An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

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		An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
		An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

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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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.

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.

This is a great book for classic movie buffs and anyone interested in the early film industry. It is written in an entertaining and comprehensive style. The book is well-researched, thorough and holds the readers attention.

Jennifer Leigh Wells
Author of "Rebecca: The Making of a Hollywood Classic"

I found the book interesting but a bit hard to follow at times. The book does not proceed in chronological order as it moves from one Hollywood "mogul" to another. I also was hoping for bit more insight into specific movie projects and how the Jewish upper management of virtually all the Hollywood studios shaped those projects to fit their viewpoint of America and the world. Still, it was an interesting look into the behind the scenes of Hollywood.

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