The Messy Origins of WarnerMedia

pretty complicated lineage. Well, today I thought we'd start down the road to talk about the various companies that make up Warner Media kind of unravel at all. And this is gonna be a heck of a story because it includes several influential media companies that had their own distinct histories before coalescing into Warner Media. But it also includes companies that are not media companies at all, like funeral homes for real. Now, when I say complicated, I'm not kidding.

Our story includes a window washing company, parking company, and online service provider company, UM, few magazine publishers and more. There are mergers, there are acquisitions, there are spinoffs, there's family betrayal, and lots of other stuff. So where the heck do I get started? Well, I suppose I should talk about the core components and then work to the

point where they all come together. And I could start pretty much anywhere, because there's so many different pieces to the story, But I'm going to begin with Time because it's on my side, Yes it is. Henry Loose and Britton Haddn't had a lot in common. They both attended Yale University, they both worked as reporters for the Baltimore News, and both of them were in their early twenties back in nineteen twenty two, and they also both wanted to

try something that was a new idea. Newspapers were a thing, obviously, but Luce and Haddn't had the idea for a news magazine. They decided to try and create one because no one had really done it before, and they raised more than eighty thousand dollars, which was a princely sum in nineteen twenty two, and they quit their jobs to found a company called Time Incorporated and a magazine called Time. It would publish weekly starting in March of nineteen twenty three.

Luce served as the business manager for the young publishing company and Hadden was editor in chief, and together they found success with this weekly magazine format. Seven years later, haddn't passed away suddenly after an illness had developed into sepsis. Loose pressed on becoming editor in chief and launching other magazines like Fortune, which launched just as the Great Depression

was settling in. So that's kind of ironic timing. He also published Life, which I think already existed as a as a different kind of publication, but he essentially acquired it and then relaunched it under a new format, effectively making a new magazine, and then much much later magazines like Sports Illustrated. He also, according to some accounts, essentially erased Hadden's contributions to the company time Inc. Was becoming a giant publisher. Moreover, Loose oversaw the launch of other

forms of media content. In nineteen thirty one, the company sponsored a radio news series that aired on CBS Radio, and in nineteen thirty five the company expanded this to newsreels, which were these things that we play in movie theaters between pictures. So instead of you know, just watching a movie, you might actually see a ten or fifteen that segment about the latest news or kind of a documentary or a highlight of something. The newsreels were slightly different from

others at the time. They had a longer format and the inclusion of stuff like re enactments. The concept was to make a newsreel that was the cinematic sibling of Time magazine or Life Magazine, something that was akin to those. The March of Time series would end up receiving several awards, including an Honorary Academy Award. This made Time Incorporated a multimedia company, publishing and newsreels and radio. It was one

of the earliest examples of such a thing. Luce was editor in chief until nineteen sixty four, and he passed away just three years after that. But the publisher, the company that is continued to grow over the years, and by the late nineteen eighties it was poised to play a bigger part in our story. But now we're going to switch over to another company. Because really, when you get to it, Times story is really one of publishing

and growing a company over time. Uh. It doesn't have a whole lot to do with with tech, apart from the fact that obviously technological advancements can mean smoothing out the processes of a company's operations like from printing to distribution. But I don't really think that that's worthy of us

really diving into here. So we're gonna switch over to Warner Brothers Entertainment Incorporated, or the old w B. Now, the Warner family immigrated to the United States from Poland in the early eighties, and in fact, three of the four Warner brothers referenced in the name of the company We're born in Poland, those being Harry, who was the eldest, and then Albert and Sam. Now some sources ice I've seen suggest that Albert and Sam were born in North America.

But a to a guy who was hired by Warner Brothers to come in and do research on this kind of stuff, that wasn't the case. Jack, the youngest of the four Warner brothers, was born in North America. He was born in Canada. And they also had other siblings as well. This was a big family. I think there were nine of them total, so that wasn't all of them, but those were the four brothers of the Warner Brothers fame. Now, this family wasn't exactly impoverished, but it was a lot

of work to make ends meet. So the brothers worked in all sorts of lines of work in the Midwest. They worked in the meat industry, they worked at bowling alleys, They did all sorts of stuff, and they were all looking for ways to be a success, and gradually they built up a little money. In nineteen o three, the four brothers rented a vacant store in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, and they wanted to turn it into a film exchange in a movie theater that they had also acquired a film

projector now obvious sleeve. This was in the extremely early days of cinema. The brothers mainly focused on getting hold of films and making them available to other theaters in the region, thus the film exchange business. They were kind of a go between between the movie studios and the movie theaters. And it turned out that motion pictures weren't just a fad. Also turned out that it was a really shady business. There were a lot of um criminal

types who got interested in stuff like film exchanges. I have no idea how involved the Warners were, if at all, in that side of life, but it was definitely a

thing that was going on. Not turned out that since motion pictures were so popular, you know, I feel pretty confident saying motion pictures were a success, you know, from the perspective of one the brothers business was also successful, and they began to, you know, use the money that they made to open more theaters and expand by n they decided that they would branch out from the business of exhibiting films and get into the business of making them,

because one of the downsides of this is that you couldn't guarantee the quality of the movies that were being sent to you, and a lot of the movies were on the not so great side, like either they were just poorly made or they frequently involved material that was considered risk a or worse. So movies had a really bad reputation in the early days, and the brothers kind of wanted to have more control over the whole process, so they decided to create their own movie studio. Jack

Warner would be in charge of movie production. He oversaw the film operations side of things. Harry handled all the business operations for the company. He was effectively the head of Warner Brothers, and Sam was in charge of securing and maintaining technical equipment, and Alb would work with other

theaters to handle distribution of the Warner Films. The four opened up Warner Brothers Studio in Hollywood, California, in nineteen eighteen, originally on Sunset Boulevard, which at the time was considered a seedy part of of Hollywood. Um, I don't know if it still is. I actually kind of like Sunset Boulevard, but maybe it's because I'm a seedy guy. Anyway. They

incorporated as Warner Brothers Pictures in nineteen twenty three. By that time, they had already produced several films, and the first really big success for them was a series of pictures, that is, movies that started a four legged actor that being rentin Tin. Uh. That's a dog for those of you who have never seen a rentin Tin picture. And the dog was learning like a thousand bucks a week, which was, you know, quite the princely pooch. I would imagine that's a lot of money back in those days,

not a not a small shake of these days. Warner Brothers was an independent studio back then and was facing off against three much more established companies. There was Paramount, there was MGM, and there was a company called First National. Warner Brothers was scrappy compared to those three and Sam had a vision for what could help set the studio apart and change the industry forever. See this was again

the era of the silent film. Movies would play in movie houses and typically you would have like a house musician who would play along with the film on on an oregon or something, and all dialogue would be represented in little interstitial cards that would pop up, which created a certain interesting style of cinema, like you could make really compelling movies this way, but it also clearly limited

the actors range. Sam wanted to synchronize sound with the images on screen, and he wanted the company to pioneer the technologies and the installations that would allow for talking pictures. He initially met with some resistance from Harry, who was like, why the heck do we need to hear the actors talk? But the studio hit a bit of a rough patch, and maybe in desperation, Harry ended up giving Sam the green light. Warner Brothers then purchased a company that had

spun off from Western Electric. This company was called the Vitograph Company. The Vitogram system was a film sound recording system, but it wasn't recording sound to film the way we do it today. Instead, this system used sixteen inch discs like records, they had a groove recorded in them, representing a soundtrack. So this is like a vinyl album, and it included everything like music and sound effects and eventually dialogue and vocals, though originally Harry did not want that included.

He just wanted, you know, music and sound effects on there. Uh. A side of a desk would run for about eleven minutes when played back at an RPM of thirty three and a third. Eleven minutes was about the same amount of time it took to project through a thousand feet

of film. And you know, in those early days you would end up just having about a thousand feet per real of film, and so one side of the record would typically have a groove on it, the other side would be blank, and each record would go with a single reel of film, and you were just supposed to

keep them two of them together. So with a setup, you would have a projectionist who would use a special piece of equipment that was part projector part record turntable, and they would feed the film into the projector they would set the little needle or stylus of the record player on the beginning of the recording, which from what I understand, was actually at the center of the disk. And you know most records, you know, you put the needle on the outside of the record and it follows

the groove gradually all the way to the inside. Apparently, with the vitaphone system, you would put the needle at the center of it, and because the way that the record turned and the way the groove was laid out, it would actually go outward to the outer edge starting the projector would mean that the film and soundtrack playback would be synchronized at least, you know, theoretically. The first Warner Brothers film using a vitophone soundtrack was Don Juan,

but the piece had already been filmed. The soundtrack included the score for the movie and some sound effects, but no dialogue, so Don Juan was still largely a silent film. The first talkie was The Jazz Singer, a film with a recorded sound all the way through, so there was

dialogue and singing within the film itself. Now I'm going to leave it to film historians to talk about the movie, which has elements in it that I think are, you know, to put it charitably, challenging, but from a technical perspective, it was marking a new era, and this was also an era that would go without it's early champion. Sam Warner, who had pushed so hard to incorporate sound into movies, died the night before the premiere of The Jazz Singer.

The narrative goes that he worked himself to death, though author David Thompson suggests that perhaps there were some other underlying health conditions that contributed to his early demise. But now the Warner Brothers were three. Now Warner Brothers, the company would stick with vitaphone for a few years, but even when The Jazz Singer came out, the writing was

already on the wall. The future of sound on film wasn't with separate recorded discs, but a methodology that would allow filmmakers to actually record sound directly onto film itself. I've covered how this works in previous episodes of Tech Stuff, so I'm not going to go into it here. But what it really meant for Warner Brothers was that the company would eventually have to come around to adopting the

industry standard and abandoning the vitaphone of coach. The Jazz Singer was a huge hit for Warner Brothers, and the company was able to afford new digs, so they relocated off of Sunset Boulevard and they purchased land to build a studio in Burbank, California, setting out a whole new studio there, and the company also acquired the Stanley Company of America, a business that owned more than two hundred

movie theaters across the United States. This gave the Warner Brothers a distribution channel for the company's movies, and it would also be one of the big elements that would prompt the US government to take a closer look at the film industry. So to be clear, I should really point out this was something that every major movie studio

was doing. It was pretty much common practice for companies like MGM and Paramount to have their own movie houses across the US, and it created a pretty rough environment for independent theater owners. In the nineteen thirties, Warner Brothers began to produce cartoons for movie theaters, and that's when we got the Loon It Tunes, characters like Bugs, Bunny, you know, they rabbit in space, Jam, Filthy Young People. It's also when Warner Brothers turned to producing a lot

of gangster movies, like a lot of them. These were the studio days when companies would sign directors and stars to long term contracts which made them exclusive talent for that studio. Same was true for film cruise too, so people would go in day after day working with the same group of folks. Sometimes from one picture to the other. You might not even really be able to tell what movie you're working on, just because you're always around the

same people in the same studios. James Cagney became the top star for the company, and Humphrey Bogart, who was on the company payroll, was held back because Harry Warner wasn't convinced that Bogart was star material. Talk about a a wrong take anyway. Warner Brothers also acquired another company called Cosmopolitan Films, which was formerly owned by the newspaper giant William Randolph Hurst, who perhaps has the tackiest home I've ever seen. The Hearst Castle is just a monument

to gaudiness. Anyway, the company kept on growing. In nine four, most movie studios, including Warner Brothers, signed onto the Motion Picture Production Code also known as the Haze Code, after the then president of the Motion Picture producers and distributors of America Will h Code. Now I'm just kidding. It was Will H. Hayes. That was his name, and the Haze Code was meant to perform triage on Hollywood's image.

Like I said, the movie business was seen as something of a seedy thing, especially because around this time there were some really nasty scandals that were surrounding Hollywood. Uh, scandals that involved stuff like sex and death. It was not a not a good thing too to have if you're trying to put forth the the aura of respectability. So the movie business was no stranger to scandal, both on and off screen, and the US government was kind of starting to think about ways that they might censor

the film industry. So rather than have the government come in and regulate the movies, the goal was to create a code of standards of what was and wasn't suitable to show in movie theaters and head off the US government at the past and have movie studios sign on to you know, produce films under this code. For the record, this is something that has happened numerous times in American history with industries that range from comic books to film to video games. We've seen it happen again and again.

The Haze Code was extremely restrictive. Movie studios weren't forced to comply to the Haze Code, but generally speaking, it was best to play the game if you wanted your films to get played in theaters. Warner Brothers scrapped the gangster film genre pretty much, as it would be pretty challenging to make a compel in gangster movie while still holding true to the restrictions of the Haze Code. And that's where we're going to leave off for our first break.

When we come back, we're going to skip forward a little bit in time to talk about some other changes at Warner Brothers that lead up to the birth of Warner Media. We still got a long way to go, so let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. So the Haze Code would hold true in Hollywood until the late nineteen sixties. Warner Brothers continue to make lots of movies and cartoons in that time. And this isn't a pop culture podcast, so I'm not going to go

into all of them here. It would just be, you know, ridiculous. But Warner Brothers continued to make films in the nineteen forties during World War Two. They didn't stop, and after the war, television, which had been development for decades but had largely been paused during the war, debuted in earnest. The movie industry as a whole was not too happy about television. They were fearing that people would purchase a TV set and then just elect to stay home rather

than head out for a night at the movies. Now, gradually, studios, including Warner Brothers, would expand their operations to include TV productions, but at first it was as if you had like one giant predator suddenly spotting a totally different predator in its home turf and things get real tense. That was kind of how it was between movie studios and television

at the time. In the late nineteen fifties, Warners established a subsidiary company called Warner Brothers Records, later known as just Warner Records and then later still Warner Music Group. This was the recorded music division of the movie studio business and largely focused on producing recordings of the various soundtracks to Warner Brothers movies, as well as securing their talent.

One of the things that Warner Brothers executives were upset about was that Occasionally, an actor in one of their films would record a song and it would get released on some other record label, and that meant that Warner Brothers suddenly didn't have total control over the talent that was signed to them, and they hated that. They wanted to make sure that if if that person who was signed to a contract was gonna make money by gully,

Warner Brothers was gonna get a cut of it. So that was really the reason why they created a records division. Also in the nineteen fifties, Warner Brothers was forced to divest itself of its theater chains. This was the consequence of a legal battle between the US government and the film industry in the United States, and the issue at

the heart of all this was anti competitiveness. So movie studios had been buying up all aspects related to movie production, from the actual companies that would process film to the content creation side, you know, the actual movie studios, to the movie theater side, so everything from production, processing and distribution.

This was not necessarily great for the average consumer who might find themselves with no way to see the latest pictures from movie studio A because the one theater in their town happened to be owned by movie studio B and for actors and directors, there was the issue of getting locked into contracts that made them exclusive talent, and it meant that the actors wouldn't really have much of

a say about what projects they pursued. And in addition, studios would sometimes barter with other studios and use talent as a kind of you know, bargaining chip. It wasn't super cool. Uh. There were a lot of other considerations too that would into this, but ultimately the important point is that the big movie studios all had to spin off their movie theater holdings. They couldn't keep them any longer.

They also weren't allowed to have talent agencies and stuff like that, and so this was sort of the beginning of the end of the big studio era, although studio contracts would still be kind of a thing for a bit. And yet another development in the nineteen fifties, Jack more Or saw an opportunity, but it would mean doing some underhanded stuff. So you see, Harry Warner was technically in charge of the company, but Jack Warner was the guy who was kind of making stuff happen on the studio level.

Also not very well liked Mr Jack Warner. A lot of his stars positively hated the man. Jack wanted to lead the company, but Harry essentially said, over my dead body. So Jack one day approaches his brothers, Harry and Albert, and he essentially says, Hey, you know what we're all getting on in years, we're all getting older. We should sell our company off. We had a great run. Let's sell it off while we're still on top. We'll make a ton of money and we can retire in comfort.

And the elder brothers agreed, and the studio was quote unquote sold but low and behold. A couple of weeks later, Jack Warner is revealed as the new president of this new Warner Brothers company, which was kind of only new on paper. Really, Harry would not last very long. He actually died not too long after this happened. And of course that narrative is that Jack Warner broke his brother's heart and that's what killed Harry Warner. There was definitely

a schism in the Warner family at this point. This was also around the same time that Warner actually created its television division called Warner Brothers Television Studios in nineteen fifty five, Jack Warner's son in law, William t Or, would head up that division. One of their early major productions was the first one hour television Western series called Cheyenne. The studio would go on to produce lots of other

shows like Maverick is another great example. In the nineteen sixties, the studio began to produce a bunch of movie musicals. These were lavish, expensive productions, and they helped convince people to you know, leave their homes, leave their televisions behind to see these films that they could only see in theaters. So they included movies like The Music Man, uh Anti Name,

and Gypsy. These were all adaptations of Broadway musicals. But it was My Fair Lady, which debuted in nineteen sixty four, that proved to be a truly enormous success, as did the movie's soundtrack, which really helped establish Warner Brothers Records. That will come back to Warner Brothers Records a little bit later on, but let's stick with My Fair Lady.

There was one big drawback on that deal. So when Jack Warner purchased the rights the film rights to make My Fair Lady, it cost him five and a half million dollars. This was before they had shot even a foot of film. The rights to the film, however, reverted to CBS after seven years because CBS was the company that had actually financed the original Broadway production that My

Fair Lady was based off of. So once those seven years were up, CBS got the rights, which means that while My Fair lay He was a Warner Brothers film, it's not in the Warner Brothers library today. In nineteen sixty six, Jack Warner decided to sell Warner Brothers for real zies. This time he kind of faked it out the decade earlier, and now he's actually doing it. He sold off his controlling shares of the company to another company called Seven Arts Productions for thirty two million dollars.

He stayed on with with the Warner Company in various roles, um but he irritated the heck out of the Seven Arts Productions folks. So let's talk about Seven Arts for a second. Seven Arts Productions made movies, but did not distribute movies. So instead Seven Arts Productions would make films and then partner with other studios for their release. Three film professionals had founded the company in nineteen fifty seven, and they were able to make films using a more

independent studio approach. So like one of those films was Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, which they made on behalf of Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers actually distributed that film. The studio films were successful enough to give the owners the cash they needed to buy out Jack Warner in nineteen sixty six. So this new company was called Warner Brothers Seven Arts, and the logo changed to the W B shield was now a stylized combination of the letter W

and the number seven. So if you've ever seen a really weird looking Warner Brothers logo, it might be that one. To be fair, there's been a few weird Warner Brothers logos. So if it looks like there was a number seven merged onto the end of a W, that would be this era. And the deal included Warner Brothers Studios, all of the black and white Looney Tunes catalog, and Warner Records. So why just the black and white Looney Tunes catalog. Well,

that's a really complicated story all by itself. It mostly involves how Warner Brothers handled the rights to various cartoons during the early era of television. The company originally made these cartoons to play in movie theaters, not for TV, and Warners didn't have an established television studio in the early nineteen fifties, so the company sold television distribution rights to a few different companies, including one that was called Guild Films. That was the one that got the black

and white ones. But Guild Films would go bankrupt, and then Seven Arts Productions acquired that company's assets. So technically the distribution rights to the black and White ones already belonged to Seven Ages Productions, but now they also owned the company that made it. The distribution rights to the other cartoons belonged to other companies. And I'm not going to get into all that because wolf y'all, this is

already complicated enough as it is. The company did also acquire Atlantic Records, which joined the Warner Records label as a music label owned by this bigger media company. So Warner Brothers Seven Arts was a new movie and record

company that lasted all of nearly three whole years. Why is that, Well, partly it's because the company overextended itself with all these acquisitions, which is something we see way too frequently in business and partly well it's because of the mob and parking lots and window cleaners plus a funeral home. All right, hear me out, because things are about to get way more bizarre. Okay, So for this part of the story, we gotta go way way back again,

back before time. Not not you know, time is in space, time or the experience or whatever. I mean, time incorporated. So we're gonna go back to eighteen six. That's when Max Swag founded a window cleaning company that he called National Window Cleaning and House Renovating Company, and it was in New York City. A guy named Louis Frankel joined the company in the early nineteen hundreds and the name

changed slightly to National House and Window Cleaning Company. In nineteen thirty seven, Max passed away, Frankel ended up leading the company. Uh Frankel died a decade later in nineteen seven, and his son, William Frankel took over the company. At that point, the name of the company changed again and

became the National Cleaning Contractors, Incorporated. William Frankel would oversee operations at the company until nineteen sixty six, which is when a different company swoops in to acquire it, and that company was Kinney Service Corporation. Now, for some reason, the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department opposed this merger. I think I know why, but I couldn't find anything

like firm about it. However, I do know that Kinney Service Corporation was let's say, it was creative in the way it did business, So I'm gonna switch over to them now. So, while the cleaning company was doing business in New York City in the nineteen forties, you at another company that was taking shape over in New Jersey. This one was founded by Sigmund dornbush Manny Kimmel and

mob boss Abner's Willman. Now, I'm sure you've heard that the mob was involved in Hollywood to some extent, but I'm not sure that you guessed it came from a parking lot company in New Jersey, huh. Anyway, the three of them founded the Kenny Parking Company. Anyways, Willman is not really part of our story here because the merger we're going to talk about happen in nineteen sixty six.

Willman died under potentially controversial circumstances. In nineteen fifty nine, he was found hanged, but some argued that it was suicide and some argued that it was murder. I don't know what the truth of the matter is, but anyway, in the early sixties, the parking Company formed a partnership with a rental car company owned by Edward Rosenthal. And yeah, this is getting more complicated. I'm sorry. The partnership worked well.

It was the Abbey rent a Car Company, and a couple of years later, these two companies, the parking Company and the rent a car company, decided that, hey, this works so great, let's merge and make a single company. Now. In that process, Rosenthal decided he would bring in some of his other concerns, some of his other companies that he owned, which included a funeral home called Riverside Memorial Chapel and another company called the City Service Cleaning Contractors incorporated.

This collection of rag tag companies became the Kinney Service Corporation, which I mean, I guess you've got to call it something and and it is hard to come up with a name for a company that has divisions that specialize in parking lots, window cleaning, rental cars, and funeral homes. I'm drawn a blank here, so I guess Kinney Service Corporation it is. The company also bought up nine more funeral homes too. They really took service to a new,

really weird level. Edward Rosenthal's daughter Carol, married a man named Steve Ross, and in nineteen sixty six, Kenney Service Corporation merged with the National Cleaning Contractors, the one that was founded in eighteen six. And I'm guessing that the Department of Justice was worried that the cleaning National Cleaning Contractors and the the City Service Cleaning Contractors that were part of Kinney could have represented an anti competitive monopoly

in cleaning. That's the only thing I can guess. Anyway, whatever the beef was, the merger still happened, and the new company had the name Kinney National Company, and Steve Ross took the helm. We'll talk a little bit more about Kinney National Company and what happened next after this quick break. In nineteen sixty seven, the Kinney National Company purchased a publishing company called National Periodical Publications. But you

probably know that company better as d C Comics. Yep, this is how d C Comics would eventually become part of the Warner Brothers family. By way of a funeral home slash window cleaning slash parking lot company, you know, naturally. So, just so we're clear, Warner Brothers didn't so much as acquire d C Comics, as both DC and w B

got gobbled up by the same company. Steve Ross, the head of Kinney National Company, must have had a real love of the movie industry, because he, in short orders set about using the newly merged companies assets to acquire companies in the business that is show. He bought a talent agency, and he bought the Cabra and Lynn company

Pana Vision, and he had his eye on Warner Brothers. Now, as I mentioned earlier, Seven Arts Productions purchased Warner Brothers from Jack Warner for thirty two million dollars a few years earlier. Then they went and purchased Atlantic Records, and they ended up being a little strapped for cash. Ross was given a hot tip about it from the owner of the talent agency they had acquired, and so he made an offer to the heads of Warner Brothers seven Ages,

and they accepted it. The offer was for sixty million dollars for four hundred million dollars. Honestly, I found a lot of conflicting information about this um. I tend to believe the sixty million more than the four hundred million,

but I kept coming up against different amounts. Anyway, the companies ended up merging, and consequently Kenny National Company would sell off its talent agency because otherwise that would be seen as being anti competitive to have both movie studio and a talent agency, not just a movie studio, a television studio too. Ted Ashley, who had previously overseen said talent agency, would become the head of the new Warner

Brothers Incorporated. Around this time, Jack Warner officially retired from Warner Brothers, but he continued to work with the company in some respect for nearly another decade until his death. As for the new Warner Brothers Incorporated, it ran into some trouble before too long, but for once it wasn't because of the movie side of the business, at least

not overtly. Rather, there was a price fixing scandal that focused on the parking operations of the company, and so in an effort to kind of salvage operations, the company leaders decided that they needed to split this company into two, so in one company would be all the entertainment assets such as the Warner Brothers Movie Studio, the television studio, the record studios, cetera. The other company would be everything else, you know, window washers and funeral directors and parking lots

and all that kind of stuff. So what we got was Warner Communications on one side and the Kinney National Company on the other side. So now we can say goodbye to Kenny and we'll stick with Warner. Okay. So at this point we've got Warner Communications, which serves as a parent company, and its subsidiaries include Warner Brothers Studios. That's the movie studios, h the Warner Music Group, which included not just Warner and Atlantic, but also record companies

like Asylum, Elektra and more. Then we've got Dimension Pictures, which is a film production company or was a film production company that was largely known for making movies in the exploitation categories. So that includes classics like Dolomite, Returned to Boggy Creek, which MST. Three K did an episod it on oh In Satan's Cheerleaders, you know, real classics, and the company also owned d C Comics and Mad Magazine.

Warner Communications would make several more acquisitions. In ninety nine, it partnered with American Express to create a joint venture called Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment, which oversaw cable channels like MTV and Nickelodeon and the movie Channel YEP. Those started out as Warner Brothers Concerns or I guess Co. Warner Brothers Concerns and Warner Communications also purchased a little company

called Atari in nineteen seventy six. Now I covered this in my episodes about Attari several years ago, but let's go over a real quick version. So Nolan Bushnell, who was leading a Torii when it was a private company, had a problem. He was about to launch a video game console to the home market. But producing hardware is expensive.

You have to pay the manufacturing costs, and then there's issues like supply chain, both before when you're just getting all the parts to put together and after when you're shipping the finished units out to retail outlets. It was going to require more money than the company had on hand, and so Bushnell made the decision to see if some other company would be willing to buy Atari and essentially foot the bill for production. Warner Communications turned out to

be that company. In nineteen Warner Communications acquired Attari for the princely sum of twenty eight million dollars. It took some time for that investment to actually pay off. Early issues with manufacturing caused delays, which cost the company a lot of money, but things turned around fairly quickly, and the success of Atari helped Warner Communications offset some shortfalls that the company was experiencing in their movie and music divisions.

Of course, anyone familiar with the home video game market knows what ultimately happened. While the industry was writing high in the late seventies and early eighties, sometimes literally, as I understand, companies like Atari sometimes resembled more like a

rock star party than a media company. Anyway, it all came crashing down in a glut of consoles and cheap games had saturated the market, and consumers were drifting away from consoles and toward a new technological wonder, the personal computer. The entire industry had a massive collapse, and Atari was essentially at the center of it. By the end of nineteen eight three, Warner Communications was hurting. Its film and music divisions weren't performing so well, and the video game

division was now in shambles. Warner sold off the parts of Atari associated with consumer products, which included stuff like consoles and computers and game development, and sold it to Jack Tramiel, the former CEO of Commodore. I've done episodes about Tramuel in the past. It's kind of a vindictive guy. But that's off topic for our discussion about Warner. Warner retained the arcade game division of Atari, so they sold off the home market stuff, but they kept the arcade

market stuff. They renamed that Atari Games. So this was the great split of Atari into two different entities, and it would fracture further from there. And if you listen to my episodes about Midway, you might have heard that this division of Atari would ultimately shift over to Williams slash Midway Games, and Atari Games would eventually become Midway Games West. So Warner Communications was in some financial trouble. In Warner bought out American Expresses Steak in the Warner

Amex satellite entertainment company. It's the one that owned cable channels, and then in Night five, Warner sold this company off to Viacom, which has its own incredbly complicated history, but for now we'll just say that Warner's brief fling and owning cable companies had come to an end for now, with Viacom assuming a big chunk of debt from Warner as part of this deal. And now finally we get

to the merger between Time Incorporated and Warner Communications. So Time announced in March of nine nine that it was going to merge with Warner Communications and thus create a new company called Time Warner. But at that same time, a company called Gulf and Western later known as Paramount Communications, attempted a hostile takeover of Time. And these hostile takeovers really big in the eighties, So I guess i'll go

over that really quickly, just to explain what they are. So, typically you have the board of directors of a company that makes decisions on behalf of a company, and those decisions include whether or not to accept some other companies acquisition offer. So if it's a private company that this is just These are the people who make all the decisions. What they say goes. If they don't want to sell, no one sells. But for publicly traded companies like Time Incorporated,

it's different. So in a publicly traded company, it's possible to convince shareholders to agree to an acquisition against the wishes of the board of directors. The acquirer has to convince enough shareholders to vote for the measure, and then even if the Board of directors disagree, the acquisition goes through. One way to do this is to appeal to the greed of shareholders and promise higher share prices than whatever the market currently values them at. Time raised its bid

for Warner Communications and rushed to complete the merger. Now, at this point, the deal was valued at nearly fifteen billion dollars, and there were a couple of court cases that Paramount Communications brought against this, but Time ended up winning those time and time again, and thus the Time Warner merger finally got greenlit and we got ourselves emerged company. This is a good place for us to wrap up.

When we come back for the next entry into this series, we'll learn more about the business of Time Warner, which was pretty complicated and got into things like amusement parks and and other things. We'll talk about how a O L would fit into all of this not well, by the way, and all the messy stuff that would follow leading up to the modern take on Warner Media and what is going on with the proposed merger with Discovery Communications.

But that's for the next episode. If you have suggestions for other things I should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter the handle I use as Text Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.