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| Author | Neal Gabler |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-Fiction |
| Publisher | Crown |
| Publication date | 1988 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print ( Hardback, and Paperback) |
| Pages | 502 pp (hardback) |
| ISBN | isbn=0385265573 Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood is a non-fiction book recounting the careers of several prominent Jewish movie producers in the early years of Hollywood. Author Neal Gabler focuses on the psychological motivations of these film moguls, and examines how their background as Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe shaped their careers and influenced the movies they made.
Gabler's main thesis is that these producers (whom Gabler terms 'Hollywood Jews') generally came from poor, fatherless backgrounds, and felt like outsiders in America because of their Jewishness. In Hollywood, these producers were able to run their own industry, assimilate into the American mainstream, and produce movies that fulfilled their vision of the American dream. Gabler asserts that the nature of their business and their movies can often be traced back to their feelings of alienation as immigrants.
Synopsis
The book discusses the fundamental irony of Hollywood in the early half of the 20th century: it was producing movies that portrayed core American values and ideas, yet was run by Jews who themselves did not fit the American stereotype and did not feel that they fit in to the American mainstream: "The paradox is that the American film industry, which ... called 'the quintessence of what we mean by America', was founded and for more than thirty years operated by Eastern European Jews who themselves seemed to be anything but the quintessence of America.... The much-vaunted studio system ... was supervised by a second generation of Jews, many of whom also regarded themselves are marginal men trying to punch into the American mainstream."
Gabler notes that Jews held significant portion of key roles in the Hollywood movie industry: "When sound movies commandeered the industry, Hollywood was invaded by a battalion of Jewish writers, mostly from the East. The most powerful talent agencies were run by Jews. Jewish lawyers transacted most of the industry's business and Jewish doctors ministered to the industry's sick. Above all, Jews produced the movies. 'Of 85 names engaged in production' a 1936 study noted, '53 are Jews'."
Jewish success in Hollywood led to anti-semitism: Gabler notes that "F. Scott Fitzgerald Hollywood as 'a Jewish holiday, a gentiles tragedy'. The real tragedy, however, was certainly the Jews'. Their dominance became a target for wave after wave of vicious anti-Semites - from fire-and-brimstone evangelicals in the teens and early twenties ... to Red-baiters in the forties. The sum of this anti-Semitic demonology was that the Jews, by design or sheer ignorance, had used the movies to undermine traditional American values."
Gabler notes the irony of accusing Jewish producers of being anti-American: "Hollywood Jews were being assailed by know-nothings for conspiring against traditional American values and the power structure that maintained them, they were desperately embracing those values and working to enter the power structure."
Most Jewish Hollywood producers shared a common desire to embrace American values: "The most striking similarity among the Hollywood Jews, however, was not their Eastern European origins. What united them in deep spiritual kinship was their utter and absolute rejection of their pasts and their equally absoute devotion to their new country. ... something drove the young Hollywood Jews to a ferocious, even pathological, embrace of America. Something drove them to deny whatever they had been before settling here."
| Mogul | Country of origin | Studio |
|---|---|---|
| Adolph Zukor | Hungary | Paramount Pictures |
| Carl Laemmle | Germany | Universal Pictures |
| William Fox | Hungary | Fox Film Corporation |
| The Warner brothers | Poland (2nd generation) | Warner Brothers Studios |
| Louis B. Mayer | Russia | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| Harry Cohn | Germany (2nd generation) | Columbia Pictures |
The movie industry was particularly attractive to Jews: "The movie industry held out a number of blandishments to these Jews, not the least of which was that id admitted them. There were no social barriers in a business as new and faintly disreputable as the movies were in the early years of this century. There were none of the impediments imposed by loftier professions and more firmly entrenched businesse to keep Jews and other undesireables out. Financial barriers were low, too."
Many producers had skills that leant themselves to the entertainment industry: "The Jews also had a special compatibility with the industry ... For one thing, having come primarily from fashion and retail, they understood public taste and were masters at gauging market swings, at merchandising, at pirating away customers and beating the competition."
Hollywood producers could satisfy their need for assimilation by using the movies to represent their own ideal of what America should be: "Within the studios and on the screen, the Jews could simply create a new country - an empire of their own, so to speak - one where they would not only be admitted, but would govern as well. The would fabricate their empire in the image of America as they would fabricate themselves in athe image of prosperous Americans. They would create its values and myths, its traditions and archetypes. It would be an America where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent. This was their America, and its invention may be their most enduring legacy."
Chapters
Chapter 1: The Killer
In chapter 1, Gabler surveys the life of Adolph Zukor, leader of Paramount Pictures. Zukor's youth paralleled that of the other producers covered in the book: born in Europe, he emigrated to America when he was 16 years old. "Zukor plunged into assimilation. ... And he left any vestige of his Judaism behind.... He worked on the Sabbath ... He was an American now."
Zukor teamed with fellow Hungarian-American Morris Kohn and fellow Jew Marcus Loew to establish a chain of movie archades on the East coast. At the time, most movies were short, and interspersed with live acts. Zukor pushed movie makers to produce feature-length movies. "Zukor had hit upon a formula for the advancement of the moveie to the middle class. "Famouse Players in Famous Plays" ... His intention was that the movies would become a kind of 'canned' theater, ... attracting a new audience while elevating the old one."
Zukor was fully conscious that he was now engaged in prestige building - for the movies and for himself. Zukor bought the rights to the very successful Queen Elizabeth, which proved that feature films were economically viable. Zukor then produced his own movie The Prisoner of Zenda, the first of many successful productions. "By war's end the movies were indisputably the most favored entertainment in the country, largely because they had matured into dramatic narratives, as Zukor had always prophesied they would."
Gabler describes Kukor's success as a result of his ability to straddle a great cultural divide: "On one side of the cultural divide were the .. white Anglo-Saxon Protestants clinging to a moralistic, traditional way of life and terrified that the influx of immigrants would somehow destroy their values.... On the other side were the immigrants and the forces of urbanization , mass communication, unionization, the proliferation of middle class and education.... Zukor was positioned at the fulcrum between these Americas ... This made Zukor, the Hungarian Jew transformed into the American gentleman, the ideal facilitator for the movies' similar transformation."
Gabler concludes his portrait of Kukor: "There was also a particular irony for him in the conflict between his past and his present. The man who hated losing had lost himself. The man who hated lying had carefully manufactured his entire life. Zukor had triumphed over .. his competitors. ... But most of all, he had triumphed over the embittered orphan from Hungary. Most of all, he had triumphed over himself."
Chapter 2: "Don't be a salary slave"
Chapter 2 is an outline of Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures, and William Fox, founder of the Fox Film Corporation Laemmle was born in Germany in 1867, and emigrated to America when he was 16 years old. When Laemmle started operating movie theaters in Chicago in 1906 "reformers had already begun castigating the movies for their deleterious effects, particularly on children."
Laemmle responded by calling "his theater The White Front. He meant it to conjure an image so clean and wholesome that a father wouldn't hesitate to take the family there."
"But what Laemmle had discovered ... was that these movies ...had begun to satisfy the need of an expanding working class and a mushrooming immigrant population .... For immigrants, the movies were a powerful socializing force, acclimatizing them to American customs and traditions."
William Fox was born in Hungary, and emigrated to America as an infant. Like Laemmle, Fox started as a movie-house owner, and eventually moved into producing his own movies in New York. Gabler quotes Fox: ".. As I became established and expanded my business,.. I reached the period in 1912 or 1913 where I found myself with $500,000 in cash that I wanted to invest, and I realized that there was a great deal more in life that just making money. What concerned me far more was to make a name that would stand for the finest in entertainment the world over" Gabler comments: "He could have been speaking for nearly all of the Hollywood Jews."
Gabler finds Fox sharing some traits with the other producers covered in the book: "But the most significant remnant of his childhood, as for so many of the Hollywood Jews, was fear. Jews succeeded at the sufferance of the gentile establishment. Everything gained could just as easily be lost, and it was the provisional nature of success, as much as anything else, that impelled him.... It was desperation born of insecurity, but it would prove a powerful force in the motion picture industry, where desperation often ruled"
Chapter 3: Born on the fourth of July
Gabler describes Louis B. Mayer's - co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer - contributions to the film industry in chapter 3. Mayer was born in Russia and moved to Boston when he was 19. He acquired movie theaters throughout the New England region. Gabler describes Mayer's character: "Mayer was always an extremist.... Evertything Mayer did had to be more - a relatively common affliction among Jews, particularly Jews of Mayer's generation, since Jews were often born with the racking sense of being outside and having to compensate." Gabler cites Mayer's poor relationship with his father as an example of a pattern: many of the Hollywood Jews that Gabler studies had no fathers, absentee fathers, or abusive fathers. Of Mayer's father, Gabler says: "Jacob Mayer was a failure in bsiness and a failure in his family." "At home he was subjected to his father's abuse and humilation." Gabler analyzes the psychological motives of Mayer: "Recognition and status meant less to Mayer than to Zukor.... Zukor wanted to control the world. Mayer want to make it his family - to embrace and be embraced by it."
In chapter 3, Gabler also discusses two important Jewish movie-theater owners: German-born Samuel Rothapfel, nicknamed 'Roxy', and American-born Sid Grauman, who founded many theaters, including Grauman's Chinese Theatre.
Hollywood, Gabler contends, was an ideal environment for the immigrant movie producers to fashion a new industry: "When Mayer moved west in 1918, there were well over seventy production companies in Los Angeles, and over 80 percent of the world' movies were made there.... one blandishment that must have drawn the Jews to Californai was that, unlike in the East, the social structure was primitive and permeable. One could even have said that California was the social equivalent of the movies themselves, new and unformed, which really made the producers' emigration there a matter of an industry discovering its appropriate spot. There was no real aristocracy in place, and few social impediments obstructing Jews." "In a raw, yawning environment like this, it was relatively simple to aestheticize oneself, to make oneself over, and most of the Hollywood Jews did."
The book claims that Mayer's personal desire to feel included in a family spilled-over into his movie productions: "What Mayer did in the thirties - what he was situated to do as a Jew yearning to belong - was provide reassurance against the anxieties and disruptions of the time. He did this by fashioning a vast, compelling national fantasy out of his dreams and out of the basic tenets of his own dogmatic faith - a belief in virtue, in the bulwark of family, in the merits of loyalty, in the soundness of tradition, in America itself."
Gabler's main thesis is repeated here: that immigrant Jews were uniquely positioned to invent Hollywood: "Native born, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans could share this fantasy with Mayer and even call it their own. But it is unlikely that many of them could have or would have invented it. To do so, one would have needed the same desperate longing for security that Mayer and so many of the other Hollywood Jews felt.... One would have had to be so fearful of being outside and alone that one would go to any lengths to fabricate America as a sanctuary, safe and secure, and then promulgate this idealization to other Americans."
Chapter 4: Between the old life and the new
In chapter 4, Gabler describes the founders of Warner Brothers Studios, Sam, Jack, Harry, and Albert, sons of a Jewish Polish immigrant.
Gabler chronicles the Warner's efforts to spearhead the production of sound movies ('talkies'), a new technology in the 1920s. In 1927, Warner Brothers produced - at grave financial risk to their personal finances - The Jazz Singer, which was a success.
Gabler dissects The Jazz Singer's plot (about a Jewish entertainer), and finds parallels with the Hollywood Jews: "How does ... problem suddenly get resolved? ... The answer is that the movie, swiftly and painlessly, dissolves the problem altogether. Within the bounds of theatrical realism this could never happen, but the movies, after all, are a world of possibility where anything can happen, and of all the themes in The Jazz Singer, this might have been the most important and the most telling for the Hollywood Jews. The movies can redefine us. The moves can make us new. The movies can make us whole. And that is precisely how the Hollywood Jews would use them."
In this chapter, Gabler also gives examples of anti-Semitism endured by the Hollywood Jews. Gaber quotes Milton Sperling telling a story about Joseph Schenck: "Schenck walked into a bank .. and the banker said to 'What are you doing with a kike?'. Years later, Schenk went back to this banker and said 'This kike wants to borrow $100 milllion'... The banker said 'I'll be very happy to do business with you' and said 'Fuck you'."
Gabler also quotes Milton Sperling telling a story about Harry Warner in a meeting with a Western Electric executive: " said '... I will give all the rights to our patents ... if you'll give me the name of one Jew who works for your company'. said 'Realistically, I don't think I can produce one'. Harry said 'It's a policy of your company not to employ Jews. It's a policy of my company not to do business with you'. And he walked out of the room."
Chapter 5: "I don't get ulcers, I give them"
Gabler discusses Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, in chapter 5. Cohn was born in New York, and his parents were German Jewish immigrants. "Out in California, Cohn set up his offices in ... Poverty Row. Poverty Row was ramshackle and chaotic.... For Cohn, with his pretention to machismo, it was actually an invigorating environment in which to prove, once again, his jungle daring. " "If Poverty Row was a fast-buck factory where artists weren't pampered and scripts weren't nurtured, it both attracted and required a certain kind of individual ... 'bootleggers and icemen and butchers'.... In the early days at Cohn surrounded himself with precisely these sort of men - other New York Jews who know how to dish it out. "
Cohn's collaboration with director Frank Capra produced a number of high-grossing and critically acclaimed movies, including including It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can't Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
Cohn was renouned for his aggressive, bullying management style. "Cohn had good reason to be cautious. With his badgering mangagement style, which infuriated practically everone, he was an ideal target for a palace coup, and the rumbling of an impending revolution were constant. Keenly aaware of all this Cohn never know whom ehe could trust, so he wound up trusting no one."
Gabler points out that most of the major studios were publicly-traded corporations: "Cohn was a major stockholder of Columbia, as Zukor was of Paramount, Laemmle of Universal, Mayer of MGM, and the Warners of Warner Brothers, but all were ultimately accountable to a board of directors in the East. Each of them served at the sufferance of the board, though in artistic matters it almost always deferred to its creative people."
Chapter 6: In their image
Chapter six contrasts the styles of the major motion picture studios, and Gabler ties the personality of the founders to the characteristics of the production companies.
Gabler describes Warner's budget-tightness, and the impact it had on their movies: "Warner's pictures were blunt and tough af fast. Their mis-en-scene was flat and cold; their visual cadences clipped." "The Hollywood Jews would create other versions of America, bent to their own fantasies and needs, but it is fair to say that the Warners' version was the least assimilative. Reflecting the divisions within the family itself, what Warner Brothers' films acknowledged was that there were deep divisions - divisions of class, of roots, of style, of religion, of values."
Of Universal, Gabler says: "Universal's pictures had neither the economy and speed of Warners', the screwball inventiveness of Columbia's, nor the continental sheen of Paramount's. If anything, the Studio was best recognized for its Westerns ... and for its horror films."
Gabler addresses nepotism in this chapter: "By far the most important factor in the management miasma at Universal was nepotism, especially after Junior Laemmle ascended to power. Not that nepotism wasn't everywhere in Hollywood; in some measure it was a defense mechanism for the Hollywood Jews to surround themselves with their own kin, and during the Depression, when the studio heads might have felt personally obligated to support their extended families, the studio payroll allowed them a way to fulfill their obligations without personal liability. Even so, nowhere was nepotism as rampant as at Universal, where by one count over seventy relatives, friends, and pensioners were on the payroll even during the depths of the Depression."
Gabler quotes Mayer's grandson, who claimed that Mayer used movies to shape American values: "Some - perhaps most - may have thought that Mayer was hopelessly naive in this vision of small-town America with its simple pieties and Norman Rockwell preciousness, but Mayer knoew that he was confecting, not reflecting. According to his grandson ... saw these films 'as artifacts of Americana and really saw them as shaping the taste of the country.... He wanted values to be instilled in the country and knew how influential films could be and very much wanted to capitalize on it.'"
Chapter 7: How they lived
Chapter 7 concerns the personal lives and habits of the Hollywood Jews, focusing on their family lives, gambling, and status symbols. Gabler describes the social life, parties, and status symbols of the Hollywood elite: "Even the private social functions were intended primarily as conspicuous displays of status, and the social competition was fierce.... On any given Saturday night there were at least twenty-five parties throughout Hollywood bidding to capture the biggest stars, the most power executives, the hottest writers and directors."
Gabler describes the tendency of Hollywood Jews to gamble: "As vices went, Jews seldom drank or indulged in drugs.... The Hollywood Jews had another vice - a metaphor that become an obsession. They loved to gamble. Virtually everyone ... gambled. They would wager on anything."
Gabler also describes their infatuation with horses "The Hollywood Jews ulitmately discovered something that solidified their claims to status while at the same time providing the therapeutic benefits of gambling. They discovered horses." "By the the late twenties more than half the members on the Hollywood Polo and Riding Club were Jews. Given their fixation on aestheticizing themselves, it wasn't surprising that when the movie Jews moved out to Hollywood from the clotted cities of the East, they assumed the same affectation; and so there was Louis Mayer, like a country squire ... on his morning horseback ride."
Chapter 8: Rabbi to the stars
In this chapter, Gabler examines the relationship between the Hollywood movie industry and the Jewish faith. Gabler also discusses anti-semitism, and the ways that the non-Jews viewed Hollywood and the Hollywood Jews. Gabler outlines the relationship of one particular Rabbi, Edgar Magnin, with the Hollywood moguls.
In the 1940s, some Jews began to wonder if movies could portray Jews in a more positive light: "Crossfire ... had a profound effect on the leaders of the Jewish community, espeically in the East, by sensitizing them to a new issue: since Hollywood promulgated the image of the Jew to most Americans and since Jews controlled Hollywood, why couldn't they be coaxed into presenting a more positive image of their own people? Prior to World War II, the question of Jewish identity on the screen was never very significant because Jews were very seldom seen there."
Producers put business considerations above religious or political considerations: "Usually the Jewish executives invoked the box office; regardless of how they felt personally, they said, no one else wanted to see a movie about a Jew.... Some Hollywood Jews admitted that they deliberately avoided Jewish sbujects because they didn't want to 'ruffle the goyim.' "
Producers frequently avoided any Jewish-related issues in movies, to avoid criticism of Jewish domination of Hollywood: "Mayer immediately vetoed a scene where the heroine ... spoke Yiddish.... from Mayer's point of view, this kind of thing would be interpreted as the Jewish-dominated motion picture industry trying to promote Jewishness."
Hollywood producers were not interested in using movies to promote Jewish causes: ".. this was the deeper truth: Hollywood was itself a means of avoiding Judaism, not celebrating it. Most of the moguls had no stake in ... so-called Jewish projects, and those projects that were attempted often got lost in ambivalence .. about Judaism. "
Jewish actors had fewer roles and often changed their names to hide their Jewishness: "The ones who were hardest hit by the shunning of Jewish films were the Jewish actors. "With acting there was very definitely the feeling that a Jewish personality would not work."
After World War II, Jewish organizations attempted to influence scripts involving Jews: "By the end of Jewish leaders were lobbying Hollywood executives to accept Jews as a valid and dramatic subject for movies.... But what Rothschild was recommending ... was something more than a lobby. What he was proposing was a kind of Jewish clearance board that would look at the scripts involving Jews and give its approval. The attitude of the big New York Jewish organizations, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League, was, 'We left it to Mendel Silberberg and his guys to watch over this and look - they fell down'. So now each organization begain scouting Hollywood with an eye toward establishing its own connections with Hollywood money and influence."
Gabler explains that the Hollywood executives resented intrusion by Jewish organizations: " 'Jewish organizations have a clear and rightful interest in making sure that Hollywood films do not present Jews in such a way as to arouse prejudice' declared a memo from an umbrella group of Jewish organizations called the NCRAC early in 1947.... What NCRAC recognized, however, was that the highly suspicious movie industry, was apt to resent anyone interfering in its business - even, or especially, other Jews."
Gabler quotes from Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent to illustrate the anti-semitism of the day: "Jew-controlled not only in spots, not 50 percent merely, but entirely; with the natural consequences that now the world is in arms against the trivializing and demoralzing influences of that form of entertainment as presently managed.... As soon as the Jews gained control of the 'movies', we had a movie problem, the consequence of which are not yet visible. It is the genius of that race to create problems of a moral character in whatever business they achieve a majority."
Gabler, after giving some examples of anti-semitism, also cites an example where a non-Jew George Schaefer was falsely called an anti-semite in retalliation for a business deal gone sour.
Adaptations: the movie
The book was adapted into a documentary movie in 1998, a decade after the book was published. The movie has two titles: "Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream" (original title for A&E) and "Hollywood: An Empire of Their Own" (title for video/DVD). The plot synopsis from IMDB is "This film discusses the effect on how major American films in Hollywood were influenced by the Eastern European Jewish culture that most of the major movie moguls who controlled the studios shared. Through clips of various films, the filmmakers illustrate the dominant themes like that of the outsider, the outspoken American patriotism, and rooting for the underdog in society."
Trivia
The title of the book is taken from a line in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Last Tycoon.
See Also
- Cinema of the United States
- Controversies related to prevalence of Jews in leadership roles in Hollywood
References
- Gabler, Neal (1988). An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Crown. ISBN 0385265573.
- Langdon, Jennifer (2009). Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231142501.
Footnotes
- Gabler, p. 1
- ^ Gabler, p. 2
- Gabler, p. 3
- ^ Gabler, p. 5
- Gabler, p. 15
- ^ Gabler, p. 28
- Gabler, p. 40
- Gabler, p. 43
- Gabler, p. 46
- ^ Gabler, p. 53
- Gabler, p. 56
- Gabler, p. 69
- Gabler, p. 71
- Gabler, p. 80
- Gabler, p. 82
- Gabler, p. 83
- Gabler, p. 86
- Gabler, p. 105
- Gabler, p. 106
- ^ Gabler, p. 119
- Gabler, p. 145
- Quoted in Gabler, p. 132
- Quoted in Gabler, p. 137
- Gabler, p. 160
- Gabler, p. 161
- ^ Gabler, p. 181
- Gabler, p. 190
- Gabler, p. 197
- Gabler, p. 206
- Gabler, p. 208
- Gabler, p. 216
- Gabler, p. 251
- Gabler, p. 257
- Gabler, p. 262
- Gabler, p.263
- ^ Gabler, p. 300
- Gabler, p. 301
- Gabler, p. 302
- http://www.gutenberg-e.org/langdon/chapter7.html
- Gabler, p. 303
- Gabler, p. 277
- Gabler, p. 279