Jews were not the first to arrive in Hollywood. In 1907, Hollywood was chosen by a studio as the location for the filming of The Count of Monte Cristo, and a small studio was built. As a result, free-spirited artists have flown in from the west, and independent filmmakers have come here to set up shooting and production bases. Jews with a keen sense of business saw the newly emerging film industry and Hollywood as a feng shui treasure. They invested in the film industry one after another and moved their production companies to Hollywood for development. The 1920s and 1930s were the golden age of Hollywood, and its arrival was inseparable from the big Jewish film companies. Today, people can still see these famous studio logos on the title of Hollywood movies: Warner Bros. with the WB letter shield, MGM with the sleeping lion, Paramount with Snow Mountain and Stars, Torch Goddess Columbia, Globe with globe logo, 20th Century Fox with golden steps. These companies have dominated Hollywood for decades, and some continue to prosper, while others are vicissitudes.
These studios are the pillars of Hollywood’s rise, and most of them were founded by Jews. Warner Bros. is the world’s largest film and entertainment production company, currently a subsidiary of Time Warner, founded in 1918. Four Warner brothers were Jewish immigrants, their father was a Yiddish-speaking Polish cobbler who was tossed through Hamburg, Germany due to hopeless ghetto life and rising anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. To the United States (the route often taken by Eastern European Jews to immigrate to the United States). There are nine brothers and sisters in the Warner family. The founders of the company are mainly four brothers: Harry Warner, Albert Warner, Sam Warner and Jack Warner, who once worked as cobblers and opened a bicycle shop. Engaged in various trades, in 1903 they owned the first pennies movie theater in Pennsylvania. The five-cent movie theaters were very popular at the time, also known as coin theaters, and their main customers were immigrants and working class newcomers to the United States. Warner Bros. quickly amassed funds to become a distributor and exhibitor of films, moving to California in 1912, and after a series of hardships, founded Warner Bros. Due to the strong momentum of Warner Bros., the brothers are called “Mongolians in the film industry”.
The immigrant origins and hardships of Warner Bros. are a microcosm of Hollywood’s Jewish tycoons. The three founders of MGM, Marcus Roy, Louis Mayer, and Samuel Goldwyn were all Jewish. Marcus Roy’s parents were Jewish immigrants. He was born in a poor Jewish family in New York. He saved money by doing menial jobs and began to enter the coin theater, which gradually developed into a huge theater industry. In 1920, it bought the Mitro Corporation, one of the origins of MGM, and a few years later merged with the troubled Goldwyn Films Distribution Company. Samuel Goldwyn was born into a Hasidic Jewish family in Warsaw (Hasidism is Jewish mysticism that became popular among Eastern European Jews in the Middle Ages). At a young age, Goldwin left Warsaw on foot penniless. He spent a few years in Birmingham, England, and immigrated to the United States in 1898. After working as a salesman for a few years, he became a glove dealer. Mayer, who has been in charge of MGM for three decades, was born into a Jewish family in Minsk. He lived a life of migration with his family in his early years, from Russia to Rhode Island to Canada to the United States. He was often threatened by anti-Semitism. Have done business such as scrap metal acquisition. Adolf Zucker, born in Hungary, immigrated to the United States at the age of 16 and worked as an apprentice in a fur store and later became a fur merchant. Zucker is one of the founders of Paramount and has been the president of Paramount for a long time. He revolutionized the film industry by combining production, distribution, and promotion functions in one company, and he was both a director and a producer himself. One of the founders of Universal, Karl Limler, was a German Jewish immigrant. After he came to the United States, he ran a clothing store and a bookstore. After seeing the coin theater for a few weeks, he thought it was profitable to raise funds to buy some theaters. The founder of Fox Films, William Fox, was a Hungarian-born Jewish immigrant who traded clothing and opened a dry cleaner. Harry Cohen, the owner of Columbia Pictures, was born in a Jewish working-class family in the Lower East Side of New York. He worked as a bus conductor, ballet dancer and commercial song singer. In 1920, he and his younger brother Jack established the film distribution together. company. In the 1930s, the controlling shareholder of RKO, David Shanov, was a Belarusian Jewish immigrant under Russian rule.
In addition to the heads of these big companies, most of the partners, investors, directors, and producers of the film companies are Jewish. In Hollywood, the whole atmosphere is Jewish, and even non-Jews have Jewish behaviors, expressions and languages. Habit. However, there is nothing Jewish about the production of Hollywood films, but something Jewish in style. For example, the Jewish old Selznick once said to his son David Selznick (producer of Gone with the Wind): “Live a life of luxury, spend money lavishly, and always remember not to live on your income. , so that a person can gain self-confidence.” When it comes to their Jewish origin, the Jewish attitude is cautious. So although there are many Jewish magnates from very orthodox Jewish families – some of them are the sons or grandsons of rabbis – they only convert to the faith of their fathers at the end of their life for a funeral, and some don’t even then convert Judaism. But the whole environment of Hollywood was so Jewish that non-Jews felt like they were outsiders.
The Jews of Hollywood are not innovators of film technology, although they may have many new ideas in technology, they are by no means scientists and inventors, nor are they high-level artists. On the contrary, they are all immigrants from the bottom of the society, who have barely finished high school, and some even speak English well, often with a “Jingjing” English mixed with Yiddish. But it is precisely because they grew up on the side of the road that they roamed the streets full of immigrants, the proletariat, and small traders. They had a deep understanding of the hobbies of the lower classes, and quickly recognized the huge business opportunities contained in the coin theater. Sensitive predictions of public demand led Jews to combine box office with art, and Warner Bros once said, “If you start to please the upper class, you’re done.” Down, let it go to the public, put money and trust in it, and develop a large-scale film art industry.
As the first or second generation immigrants, the Jewish giants in Hollywood came from the bottom of the society. In order to survive and develop in the United States, they fully inherited the adaptability, hard work and business sense of their predecessors. In the business battlefield of Hollywood, entrepreneurs have never let up, nor can they relax, and they are also full of intrigue struggles. Universal’s president, Carl Limler, who fainted at a business meeting in 1930, said “I never knew how tired I was”, but later admitted “I felt completely exhausted — not sick. , just exhausted.” The ups and downs of William Fox, who often worked ecstatically, said: “I don’t wear a watch as much as possible, I never want to know what time it is, and my day ends when the day’s work is done. Yes. I often work 24 hours without sleep.” They are creating and enjoying the process at the cost of their lives, just as the challenge of courage led Jews to dominate the gaming industry in Las Vegas, in the show business, in Hollywood, The challenges and adventures fraught here fascinate the Jews, whose resolute determination and unbridled energy make them legends themselves in the process of creating them
