An Empire of Their Own; How the Jews Invented Hollywood

New York: Anchor Books, published by Doubleday, 1989. First Anchor Books Edition [Stated]. Presumed first printing. Trade paperback. Good. The format is approximately 5.125 inches by 8 inches. vi, [2], 502 pages. Illustrations. Reference Notes. A Note on Sources. A Selected Bibliography. Index. Some cover wear and soiling, and a crease at the back. Provocative, original group biography of the Jewish immigrants who came to dominate the American film industry. These men--Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, the Warner Brothers, Harry Cohn--created an image of America out of their idealism. Neal Gabler (born 1950) is an American journalist, writer and film critic. Gabler has contributed to numerous publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, Vogue, American Heritage, The New Republic, Us, and Playboy. He has appeared on many television programs, including The Today Show, CBS Morning News, The News Hour, Entertainment Tonight, Charlie Rose, and Good Morning America. He hosted Sneak Previews for PBS, and introduced films on the cable network AMC. He is the author of seven books: An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality; Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination; Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power; Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour 1932-1975; and Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism, 1976-2009. 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. Derived from a Kirkus review: 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. Gabler writes clearly and simply, his 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; 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. 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 America created by these businessmen become the America that later generations of movie-goers took as the real place 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. True or not, Gabler's book may well reshape Hollywood history into this image.