Jews, Movies & The American Dream
DarrinT68
* The Hollywood Jews who created the American Dream
* How Jews were involved in every "movie first"
* The producers and directors who added the "Jewish touch"
* The Spielberg phenomenon that made Jewish values & ideas universal
* Unmasking the stars to tell you who's really Jewish
FOUNDING JEWISH FATHERS OF HOLLYWOOD:
MGM (Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn. Mayer also created the actual Oscar
statuette)
UNIVERSAL (Irving Thalberg, Carl Laemmle)
PARAMOUNT/RKO (David O. Selznick, Adolph Zucker)
WARNER BROS. (Jack Warner)
20TH CENTURY FOX FILM CORP (William Fox, Jacob Loeb)
COLUMBIA (Harry Cohn)
ORION/AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL PICTURES (Samuel Z. Arkoff)
Many scholars agree that movies have shaped American culture more than any
other medium. Movies give us many of our heroes. Movies that help identify our
values. They help define for us love and life, the "good guys" and the "bad
guys." They teach us to laugh and to cry. And most important of all, they imbue
us with our dreams. Hollywood movies, probably more than anything else, created
the American dream and then exported it around the world. And wonders to
wonders, the founding fathers of cinema and many of the most important movers
and shakers of this industry were none other than the descendants of Abraham.
Progeny of the very people who in ancient days sought to influence the world by
using holy wood to build a temple, would now create Hollywood to build an
industry that would attract devout worshipers and insatiable devotees. The
story of the birth of the movies is so fascinating, it ought to be made into a
movie.
THE FOUNDING FATHERS BIO:
* Carl Laemmle was born in a small village in Germany, fled from the poverty of
his background to come to America, and founded Universal Pictures
* Adolph Zucker was born in Hungary, became orphaned as a small child, came to
America lonely, and unloved, and built Paramount Pictures.
* William Fox, also born in Hungary, came to the States as a poor immigrant
selling soda and sandwiches and working as a chimney sweeper until he one day
founded the Fox Film Corporation.
* Louis B. Mayer was born in Russia, fled his father's junkyard business, and
eventually headed up the greatest studio of all, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
* Benjamin Warner came from Poland to seek fortune in America. Here he worked
as a cobbler in Baltimore, peddled notions from a wagon, and tried to eke out a
living so that he could feed his four sons, Harry, Sam, Albert, and Jack. Then
he bought a broken movie projector and one thing led to another, until
incredibly enough, Warner brothers was born.
Yes, they were all Jews, but the connection goes deeper. They all came from a
background of failure. They either had no father or their father was a
luftmensch - a man in the air who could never find a permanent job. Maybe it's
too Freudian, but Neal Gabler, in his fascinating study of the Jewish influence
on Hollywood, An Empire Of Their Own, suggested: The evidence certainly
supports the view that the sons, embittered by their father's failures,
launched a war against their own pasts, a patricide one could say, against
everything their fathers respresented. To escape their father's fate meant
escaping their past: The European roots, the language and accents, the customs
and the religion. One had to erase it...and adopt a new style - a style for
America. America was the vaptism to cleanse and renew.
These were immigrants who not only wanted to assimilate in a new land, they
wanted to re-create it in their own image. Movies gave them a power that was
almost God-like: If they were too late to create the world, they could at least
create America- its values and its myths, its traditions and its archetype, its
hopes and its dreams. And so it was the Jewish immigrants who came from the
shetels and the ghettos, who fled poverty and persecution, who thought up,
produced, and then mass marketed nothing less than the American dream.
THE MOVIE "FIRSTS"
Even before the powerful movie studios ruled the industry, one-reeler shorts
were made, forerunners of films as we know them. Probably the first one
produced was Cohen's Advertising Scheme. The story line was pretty simple: A
Jewish storekeeper tries unsuccessfully to make a sale. He finally gives up and
gives the vagrant, who didn't buy it, a full-length coat as a gift. When the
vagrant turns around, we see a sign advertising the store painted on the back.
So the very first movie made clear that the Jews were great salesman. It would
become a fitting metaphor for the movie industry that would make its mark with
brilliant advertising.
The first American feature film was The Great Train Robbery (1903) starring a
Jew, Max Anderson, in the lead. Anderson went on to write, produce and act in
the very successful series of westerns - "Bronco Billy" - a theme Jewish
producers would find irresistible, maybe, just maybe, because it portrayed the
themes of heroism, conquering a new land, and overpowering the "strangers"
(translate that to mean Indians or Cossacks) who wanted to kill you?
The first large Hollywood production, from Adolph Zucker's Paramount, was
Queen Elizabeth (1912), starring the incomparable Sarah Bernhardt. Here was
more than a Jewish American Princess; Sarah, in the first major film, actually
made it to Queen. It was the success of this movie - the first film to be shown
in legitimate theater halls - that allowed Zucker to claim film as a legitimate
art form.
But the biggest "first" of all, the one that catapulted movies from a minor
diversion to a major form of communication was the move into "talkies." And the
Jewish connection wasn't only that it was Warner Brothers that made the
picture. The first full-length talking film told the story of a young man who
rejected the wish of his father, a cantor, who wanted him, too, to become a
cantor. The cantor's son, instead of singing to God in the temple, chose to
become a popular singer. The movie was really the story of Al Jolson's life. In
a deeper sense, as the story of children breaking with their past for popular
acclaim and fame, it was also the story of almost all the patriarchs of
Hollywood.
PRODUCED BY...
As the studios grew, so did the role of the Jews there. Barney became president
of Paramount in 1936; Nicholas and Joseph Schenk became presidents of MGM; and
Irving Thalberg, the wunderkind of the film industry and movie legend who was
responsible for production at the age of 23, was manager of MGM from the end of
the 1920s until his death in 1936. When independent producers started to
challenge the major studios, again the majority of them were Jews. Probably the
most outstanding independent was Mike Todd, producer of Around the World in 80
Days. Todd was responsible for trhe Todd-AO new method of cinematography and,
according to many, responsible for Elizabeth Taylor joining the misshpachah and
converting to Judaism.
David O. Selznick, son of industry pioneer Lewis J. Selznick, produced Gone
With The Wind (1939), one of the all-time movie classics. Hal Roach made us
laugh with the Harold lloyd series and the Laurel And Hardy films of the 20s
and 30s. Sam Spiegel used his high artistic standards to produce such fine
films such as the African Queen, On The Waterfront, The Bridge On The River
Quai, and Lawrence Of Arabia. Stanley Kramer, another independent producer, was
responsible for some of the best films to come out of Hollywood after 1945:
Home Of The Brave, Champion, High Noon, and Death Of A Salesman. He would later
direct On The Beach, Judgment At Nuremberg and Ship Of Fools.
DIRECTED BY...
To be a director has to be a Jew's dream job. Descended from people who
throughout the ages have been told what to do by others, it must be the
ultimate thrill to finally be able to tell others what to do. No wonder so many
Jews made their mark as film directors! Ernst ubitsch came to this country from
Germany in 1923, after making a name for himself in his native country. He
directed sophisticated comedies with such finesse that a new phrase was coined
in Hollywood, "The Lubitsch touch." To him we owe Ninotchka, To Be Or Not To
Be, and Cluny Brown. Erich Van Stroheim and Josef Von Sternberg began the
trend toward realism. To Sternberg we owe Marlene Deitrich's performance in
Blue Angel - and from then on Detrich considered him her permanent director.
Any movie buff will know and appreciate these other names in our Jewish Hall
of Fame: William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Jules Dassin, Garson Carlin, Fred
Zinnemann, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, Roman
Polanski, Michael Curtiz, Mervyn LeRoy, Woody Allen, Otto Preminger, Richard
Brooks, George Cukor, Daniel Mann, and Robert Rossen, etc, etc, etc.
THE DIRECTOR WITH JEWISH ANGST
As the Jacob-of-all-trades, one of the most famous of all in the movie industry
is Allen Stewart Konigsberg. Oh, maybe you don't recognize him by his name his
parents gave him when he was born in the Flatbish section of Brookllyn, New
York. But of course you've heard of Woody Allen - director, screenwriter,
playwright, actor, and self-described genius. Like many other Jews, Allen had
problems coming to terms with his past and his heritage. In his early stand-up
routines, Allen would quip about his parents: "Their values are God and
carpeting." He explained his problem about believing in God this way: "If only
God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a
Swiss bank." he obsessed about his mortality: "It's not that I'm afraid to die.
I just don't want to be there when it happens." And, as a Jew, he was so
depressed by the lessons of history that told he told a 1980 college graduating
class: "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One
path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction.
Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
Woody Allen may well be neurotic. For some he is a protypical "self-hating
Jew." And his private life has had its problems. But his incredible talent
simply cannot be denied; his creative genius set the standard for comedy as an
art form. How many of these would you rank among the all-time great films ever
produced, directed, and written? What's New Pussycat?, Play It Again Sam, Take
The Money And Run, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were
Afraid To ask), Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Zelig,
Radio Days, Hannah & Her Sisters, and Crimes And Misdemeanors. And this is only
a sampling of Allen's films. Not bad for a college drop-out from NYU and City
College.
AND "THE SPIELBERG PHENOMENON"
Steven Spielberg says that his earliest memory is a brightly lit room with a
red light on one end, filled with white-bearded old men wearing black hats -
the Cincinnate synagogue into which he was carried by his parents when he was
six months old. Since then he probably hasn't forgotten a thing. And he can
describe everything with total recall.
Spielberg was a self-described "Jewish nerd" who felt like an alien in the
gentile world around him. That may well make him the subconscious role model
for E.T. - and reveal for the first time that E.T. was really Jewish!!
Bar mitzvahed in an Orthodox synagogue, Spielberg's movies all have a profound
link with his identity. They share his perception of the world as a member of a
people who have been considered outsiders for countless centuries. Close
Encounters of the Third Kind is really a religious conviction that "there's
something else out there." Raiders of the Lost Ark, a movie about an American
archaeologist vying with the Nazis to find a sacred relic with cosmic power, is
a parable of good struggling with evil for control of the religious power that
comes with the past . E.T. is the way a modern Jew would record an encounter
with a Biblical angel. Jurassic Park tells the incredible tale of a dinasour -
an animal that surely would have been extinct by now - coming back to life.
Do you know Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones from Ezekiel 37:1-14?
Speilberg did the last editing cut on Jurassic Park while he was filming
Schindler's List in Poland. The remarkable connection between the two couldn't
have been lost on him: By all logic, the Jews should have disappeared during
the Holocaust just as th dinosaurs did eons earlier. But a remnant survived.
That remnant served as a remarkable conclusion to Schindler's List when those
who were saved filed past the grave of Oskar Schindler to give thanks. The
screen told us how the hundreds who didn't perish were blessed to become
thousands and thousands in the next generation.
Whenever the Torah is carried back to the Ark after being read in synagogue
services, the congregation recites the prayer, "Renew our days as of old."
Sounds a lot to me like Back To The Future, a theme so imporatnt to Spielberg
that he went ahead and made Back To The Future II and III.
By all accounts, as well as by uts seven Oscars, Schindler's List is the most
powerful, the most revealing, and the most sensitive movie ever made about the
Holocaust. It has probably been able to make a greater impression on humankind
than all the Holocaust museums combined. And, as Spielberg made clear on the
screen, the aim of this masterpiece is to make the world understand a simple
Talmudic teaching: "He who saves one's soul is as if he has saved an entire
world." We might have thought that after this there was surely nothing
Spielberg could do for an encore. Real genius, however, knows no limits. The
greatest jewish ideal of all is shalom - peace. Who else but Spielberg could
have given us Saving Private Ryan - the movie that will assuredly go down in
history as the ultimate depiction of the horros of the war. It is the one movie
that may perhaps turn the prophetic ideal of peace into reality.
STARRING: NAME THAT JEW
Let's play a game. You're welcome to try it with your friends. I call it "NAME
THAT JEW." For the purpose of the online world, I will supply you the birth
names & corresponding stage names of some of the many famous stars:
Issuri Danielovitch-Demsky (KIRK DOUGLAS)
Fanny Rose (DINAH SHORE)
Emanuel Goldenberg (EDWARD G. ROBINSON)
Allen Stewart Konigsberg (WOODY ALLEN)
Judith Tuvin (JUDY HOLIDAY)
Julius Garfinkle (JOHN GARFIELD)
Simone Kaminker (SIMONE SIGNORET)
Shirley Schrift (SHELLY WINTERS)
Jospeh Levitch (JERRY LEWIS)
Theodoria Goodman (THEDA BARA)
Pauline Marion Levee (PAULETTE GODDARD)
Milton Berlinger (MILTON BERLE)
Benjamin Kubelsky (JACK BENNY)
Asa Yoelson (AL JOLSON)
Tula Ellice Finkler (CYD CHARISSE)
Betty Jane Perske (LAUREN BACALL)
Leslie Stainer (LESLIE HOWARD)
Joan Molinsky (JOAN RIVERS)
Jill Oppenheim (JILL ST. JOHN)
Sophie Abruzza (SOPHIE TUCKER)
Jerome Silberman (GENE WILDER)
Robert Allen Zimmerman (BOB DYLAN)
Laszlo Lowenstein (PETER LORRE)
David Kominski (DANNY KAYE)
Eugene Orowitz (MICHAEL LANDON)
Eric Weiss (HARRY HOUDINI)
Bernie Schwartz (TONY CURTIS)
Winona Horowitz (WINONA RYDER)
Michael Igor Peschowsky (MIKE NICHOLS)
Al, Jimmy, And Harry Joachim (THE RITZ BROTHERS)
Sophia Koscow (SYLVIA SIDNEY)
Nathan Birnbaum (GEORGE BURNS)
Andrew Silverstein (ANDREW DICE CLAY)
Leonard Alfred Schneider (LENNY BRUCE)
Aaron Chwatt (RED BUTTONS)
Roman Liebling (ROMAN POLANSKI)
THE LEAST YOU NEED TO KNOW
* Jewish immigrants are the founding fathers of almost all of the Hollywood
studios, and they continue to bring their vision of the American Dream to the
screen.
* All the movie firsts - firts one-reeler, first feature film, first talkie -
all have an important jewish theme or demension.
* Jews played and continue to play a major role as producers and directors of
some of the most important films in cinema history.
* Woody allen occupies a unique place in movie history for his multifaceted
genius and his comic ingenuity.
* Steven Spielberg has managed to universalize Jewish values in a way like no
one else and leaves an unparalleled legacy that includes the most powerful
films ever made about war and the Holocaust.
* There were many famous Jewish actors and actresses who were compelled to
change their names so that they'd appear more "American."
* It's much easier today in Hollywood for Jews to be successful without having
to hide their background.