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An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood Paperback – August 8, 1989

by Neal Gabler (Author)

103 customer reviews

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A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America's motion picture industry.

The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream. Even to this day, the American values defined largely by the movies of these émigrés endure in American cinema and culture. Who these men were, how they came to dominate Hollywood, and what they gained and lost in the process is the exhilarating story of An Empire of Their Own.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

That subtitle may inspire in some readers waves of ethnic pride, and in others waves of ethnic revulsion, but the point of this book is that its claim of origin is quite literally true. And what makes it an interesting read for political types is the way it demonstrates that no matter how much the founding Hollywood moguls and their successors tried to peddle an idealized, escapist form of entertainment, bubbling up under and around their every project was ideology, racism, ethnic prejudice, class friction, domestic and international politics and all the other raw, seething stuff that distinguishes this country from all others. In Gabler's hands, the Industry draws a picture of American political history in spite of itself.

From Publishers Weekly

The author presents "an entertaining, wide-ranging, in-depth account" of the Jewish studio executives, theater owners, producers, writers, lawyers and talent agents who dominated the American film industry until shortly after WW II. "Gabler vividly recreates a way of life now gone forever," commented PW. Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Paperback: 512 pages
Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition (September 8, 1989)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0385265573
ISBN-13: 978-0385265577
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.1 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 103 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #289,219 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #94 in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Civil & Environmental > Acoustics
- #98 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Movies > Industry
- #131 in Books > Science & Math > Physics > Acoustics & Sound

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Michael Lapelosa

Fascinating Portraits!

August 13, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This book recounts the stories of the individuals who created the American motion picture industry and Hollywood. They were the producers, writers, lawyers and agents who dominated the American film industry until shortly after WW II. These men were mostly displaced eastern Europeon Jews who struggled to attain success in their adopted country. The author relates the attempts to assimilate and, in many cases, reject the Jewishness that defined them. The cast of characters included the fatherly but domineering L. B. Mayer, the crude and womanizing Harry Cohn and assorted husbands, fathers, thugs, party-givers, gamblers and racehorse owners who nevertheless created MGM, Columbia, Universal and Warner Bros. The author describes the personal lives, lifestyles and business success and failures with unerring prose that engrosses the reader in these stories. I found particularly interesting the styles and themes that distinguished each of these movie moguls and their respective motion picture institutions from each other. Wonderful photographs augment the narrative.

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Barbara Ardinger

True-life Hollywood and the men who invented the movies

March 1, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is an excellent, well researched book about the men who invented Hollywood and the movies according to their own ideas about what the American Dream should be and what their ideal of America might look like. If you think MGM musicals are realistic, blame Mr. Mayer. But the book's not only about the glory days of Hollywood. The Red Scare, HUAC, and the black list--and how the studies acquiesced and then some of them fought back is also covered. If you like movies and want some real history about them and the studios that made them, this is the book to read.

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Robert J. Crawford

fascinating slice of the American psyche

August 4, 2008

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Gabler is a uniquely erudite cultural critic. This is the third book I have read by him and I am deeply impressed with the unusual breadth of his coverage. In this case, he writes about the founding fathers of Hollywood, the dictatorial dreamers and shapers of its golden age (to the late 1940s}. In his telling, they are all Eastern European Jews, striving to become part of the American dream and at the same time providing many of the images that entered the American psyche. They all started with the penny arcades at the beginning of the century, and built empires in which they exercised total control of content and creation.

This book is less about the economics of the studio system - cartels that manufactured films on lots, virtually owned the "talent" via long-term contracts, dominated the distribution of their films, and controlled many of the theatres that played them - than about the culture and ethos they were trying to create in their dictatorial domains. The era passed with the Supreme Court trust-busting ruling, political attacks during the McCarthy era, and the rise of independent talent in actors, producers, and writer-directors.

As Gabler sees it, these founders were fairly secular Jews, who wanted to fit into the American ideal of pseudo-aristocratic entrepreneurs (from poverty). This was the source of their maudlin, sentimental style and crude american ideals, each studio with its own peculiar character. I must admit, I find this angle of analysis, with all the objections one can make for its subjectivity, quite fascinating and given their power to shape things, dead on the mark.

Gabler tells the story in the form of serial biographies. It is a wonderful flowing narrative, superlatively written and with a genuine depth of historical understanding. Indeed, while I think this early book is somewhat weaker than his later books, Disney and Life" the Movie, I will read any book that this critic writes.

Warmly recommended. This is not my usual domain of interest, so the reading is often hard going for me, but I have learned an immense amount from this critic, who is a real intellectual.

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Buddy Mear

A fascinating tale of hubris disguised as genius.

October 4, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Despite perplexing use of the hyphen and mistakes confusing the words gentile and genteel I loved this book. The early tales of the studios founders is a great read. But the book really comes into its own when the nasty politics begin to take a toll on the Studios. While many of the film executives were almost deaf to Hitler and his murder of Jews, the national swing to the right and paranoid fear of communists came close to destroying the studios. The studio heads cooperated with the HUAC and betrayed the writers and directors genius and creativity was responsible for the decades of profit for studio bosses. The studio heads had the hubris to pretend that they were the creative force in what a become a reflection of American culture and a major economic contributor to American prosperity. But their refusal to unionize and their refusal to accommodate the Screen Writers Guild in many ways contributed to the downfall of their empire.

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