The text was adopted from a broader Survey Prepared for the City of Los Angeles, Department of  City Planning, Office of Historic Resources. This Survey has been compiled by the team of contributors to whom we are extremely grateful.

This is a preliminary text and we are currently working on a collaborative narrative.

The title for this essay in progress is,

ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY IN LOS ANGELES:  ALWAYS A JEWISH FACTOR. ADAPTATION OF THE NEW CULTURE,  1908 -- 1980s. 

We are hereby presenting a phenomenon of social, economic and cultural developments that made   the early stages of 'Hollywood-building' a Jewish venture. We will be seeking explications of what were the driving forces and ideation behind the mere entrepreneurship.  

Over the past century, Los Angeles has become the center of many facets of the entertainment industry, starting with motion pictures, then moving on to music, radio, and television. The origins of these industries lay principally with several waves of first and second-generation Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe. Their traditions, brought first to New York and then to Los Angeles, along with the unique circumstances of their role as immigrants, have largely formed today’s entertainment industry and in the process transformed Los Angeles. 

Motion Pictures. Though there was a smattering of film production before their arrival, it was the appearance of a small group of Jewish men, each arriving separately, starting in the early 1910s, that marked the true beginning of Southern California’s motion picture industry. Adolph Zukor, a New York furrier born in Hungary, and vaudevillian Jesse Lasky, whose parents had emigrated from Poland, founded Paramount Pictures. Louis B. Mayer, the Russian-born owner of a Massachusetts theater, would head Metro Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. Albert, Harry, Sam, and Jack Warner, the eldest three born in Poland, would start Warner Brothers Studios, while Hungarian-born nickelodeon owner William Fox’s Fox Film Corporation would eventually become 20th Century Fox. Along with RKO, whose creation by the merger of RCA, FBO, and the Keith Albee Orpheum Circuit (overseen by Russian Jewish immigrant David Sarnoff) did not happen until 1928, these made up the so-called “Big Five” studios. 

With considerably less income and without their own theater chains, there were also the “Little Three” studios. Universal was founded by Carl Laemmle, a German immigrant who had previously failed at many business ventures. Harry Cohn, the product of a rough New York childhood, whose parents had come from Russia and Germany, ran Columbia Studios with an iron fist. And United Artists, founded by superstars Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith, was the only major studio to be run by Gentiles, though even there, they eventually chose Russian Jewish immigrant. "The Studio Era," Joseph Schenck as the company’s chairman. 

Though between 1930 and 1948, the eight major studios controlled 95% of the films shown in the U.S.,  there were also many smaller studios mostly making B movies, which were collectively known as “Poverty Row.” Many of these were centered in Hollywood, especially around the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Avenue -- also referred to as “Poverty Row.” These studios tended to change hands quite often. For example, at 846 N. Cahuenga Boulevard, Metro Studios was constructed in 1915 and was run by Louis B. Mayer. 

After the departure of Metro, the property was known as Equity Studios, Motion Picture Center Studios, Desilu-Cahuenga Studios, Cinema General Studio, Television Center Studios, Ren-Mar Studios, and finally today’s RED Studios Hollywood. From the earliest days, studios could also be found in a wide swath from the eastside of Los Angeles, like William Selig’s Selig Polyscope Company in Edendale (present day Echo Park), to the westside, like Thomas Ince’s Inceville in Pacific Palisades. Studios could also be found among the orange groves of the San Fernando Valley, such as Nat Levine’s Mascot Studios in Studio City at 4024 Radford Avenue, which was originally built by Mack Sennett. Though not entirely Jewish, these smaller independent studios also had a Jewish presence. 

These Jewish pioneers were not the first to produce and exhibit films. So why did they, none of whom had any experience in the arts, succeed while their Gentile peers and predecessors failed? In other words, what exactly was the Jewish influence on the film industry? The first reason for their success was that they were, with few exceptions, part of the working class, which was the target audience for this new form of popular entertainment. 

Carl Laemmle recalls the moment he first saw a moving picture in Chicago and found himself roaring with laughter along with the rest of the working class crowd. When the Jewish film pioneers were starting out, the men making up the existing production and distribution companies were anything but working class. In 1908 Thomas Edison gathered them together and formed the Motion Picture Patents Company, known simply as “The Trust.” This conglomerate licensed the cameras and projectors and controlled the film stock, thereby controlling who was able to make and exhibit films. With the exception of Jewish immigrant Siegmund Lubin, they were “primarily older white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had entered the film industry in its infancy by inventing, bankrolling, or tinkering with movie hardware: cameras and projectors.” They viewed films as novelties. 

But the Jews knew they were much more. According to Adolph Zukor, “What they were making belonged entirely to technicians… What I was talking about – that was show business.” Another factor that set these working class Jews apart from the rest of the working class was that culture had always been part of Jewish life, no matter the position in society. So it is no surprise that Adolph Zukor immediately realized, unlike the Anglos in the Trust, that if the quality of the films improved, the middle class, who currently looked down on moving pictures, would be drawn to them as well. So like the other Jewish independents, he knew what the middle class wanted, in addition to what the working class wanted. And like the others, he started acquiring and then producing longer, more sophisticated films. 

The other factor that put the Jews in a prime position for creating films that would appeal to the mainstream was the fact that they themselves so wanted to be in the mainstream. 

Outsiders for centuries in Europe, they were finally in a country that permitted them to assimilate, and in motion pictures they found a way to accelerate that process. Their studios manufactured the American Dream that they themselves desired. In An Empire of the Their Own, Neal Gabler writes that Louis B. Mayer fashioned, “…a vast, compelling national fantasy out of his dreams…a belief in virtue, in the bulwark of family, in the merits of loyalty, in the soundness of tradition, in America itself… it is unlikely that any of them [Native born, white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans] could have…invented it. To do so, one would have needed the same desperate longing for security that Mayer and so many of the other Hollywood Jews felt.” 

This was, for all the moguls, the polar opposite of their own family experience, and in fact, Mayer went so far to escape his heritage and embrace his adopted country as to legally change his birthday to the Fourth of July. Meanwhile over at Columbia, Harry Cohn, whose CBC Film Sales Corporation was  Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, disparagingly referred to as “corned beef and cabbage,” the films’ stars inhabited a “homogenized stratum where houses were spacious, money plentiful, style abundant, values reasonably clear, and Jews absent. It is well documented that the filmmakers came to Southern California both for the production benefits of year-round sunshine and to escape the reach of Edison’s Trust. But these Jewish outsiders also found that Los Angeles was the perfect place to reinvent themselves. The social ladder on the East Coast was entrenched and equipped to keep Jews and other outsiders in their place. But no such ladder existed in Los Angeles. As Gabler puts it, “One could even have said that California was the social equivalent of the movies themselves, new and unformed, which really made the producers’ emigration there a matter of an industry finding its appropriate spot." 

Jewish actors and actresses were also reinvented. For example, who would have guessed that the sultry siren Theda Bara, the original vamp, who, according to Fox Studios, “…was born of an Italian artist and an Arabian princess … her first name was an anagram spelling "death" and her last name spelled backwards was Arab… born in the Sahara desert in the shadow of a sphinx…sent to Europe to be trained for the stage where she became a popular Parisian stage actress who played the most renowned theatres of the time…” was actually a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati, Ohio named Theodosia Goodman, the daughter of a tailor? Even with the output of the studios reflecting the moguls’ desire to assimilate, there was another opposite tendency to include Jewish values in the films. 

For example, Harry Warner strictly adhered to his Judaism. While other studios avoided the topic, Warner Brothers released movies like Private Izzy Murphy, Sailor Izzy Murphy and Ginsberg the Great.  And what did the Warners choose for their groundbreaking foray into sound pictures? Also running counter to the Hollywood version of sanitized America, the studios sometimes utilized the Jewish tradition of social justice in such films as Warner Brothers’ I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang in 1932 and the anti-lynching film, They Won’t Forget in 1934. 1947 saw the release of both 20th Century Fox’s Gentlemen’s Agreement and RKO’s Crossfire, exposing anti-Semitism both subtle and overt. Warner Brothers had dealt with the same subject the previous decade with Disraeli (1929), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), a film about the Dreyfus Affair, featuring Yiddish theater veteran Paul Muni, and Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940), featuring another Yiddish theater alum, Edward G. Robinson. 

That there was a limit to how far even the Warner brothers was willing to go in battling anti-Semitism can be seen in the fact that nowhere in The Life of Emile Zola was it mentioned that Dreyfus was even Jewish. Another place that the Hollywood studios were able to make Jewish tradition appeal to mainstream America was in the field of comedy. It makes sense that a people who spent centuries persecuted and marginalized with no way to fight back against authority would turn to humor. According to the Big Book of Jewish Humor, “Jewish humor tends to be anti-authoritarian. It ridicules grandiosity… exposes hypocrisy, and kicks pomposity in the pants. It is strongly democratic, stressing the dignity and worth of common folk… Often its thrust is political–aimed at leaders and other authorities who cannot be criticized more directly...Jewish humor mocks everyone.”

 What could be more of a kick in the pants to pomposity than the Marx Brothers invading a high society dinner? Or the Three Stooges? Though the Marx brothers, who started at Paramount in 1929 and moved to MGM in 1935, hit the vaudeville circuit as children, Stooges Moe, Shemp and Curly Howard were the sons of a Brooklyn garment cutter,286 and Larry Fine’s father owned a jewelry store in South Philadelphia.287 In addition to taking the upper classes down a peg, the Three Stooges, who worked for Columbia, also presented an even straighter line to their Jewish roots. Out of 190 shorts made throughout their career, 40% used either Hebrew or Yiddish. 

Meanwhile, at Warner Brothers, the Jewish underdog was actually a rabbit. Or to be more precise, a bunny. Making his first appearance as a fully formed character in 1940’s animated short, A Wild Hare, Bugs Bunny possessed many of the same attributes as Jewish comedians, including a quick wit, an irreverence for authority and even a Brooklyn accent, supplied by that Jewish “Man of a Thousand Voices,” Mel Blanc. “The spirit of Jewish vaudeville inhabits Bugs’s slight frame, down to the lightning puns, double-meanings and gloriously underhanded tricks that he’s lifted from folks like Groucho and Chico Marx, as well as the manic physical mayhem that typified acts like the Ritz Brothers. …Nor should we forget the dead-on parodies of high art in… “The Rabbit of Seville” and “What’s Opera, Doc,” which made mincemeat of postwar German productions of Wagner. They all seem happy to indulge in that gleeful Yiddish sport of cutting pretension down to size.” Warner Brothers Studios at 5842 W. Sunset Boulevard.

 Eugenie Besserer, Al Jolson, and Warner Oland in the Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer, 1927 (The Red List) It was also the heightened outsider status of the Warner brothers themselves that led to the most significant change in motion pictures since the beginning of the medium: Sound. The Warner brothers came to Hollywood later than the other Jewish pioneers, and, according to Gabler, “All their lives the Warners had been acutely aware of their status as outsiders, even within the relatively déclassé encampment of Hollywood.” 

While the more established studios, and their more socially established heads, had no reason to stick their necks out, the Warners, “… the Hollywood Jews who were most sensitive to their status as outsiders, had fewer qualms about sound, seeing it more as an opportunity to break into the front ranks.” That the Warner brothers chose a Jewish theme for such an important landmark was no accident. The movie, about Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a rabbi who must choose between his old identity as a Jew and his new identity as an American, was the story of Albert, Harry, Sam, and Jack Warner. “Like Jakie, the Warner brothers left home to enter show business, and like so many of the other Jewish studio moguls, they assimilated themselves into secular American culture. it provided an extraordinary revealing window on the dilemmas of the Hollywood Jews generally, and the Warners specifically. 

Jolson pursued the part because, as the Americanized son of a cantor himself, he also identified with it. As with so much of what the studios were creating, this Jewish theme of generational change struck a chord with mainstream America as well, as the movie was a colossal success. Though the bulk of the filmmaking process occurred in the sound stages, back lots, and offices of the studios, some tasks took place outside their walls as well. For example, the 1937 Studio Blu-Book lists twenty-nine film distributors grouped together on the 1800 and 1900 blocks of Vermont Avenue and the intersecting Cordova Street, including Warner Brothers, Universal, Vitagraph, Monogram, and Republic, along with MGM Distributing Corporation, which is still extant at 1620 Cordova Street. 

There were also the many crafts outside the studios that contributed to filmmaking, like make-up. In that arena, the biggest name was Max Factor. Born in Russia, Factor fled that country’s anti-Semitism, heading first to Saint Louis and then to Los Angeles, where he arrived in 1909 to revolutionize the art of motion picture make-up. Eventually his empire would be centered in the heart of Hollywood in building designed by architect S. Charles Lee at 1660 N. Highland Avenue. Lee was another Jew who moved to Los Angeles to reinvent himself. He was born Simeon Charles Levi to German Jewish parents in Chicago. He is best known as the designer of movie palaces, especially for the Fox West Coast Theatres chain. The next stage of substantial Jewish migration into Hollywood came from artists fleeing the rise of the Nazis in Europe. Though there had been a trickle of European writers, directors, actors, musicians and cameramen as early as the 1920s, the numbers increased throughout the 1930s, the floodgates being forced open by Hollywood Jews themselves just as the war was beginning. 

Fifteen hundred film industry exiles, most of them Jewish, arrived in Southern California from Germany alone, along with others from Austria, Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. The composer Franz Waxman left Germany in 1934 after receiving a severe beating from Nazi sympathizers in Berlin. These new arrivals had a great deal of influence on the motion picture industry. For example, much of the creative force behind the German Expressionist Weimar cinema came from Germans and Austrians of Jewish descent. Though Robert Wiene, the director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, fled to France and then England, many others came to Hollywood. As cinematographer for Dracula (1931) and director of The Mummy (1932), Karl Freund, who emigrated from Germany in 1929, used the same dramatic lighting and camera angles of his previous work on German Expressionist films like Metropolis (1925). In the process, he set the tone for Universal’s horror genre, which was being developed by Carl Laemmle, Jr. Other directors who made the journey from Weimar to Hollywood included Joe May (The House of the Seven Gables), Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel), Edgar G. Ulmer (Detour), Max Reinhardt (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Robert Siodmak (The Killers) and Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard).  Of course, finding themselves in a foreign land and forced to speak a foreign tongue, not all refugees found such success. Aljean Harmetz writes in Round up the Usual Suspects, “It was the émigré writers and actors who struggled the hardest... Directors spoke with their eyes. With the aid of dialogue directors to coach the actors, Fritz Lang, Henry Koster, Robert Siodmak, and Douglas Sirck slipped easily into the industry. Producers had assistants to translate their thoughts. 

And the musicians, including Franz Waxman, Hanns Eisler, and Miklos Rozsa, didn’t need words at all.” Though working émigrés tended not to socialize with those less successful, they did keep them afloat financially by forming the European Film Fund in 1938, donating one percent of their salaries in order to provide them with homes and clothing.297 From the 1942 movie Casablanca, in which dozens of actual refugees filled Rick’s Café as extras or one-line walk-ons, director Michael Curtiz and actors Peter Lorre and S. Z. Sakall, all Jews from Hungary (as well as Gentile Austrian refugee Paul Henreid) contributed money to the fund. American-born Jewish Casablanca writers Julius and Philip Epstein sponsored refugee writers as well. 

After the war began in 1939, Bohemian-born Jewish talent agent Paul Kohner, who had spent three years in Berlin as head of Universal’s European operations, was receiving frantic letters from writers trapped in Europe and North Africa. He and German-born Jewish director Ernst Lubitsch called a meeting of the European film colony to strategize their escape, proposing that they convince the studio heads to sponsor the stranded writers and hire them at minimum salary. Kohner approached Jack Warner first. “He told Warner that most of the stranded writers were Jews, and Warner agreed to hire four of them at $100 a week each. Kohner was not a successful agent for nothing. Since Warner had bought four, L. B. Mayer took six, and Harry Cohn at Columbia took ten. After the war ended, work got scarcer for the refugees, and many returned to Europe. 

On the other hand, writer-director Billy Wider, who arrived from Vienna in 1933 and whose mother, grandmother, Christian Rogowski,  Harmetz, and stepfather died in the Holocaust said, “This was home. I had a clear-cut vision: ‘This is where I am going to die.’” Music As 1927’s The Jazz Singer featured nine songs -- several by Russian Jewish immigrant composers like L. Wolfe Gilbert and Irving Berlin -- the arrival of music in the movies was literally simultaneous with the arrival of sound. The next decade would see the mass migration of the field’s biggest talents from the East Coast to the West. They filled the demand for music both in and outside of the movies, until Hollywood rivaled New York’s Tin Pan Alley and Broadway for supremacy of the music industry. The majority of these musicians were Jewish. As with their counterparts in the motion picture industry, their Jewish heritage would shape their music and the industry itself. The path taken by lyricist Gus Kahn is representative of many Jewish musicians. Born in Koblenz, Germany in 1886, Kahn emigrated to the U.S. in 1890, wrote material for vaudeville (“Aint We Got Fun?” and “Carolina in the Morning”), then Broadway (“It Had to Be You” and “Makin’ Whoopee”), becoming a full-time motion picture songwriter by 1933 (“Carioca” and “You Stepped Out of a Dream”). As for the percentage of Jewish song writers, Jack Gottlieb writes in Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish, “Seventy-five percent of the lyricists appear to have been Jewish, as do fifty percent of the composers of the melodies of the good songs. The sixty percent of the good songwriters who were Jewish wrote about seventy percent of the songs, since almost all the most prolific among them were Jewish.”302 So again, why such a high percentage? Like their motion picture counterparts, one reason was motivation. 

Many were first or second generation working class immigrants trying to escape the poverty of their ethnic enclaves, the largest being New York’s Lower East Side. As the Jewish studio heads were constructing the American Dream through their movies, Jewish composers were creating the Great American Songbook in Tin Pan Alley and Broadway in New York City. In what might be considered the musical version of the studios’ All-American vision, Irving Berlin was writing patriotic songs like “Over There” and “God Bless America” and secularized songs for Christian holidays, like “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade.” The result? As Jerome Kern wrote, “'Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music.'' Johnnie Marks followed suit with “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” as did Mel Tormé with “The Christmas Song.” However new and inventive this American music was, it also had ancient roots in Eastern Europe. These Jewish songwriters came from long traditions of music and culture that influenced their work. An example of Jewish musical elements appearing in these American songs include the opening clarinet solo of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which has been characterized as a “typical Yiddish-Romanian soliloquy in the style of a doyna.” More structural samples include a melody by Ukrainian-born Dmitri Tiomkin for John Wayne’s The Alamo in 1960, which “begins with a variant of the Kol nidrei formula.”Gottlieb also points to a seminal moment in the transition of Jewish to American music, writing of Jerome Kern, “It was an American-born Jew of German-Bohemian parentage who broke the European bonds...