Leslie Iwerks (‘100 Years of Warner Bros.’ documentary series) on the ‘daunting’ task of squeezing a century of history into 4 hours [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“You know, it’s funny, I went to the other side of the tracks, didn’t I?” admits Leslie Iwerks as she begins talking about the four-part docuseries “100 Years of Warner Bros.: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of” that she directed for Max. Why the other side? Because the Oscar and Emmy nominee grew up as the daughter of longtime Disney executive Don Iwerks and granddaughter of Ub Iwerks, the Disney animation legend who worked side-by-side with Walt Disney and co-created Mickey Mouse. Yet here Leslie was tasked with putting together the ultimate history of a studio (Warner Bros.) that has long been a chief competitor of Disney. How did that happen? Her 2019 documentary “The Imagineering Story” that told the tale of Disney Imagineering came to the attention of the Warner Bros. folks. “They really liked it and asked if I could do something similar for them (to celebrate their 100th),” Iwerks says. “Next thing I know, I’m deep-diving into Warner Bros. history – and here we are.” See the exclusive video interview above.
Originally conceived as an eight-part historical overview of the studio, “100 Years of Warner Bros.” went through numerous permutations before Iwerks and her team finally settled on the four-part, four-hour format that takes viewers through the rich and colorful history of the film, television and animation colossus that was founded a century ago by immigrant brothers Jack, Harry, Sam and Albert Warner. Sitting down to plot the course of the series, Iwerks admits the task ahead of her felt “pretty daunting.” She stresses, “We asked ourselves a lot of questions. What were the films that really made a difference? What was the DNA of Warner Bros.? What were the highs and the lows and the near-death experiences for the studio? What were the things that really pushed it to higher highs and lower lows? That’s kind of how I started to frame it.”
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All of the various puzzle pieces had to be carefully organized, Iwerks adds. “The tricky part is, you’ve got TV, you’ve got film, you’ve got the business story, you’ve got the story of the industry, the story of the economics and their survival, as well as the wars and the financial crashes. It was hard to juggle the time frames. When do you go back to TV and talk about that? When do you go to film? When do you bucket these films together as a movement like in the Seventies, when all of these bold, brash filmmakers tried to tell new stories and break out of the classic Hollywood system. We were looking for movements to bucket these stories in.” The series also tells in its first installment about how a dog named Rin Tin Tin saved the studio from bankruptcy in its early days.
Iwerks’s research included watching dozens of Warner Bros. features both old and new and mapping out which represented the important turning points, along with the cataclysmic business stories. She was given cart blanche with no restraints to tell the tale, the good, bad and ugly. And seemingly everyone Iwerks asked to participate with on-camera interviews complied, from Morgan Freeman agreeing to narrate to the participation of everyone from Martin Scorsese to Oprah Winfrey to George Clooney, Ron Howard, Keanu Reeves, Oliver Stone, Harvey Keitel and Baz Luhrmann. “For the most part, they were all excited to be part of this,” she observes, “and they not only discussed their own experience with the studio. Most of them were steeped in the studio’s history, too.”
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When asked what in her research surprised her, Iwerks replies, “From its earliest days, this studio was unabashed in doing whatever it took to be successful. They broke down doors. They broke down walls. They tried new things. And the things that consistently excited me were the innovation and leadership stories I found that met with technology, with art and the creative and vision and innovation…The evolution of visual effects and their changes over a hundred years proved to be markers, and we saw how technology is evolving so fast in the digital age.”
And what is Iwerks’s favorite Warner Brothers film? Her answer will probably surprise you: “Blazing Saddles,” a comedy considered almost unreleasable by studio executives initially. “I just loved it,” she admits. “It would have been so much fun to work on. Some people are offended by it; others consider it the funniest movie ever. It holds up today and smacks racism in the face.”
All four parts of “100 Years of Warner Bros.: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of” are streaming on Max.
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