Peter Bart: Jack Warner Presaged Trump, Hated Roosevelt, And Might Have Voted For ‘Oppenheimer’ At The Oscars
deadline.com“That movie was the President’s idea, not mine, but it was a demand, not a suggestion.” The speaker was Jack Warner in a 1947 foreshadowing of his Donald Trumpian style.
I recalled his remarks this week as I drove onto the Warner Bros lot, the fabled arena where Warner long reigned. In his heyday, Warner was a Trump pre-clone in terms of temperament and rhetoric – a man who boasted about his mental acuity yet, to Hollywood’s power players, seemed occasionally unhinged.
I was visiting Warner Bros this week to spend some time with David Zaslav, a figure who, in temperament and politics, is the mirror opposite of Warner but whose empire is nonetheless a product of Warner’s erratic vision.
Some believe that Zaslav’s studio – Hollywood in general – might still glean some insight from its founder’s idiosyncrasies.
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