The Warner Meltdown. Or The Warner Bro's Turn for November-December 1975 Results
Looney Films: A Warner Bros Quest. Turn 41 November-December 1975 Turn Results
Your name is David Zavlas, CEO of Warner Bros. After the retirement of Jack Warner in early 1970, you had for the past five years near total control of Warner Bros and had been crafting a Grand Plan to destroy the competition and create a Warner Bros monopoly on Hollywood. It's been a long and tough road, but even with the Strike you were coming so close to your Grand Plan seeing the executions of its First Act, The Exorcist proving to be a fortunate prophesy as your first film to make Some Nights money and finally kick those fuckers at Universal at the balls. You were on the precipice of greatness, and just a few more pieces were needed to see the beginning of your well deserved reign at the top of Hollywood. Then a few wrong moves, and everything seems to be falling apart, with wide whispers across Hollywood that Warner is finished.
Releasing New Films:
D100 => 92
Thanksgiving season had started off with some golden eggs with the release of Barry Lyndon and three of your popcorn flicks that you had managed to rush to completion before the Strike popped off. While the popcorn flicks didn't really generate anything but steady profits and mild public and critic approval, Barry Lyndon was proving to be a winner with marketing estimating $50-$60 million and tons of Oscar buzz for Best Picture, Director and scores of other awards. With Warner being snubbed at the Oscars under your tenure, you needed a win bad before the Universal cunts bribed the Academy with their wallets. Hopefully you could apply whatever Coppola and Paramount did to get your rightful win, although the Strike proved to be a surprising ally in this case with new rules making it tougher to bribe and influence Academy voters. And if it was a question of art alone, Barry Lyndon was better than Jaws by a hell of a mile.
Fortunately Santa gave you a very nice early Christmas gift this year in the form of a quiet winter season. None of the studios were pumping out anything decent that could make more than their budget back and even those Japanese obsessed brats at Lucasfilms finally got what was coming to them with one of their ugly imports being found to have a major contract quarry that sent Eisner away to Tokyo for the past couple of weeks, thus leaving Lucasfilms without their only competent executive. The only major form of competition was a UA film called "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" about Jack Nicholson playing some mental asylum patient. Not only was it making money at twice the rate as Barry Lyndon, but it was generating more Oscar buzz. You were going to have to find a way to sick Paramount and UA against each other to have Barry Lyndon glide quietly to victory while they were too busy stabbing each other.
Hiring New Writers:
D100 => 64
"Everyone, I'd like to thank you all for coming today and on behalf of the Warner family, welcome you to a very long and lucrative career with our company. In this room lies the future of Hollywood, some of the best talent in this town who are going to make Blockbusters so spectacular it will make Some Nights look like a a student film. You've got your pen and paper, we got the resources, let's get to work and make some movies!" You say to the writer's room, then shuffle out to your next meeting, receiving a muted applause on the way out.
With the end of the Strike it should have meant a return to the status quo and the resumption of stalled productions and resumption of contracted scripts. Unfortunately, not only did you have to cut a majority of your production que thanks to the lack of any hits besides The Exorcist, but almost all of your writers you had employed didn't come back, claiming that Warner Bros was a "Hostile work environment" that couldn't be trusted to upheld their contracts, thus shifting work elsewhere.
In response, you did the old tried and true method of strike busting...after the strike, hiring new help. Those ingrates and hacks may think they're oh so special just because the films and shows were born out of their pens and minds, but you knew they were only special because you and the other studios made them so. Anyone with a working brain and basic understanding of the English language could write, and no matter when and where, there would always be a starving artist eager for a contract and fame. So you hired en masse a group of young men and women who had been rejected by the establishment for a long time and had some decent literary work in novels, poetry, plays or newspapers. It was an honest case of charity you had performed, and the Pinko Writer's Club dared to claim you were against the Hollywood artist by replacing them with wage slaves. Commie scum. Well you had a few tricks up your sleeve to get the writers back, and not give them a damn cent more.
Ironing Down the Contracts!:
D100 => 22
Those ungrateful turncoats of the Writers may have decided to abandon their posts, but you had an ironclad contract and 20 films that needed to see be given their due labor. Thanks to your lawyers, you had some rock solid clauses to bring the old writers back and get them to finish their work with no extra cost while the new boys and girls made new material to be pumped out after the stalled catalog was finished. You presented your demands to the Writer's Guild, and in return they laughed at you and said that all contracts before the Strike were now null and void and you had to play by their rules. Since you never ripped open the contract, you threatened to take them to court, and in return, the Writers threatened to call another General Strike with Actors and Producers expressing their pleasure at going for another round, with even the Directors and Animators voicing their sympathies for a total Hollywood strike.
When word became public and a second strike was popping up on news headlines, all of the major establishment studio CEOs personally traveled to your office and demanded in no uncertain terms that you back off from the Pinkos or they would unite together and make sure that not a single Warner Bros film made its way to the big screen or television. It was at that moment you knew that Hollywood had gone mad, that even your brothers of Capitalism had fallen sway to Socialist garbage. Thus, reluctantly, you backed off and let the errant writers get away with their treason. If there was one thing you could at least take satisfaction in, it was that most of the former Warner writers would not get any work at the other studios and would starve and end up on the streets. Serves those brats right.
Sabotaging Josey Wales Marketing:
D100 => 19
Sabotaging Josey Wales Release:D100 => 1
Striking Back against the Guilds!:
D100 => 3
Josey Wales. What started as a simple milking project of Clint Eastwood to get the first profitable Western in years thanks to Eastwood's success with Dirty Harry and get him on board for a third Harry sequel, was turning into a nightmare you never could have foreseen. While you initially were open to release with grated teeth, the Strike and Clint Eastwood's continued operations in violation of Guild code gave you a golden opportunity. To save some tax money and prevent even more downsizing, you ordered to have Josey Wales shelved. It along with other movie closures would cause a major shrinkage of your tax dues and allow you to save as much money as possible from the Exorcist profits. While Eastwood and friends buying the film was annoying, it was still a benefit as you could still count it as a tax break and with your accountants, you were able to swish the money around so most of it went in your hands, or more specifically your Swiss bank accounts.
You would have been content to wash Josey Wales away with some other studio having a bomb on their hands, but then you found out that Josey Wales fell into the hands of Lucasfilms. You cursed yourself greatly upon hearing the information. Never before had you felt so monumentally stupid as you should have remembered that Lucasfilms was headed by Eastwood's nephew, of course the cowboy would give his film to the company of his blood kin. While you still believed Josey Wales was a flop in the making, this was the same company who were able to turn black and white Japanese releases with crappy effects and no English dubs into profits, therefore you couldn't take ANY chances and launched a secret war to destroy the film.
First you started with a smear campaign, trying to generate scandals for Eastwood so that an outraged public would not dare to see the film of such a scoundrel. Unfortunately the scandals for Eastwood didn't seem to stick as newspapers for once in their life didn't drag out the story and easily fact checked the lies. Then you tried to get the theaters and stations to kill showings of Josey Wales trailers and commercials, but unfortunately all your good will had been used up in the Writer's negotiations and that was a no go. Plus tens of thousands of dollars spent trying to prove that Forrest Carter was a Klansman kept on turning up dead ends. And with each talk of Eastwood, Josey Wales got even more free publicity and people were interested in this mystery Western based off a bestselling book.
With marketing being a bust, it was time for a good old fashioned heist. Through multiple intermediaries, you hired some muscle associated with the LA mafia to rob Lucasfilms of all the Josey Wales footage and then promptly destroy them. And if a fire or two was started, all the better. Unfortunately it appears that your goons were some of the greatest morons on the planet, as they rid in a hippie van to Lucasfilms with open windows while wearing the most stereotypical robber outfits with ski masks and stripes and everything; and worst of all they didn't even get within a mile of Lucasfilms, their van breaking down at all places outside of a bank. Panicked customers and tellers called the police, and hours later your men received a call requesting bail, only to be told they spilled the beans.
Since you weren't directly involved, you did your best to not only cover your tracks, but turn defeat into a golden opportunity to wipe out the Pinkos, you were going to frame the Guilds for the heist! For the following days, an operation was carried out to link all evidence of the heist to the Guilds, that the action was all part of some elaborate punishment against Lucasfilms for not joining the Strike in solidarity. It was a more believable theory than one would think as the Actor's Guild apparently strongarmed Ball into firing O'Brian over payment even though the boy wanted to work for cheap. Unfortunately for some reason, LAPD just wouldn't take the damn bait and believed the damn Pinkos for their word! Then another set of spies had been caught trying to place documents implicating them for the heist along with forged financial records showing tax frauds, and the dots were starting to get connected and whispers of Warner Bros were being spread in the precincts.
At the moment you were playing damage control with your lawyers, trying to build an airtight case and a million alibis and misdirects so that you could not possibly be thought of as suspects, while trying to secure as much blackmail as possible on the Guilds to get them to back down. Unfortunately, it was far from the end of your troubles as right before Thanksigiving, company stock prices started to tank and hard. While you were hyperfocused on the writer and Eastwood, an unlikely coalition of Hollywood's A-listers and the establishment had been growing behind your back. Anyone who thought you had wronged them or had their previous uses as pawns along with rivals were hunting down the company like that Jaws shark. Lawsuits were being filed left and right, interviews spouting falsehoods and exaggerations about the company were on prime news; veterans were getting their friends in the company to stage walkouts, it was like watching the Titanic hit the iceberg as its captain.
But the moment you knew that the days of your career were likely numbered and you had to book a ticket for Switzerland as soon as possible was when the 83 year old Jack Warner marched into your office, waving his cane around angrily like a baseball bat and staring at you with venom in his eyes.
"WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO TO MY FAMILY'S COMPANY DAVID?!"
A/N: So for the Warner Bros section of the update, Magoose asked me to fill it in with a Warner Bros Negaquest to give a glimpse into the insanity that is going on at Warner Bros at this time. Magoose can fill you in on greater details and more sins, but to put it simply, Warner Bros this decade has been overseen by scummy leadership that has made an exponential list of enemies and few smart decisions. This is the current tip of the iceberg, but there's a greater well of scuminess to unveil and now Warner Bros shall pay the price. If you are wondering who the CEO is, take a look at current events and let's just say that this quest may be an isekai...
