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

Jonathan Rosenbaum: Self

Quotes 

• Narrator : The moguls are gone, but their vision survives. The America of Edison and Rankin has given way to an alien ideology. It isn't to Communism or Judaism that the Gentile elite once feared. It's Americanism as defined by Hollywood. The icons endure. The little guy fighting the odds. The pogrom imagery. The desperate desire to survive and the various races assimilating to create the ultimate happy ending... A white middle-class President articulating the Jewish experience writ large. A new global religion, Hollywoodism...

  Jonathan Rosenbaum : There was a Hollywoodism then. There's a Hollywoodism today. I would go further and say it is what is the ruling ideology of our culture. Hollywood culture is the dominant culture. It is the fantasy structure that we're all living inside.

• Narrator : In the 1920s and 30s movie houses became temples of the new Hollywood religion. Jewish values made kitsch. Seventy-five percent of all Americans went to the movies at least once a week.

  Jonathan Rosenbaum : This kind of movie going was religious because it had to do with worship. It had to do with the screen being larger than you were and you being in awe at what you were looking at and feeling a certain reverence for it. And so there was, maybe you could say a bogus spirituality, but it was a spirituality still that was believed in...

  Narrator : Actors became the gods and goddesses of the new American religion... And where there are new gods there must be new idols. So the studio heads began a movie guild with a lofty title of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was Mayer's brilliant idea to create the Oscars where the movie moguls could honor themselves by giving each other awards. In this way, they went from being a group of immigrant Jews to award-winning American producers... In their own lives the Hollywood Jews subscribed to the religion of their own making. They were the quintessential little guys who had made it to the top. They threw parties on their yachts. They dressed in tailor-made suits. They lived in the kind of houses that aristocrats were supposed to live in. And when they were not admitted to the Gentile country clubs they rebuilt this one-Hillcrest-bigger and better than all the rest.