An Empire of Their Own – How the Jews Invented Hollywood

"An Empire of Their Own is a great starting place for anyone who wants to understand Hollywood because it grounds you in an understanding of the fact that film was an upstart art form and an immigrant art form, largely created by Jews who were trying to find a place in American society when the doors of a lot of other businesses were closed to them. You really get a great sense of the fact that movie studios like Universal, Paramount and Warner Brothers, which we might now think of as multinational faceless corporations, began as scrappy businesses. Gabler really captures the excitement and cultural particularities of American cinema’s birth. Yes, but another thing Gabler gets at is that the studios weren’t the same, so they didn’t reflect the same aspect of America. Warner Brothers movies were largely urban and scrappy and the studio chose heroes who were upstarts and rebels. A different kind of American experience is reflected in the movies of MGM, a world of luxury and good manners presented a view of what American success looked like. Because movies are so influential, those visions shaped views of America. When people talk about ‘Hollyweird’ or ‘coastal elites’ those are, to some degree, code words for Jews, who have always been accused of having a disproportionate influence in the media and of using that influence in a concerted way to advance an agenda that is presumably self-serving. That nativist idea formed in the 1910s and 20s, when these companies were just starting, and it persists to this day. The specifics are different, but the conviction that movies are made with nefarious intent has not changed over the century. There’s a growing understanding that progress can’t just be measured by how many African Americans are in a position to get good parts in movies, for instance. It has to be measured, for example, by how many African Americans are at the industry’s executive level, empowered to greenlight projects and give people good parts in movies. I’m sympathetic to the argument that nothing will change meaningfully and permanently in movies until the power structure that shapes and makes those movies changes. That’s happening slowly. But I think the understanding that it needs to happen is more broadly accepted now than it was even 10 years ago."

"I’ll start with An Empire of Their Own , because it’s just so difficult for us to understand what Hollywood was like then, particularly for these guys who were either first generation, or immigrant German, or East European Jews, who’d come largely from running things like nickelodeon outfits on the East Coast, and ended up creating this extraordinary confection out in California. Bearing in mind that they weren’t allowed in the country clubs and things like that, they ended up trying to suppress their Jewishness in almost every way. Absolutely. Because remember that what they were doing was effectively bringing into mass circulation an art form – what we now regard as an art form – that at the time was regarded as frightfully déclassé. Smart people went to the ballet and opera, and what the poor and lower middle classes did with their time didn’t matter. But these men in Hollywood had a vision and were creating this product that was loved by everybody of all different backgrounds. They were very intent that those people should have something for themselves, but they became very obsessed with elevating the public and doing something great with movies. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter They ended up more or less creating a new establishment, because Hollywood was a place that they could really make their own. There wasn’t an awful lot there: at the time LA was a relatively small town, but it had masses of real estate. Having started out as fur traders and so on they built these studios that were really little principalities: you just think my God, these journeys that these people go on! They created the art form of the American 20th century, starting with these little pictures where people were just amazed by movement, or really early talkies, and which everyone had access to."