An Empire of Their Own: How The Jews Invented Hollywood, Gabler - B-

           Hollywood, and the American Dream it presented to the world, was created and run for thirty years by Jews from Eastern Europe. Then their sons managed the greatest era in the history of the industry. The writers, lawyers, and agents were Jews as well. The anti-semitic reaction began immediately, and culminated in the Red-baiting of the 1950's. 

         Carl Laemmle (Universal) was born in Germany in 1867; Adolph Zukor (Paramount) was born in Hungary in 1873; William Fox (Fox) was born in Hungary in 1879; Louis B. Mayer(Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) was born in Russian 1885; and the Warner boys (Warner Brothers) were born in Poland, Canada and the US. "What united them in deep spiritual kinship was their utter and absolute rejection of their pasts and their equally absolute devotion to their new country." All grew up very, very poor. They desperately wanted to assimilate, to be American. And they created the visualization of what America and Americans should be.

       Adolph Zukor, an orphan, came to America at the age of 16. He trained as a furrier, built a successful business, and as the new century began was a rich New Yorker. He turned to the ownership and promotion of arcades showing 30 second videos. He opened a movie theater. He believed that what was needed was longer quality films. He was soon making films of plays and books. He combined his business with Paramount, a fledgling producer of films, and was now running a studio. 

     The affable Carl Laemmle moved to America in 1883, where he spent years failing at endeavor after endeavor. He did reasonably well in an Oshkosh clothing business and while visiting Chicago, was amused by a 5 cent motion picture and purchased a theatre. He began to buy and rent films. By 1911, he was the largest distributor of films in the US and moved to New York. Films were not watched by the broad middle class, but almost exclusively by immigrants. Considered a low-life business, the wealthy establishment eschewed any financial interest in movies. "Laemmle, who failed to scale even the lower reaches of American industry, now presided over a considerable domain - one built on outsiders and the culturally disenfranchised like himself. And these would be his troops in the war that followed when the Jews would take over the movie industry for good." Laemmle formed Universal in the midst of NYC's distribution wars in the 1910's. 

       William Fox was "obsessed with success," quit school at 11 and was a clothing foreman at 13. He and a friend purchased a movie theater in Brooklyn in 1903. Within a decade, he was a wealthy man and Fox Film was a success. 

       Louis B. Mayer, claiming his birth records were lost, took July 4th as his birthday. He was raised in New Brunswick, Canada, and went to work at 12. He left for Boston when he was 19. A few years later, he leased a theater and began exhibiting films. In 1911, he built a 1600 seat theater. He was a principal in the creation of the film distributor Metro Pictures. He produced a few films and decided it was time to head to California. "Another blandishment that must have drawn the Jews to California was that, unlike in the east, the social structure was primitive and permeable." He merged Metro and Goldwyn to form MGM. 

      Harry and Jack Warner were the sons of a Polish shoe maker who immigrated to Baltimore. They were complete opposites who hated each other. Their father's devotion to religion was a major dividing point. Harry could speak Hebrew at seven; Jack never tried. Harry believed in promoting tolerance and justice; Jack didn't care. Their entry point also was film exhibition. They soon moved to production and to Hollywood. Their reputation was that they were iconoclastic and aggressive, a reputation they cemented when they were the first to introduce sound. With 'The Jazz Singer', they assured that sound was here to stay. 

     The toughest and meanest of them all was Harry Cohn at Columbia. Born in NY in 1891, he was bit of a street hustler whose brother Jack got him a job at Universal. They left and formed their own company. Columbia teamed up with an unknown director named Frank Capra and together, they built a powerhouse. Cohn wanted power, Capra recognition. Together, they achieved their goals.

     By the 1930's, the studio system, with its emphasis on control, was fully entrenched. "The moguls made the studios in their images to actualize their own dreams." A Warner film was scrappy, quick, topical and a product of a tight-fisted organization. MGM's heroes were tall, elegant and attractive; Paramount's continental. Warner's stars were Cagney, Robinson, Bogart, Raft and Davis, all fighters and strivers, often in urban settings. Warner's America was a tough place where the little guy didn't have it easy. Their films were "the least assimilative." Warner pushed his people, worked them very hard and they often rebelled against his demands. At Columbia, Cohn ran the studio like "a private police state." His America was Capra's, one propelled by ruthless capitalists against whom good guys like Stewart or Cooper pushed back. It was a "populist America of sinister forces at the top pitched against decency at the bottom..." Columbia's stars - Colman, Stanwyck, Arthur and Grant - weren't remotely ethnic. At Paramount, "the pictures purred with the smooth hum of sophistication." Zukor viewed his movies "as a source of intellectual elevation." Universal was known for its westerns and horror films and received half of its revenue from Europe. The studio struggled in the '30's, not the least because it specialized in nepotism; at one point with seventy of Laemmle's relatives on the payroll. "In the thirties, there was no doubt that MGM was the Tiffany of studios..." They had the best talent and paid well for the privilege. Mayer was obsessed with being the best. He wanted to project beauty on the screen; he wanted to be a father to the big MGM family.  His stars were Gable, Astair, Turner, Garbo, Crawford, and Garland. 

   Politically, the Jews of Hollywood were reactionaries. They also were the highest paid people in America. In the mid-30's, forty of the sixty-five highest paid Americans were Hollywood execs. In 1934, they worked together to thwart the gubernatorial candidacy of Upton Sinclair. The younger, better educated Jews who worked for them as writers disagreed. A Jewish actor formed the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. The communist party also took root. The rise of Hitler garnered the attention of the leaders of the industry. Laemmle and Zukor helped hundreds escape. However, not wanting to draw attention to themselves, and not wishing to hurt their European business, the studios were slow to confront the Nazis. Once they began to do so, Sen. Wheeler called for an investigation into why Hollywood was encouraging America to end its neutrality. With the onset of war, Hollywood was on the side of the angels. Hollywood's leftward leanings came under attack later by the House Un-Americam Activities Committee (HUAC). Inspired by rabid anti-semitism, HUAC came after Hollywood after the war. The hearings began in Washington in October, 1947. The studio heads feared that the protestant establishment that shunted them into a marginal business that they turned into a world class industry, was coming to take that industry and their wealth away. Ten witnesses refused to answer the committee's questions and were held in contempt. The industry folded. It fired the Hollywood Ten and promised to not hire known communists.

   The moguls were aging and slowly losing their personal control of their empires. In an agreement with the DOJ, the studios divested themselves of their theater holdings. Zukor, Fox and Laemmle had left in the thirties. Mayer was distracted by his wife's long illness. Cohn simply lost his ability to dominate everything. Jack Warner convinced his brothers to sell the business, which they all did. The next day he bought it back. He and Harry never spoke again. After needing a year to recover from a car accident, Jack came back but the role of the studio was diminishing daily. A decade later, he sold his interest's in his company. Mayer resigned from MGM after a battle with his production team. "Though it was a purveyor of sentiment, Hollywood was, as Mayer learned, a notoriously unsentimental place." He became a bitter, lonely old man. Slowly, the founding moguls passed away, Zukor was the last dying at 103 in 1976. "What remains is the America of our imaginations and theirs. Out of their desperation and their dreams, they gave us this America."

   In many ways, this is an exasperating book. It's quite long and at times goes into incredible detail, yet loses track of the big picture. It opens with specificity about all of the moguls and then focuses on Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer for almost all of the second half of the book. I kept wondering what happened to the others. I do not know how one could run through the 1930's without any mention of all the Europeans who came to Hollywood. From a continuity standpoint, it's been a bit of a challenge. However, it affirms the obvious about this niche area of Jewish immigrant history. The German, Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants of the 19th century disrupted and changed American society, I like think for the better. With fewer people, the Jews did it faster than anyone else I can recollect.