1/ 100 YEARS AGO TODAY: LARRY ELLISON, OCTOBER 7TH, THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE, HOLLYWOOD, TALKING PICTURES, SOCIETAL SUBVERSION, AND ASSASSINATION—WAS SAM WARNER, ONE OF THE FOUNDERS OF WARNER BROS., MURDERED?
▪️THE BEGINNING▪️
99 YEARS AGO yesterday, on October 6, 1927, Hollywood's first talkie "The Jazz Singer", produced by Warner Bros., premiered to tremendous fanfare. The New York Times reported on the tremendous standing ovation. Irving Berlin cried. Frank Capra called it a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The revolution was on. One problem: none of the 4 Warner Brothers was there to witness any of it. Sam Warner, the man who pushed for it, believed in it, and worked for it, had died the day before.
Let's back up. That was 99 years ago yesterday.
100 YEARS AGO YESTERDAY, a whole year previous, on October 6, 1926, the daughter of Sam Warner (actual name Szmuel Wonsal), founding member of Warner Brothers, was born. He and his wife, Lina Basquette, name her Lita after Charlie Chaplin's wife Lita Grey.
As we just saw, in exactly 1 year, Sam Warner would be dead.
▪️RUSSIAN EMPIRE AND THE WARNER BROS.▪️
Szmuel Wonsal, along with his brothers Hirsz (Harry), Aaron (Albert), and Jacob (Jack) were jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire who came as part of the larger 2-million person wave of jewish migrants from 1881-1924.
In addition to the entrepreneurship of jews like the Wonsal/Warner brothers, these jewish migrants disproportionately brought with them socialism (Victor Berger), Bolshevism/communism (Alexander Bittelman), anarchism (Emma Goldman), labor activism & violence (Louis Buchalter), and gambling, prostitution & liquor rackets (Arnold Rothstein), to name just a very few. Indeed, these jewish immigration waves & the social instability they brought 1
were part of the driving force behind the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act that severely restricted further immigration from Eastern Europe.
After years in the film business on the east coast, the Wonsal/Warner brothers moved out west and founded Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. in 1923. However, we shall see they weren't necessarily squeaky clean entrepreneurs, themselves, and carried with them the seeds of social subversion as well. More on this in a bit. In 1921, they had become some of the first members of the Mount Olive Freemason lodge, which was known as the masonic lodge to the motion picture industry.
In 1925, Warner Bros., led by Sam Warner, acquired a brand new technology developed by Western Electric's Bell Laboratories called Vitaphone. It was a sound-on-disc system. Sam was the visionary who saw its potential and pushed for its adoption into motion pictures. That brings us back to 1927's "The Jazz Singer," the result of Sam's enormous exertions and force of will, who pushed for it against some objections from his Brothers.
▪️NATURAL DEATH...OR WAS IT ASSASSINATION?▪️
However, the stress & strain of bringing this technology to the silver screen ended up costing Sam his life, and on October 5, 1927—99 years from yesterday—he allegedly succumbed to an infection and died. His brothers, aware of the impending doom, bolted from New York before the premier of "The Jazz Singer" to rush to his side. They didn't make it in time.
Sam had developed abscesses in his teeth, that spread to his jaw and then to his brain. Surgeons operated on him, but to no avail. He just kept getting worse until he succumbed (tragically for him, penicillin would be discovered just one year later). At least that was the story until Hollywood's 1977 50th anniversary celebration of "The Jazz Singer."
It was there that Cass Warner (granddaughter of Harry Warner & mother of "Yellowstone" star Cole Hauser) met William Demarest (one of the original actors in "The Jazz Singer") who dropped a bombshell on her: Sam had been murdered by his brothers.
She recounted the tale in her 1993 memoir, "Hollywood Be Thy Name":
[Begin Excerpt]
"They killed him!" he whispered urgently. "They killed Sam."
Before I could say anything, he continued, "I worked with Sam. He was a good man. He didn't agree with what they wanted him to use the medium of film for, so they got rid of him."
I felt privy to a very deep secret and urged him to continue. I sensed his urgency to share this with a relative of Sam's he could trust. He continued, "Sam didn't die of natural causes. He went in for
a very simple operation. The doctor was paid to make it look like his death was unavoidable. Sam wouldn't agree to what they wanted, so they got rid of him. They killed Sam."
I asked who "they" was. He said, "They wanted to use the film for propaganda purposes and Sam would have nothing to do with it, so they got rid of him."
I felt the weight of carrying this untold story lift from him. He was relieved of the guilt from not saying something sooner.
Later, I felt like I was part of a mystery plot—a true-life mystery—an angle that no one yet knew about. The burden he had carried for fifty years
was now transferred to me.
We talked for a few more minutes and I noted that he had NOT been drinking.
[End Excerpt]
▪️SMUT & CENSORSHIP▪️
What might Demarest have been talking about? What direction did the brothers want to take the studio in over Sam's wishes? We won't really ever know, but perhaps there are clues.
"The Jazz Singer" is a movie that centers around a jew who forsakes the old ways and instead decides to go live a life of show business and assimilate into American life and culture. It highlights one of the central tensions of jewish life in America that is still an open question: do jews assimilate into their host nation, or do they continue to retain their jewish nationality and identity above all others? Maybe Sam Warner was on the side of assimilation, as reflected in his choice of movie for the first Talkie? Indeed, he married a Catholic girl and had a family with her.
Now, let's look at the direction in which his brothers would soon take the studio. After Sam's death, the studio pushed on and produced a string of hits including a rather notorious movie called "Gold Diggers of 1933," Starring Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, and Ginger Rogers. "Gold Diggers" was notable for its extremely risqué content and for accelerating the adoption of more strict censorship standards over Hollywood, known as the Production Code.
Most of the major studios were owned and run by jews, and Americans were not keen to be overrun by smut disguised as entertainment, like their counterparts in Weimar Germany were.
The movie began with a musical number "We're In The Money," sung by Ginger Rogers and an entire chorus line of girls wearing strategically placed gold coins. In 1933, there was no such thing as a bikini or even a 2-piece swimming suit. Yet there was an entire chorus line of girls essentially dressed in bikinis made of gold coins and singing about money. Hard to imagine something more jewish! Lol
The movie's "climactic" number pushed the envelope even further. "Pettin' In The Park" featured nudity, implied nudity, explicit lyrics, a sexually horny baby-turned-young-boy, along with open encouragement to engage in fornication en masse. The number ends with a woman's chastity armor being cut open with a can opener (see video clips below).
Warner Bros. tried to get around the censorship it knew the movie would face by sending strategically edited final cuts to different jurisdictions, but in the end it only convinced Americans that the Hollywood jews needed to be reined in.
The entire story treats chorus girls, wealthy men, sexual attraction, gold-digging, seduction and unmarried romantic relationships with a distinctly comic attitude. The women are often the sexually and socially aggressive characters rather than being punished or looked down on for such behavior. That kind of presentation became harder after 1934, when the Production Code required illicit sexual behavior to be treated as morally problematic instead of funny or glamorous.
The movie's actual content won't seem shocking to you by today's standards. What will perhaps mildly shock you is how "forward" it is for the 1930s. It will seem out of place amongst the rest of the 1930s movies you're more familiar with like "Wizard Of Oz" and "Gone With The Wind," which came after the Production Code started being enforced.
For those who NOTICE and engage in PATTERN RECOGNITION, the degeneracy of the content will all make sense to you. Was this the direction that Sam Warner hesitated to take the studio in? Was this the propaganda his brothers wanted that he resisted?
▪️LITTLE BROTHER JACK WARNER▪️
Assassination is not a thing to be treated lightly, nor is it an action that typically materializes out of thin air. It's usually accompanied by other unsavory actions, like BETRAYAL & GREED, for example. Was any of that present with the surviving Warner Bros.?
Well, in 1956, little brother Jack brought a deal to his two remaining older brothers Harry & Albert to sell the company to a Boston Banker named Serge Semenenko (also an immigrant from the Russian Empire). Harry & Albert thought they were all cashing out, but Jack actually had a secret side deal with Semenenko. After the sale went through, Jack bought back his shares, making himself the largest shareholder. He then crowned himself the president of the new "brotherless" Warner Bros.
When his brother Harry found out about the swindle from Hollywood's trade magazine "Variety," he had a heart attack and then a stroke, leaving him to walk with a cane for the rest of his life. Albert and Harry never spoke to Jack again.
But it gets worse.
Due to other interpersonal intrigues, which you can go read about, Jack Warner fired his own son, Jack Jr., from Warner Bros. and had him thrown out of the studio. They never reconciled or spoke again.
However, what goes around comes around. In 1967, Jack sold a controlling stake in the studio and was then muscled out of the company despite assurances that he'd be retained. Too bad, so sad.
Jack died in 1978. The assassination allegation came to Cass in 1977, and to my knowledge she was never able to confront her great Uncle Jack about it.
WHITHER ASSASSINATION?
When you're talking about assassination by family, you're talking about betrayal of the worst sort. Cain-killed-Abel stuff. I find it interesting that it was Jack who was initially by Sam's side in California, while Harry and Albert were in New York taking care of preparations for "The Jazz Singer" premier. Jack insisted on staying behind with Sam, and missing the big event. Given what you know now about Jack's (lack of) love for family, does that sound like him? Predictably, Sam made Jack go, telling Jack he (Sam) if he okay and would follow right behind. Certainly, Jack knew this would be how it played out. Jack reached New York only to almost immediately turn around to go back to his dying brother. Jack would get the news of Sam's death when his train back passed through Chicago. IOW, Sam was (in)conveniently absent at the actual time of death. That's a lot of travel, all for nothing. Unless it wasn't all for nothing.
For his part, the estranged Jack Jr. didn't believe Demarest's 1977 allegation, saying, "Bill Demarest was a wonderful guy who could not hold his liquor and when loaded indulged in flights of fancy. This murder plot is based on an oversoaked imagination. Some pretty dreadful things happened at Warner Brothers, but this was not one of them."
Of course, as we saw, Cass Warner emphasized that Demarest was completely sober and had not been drinking when he told her his suspicion.
▪️EPILOGUE▪️
Warner Bros. has figured prominently in the news over the last year as it's been the object of a bidding war between Netflix and the jew Larry Ellison, the largest private donor to the IDF. The sale of Warner Bros. Discovery has been granted final approval and will now be rolled into the larger Ellison family ecosystem of Skydance, Paramount, CBS, CNN, Annapurna Pictures, Tiktok and every channel & property under those umbrellas.
What's ironic is that in 1926 Paramount head Adolph Zukor had offered Sam Warner a deal as an executive producer at Paramount if he brought Vitaphone with him. Sam, not wanting to take any more of Harry Warner's refusal to move forward with using sound in future Warner films, agreed to accept Zukor's offer, but the deal died after Paramount lost money in the wake of Rudolph Valentino's sudden surprise death.
On August 15, 1926, Valentino collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Only 6 weeks previously, he'd had an attack of stomach pain that he pushed through, not considering it serious. This time, he underwent emergency surgery for a perforated ulcer mimicking appendicitis. Afterward, he developed peritonitis and died of the resulting infection.
It's eerily similar to how Sam would go less than 2 months later. Sam allegedly had an ongoing tooth abscess problem that grew increasingly worse until he had to be hospitalized. Then he underwent surgery, after which the infection spread, soon killing him.
Was it all just a cohencidence? Did a remarkably similar scenario between two closely connected men played out at nearly the same time? Or did somebody maybe think that Valentino's story sounded like a great way to hide a murder?
I guess we'll never know. In the meantime, enjoy your October 7th™️ coverage, courtesy of the jewish-Larry Ellison-IDF media empire. Maybe this was always the way things were going to end up. But I can't help but wonder how the trajectory of Warner Bros., and indeed Hollywood, might have been different had Sam Warner survived.
[Select sources in the next tweet]