Talking Hollywood History with Filmmaker Cass Warner Sperling

At the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills earlier this week, I had a chance to sit down with author and filmmaker Cass Warner Sperling.

Her documentary The Brothers Warner premiered on PBS last month as part of the "American Masters" series. Two questions I wanted to ask: how did she get the film onto PBS, and what are her other distribution plans?

But we also talked about Cass' famous ancestors. Her grandfather Harry was one of the four original Warner brothers who founded the great studio. Since my new book deals with the way the Warner brothers helped usher in the sound era (they were also early proponents of Technicolor), I wanted to talk about some of that history. Cass tries to set me straight about whether her grandfather ever really said, "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"



The audio is also here in MP3 form.

There's some video from her film here (in non-embeddable form).