"“Mutual Exploitation”: On the Origins of Warner Bros. and Edna Ferber’s Middlebrow Marriage"

Abstract:

      In adapting Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer-winning 1924 novel So Big into a feature film in 1932, Warner Bros. forged a relationship with the writer that would prove mutually beneficial for more than three decades. While the film was only a mild success and Ferber’s status in the American literary canon is now hotly contested, Warner’s courting of this story specifically and her broader style reveals much about how it —as well as the other four major film studios—redefined themselves in the years following the Great Depression. After a decade of growth that culminated in an unprecedented spree of acquisitions almost entirely funded by stock issuances, Warner entered the 1930s with its highest share of the Hollywood market but deeply overleveraged. They survived the lean early years of the Depression primarily due to a change in corporate structure. This paper argues that Warner’s transition into what Tino Balio refers to as a “modern business enterprise” not only kept the company afloat post-Depression, but also transformed a studio once specializing in cheaply-made lowbrow films into a thoroughly middlebrow enterprise. Further, the very diversity of the company’s assets allowed it to insulate itself from the pointed critiques of capital accumulation like those found in So Big. Such investment in films of both mass appeal and biting sociopolitical relevance—epitomized by Ferber’s oft-adapted body of work—should thus be understood as not merely an ironic or contradictory departure for Warner Bros. but as an essential marker of their evolution into a modern media conglomerate.