An Empire of Their Own

An Empire of Their Own by Neal Gabler. Published in 1989, this is the interesting story of how the Hollywood movie industry was created. The author illustrates how all the early film pioneers, who became movie moguls, Louis B. Mayor, Zukor, the Warner Brothers etc were all immigrants or first generation of immigrants from eastern Europe and were Jewish. A major part of these movie people and their move from the east coast to California was to downplay their Jewish heritage and to become as American as they could. Another interesting aspect of this, according to the author, is that in the early 1900 the first iteration of the movie houses were the nickolodians, which in a lot of cases were nothing more than peep shows. So this was an industry that 'respectable' people wanted nothing to do with, allowing poor immigrants to get in on the ground floor of what would become a multi-million dollar industry and make many of the moguls some of the richest men in America.