It’s a real-life act of Hollywood villainy that ranks with the very worst depicted on the big screen — how Jack L. Warner tricked his brothers into surrendering the studio they’d spent half a century building.
“I was always fascinated by my great-uncle Jack, whose name was never mentioned in my house after Grandpa Harry died,” says Cass Warner, who recounts this tragedy of Shakespearean proportions in her documentary “The Brothers Warner,” recently released on DVD.
“It took me many years to get answers to my questions. It was not until I started talking to Jack’s family that I began to find out what was really behind that door.”
The Warner family was split for decades after Jack — the youngest of the brothers and the vice president in charge of production at the Burbank, Calif., studio — talked his brothers, Harry, the company’s president, and Albert, the treasurer, into accepting a $22 million buyout offer in 1955.
Harry was reluctant, but finally agreed — only on the condition that Jack give up his shares in the company along with those of his brothers.
Jack Warner sneakily bought back Warner Bros. from the purchasers — a syndicate headed by Boston banker Serge Semenenko, who took a quick $1 million profit — as soon as the deal went through, and installed himself as president, an office he had long coveted.
“I was 18 years old and walking on the lot with James Dean when Jack Warner approached us and introduced us to Semenenko,” Dennis Hopper recalls in the documentary.
“Jimmy ignored Semenenko’s outstretched hand and threw some dollar bills on the ground. Harry Warner was stabbed in the back by his brother!”
Harry suffered a debilitating stroke shortly afterward, and a furious Albert never spoke to his younger brother again.
Jack Warner Jr. reports that when his jovial father visited Harry for the last time at his 50th wedding anniversary party, the ailing old man simply shut his tear-filled eyes to avoid his betrayer.
Jack Sr. did not even return to Hollywood for his eldest brother’s funeral, remaining on the French Riviera.
Just six days later, the new president of Warner Bros. was nearly killed when the car he was driving plowed into the back of a parked truck after he left a casino early one morning.
Before he returned to the studio, Jack Warner committed one last unspeakable act of familial betrayal.
Jack Jr., head of the studio’s TV division and heir apparent, was summarily fired by his stepmother’s lawyer after being falsely accused of telling the press his father wouldn’t survive. As Jack Jr. left the lot for the last time, a banner was being raised at the entrance: “Welcome back, Jack.”
“My father described Jack in one word: He was a coward,” says Sperling, daughter of Harry’s daughter Betty and producer Milton Sperling. “He was incredibly insecure, the kid in the playground who needed attention.”
Jack Sr., the last survivor of Hollywood’s original studio bosses, had a brash, flamboyant personality that was at constant odds with his conservative and dignified brother Harry, 11 years his senior.
Originally, the business was founded by four brothers born to Polish immigrants originally named Wonskolaser. Harry and Albert came to the US with their parents. Sam was the only American-born brother in the business; Jack, the youngest, was born in Canada, where the family lived for a time.
The four Warners entered the movie business by operating a theater in 1905, but they did not hit the big time until “The Jazz Singer” popularized talking movies in 1927.
That success came at a tragic cost to the family — Sam, who neglected his health while supervising that breakthrough, died suddenly just before the movie’s premiere.
Then, in 1931, Harry’s son Lewis, the company’s original heir apparent, died of pneumonia after an abscessed tooth became infected on a trip to Cuba.
Among the brothers, the only other son was Jack Warner Jr.
But he had a fraught relationship with Jack Sr., who divorced his mother to marry longtime mistress Ann — whom the rest of the clan disapproved of, to put it mildly.
“Because of the terrible way Ann was treated by the family, she found ways to get back at the rest of them, including Jack Jr., who remained close to his mother,” Sperling says.
Jack Jr.’s maternal loyalty inspired his father to stonewall on his entrry into the family business. “My grandfather Harry literally had to threaten to fire Jack unless he gave Jack Jr. a job on the studio lot,” she says.
In the 1950s, Sperling’s father had to carry increasingly testy messages between his father-in-law Harry — furious that Jack was spending so much time in France — and Jack.
“My grandfather thought Jack was leaving his post and delegating authority to a nonfamily member,” Sperling says. “One time, Harry was chasing Jack around the lot with a lead pipe. Dad had to separate them.”
She had only one major encounter with Jack Warner, who sold the studio to Seven Arts in 1967 for $32 million. (After a series of mergers, it’s now part of the conglomerate Time Warner.)
“He was never at family gatherings after what happened with my grandfather, but one time I spent an evening in Palm Springs alone with [Jack] and my father, who was divorced from my mother by that time,” Sperling recalls.
“I was 15 years old and, man, he fascinated me. According to my journal, he said, ‘Look at this girl, those teeth, those legs.’ He was just on for the entire night — the guy never stopped. He was so full of life, but his need for attention made it uncomfortable for everybody around him.”
Sperling says she started working on the documentary after Jack’s funeral in 1978, partly as a way of bringing together the fractured family. Members included the late restaurateur Warner LeRoy (Harry’s grandson), the late silent-screen actress Lina Basquette (Sam’s widow) and filmmaker Gregory Orr, whose mother was Jack’s stepdaughter and appeared as a young Bulgarian gambler in “Casablanca.”
Last year, Sperling made a deal with a French producer to turn the remarkable saga of “The Brothers Warner” into a feature film.
“Years ago, I thought that Jack Nicholson would have been a great Jack Warner, with Dustin Hoffman as my grandfather,” she says. “I can guarantee that whoever ends up playing Jack is going to win an Oscar.”
Spoken like a true Warner.
lou.lumenick@nypost.com