An Empire of Their Own

"From noted film critic Neal Gabler comes a provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who founded and came to dominate the American film industry. These men--Adolph_Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, the Warner brothers, Harry Cohn--created an image of America out of their own idealism, a vision that proved so powerful that it ultimately came to shape the myths, values, traditions, and archetypes of America itself. This spellbinding social history of Hollywood reaches beyond the commonplace stereotypes to examine the psychology of the movie moguls, and the political, religious, and economic milieu of the town and industry they built. For these men, prevented from entering the real corridors of gentility and power in America, cut their lives to the pattern of American respectability as they interpreted it. In the process they created a new country, an 'empire of their own,' and colonized the American imagination to such an extent that this country came to be largely defined by its movies. In prose as vivid as Tinseltown itself, Neal Gabler paints a mesmerizing portrait of the human face of Hollywood. Richly entertaining, dramatic, and impeccably researched, An Empire of Their Own is, finally, the powerful story of the men who gave us America and wound up losing themselves."--Dust jacket.