How rags-to-riches musical finally won Jack his Oscar
JACK L. Warner had wanted his very own Oscar for 20 years. In 1965 he took one home. The man who steered the likes of Humphrey Bogart to stardom and created arguably cinema’s greatest run of hard-nosed gangster flicks won an Academy Award for a musical:
Taking to the stage, he thanked the academy, playwright George Bernard Shaw, director George Cukor and lyricist/librettist duo Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Then he added: “It’s something we will always be proud of and I speak for those on the back lot, the front lot, upstairs, downstairs, everywhere. I know they thank you and I thank you for them.”
Those who knew the private Jack Warner saw something simple in his devotion to Shaw’s transformative tale. And if it didn’t fit the traditional Warner Bros. brand, then Warner himself wasn’t looking at a notion of continuation: he was looking to his legacy.
The magic of Lerner and Loewe can be seen anew when
screens as part of Bradford’s Widescreen Weekend tomorrow. It will be introduced by Warner’s grandson, documentary filmmaker Gregory Orr. Orr grew up on movie sets. As a 13-yearold he mixed with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table when his grandfather produced one of his very last epics, came
“Certainly the story of a young girl coming up from the East End and rising up and becoming a proper lady was a story that he could identify with,” says Orr. “Many people in Hollywood had an Anglophile streak. They liked the English way of the country squire. My grandfather was attaching himself to something that was sentimental but also had the rags-to-riches story. He wanted one last chance – and he wanted an Oscar.”
By the mid-1960s, Jack Warner had more than 300 film credits to his name. With his brothers Albert, Harry and Sam, he had built one of the principal film factories in the world and one that practically reinvented Hollywood as we know it.
The popular image of Jack Warner was that of the showman and shameless self-publicist. Yet his But before that grandson, director of
said the bluff exterior masked deep insecurities. “The industry is very hard. Cut-throat might be the word,” muses Orr. “But it’s contagious. And there’s a lot of drive and tremendous ambition in all those smiling faces at the Oscar telecast. My grandfather’s position was don’t be tough on the people that don’t have any power, such as the smaller person who is not trying to do you ill-will. He was nice to people. He’d put old silent movie actors in movies and make sure they were hired. He was really in the people business because you need all that talent. But he was always worried that someone was going to take advantage of him because people had tried in the past. So there was a little bit of paranoia there, which was deserved on some level, I suppose.”
Orr was six when he went with his father and mother to Antibes where his grandfather owned a palatial house on the waterfront. It was the moment he realised that Jack Warner was “powerful, unusual and rich”. People like Orson Welles and future President John F. Kennedy would stop by on their yachts. He remembers it as “a magical place for a kid”.
“He loved to gamble and he would go off to Cannes to play baccarat. He was a boy with barely a sixth grade education. At home we knew him to be a bit of a music hall performer.
“He loved to tell jokes, whistle little songs and ditties. He was a sensitive guy who covered it up with a lot of bluster,” adds Orr.
Gregory Orr will be in conversation at 2pm on Friday, October 13, as part of Widescreen Weekend at the Science + Media Museum, Bradford.