Readers of the Plan9Crunch blog may have realized that TCM has of late been showing a lot of Warner Bros. films. It's because the iconic film studio is realizing its centennial.
On May 30, 2023, the volume Warner Bros. 100 Years of Storytelling (2023, Running Press, NYC), will be for sale. Written by Mark A. Viera, it's mostly a compendium of photos and awards Warner Bros. appropriately boasts of each year of the century. Although a Kindle version is available for reading on the go, this 360-page, exhaustively researched tome is at its heart a "coffee-table" book. It's best suited for interested parties to glance at the many illustrations, or for a film buff to sit in his or her easy chair and read a chapter on the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and so on.
Viera does a good, pithy job recapping the changes and evolving styles of the decades and how the studio reacted to the mores. I particularly liked his essay on the '70s, described as "The Era of the Auteur,." It talks of the young directors, inspired and emboldened to explore through film sexuality, race relations, politics and other controversial issues.
Although it's brief, TCM's Ben Mankiewicz provides an interesting forward in which he discusses being regarded as part of "Hollywood royalty" by virtue of his name. He notes that long ago, beginning in the pre-code era, Warner Bros, explored controversial topics, such as the plight of veterans in the film "Gold Diggers of 1933," and prison conditions in the film "I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang."
The book is moderately pricey but worth a buy, particularly for film buffs. You can leaf through it for hours, enjoying Viera's recaps, the photos of the films produced, and the Oscars tally sheets for each year.
-- Doug Gibson
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