In the months ahead, the liveliest Hollywood drama won’t be a movie or TV show—it’ll be a corporate merger. Last week, Netflix announced that it will acquire Warner Bros., the storied studio behind “Casablanca,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” for nearly eighty-three billion dollars. Hardly any time passed before another behemoth, Paramount, launched a hostile takeover bid, setting up a clash that will have huge consequences for the American entertainment industry, the economy, and the future of cinema.

In 1998, The New Yorker published an oral history of Warner Bros., illuminating the colorful, sometimes scandalous family behind it. For more than a decade, the writer Jean Stein interviewed the wives, children, and other associates of the Warners—a family helmed by four surviving sons of a Jewish cobbler from Poland. As the brothers’ films transformed global culture and generated a vast fortune, their shifting feuds and alliances became worthy of a miniseries of their own. Stein’s report is spiced with cameos by many of the world’s most famous people. Barbara Warner Howard, the once secret “love child” of Jack Warner and another man’s wife, recalled the friendship that her mother struck up with the artist hired to paint her, Salvador Dalí. But for sheer chutzpah—and a revealing look at one brother’s opinion of the dynasty—consider Jack Warner’s advice to Albert Einstein, who visited the studio in 1931. “Doctor,” he told the Nobel Prize winner, “You have your theory of relativity and I have mine: Never hire a relative.”