Film

Cheap electricity was also one of the factors which turned Southern California into the world center of the new movie industry. The other two were sunshine and, above all, freedom from legislation. Movies were the product of a marriage between California and Ashkenazi Jews. This followed an earlier union between Jewish productive and creative genius and New York. In 1890 there was not a single amusement arcade in New York. By 1900 there over 1,000, and fifty of them already called Nickelodeons. Eight years later there were 400 of them in New York alone and they were spreading all over the Northern cities. They cost five cents and appealed to the poorest of the urban poor. The hundred of movies made for them were silent. That was an advantage. It was an immigrant art-form. At first the Jews merely owned the Nickelodeons, the arcades, and the theaters. Most of the copyright processes, and the shorts, were owned by American-born Protestants. An exception was Sigmund Lublin, operating from the great Jewish center of Philadelphia. When the theater-owners began to go into production, to make the shorts their immigrant patrons wanted, Lublin joined with the other patent-owners to form the giant Patent Company and extract full dues out of the movie-makers. It was then that the Jews led the industry on a new Exodus, from the ‘Egypt’ of the Wasp-dominated Northeast to the Promised Land of California. Los Angeles had easy laws and, if needs be, a quick escape into Mexico from the Patent Company lawyers and from another litigational killjoy, the New York Film Trust.

Most of the time Los Angeles’ climate is benign and movie-makers found it cut costs by almost half.

In 1915, the first characteristic Hollywood structure, Universal City, was built. This was the work of Carl Laemmle, first of the Jewish movie tycoons. Nearly all of them conformed to a pattern. They were immigrants or of immediate immigrant stock. They were poor, often desperately poor. Laemmle founded Universal, the first big studio, in 1912. Marcus Loew was born on the Lower East Side, the son of an immigrant waiter. He sold papers at six, left school at twelve to work in printing, then furs, was an independent fur-broker at eighteen, had been twice bankrupted by the age of thirty, and then put together Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. William Fox left school at eleven for the garment industry, set up his own business, then progressed through Brooklyn penny-arcades to a movie-chain, Twentieth Century Fox.

Louis B. Mayer, the son of a Hebrew scholar, went into the junk trade at the age of eight, had his own junk business by nineteen, a theater-chain by twenty-two. The Warner Brothers were the children of a poor cobbler. Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures, summed up for them all: ‘I arrived from Hungary an orphan boy of sixteen with a few dollars sewn inside my vest. I was thrilled to breathe the fresh, strong air of freedom, and America has been good to me.’