Warners had been one of the Hollywood majors since the 1920s. The studio is best known for its innovation with sound and its great films of the 30s and 40s – Curtiz, Flynn, Bogart, etc. They are less well known for their success in the 1950s with television and new stars. Other studios entered television – Disney was the first to make a go of it, then Warners with Cheyenne. Warners realized if they could keep their costs down television could be a way to keep up the tradition of B movies – so they put a lot of their young talent to work in television. Studios went on a talent sign up splurge in the mid 1950s with Warners the most successful of them all – consider the names under contract: James Dean, Natalie Wood, Roger Moore, Paul Newman, Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, Roger Moore, Ed Byrnes, James Garner, Connie Stevens.
OK, there’s a lot of cheese amongst that lot but they had talent and Warners kept them very busy. On the flip side, in 1956 they sold off their pre-1948 films – a company called Seven Arts who made a fortune from buying movies and selling them to television took over the company in 1967. Warners were probably the last studio to have real success with actors under contract – though Universal and Fox at the time were big on it, too.
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