The early silver screen moghuls

Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream (Documentary; 1998)



 The main driving point of this documentary is that the American Dream that Hollywood is trying to propagate is no American invention. It is the message brought in by a few Jewish immigrants who escaped the pogroms in the shtetls (Jewish village) of Eastern Europe. They invented Hollywood and owned the six leading studios in Hollywood in the 1920s. The message that they try to disseminate are their own experiences; Harry Warner and his three brothers who brought sound to the motion pictures; Samuel Goldwyn @ Goldfische, the biggest of the independent producers;  Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Studios; Louis B. Mayer, founder of MGM; Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount; and William Fox of 20th Century Fox. They all came from an area within a 500-mile radius area in Europe, between Poland, Hungary and Russia. They end up living in Los Angeles within a 15-mile vicinity.

After leaving the tyranny of persecution and discrimination against the sin of being born Jew, they left their homeland in the heart of Europe to seek newer pastures in the New World. Here, the ghost of their past re-surfaced. The American public was not welcoming of their Jewish newcomers. They were ostracised and were discriminated against in fields of banking, business and education. Growing up in the ghettos, these enterprising people persevered. They moved to West Coast with their risk-taking attitude to reinvent themselves. Within a generation, as the joke went, they progressed from “from Poland to polo in one generation,”!

Outwardly these re-invented American exude a nationalist persona. They promote allegiance to the American flag and to whatever the founding fathers stand for. Deep within themselves and their household, they stick steadfastly to their religious beliefs. In their movies, they portray images that behind in their villages. The suffering of the little people is seen as the pilgrims hunted by Native American bandits, a robust maternal character out to defend the family, the looting, the burning in the early Westerns are all reminiscence of their past lives. At the same time, the films try to create a new American society which is more democratic, where blacks, Jews and Gentiles are treated as equal. In real life then, that was far from reality.

The story of the golden era tried very hard to fit Jews in the American society. The process of assimilation had begun. Interracial marriages were depicted as acceptable norms. Came World War 2, these silver screen Moghuls paid their national service. They infused patriotic values in their stories to keep the fighting spirits high.  Washington was working hand-in-glove towards this end. Making movies about Russia, who were their allies, was acceptable. The first generation had become a power to reckon with and could walk shoulder to shoulder with the WASPs (wealthy White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), finally.


The dreams of these moguls fell apart soon after WW2. They were accused of thinly disguising communists values in their presentations. The witchhunt for un-American activities had begun through the House of Un-American Activities (HUAC). Some say that the outsiders (as the WASP always considered them to be) never really recovered from this blow. Actors and directors lost their jobs. Others lost the zest to fight.

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