Average Customer Rating: 
An Empire of Their Own : How the Jews Invented Hollywood >
Customer Review #1:
 Not necessarily so, but an interesting treatise
Heres an absorbing history of the movie industry. Neal Gabler claims that Adolph Zukor (Paramount), the Warner brothers, Harry Cohn (Columbia Pictures) and the moguls of Fox Studios, MGM and Universal had a dream of what America was which they incorporated into movies and sold to the American public and the world.Gabler claims that what these movies showed was not the real country at all. "Only this way," he writes, "could these immigrants satidsfy their hunger of assimilation into a country that had rejected them." In the end, he says, the fictive America created by these businessmen portrays an artificial "reality" that later generations of moviegoers took as truth. I have two problems with the premise of this book: First, I know for a fact that the America portrayed in the movies of the 40s and 50s did exist and second, those moguls created their own social world, partly out of geographic necessity and partly because the work of filmmaking isolated them from the everyday work world. I know the kind of family, community and lifestyle often portrayed in those "romantic" and "sentimental" movies (i.e. where family members and members of the community worked and lived together in mutual respect and affection) existed because I experienced it. The movies I saw as a child and as a young adult in the 1940s and 1950s mirrored the life I knew. I understand that contemporary life is so different from life in those days that young people view what they call "sentimental romanticism" with disbelief. I pity them. The lives they seem to be living look shabby and disgusting to me! Its an interesting premise but its built on a false presumption! The book will charm the moviephile. Its entertaining and well written and it gives a fascinating look at backstage Hollywood in a time when Hollywood enjoyed a great deal more respect than it does today.
An Empire of Their Own : How the Jews Invented Hollywood >
Customer Review #2:
AN EMPIRE THAT HAS FLOWN
When Siskel and Ebert left PBS for greener pastures at Buena Vista in 1982 an equally competent and even brighter team of movie reviewers, Michael Medved and Neal Gabler replaced them. Unfortunately these replacements never achieved the soaring if ephemeral popularity of the originators of Sneak Previews.All too soon Jeffrey Lyons replaced Neal Gabler before we got to know him. In 1988, Gablers book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Created Hollywood, was published. Here, the Golden Age of Hollywood is presented as an Age of Brass. We get to know on a first name basis the small group of Jewish immigrants, from the turn of the last Century rejected from mainstream American corporate business but with equally human hunger for comfort and wealth. They left their fathers limited little businesses to jump on the Thomas Edison often-derided risky bandwagon of moving pictures and realized its true promise. They did this not out of the motive of a pioneers dream of courageous exploration and but with the lust for gold of the Conquistadors. Neal Gablers book is a competent work. It offers an erudite tour through the various personalities in the early years and the reasons why this most unlikely group, using the most powerful and influential medium ever invented actually shaped the American Dream that we know today.
An Empire of Their Own : How the Jews Invented Hollywood >
Customer Review #3:
 Movie Jews Starring in Their Own Life Movie
Neal Gabler explores the lives of the founding movie moguls of Hollywood in this work which is at turns funny and sad. Most of the moguls never had a very good family life either growing up or growing old, but the stories of the business and oddities of Hollywood are amusing.One of the most interesting of Gablers points is that each head of the studio made a certain style of movie that reflected his personality--whether that would be Mayers idealized America or the Warners stories of tough outsiders, for instance. Gabler gives interesting insights into the struggle between Edison and the Jewish independents over who would monopolize the distribution and equipment for the business. It is suggested that this was fight between protestants on one side, and Jews and Catholics on the other, given the ethnic make-up of the two camps. Edison eventually lost out over an anti-trust suit and the movie moguls went on to pretty much monopolize the business until they lost an anti-trust suit in 1948. The reason why Jews have predominated in the movie business from the beginning was that in the early days of film, it was considered a slightly disreputable business to be in and white gentiles had no great desire to enter into a venture considered to be a novelty to make some fast cash. The Jewish businessmen saw the movies as something more than a novelty and sought to make them more high-brow by filming critically acclaimed plays and literary works. This was done also to bring in the middle class into their already working class customer base. Gabler shows how many of the movie moguls wished to present themselves as totally assimilated Americans who made themselves over to look like the high class gentiles of the Eastern Establishment. But at the same time they saw themselves as Jews and their enemies saw them as Jews too. The years of blacklisting communists is covered in which some gentiles complained about the moguls employing communist Jewish writers for their films. (The moguls themselves were Republican and many of their writers were Jewish communists.) Hollywood is shown to be place where there is no real friendship and materialism reigns. In their cutthroat business, those on top are celebrated as long as they stay successful and those who have fallen are forgotten. This rule even applies somewhat to the movie moguls of this era. Anyway, one gets the impression its more fun to watch the movies than to be in the business of making them.
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