Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and this is to be announced. Good afternoon. We're here today with Neil Gabler, who's the author of an empire of their own, How the Jews Invented Hollywood, which has just been published by Crown Press. The book is a very interesting book about the formations of Hollywood from the Nickelodeons,

really virtually to the beginnings of what we find of Hollywood today,

the kind of independent desuitude of a once noble system built, according to this book,

by the Jews.

Who are the, as you call them, the movie Jews?

Well, in this book, the main characters, the real protagonists of this book,

are the first generation of Hollywood pioneers,

all of whom were, with one exception, Eastern European Jews,

the exception being Carl Lemley,

who was a German Jew. And those people are Carl Lemley, who formed ultimately universal pictures,

Louis B. Mayer, who obviously was the head of MGM, Adolf Zucker, who did not form, but built

into a major Hollywood power of Paramount Pictures.

Harry Cohn, who ran and created Columbia Pictures, and the Warner Brothers, who obviously created Warner Brothers.

And there are many, many other characters.

In some ways, this is like a Russian novel.

All sorts of other individuals float through the narrative.

William Fox and Roxy and Irving Thalberg all move in and out of the narrative.

But those are the central characters of the book.

And the Jews who came to Hollywood were working in an area that in some way the book suggests

works out their Jewishness in the sense of allows them to sluff it off or in some way

succeed in somewhat altering the social setting of their own thought and their own business.

Well, that's very much at the heart of what this book is about.

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