An Empire of Their Own – How the Jews Invented Hollywood

“An Empire of Their Own is a great starting place for anyone who wants to understand Hollywood because it grounds you in an understanding of the fact that film was an upstart art form and an immigrant art form, largely created by Jews who were trying to find a place in American society when the doors of a lot of other businesses were closed to them. You really get a great sense of the fact that movie studios like Universal, Paramount and Warner Brothers, which we might now think of as multinational faceless corporations, began as scrappy businesses. Gabler really captures the excitement and cultural particularities of American cinema’s birth.” Read more...

The best books on American Film

Mark Harris, Film Critics & Scholar

“What they were doing was effectively bringing into mass circulation an art form – what we now regard as an art form – that at the time was regarded as frightfully déclassé. They created the art form of the American 20th century, starting with these little pictures where people were just amazed by movement, or really early talkies, which everyone had access to.” Read more...

The best books on Hollywood

Marina Hyde, Journalist