Exclusives

During the closing keynote of the Nov. 3 Women in Technology Hollywood’s (WiTH) SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit, at Nya Studios in Los Angeles, Cass Warner, president of Warner Sisters Studios and the granddaughter of Harry Warner, co-founder of Warner Bros., provided insights that illuminated the Warner family’s profound impact on the entertainment industry.

The conversation with Cass Warner during the session, “Legacy of Leadership: Empowering Women in Entertainment and Technology,” covered innovation, ethical leadership, and women’s empowerment through the lens of a family legacy that epitomizes “Educate, Entertain, and Enlighten.”

She is also an accomplished author, screenwriter, filmmaker, mother and grandmother, who has faced and overcome numerous challenges in her career, and particularly as a woman in the industry, and overcome those challenges as a result of her discipline and the balance that she has created around her.

Warner, whose new book is The Brothers Warner, had a fireside chat with Christina Aguilera, president of the WiTH Foundation, during the keynote.

“I had good aim is what I’d call it, getting born in the [Warner] family and having my grandfather as a grandfather,” Cass Warner said, calling Harry Warner “one of the most soulful, caring people I’ve ever met.” She “luckily had him around for the first 10 years” of her life, she pointed out, adding: “I had my first kid at 22, and knew I wanted to be a mother, that was first and foremost, but I also knew I needed to have something creative to do that meant something.”

She recalled going to the Warner lot with her dad every Saturday. “I saw this creative community and, at the same time, I knew that there were these battles going on behind the scenes. And I was just hooked by that, and I went to my dad in my 20s and I said, ‘I’m going to tell the brothers’ story.’”

She told attendees it has “been a beautiful journey, and it continues to be,” noting she has written two books and created a documentary. “And the reason I did the documentary is because I realized the true story had to be known first because every spec script I saw, because I’ve been wanting to do this as a seasonal series kind of project, like The Crown, so that you could really get to know the characters and what happened.”

Others were looking to do movies on the same story but would have focused on “the dirt and the scandal and … what happened between Jack and Harry. And I just [said], ‘that’s not the story.’”

Partnering with her to create the series is her son, Cole Hauser, a star of the TV western Yellowstone.

Asked to talk a little bit about the family history behind the motto “Educate, Entertain and Enlighten,” Cass Warner said:

“I’d love for you to watch the documentary [to] answer that question. That’s a great question, but a big question. Why grandpa felt so compassionate about his responsibility as a filmmaker is just him personally. He was just that kind of guy. He came from Russia as an immigrant at the age of six.” Jews were being killed or imprisoned at work camps and “his father decided he didn’t want his family to be raised in that shtetel in Russia at the time,” she recalled.

“How he managed to get to the U.S. is absolutely amazing to me and then he worked as a shoemaker,” she went on to say, noting the family was “dirt poor” when they arrived in America. “Instead of going to school, they worked on the street to raise $2 a week to feed the family, which became a family of 12…. Three of the kids died. And then my grandfather became kind of the patriarch of the family because his father wasn’t as motivated as he was. And the rest is really history.”

Brothers Sam and Harry Warner were “both geniuses in their own rights,” she said, noting “Sam was the technological innovator who saw the future of sound on film and that’s what launched them. Incredibly innovative. Everybody else was [saying], ‘Ah, it’s a fad…. Silent films are fine.”

And, with silent movies, filmmakers didn’t have to worry about the language, she pointed out. Sound films represented a “big jump for them,” she said, pointing out: “They gambled everything on it. At least three times, which really inspired me because I [said], ‘Oh my God, I mean, these guys never quit.’ It was like anything that got in the way was an incentive to do the next thing.”

She urged attendees to take the same sort of philosophy on life “because it’s a way of thinking which will make you successful because, first of all, you’re passionate about whatever it is your dream is and your goal and any way you’re going to get to it, you’re going to find a way because it’s that passion that drives you and keeps you going through all the challenges and all the stops and all the barriers. And all the people who say you can’t do that, sorry, don’t listen to that.”

Before leaving, Cass Warner, signed copies of her latest book, which is all about Harry Warner.

The annual SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit was presented by Qvest with sponsorship by Softtek, and took place at Nya Studios, located in the heart of Hollywood.

The full-day event, themed “Us, Our Org, Our Community,” offered a dynamic lineup of presentations and discussions.

WiTH, founded in 2014, plays a pivotal role in advancing women in entertainment technology. The WiTH Steering Committee, responsible for selecting Leadership Awards winners, comprises representatives from prominent organizations such as Amazon Studios, Microsoft, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and The Walt Disney Company.