Warner Bros. Pictures: Seventy-five Years of Entertaining the World

(pictorial boards; no dust jacket, as issued) [nice clean book, as-new with no discernible wear]. (B&W photographs) From it's title, you might expect this to be a survey of the legendary Hollywood studio's first three-quarters of a century, but it's nothing of the sort; it's a little more self-serving (not to say insidious) than that. Rather than a history of any sort, it's actually a heavily photo-illustrated catalog of the films that were then (1997) part of the Warner Bros. film library -- which is to say, NOT just the films produced by the studio itself, but the many titles that they had come to control over the years as the result of various mergers and acquisitions. Thus, in flipping through the book, you encounter numerous films that in their initial conception and creation had nothing to do with Warner Bros. at all, but came out of two other dream factories: M-G-M (NORTH BY NORTHWEST, BOYS TOWN, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, DAVID COPPERFIELD, A NIGHT AT THE OPERA, etc.); and RKO (SWING TIME, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, even CITIZEN KANE, for God's sake). (And it's NOT, by the way, ALL the films in these various libraries: it's basically just the better-known "classics," or "greatest hits" if you prefer.) And it is indeed a catalog -- not a chronological survey -- with the films grouped within broad genres: Action/Adventure, Comedy, Drama (with sub-categories for Romance and Western), Family, Musicals/Rock, Sci-fi/Horror/Fantasy. Each film is represented by a single still (usually two or three on a page, and not very imaginatively selected) and a two-or-three-sentence description, and there are alphabetical indexes by title, director, screenwriter, and major performer (in which at least the non-WB movies are specified with a different color ink). Not produced for commercial sale, but rather for distribution within the industry -- probably just as well, because if you're a fan of Warner Bros. and their movies you'll be much better off with a copy of "The Warner Bros. Story" (not at all a rare book), which has the virtue of actually being ABOUT Warner Bros.! ****NOTE that additional postage charges will be assessed for international shipping of this large, heavy book; if this concerns you, please contact us for a shipping quote before placing your order. As always at ReadInk, domestic Media Mail shipping is free.****

Product Info

Publisher: Warner Bros. Distributing

Year: (c.1997)

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

ReadInk

Address: 2261 West 21st St. Los Angeles, California

Website: https://www.readinkbooks.com

Country: United States