AN EMPIRE OF THEIR OWN: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

by Neal Gabler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 23, 1988

Big, very readable Hollywood history with a strong, thoroughly spelled-out theme, that once-poverty-stricken East European Jews have remade America in the image of their own dreams and anxieties. Gabler writes clearly and simply, his workmanlike history distinguished by exceptionally convincing ideas. The vehicle for those ideas are the lives of the great founding Hollywood moguls: Adolph Zukor, who built Paramount; the Warner Brothers; Harry Cohn of Columbia (who was so illiterate he couldn't spell the name of his own company); Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures; William Fox of Twentieth Century-Fox; Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; and, later, Wunderkind Irving Thalberg of MGM. These lives are limned at length, in wonderful detail, and each in its way has a demonic face. The empire they build is a dream America, not the real country at all, and the house style of each company reflects the personality of its head mogul. In the end, the fictive America created by these businessmen become the America that later generations of movie-goers took as the real place, conformed to, and made over in the Hollywood image. What united the moguls in deep spiritual kinship ""was their utter and absolute rejection of their pasts and their equally absolute devotion to their new country. . . [s] omething 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. One common, undeniable factor was a patrimony of failure. All had grown up in destitution."" Gabler makes a strong case for the brash urban energies of Warner Brothers pictures being the energies of Jack Warner, the sumptuousness of MGM style being Louis B. Mayer, and so on throughout the dream factory. Only in this way could these immigrants satisfy their hunger for assimilation in a country that essentially had rejected them: by remaking the country in their own image. Is it true? True or not, Gabler's book may well reshape Hollywood history into this image.

Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1988

ISBN: 0385265573

Page Count: -

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988

Categories: NONFICTION