An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

Only just started but riveting reading.........

look to be in good condition.

Stuff in here you would never know, a good read. The description of early cinema development is fascinating and really does show the entrepreneurial spirit that built America.

This book arrived this morning, and I have been reading all day...it's a real page turner...Thank you very very much.

Excellent.

Brilliant

Gabler is a uniquely erudite cultural critic. This is the third book I have read by him and I am deeply impressed with the unusual breadth of his coverage. In this case, he writes about the founding fathers of Hollywood, the dictatorial dreamers and shapers of its golden age (to the late 1940s}. In his telling, they are all Eastern European Jews, striving to become part of the American dream and at the same time providing many of the images that entered the American psyche. They all started with the penny arcades at the beginning of the century, and built empires in which they exercised total control of content and creation.This book is less about the economics of the studio system - cartels that manufactured films on lots, virtually owned the "talent" via long-term contracts, dominated the distribution of their films, and controlled many of the theatres that played them - than about the culture and ethos they were trying to create in their dictatorial domains. The era passed with the Supreme Court trust-busting ruling, political attacks during the McCarthy era, and the rise of independent talent in actors, producers, and writer-directors.As Gabler sees it, these founders were fairly secular Jews, who wanted to fit into the American ideal of pseudo-aristocratic entrepreneurs (from poverty). This was the source of their maudlin, sentimental style and crude american ideals, each studio with its own peculiar character. I must admit, I find this angle of analysis, with all the objections one can make for its subjectivity, quite fascinating and given their power to shape things, dead on the mark.Gabler tells the story in the form of serial biographies. It is a wonderful flowing narrative, superlatively written and with a genuine depth of historical understanding. Indeed, while I think this early book is somewhat weaker than his later books, Disney and Life" the Movie, I will read any book that this critic writes.Warmly recommended. This is not my usual domain of interest, so the reading is often hard going for me, but I have learned an immense amount from this critic, who is a real intellectual.

Just as the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers ruled American business, only fade away, so too did the Cohns, the Warners, who reigned over the kingdom of Hollywood. Until they didn’t. But in that brief time, the built an empire that not transformed and created a state of mind that remains undimmed. The book is an exhaustive history, an enthralling peek behind the curtain, and ,at times, as entertaining as the movies themselves.

I love this book

Very interesting if you like to know more about this subject

Excellent book and great readings

A great book for everybody who wants to know how Hollywood was created, who the men behind the project were and why they did what they did. And it helped me really well at my thesis about the history of Jews in America.