02.08.08 5:00 AM CST
• TV & DVDs
• Robert DeSalvo
Warner Bros. sits atop the fattest movie vault of all the studios—one that contains thousands of titles still not yet available on DVD. To celebrate the 85th anniversary of the four Warner brothers incorporating their motion-picture company in 1923, the studio unveiled its 2008 release plans Tuesday night at a special press event on the lot in Burbank, California. More than 50 library titles are being restored for release, including Black Legion, Gold Diggers of 1937, None But the Brave, and San Antonio. The centerpiece of its yearlong celebration is the upcoming five-hour documentary You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story, which was produced, written and directed by Time film critic Richard Schickel with Clint Eastwood as narrator. The ambitious doc features clips from hundreds of Warner Bros. films to show how they mirrored the values, mores and prejudices of the movies’ respective eras. It will be broadcast nationally as a three-part special in September.
Warren Beatty dropped by to reminisce—appropriate given his long history with the studio and the fact that Bonnie and Clyde (pictured) is ready for release in a flashy new special edition on DVD and high definition. Other highlights include two new-to-DVD Frank Sinatra box sets, all five Dirty Harry films in an Ultimate Collector’s Edition, plus classic Westerns (How the West Was Won), musicals and much more. It’s been announced that the studio is dropping HD DVD support later this year to focus solely on Blu-ray, a heralded move that effectively ended the high-def format war. True Blu fans will go batty for the entire Batman anthology in high-def as well as a Batman Begins Limited Edition Gift Set and the latest entry, The Dark Knight, later this year. Soon four major movies—The Wizard of Oz, North by Northwest, Gone With the Wind and Woodstock—are going on moratorium to be released in 2009 on upgraded special edition DVDs and Blu-rays. It could take the better part of, well, 85 years to watch all the films Warner Bros. is rediscovering, but that’s a good thing.
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Comments on this entry:
I hope that in addition to the material you described, the Warner Bros. retrospective will also include appropriate footage of the work produced by the Leon Schlesinger / Tex Avery / Chuck Jones / Bob Clampett / etc., etc. animation team that labored in the "Termite Terrace" until (according to Chuck Jones) Jack Warner finally learned that they **didn't** make Mickey Mouse cartoons there, whereupon he closed the shop. (Of course, as Jack Warner Jr. said of his father, "If his brothers hadn't hired him, he would have been out of work.")