But he did have a great inferiority complex."
As a child, Warner wanted to be an entertainer, singing and telling jokes. When he was a teenager, he performed in vaudeville and at a local opera house under the name Leon Zuardo. Over his lifetime, he developed a reputation for telling bad jokes. Warner's niece, Betty Warner Sheinbaum, told Jean Stein of The New Yorker that "He was cute and funny and he wanted to be in show business; he was a pest from the day he was born."
Warner's elder brothers, including the eldest Harry as well as Sam and Albert, entered the movie exhibition business while Warner was a teenager. In 1906, these four Warner brothers and their sister Rose, moved to New Castle, Pennsylvania where they ran a movie theater. Jack continued to exercise his desire to entertain by singing between movies as a "chaser" to rid the theater of its audience between films. In 1907, the Warner clan moved into distribution with its Duquesne Amusement Supply Company, which rented films to theaters. They were forced to sell the business in 1910 because Thomas Edison, the inventor of many technical aspects of film production, held many patents through which he tried to control the burgeoning film industry.
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