the most prestigious studio in its day, was documented in the superb "When the Lion Roars" documentary in 1993. Unfortunately, neither Paramount, 20th Century Fox or even RKO (among the major studios) have ever had anything approaching a documented history like this. Paramount and Fox, in particular, with their galaxy of stars and directors, would seem ideal candidates for the next such documentary, although neither studio presently has any interest in preserving their history. RKO of course is not as well known today, since the studio itself is long gone, and lacked the contract players, specialty genre films and distinctive studio moguls that defined the other studios. And while studios like Columbia and Universal have grown to a staggering size today, they were distinctly "minor" studios in the golden age, making their history of that period less easy to document.As it is, "You Must Remember This" is a commendable effort to provide a survey of the output of Warner Bros. over the last 90 years. It's flaws are understandable, given the amount of material to be covered.

Just finished watching this five hour version of the film history of Warner Bros. on the PBS "American Masters" series. Lots of fascinating clips of various pictures from the studio over the years starting with their first one from 1918 called My Four Years in Germany. From there, we hear of a young man named Darryl Zanuck and his early days as a writer on the studio's "Rin-Tin-Tin" pictures, to the triumph of the first feature talkie The Jazz Singer and the tragedy of Sam Warner's death the day earlier, to the "gangster movies" that made stars of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, to the eventual stardom of Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart. When we get to the '50s, we're briefly shown titles of Warner's TV shows as well as highlight clips of classic cartoons like Duck Amuck and What's Opera Doc? along with Doris Day's musical heyday and Elia Kazan's discoveries of Marlon Brando and James Dean. By the last two hours comes various titles from the '70s to now that show how committed Warner Bros. is to compelling dramas from big stars like Clint Eastwood (who narrates here) and George Clooney as long as they also provide crowd pleasing blockbusters. Perhaps the way this documentary glosses over some bad times and flops makes this less than ideal as a definitive history of one of the greatest movie studios of all time, but still You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story should provide plenty of reasons while watching all those scenes to want to go to the nearest library or video store and check many of their movies out!