Scan barcode
spikeanderson1's review against another edition
1.0
i just couldnt get into it- informative but dry. I stopped after c. 80 pgsor so
sjgrodsky's review against another edition
3.0
I hate to make any criticism of this very long and deeply researched history. Let's just say that I wished for more context and less detail. And that the book was written in 1988 so the lens offered by the "#MeToo" movement is absent.
Here is some of what I learned:
The studio heads featured (Carl Lammle of Paramount, Harry Cohn of Columbia, the Warners of Warner Brothers, Louis Mayer of MGM) were all first or second generation Americans.
They typically got into movie production in a roundabout way: they began by owning nickelodeons or small theaters, expanded into distribution, then got into producing movies because they needed good content to sell to their audiences. Same path as Netflix.
Movie theaters were only semi-respectable in the early part of the 20th century. To broaden the appeal, owners constructed the elaborately decorated "movie palaces" to attract the middle class.
They got into movies because discrimination prevented them from entering the well established businesses owned by earlier WASP immigrants. Interestingly, the author doesn't engage in the schadenfreude observation that the over proud WASPs missed a good bet: a wildly successful business that required living in the climate paradise of Southern California. So the Elysian Fields were open to these crude but hardworking parvenus.
They worked hard and played hard and became very rich and typically had distant relationships with their wives and children.
But they never lost that wish to be accepted by "mainstream" Americans, and that fear that they were not quite "American". My Canadian immigrant mother had that same fear.
And late in life they continued to use the racial slurs they'd heard as children. Although they were Jewish, they insulted each other with that dreadful word "kike".
Walt Disney, whose animated fairy tales brought such joy to my childhood, makes the briefest of appearances: only long enough to establish that he was an anti-Semite.
Here is some of what I learned:
The studio heads featured (Carl Lammle of Paramount, Harry Cohn of Columbia, the Warners of Warner Brothers, Louis Mayer of MGM) were all first or second generation Americans.
They typically got into movie production in a roundabout way: they began by owning nickelodeons or small theaters, expanded into distribution, then got into producing movies because they needed good content to sell to their audiences. Same path as Netflix.
Movie theaters were only semi-respectable in the early part of the 20th century. To broaden the appeal, owners constructed the elaborately decorated "movie palaces" to attract the middle class.
They got into movies because discrimination prevented them from entering the well established businesses owned by earlier WASP immigrants. Interestingly, the author doesn't engage in the schadenfreude observation that the over proud WASPs missed a good bet: a wildly successful business that required living in the climate paradise of Southern California. So the Elysian Fields were open to these crude but hardworking parvenus.
They worked hard and played hard and became very rich and typically had distant relationships with their wives and children.
But they never lost that wish to be accepted by "mainstream" Americans, and that fear that they were not quite "American". My Canadian immigrant mother had that same fear.
And late in life they continued to use the racial slurs they'd heard as children. Although they were Jewish, they insulted each other with that dreadful word "kike".
Walt Disney, whose animated fairy tales brought such joy to my childhood, makes the briefest of appearances: only long enough to establish that he was an anti-Semite.
wayneg's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Terrific story of how a small group of Jewish emigrants built the movie industry in Los Angeles. Great pace, moves effortlessly across various characters and time period.
abjohnson1's review against another edition
3.0
I found it a very interesting history of the studio era unil it veered off into politics
elizabethbetsyjohnson's review
2.0
I found it a very interesting history of the studio era unil it veered off into politics
More...