“American Masters” has been one of my favorite PBS shows for many years — and its producer Susan Lacy is a true culture hero of mine — but I can’t figure out why the show and Lacy have lent their names to a bland five-hour promo for the Warner Bros. DVD library that is debuting on PBS stations tonight.
“You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story” has the feel of a collection of DVD “extras” for boxed sets about to be released by Warner Home Video.
The five hours go over some of the most tired material in the annals of TV documentaries on Hollywood — the arrival of sound with the release of “The Jazz Singer” in 1927; the rise of Bette Davis as the biggest female star on the Warner Bros. lot; the production of the glorious 1942 best picture Oscar winner ”Casablanca”; the “revolutionary” 1967 Warren Beatty production of “Bonnie & Clyde,” etc. etc.
We’ve all gone down these roads many times in the past — indeed, the recently released “deluxe” Warner Home Video DVD versions of “Bonnie & Clyde” and “Cool Hand Luke” have “making of” documentaries that are much better researched (and more entertaining) than any of the material about those two films on the PBS show.
Directed by the fine critic Richard Schickel and narrated by Clint Eastwood, “You Must Remember This” would be perfectly acceptable as filler material on Turner Classic Movies, but it’s hard to fathom why PBS would turn five hours over to such a purely promotional enterprise.
Designed to mark the “85th anniversary” of the studio — is that really a milestone? — the documentary gets downright tacky in its final hour, “The Big Tent (1980-Present),” when we are forced to sit through a celebration of such contemporary Warner Bros. fare as “The Matrix” trilogy, “North Country,” “Syriana” and “The Departed.”
None of the Warner Bros. executives who speak in such fawning terms about Stanley Kubrick’s final movie “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999) mentions the fact that the great director’s “vision” was tampered with after he died; crude optical cut-outs were pasted over the orgy sequence in order to obtain an R-rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.
I am second to no one in my admiration for actor-producer-director George Clooney, but I was shocked to hear him discuss Warner Bros. films in which he starred, such as “Three Kings” and “Ocean’s Eleven,” without ever mentioning the names of directors David O. Russell and Steven Soderbergh. Everyone knows that Clooney feuded with Russell on the set of “Three Kings” but that doesn’t excuse Schickel from not indicating who wrote and directed the important 1999 drama about the first war in Iraq. Old grudges apparently supercede reporting and scholarship when it comes to Hollywood.
In order to flatter Clooney, Schickel actually praises the plot of the incoherent flop “Syriana” as “deliberately confusing.”
Let’s hope that “American Masters” and PBS received a HUGE check from Warner Bros. for this three-night commercial.
