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An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

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Neal Gabler explores the fascinating question of how Hollywood was created primarily by a remarkable group of men who fit into a remarkably small demographic: European Jewish immigrants, most of them poor, most of them from Manhattan's lower east side, none of them practicing Jews, most of them from families with weak father figures. But together they moved to an almost completely protestant city and created the most successful form of popular entertainment in America, presenting an idealized version of American life for a nation in a constant for new national myths. The most fascinating thing about the book is the gap between the mythical world that they were presenting and their own backgrounds. For Louis B. Mayer, Andy Hardy's America was for him the real America, an America where there were strong nuclear families headed by strong fathers, doting neo-Victorian mothers, and obedient, respectful children. Economically most people were Middle Class, the tenor distinctively Middle American, and almost always Christian. Gabler argues that for most of these men, what they provided was not America as it existed, but the America that they wanted to be a part of.

Almost all of the major studios were founded by men who more or less fit Gabler's description. There are a number of major and minor characters in Gabler's story, the most prominent being Adolph Zukor, who was instrumental in creating Paramount; Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal; William Fox of Fox Pictures, which later merged with Twentieth Century; Louis B. Mayer, who built MGM into Hollywood's largest studio; Harry and Jack Warner of Warner Brothers; and the belligerent Harry Cohn of Columbia. There are in addition a number of crucial supporting characters, none more important than the legendary Irving Thalberg (I knew very slightly Thalberg's son, also Irving, an academic philosopher who spent his career in Chicago and who quietly funded liberal political causes--he paid for the Chicago Seven's legal bills at their trial--while quietly pursuing his university career), the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald's last novel THE LAST TYCOON. We also meet the Schenck brothers, Nicholas and Joseph, the Rabbi of Hollywood Edgar F. Magnin, theater chain owner Marcus Loew, and an uncountable number of smaller figures.

One of the most striking aspects of the biography is how utterly these men suppressed their Jewish backgrounds in their films. Although THE JAZZ SINGER is the story of the son of a Jewish son rejecting the culture of his cantor father (Gabler points out that the son's story was also the story of the moguls), the vast majority of movies produced by Hollywood in the twenties, thirties, and forties contained no identifiably Jewish characters. Although an astonishing number of the people producing the movies were Jewish, it was as if they felt compelled to completely erase Jews from their idealization of American life. The was more than mere assimilationist aspirations; it was as if they were trying to expunge the weak fathers of their youths, the poverty they knew growing up, and become a part of a nation that largely rejected them. For two or three decades, at least, they could maintain this myth, but in the forties and the HUAC committee of the U.S. House of Representatives they found their fiefdom increasingly under attack for the industry's supposed inculcation of un-American (i.e., Communist) values. Many of their attackers persisted in the fascist depiction of Communism as an essentially Jewish cast of thought (in Hitler's writings there is no clear distinction between Jews and Communists, and at least one part of his motivation in attacking Russia was to attack what he weirdly considered a Jewish nation).

This is not a perfect book. For one thing, the scope is simply too large for any one book to undertake. And inevitably there are either serious omissions or details that don't quite tell the whole story. For instance, Gabler attempts to characterize the more plebian tendencies at Warner's by mentioning that one of their stars was Rin Tin Tin, which seems to hint at how far down the ladder they were in the Hollywood pecking order, but failing to note that for most of his life Rin Tin Tin was the number one box office star in Hollywood. Also, there is amazingly little discussion of the many Jewish performers in Hollywood. Some are mentioned in passing (such as Groucho Marx, noting his famous reply to the attempt by the Jewish country club Hillcrest to recruit new members following the stock market crash, that he wouldn't want to be a member of a club that would accept someone like him as a member), and Edward G. Robinson gets a few mentions, but for the most part actors are ignored. This is overwhelmingly a book about the top brass. And one can take issue with some minor depictions, such as the long discussion of the nature of Universal in the thirties, but no mention of the man who is most responsible for the visual look of those films and the director of all their major achievements, James Whale. The implication is that the distinctive look of Universal films was not determined by the former art director Whale. But this is all nitpicking.

I do have to take strong issue with one of the current featured reviews that criticizes the book because he believes that the American depicted in the movies was very much the America he knew in the forties and fifties. First, the book deals mainly with America in the twenties and thirties, a bit less with the forties, and the fifties almost not at all, so the time framework of his criticism is off. Second, how can anyone argue that the movies were not an idealization if one knows any American history at all? Certainly the poverty that my parents and grandparents knew growing up in Arkansas during those decades was almost completely ignored, THE GRAPES OF WRATH aside (and the subject of that film were very much my people). Any informed demographic study of the period will show that the depiction of women in the films was wildly out of kilter with the actual lives of women, many of whom had to take jobs even in the thirties, forties, and fifties to enable families to make it financially (the fifties is the only decade in American history of which the so-called traditional American family is even somewhat true). And Hollywood films of the period are notorious today for their depiction of race relations. Anyone stating that the Hollywood film in any conceivable sense depicted America as it really existed beggars credulity.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone either interested in the history of the movie industry or how immigrants sought to integrate themselves in their new nation. The book contains a wealth of information and I can't imagine anyone know coming away from it not merely entertained but better informed.

Film scholar and critic Neal Gabler offers a surprisingly well-researched, academically sound, and insightful study of the scions of early Hollywood and their vision for America. Ironically, and somewhat paradoxically, he finds that the early movie industry was largely founded by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. As outsiders in WASPish America, they nonetheless excelled at creating a vision of the United States that incorporated some of its most cherished principles and desires. Such studio executives as Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, and the Warner brothers ensconced a vision of America at its best that stood far removed from the reality of their lives.

As Gabler wrote of these industry leaders: "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....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" (p. 4). Gabler believes that these Jewish leaders "colonized the American imagination" (p. 7). Over time, their films embodied American values; the irony is that they were made by people alienated from that culture. As Gabler concludes, "the Jews reinvented the country in the image of their fiction" (p. 7).

This is a very interesting and useful study of the role of film in defining the American character in the early twentieth century.

This is, to the extent of my explorations, the only book on what would seem to be a pair of significant questions about American mass culture: why did the Jews take control of the motion picture industry in its earliest days; and how did that fact shape their creations and the culture they influenced? For its uniqueness, its thoroughness in investigating the relationships of the early film moguls to their religious heritage, and its wealth of detail regarding their lives, I applaud it. I find myself, however, yearning for a second book, or a revised edition, for this first exploration leaves much untouched.

Neal Gabler states early on that the moguls' vision of "America" shaped not only the fictional realities of their films but the reality of America itself, in that it was through Hollywood that we developed much of our self-image. Apart from passing mentions, however, such as noting that our later vision of a lost, small-town America was largely shaped by memories of the Andy Hardy series beloved by Louis B. Mayer, he does not develop that important thread.

There are also a few frustrating narrative lapses that set me to reviewing the index to see if I'd missed something (which I hadn't). The author leads us through the story of Paramount's Adolph Zukor, whom he presents as perhaps the most important and emblematic of the moguls, to a point at which Zukor is poised to seize a commanding role in the national distribution of films. Gabler then cuts away, and when we return to Zukor we find that his expansionist efforts have failed and his position at the studio is now in jeopardy, though we are not shown how.

I recommend this as a fascinating beginning to an exploration. I hope there will be more books like it to develop the story further. Perhaps, in time, we will even see books that will treat the same questions with regard to popular music, comedy, and other fields so shaped by the Jewish people.

Gabler's book took me a while to get through (mostly since I read it before going to bed and I was always exhausted), but was worth the journey. Gabler writes vividly (with constant analysis) of the who and the WHY of early Hollywood. He deals with their stories, motives, and dreams. It is a fascinating history and social history--for those into religion and cinema. It gets a bit long at the end--the Red Scare seems to go on forever and confusing, but worth the trip. Gabler sheds light an important part of history. Thanks, Neal.

Insightful analysis of how the wide-open land of opportunity was not an ever-present American ideal but was in fact invented by those who most wanted it to be: poor, persecuted immigrants. Unlike the racist and elitist establishment cinema of the East Coast, Jewish Hollywood promoted recurring themes of equality of opportunity -- haunted by nightmares of persecution. The movie 'Hollywoodism' may be in some ways better than this book, because you can see the evidence for yourself. Nonetheless, recommended.

This book by Neal Gabler is a well written account about those individuals that initiated the biggest movie studios of all time. From Adolph Zukor and Paramount to Harry Cohn and Columbia Pictures to Louis B. Mayer and MGM, this book offers a riveting synopsis of what drove these men to so the things that they did and to make the decisions that they made. I highly recommend this book to anyone that is seriously in search of information on the origins of some of the most powerful companies with such a profound impact on American thought.

BNS FOREVER.

Gabler's An Empire of Their Own is an outstanding sociological, political, literary, and historical review of the important role mostly immigrant Jews played in the first few decades of Hollywood as the film capital. He doesn't pull punches, but gives findings that can be viewed as positive or negative--a welcome approach instead of a biased approach giving only one side. He shows the seven major producers (and many others in lesser detail) to be human beings, with strengths and weaknesses. The bigger picture, including an insight into the personal lives of the producers and how this affected their movies, is very good. He also does a good job of explaining how anti-Semitism played a real role in the lives of these Jewish producers, but how their personal styles also were sometimes not admirable. I have used the book in my Sociology Through Film: Jewish Images class, and rate it very good.

Neal Gabler explores the lives of the founding movie moguls of Hollywood in this work which is at turns funny and sad. Most of the moguls never had a very good family life either growing up or growing old, but the stories of the business and oddities of Hollywood are amusing.

One of the most interesting of Gabler's points is that each head of the studio made a certain style of movie that reflected his personality--whether that would be Mayer's idealized America or the Warners' stories of tough outsiders, for instance.

Gabler gives interesting insights into the struggle between Edison and the Jewish independents over who would monopolize the distribution and equipment for the business. It is suggested that this was fight between protestants on one side, and Jews and Catholics on the other, given the ethnic make-up of the two camps. Edison eventually lost out over an anti-trust suit and the movie moguls went on to pretty much monopolize the business until they lost an anti-trust suit in 1948.

The reason why Jews have predominated in the movie business from the beginning was that in the early days of film, it was considered a slightly disreputable business to be in and white gentiles had no great desire to enter into a venture considered to be a novelty to make some fast cash. The Jewish businessmen saw the movies as something more than a novelty and sought to make them more high-brow by filming critically acclaimed plays and literary works. This was done also to bring in the middle class into their already working class customer base.

Gabler shows how many of the movie moguls wished to present themselves as totally assimilated Americans who made themselves over to look like the high class gentiles of the Eastern Establishment. But at the same time they saw themselves as Jews and their enemies saw them as Jews too. The years of blacklisting communists is covered in which some gentiles complained about the moguls employing communist Jewish writers for their films. (The moguls themselves were Republican and many of their writers we're Jewish communists.)

Hollywood is shown to be place where there is no real friendship and materialism reigns. In their cutthroat business, those on top are celebrated as long as they stay successful and those who have fallen are forgotten. This rule even applies somewhat to the movie moguls of this era. Anyway, one gets the impression it's more fun to watch the movies than to be in the business of making them.

An interesting book about the early Hollywood moguls. Other posters have described and praised the books, so I won't repeat. It is very good, except for two things. First, the author says that the movies colonized the imagination of americans. He assumed that people who watched these movies believed that life was really like that. But can that really be the case? Didn't people acknowledge as we do today that movies have conventions and that those conventions are not necessarily life like? The convention for instance that the bad guy is always punished and virtue is rewarded.

The author says that Hollywood made our values. It is true that our artistic conventions, what we are willing to give lip service to, and our vision of the ideal reflects our values. But those values existed before Hollywood. They are found in the art and popular entertainment from all ages and all cultures. The conventions in American movies are the conventions of art in every culture. I have never heard of any people whose art celebrated wickedness or adopted the attitude that people should not be good or that they should not like their country, just to name a few values. All nations have their myths, not just the US.

The reflection of values in art is complicated. For instance, art traditionally revels in the Jesse James types, the bad guy as hero. Many cultures have the bandit hero. But in the end, that convention serves to uphold the usual moral values. After the audience has the fun of watching him, the bad guy hero is punished. Similarly, the prohibition on violence and sex upheld the values that were already in the society. In that regard, America has changed but many countries have not. They practice censorship of their own products and either ban or severely edit American movies before showing them in their countries.

Bollywood shows very idealized lives. It follows a strict code of conduct. Does that make Bollywood movies bad? Are the Indian people being "colonized" by their own movie makers?

The moguls made not just what they wanted but what others wanted. They gambled that they knew what people all over the world wanted to watch and they were right for a long time. The kinds of movies that the author perhaps would have liked them to make would be movies that no one would want to see.

Second, the author feels that the moguls should have been truer to their jewish heritage. He is harsh towards them for assimilating (and that is a whole other issue that I don't agree with). But any jewish heritage that they followed would have been very conservative, because that was their background and I don't think the author would have liked it if they had been like that. He condemns the moguls for behavior that if they had adopted it he would have condemned it.

Here's an absorbing history of the movie industry. Neal Gabler claims that Adolph Zukor (Paramount), the Warner brothers, Harry Cohn (Columbia Pictures) and the moguls of Fox Studios, MGM and Universal had a dream of what America was which they incorporated into movies and sold to the American public and the world.

Gabler claims that what these movies showed was not the real country at all. "Only this way," he writes, "could these immigrants satidsfy their hunger of assimilation into a country that had rejected them." In the end, he says, the fictive America created by these businessmen portrays an artificial "reality" that later generations of moviegoers took as truth.

I have two problems with the premise of this book: First, I know for a fact that the America portrayed in the movies of the '40s and '50s did exist and second, those moguls created their own social world, partly out of geographic necessity and partly because the work of filmmaking isolated them from the everyday work world.

I know the kind of family, community and lifestyle often portrayed in those "romantic" and "sentimental" movies (i.e. where family members and members of the community worked and lived together in mutual respect and affection) existed because I experienced it. The movies I saw as a child and as a young adult in the 1940s and 1950s mirrored the life I knew.

I understand that contemporary life is so different from life in those days that young people view what they call "sentimental romanticism" with disbelief. I pity them. The lives they seem to be living look shabby and disgusting to me!

It's an interesting premise but it's built on a false presumption!

The book will charm the moviephile. It's entertaining and well written and it gives a fascinating look at backstage Hollywood in a time when Hollywood enjoyed a great deal more respect than it does today.