Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream (1998 TV Movie)

Neal Gabler: Self

Quotes 

• Narrator : Their's was a mythical America. A world of boundless optimism, happy endings and homespun truths. This was a world of clapboard houses with broad verandahs and white picket fences, gleaming streets and shops with friendly picture windows. Hollywood's America was made up of citizens who were industrious, religious, wholesome and decent. And although they were of different classes and ethnicities they were knitted together by a larger almost spiritual sense of family. The moguls created the images, the icons and the visual forms that we identify with the American way of life.

  Neal Gabler : They created their own America. An America, which is not the real America. It's their own version of the real America, but ultimately this shadow America becomes so popular and so widely disseminated, that its images and its values come to devour the real America. And so the grand irony of all of Hollywood is that Americans come to define themselves by the shadow America that was created by eastern European Jewish immigrants who weren't admitted to the precincts of the real America.

• Narrator : Modern America first saw light on a Hollywood screen. It was largely the product of six movie studios established in the 1920s and run for over thirty years by a group of Jewish immigrants that had strikingly similar backgrounds.

  Neal Gabler : All of these men who founded Hollywood were born within a 500 mile radius of one another and all of them wound up roughly within 15 miles of one another in Los Angeles. One could say the American dream was born in Eastern Europe.

• Neal Gabler : One of the things that made American films so exportable is that anyone, anywhere could identify with so many of the themes of American movies. One of which was the idea of the outsider, which was a Jewish theme. Jews being outsiders making films about outsiders. You see this even in monster pictures. I mean, King Kong, there's a film about, you know, an outsider. And yet, it's the monster, if you want to call King Kong that, with whom the audience sympathizes.

  Narrator : In Hollywood every outsider could be transformed into an insider. Even in appearance Carl Laemmle was an outsider. He resembled an elf. Not surprisingly Universal's films often championed marginal beings who were persecuted like the Jews of Europe. At Warner Brothers the Jewish sensibility expressed itself by an identification with the little guy-the prize fighters and the losers, the loners and the gangsters.