Hollywoodism, Jews, Movies and the American Dream
 
   
Director: Simcha Jacobovid & Stuart Samuels
Year:  1997
Rating: 7.0

One of the more remarkable facts about Hollywood and the American film industry is that it was largely created by a group of Eastern European Jewish immigrants coming to this country around the beginning of the 20th century. And to some large degree these Jewish immigrants through their films and depiction of Americana, patriotism and the American dream created the image that America has of itself.

These men who were to become the Moguls of Hollywood were the Warner Brothers from Poland, Samuel Goldwyn from Poland, Carl Laemmle who began Universal was from Germany, William Fox was from Hungary as was Adolph Zukor who along with Goldwyn formed Paramount. Harry Cohn who was Jewish but born in New York City formed Columbia. These immigrants were driven here by poverty, persecution and pogroms in their homeland to America. Once they got here they were not exactly welcomed with open arms and were kept out of many businesses - and so looked for entrepreneurial opportunities in new businesses.

Filmmaking was still in its early stage and nearly all of these men began by exhibiting films that were produced by a monopoly of the Edison Company - they fought this so that they could produce their own product - won in a case court and then moved to a brand new territory to escape their anti-Semitic confines to Hollywood. Forming the studios and producing films that extolled American values became their way of saying I am an American too and they toned down their Jewishness to a large degree rarely making films about Jews even in the lead up to WWII and Jewish actors were expected to Gentilize their names so that no one knew. After the war was over they felt threatened again by the HUAC investigations in which some of the virulently anti-Semitic members of Congress attempted to infer a relationship between Intellectualism, Communism and Jewishness - as many of the leftist writers were Jewish and so of course were the Moguls. They were scared to push back and created the blacklist that was demanded of them.

This film explores all of this and in its 90 minutes does a good job. My only complaint was that the many film clips were not identified. This is based on a book from Neal Gabler titled "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood" which is very good and obviously much more detailed.