Hollywood Sex Scandals Go Back To Its Jewish Founding Fathers

November 13th, 2017

Awake Goy

Decades ago, Warner Bros. studio mesmerized moviegoers with films such as “The Jazz Singer” and “Casablanca” — some of the most popular hits of cinema’s golden age.

Now, the four Jewish-American brothers who founded that studio — Jack, Harry, Sam and Albert — are the marquee attractions of a new book: “Warner Bros: The Making of An American Movie Studio,” by film critic and historian David Thomson.

It’s part of Yale University Press’ Jewish Lives series, and the protagonist is studio head Jack Warner — a walking paradigm of Hollywood success and scandal.

Warner is “maybe the biggest scumbag ever to get into a Jewish Lives series,” writes Thomson. But when Yale suggested Thomson take up the Warner Bros. for the series, the acclaimed author of 20 books was intrigued. It hadn’t occurred to him to write about a corporation, he told The Times of Israel.

He said, “certain corporations that were absolutely vital in the history of movies were largely or almost entirely Jewish. … I was always very interested in the way in which Jewish culture had so much to do with the foundation of movies.”

“The most important factor of all is that I really felt, for me personally, Warner Bros. was the great studio,” he said.

The family’s original name was either Wonsal or Wonskolasor. Of the four brothers, the older three — Harry, Albert and Sam — “were all born in what was either Poland or Russia depending on the frontiers at the time,” Thomson said.

In the late 19th century, their father, Benjamin, immigrated to the US and changed his last name to Warner. His sons Moses, Aaron and Shmuel became, respectively, Harry, Albert and Sam.

“I think, back in Europe, they had a hard time,” Thomson said. “They were not nearly as poor as some, but they were not well-off. Because they were Jewish, I think they were subjects of a great deal of hostility.”

As the family moved across North America, they lived in Canada, where in 1892, a baby boy named Jacob was born; he would become Jack.

They relocated to Youngstown, Ohio, trying their hands at various career paths including operating a bowling alley.

One night in 1903 or 1904, Sam Warner suggested something different: As his brothers sampled their mother Pearl’s potato latkes with applesauce and sour cream, he used a recent technological phenomenon — a movie projector — to show a 1903 film, “The Great Train Robbery,” on a sheet pinned to the wall.

“If Sam had not really urged it upon them, they might have done something else altogether,” Thomson reflected.

Follow the celluloid road

Moviemaking in that era was a path well-traveled by Jewish Americans, according to Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and a professor of critical and media studies.

“Almost all of them were immigrants from the shtetl, Jewish, from Russia or Eastern Europe,” Horak said. “Louis B. Mayer, Fox, Samuel Goldwyn, whose real name was Goldfish.”

“[At] the beginning of the 20th century in this country, there was still a lot of anti-Semitism,” Horak explained. “Certain professions, they were maybe not legally banned from, but it was extremely difficult to get into. At the beginning of the 20th century, what you had was the creation of, the invention of, motion pictures. A lot of Jewish immigrants saw this as a way to get into something in which there was no competition.”

However, they faced anti-Semitism from first-generation film producers such as Thomas Edison, Horak said. “In the period to 1912, there were a lot of anti-Semitic statements that ‘these Jewish pushcart peddlers are taking over the film business, destroying the morals of our youth, etc., etc.’ — from the right wing, of course,” he said.

But circa 1915-1917, Jews moved into production “and pretty much invented Hollywood,” he said — referencing film critic Neal Gabler’s 1988 book “An Empire Of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.”

“He was the first to write about it,” Horak said. “Up to that time, it had been a taboo subject — that someone thinking about it would say that it would be anti-Semitic. In 1912, it happened that most of the producers themselves … did not make films with Jewish themes. [They wanted to] appear completely American. So much of America, in the heartland especially, was anti-Semitic. They did not emphasize the fact they were Jewish.” […]