Excerpt:
Joseph Michael Schenck (December 25, 1878 – October 22, 1961) was a pioneer executive who played a key role in the development of the United States film industry.
After parting ways with his brother, Joseph Schenck moved to the West Coast where the future of the film industry seemed to lie. Within a few years the brilliant and ambitious Schenck was made the first president of the new United Artists. In 1933 he partnered with Darryl F. Zanuck to create 20th Century Pictures that merged with Fox Film Corporation in 1935. As chairman of the new 20th Century Fox he was one of the most powerful and influential people in the film business. During his tenure as chairman, he sought to establish equal pay rates for animals used in filming and more representative speaking roles for women and African Americans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Goetz
Excerpt:
William Goetz (March 24, 1903 – August 15, 1969) was an American Hollywood film producer and studio executive.
Born to a Jewish working class family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Goetz was the youngest of eight children. His mother died when he was ten years old and shortly thereafter his father abandoned the family. Raised by older brothers, at the age of twenty-one he followed some of his brothers to Hollywood where he found work as a crew hand at one of the large studios. After a few years, he began doing production work and in 1930 was made an associate producer at Fox Films. That same year he married Edith Mayer (1905–1987), daughter of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer – who at first was less than enthusiastic at the idea. Nevertheless, the marriage worked and they remained together for life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_B._Mayer
Excerpt:
Early life
He was born Lazar Meir on July 12, 1884 to a Jewish family in Dymer, in Ukraine, about twenty-five miles north of Kiev.[1][2] His parents were Jacob Meir and Sarah Meltzer and he had two sisters—Yetta, born in 1878, and Ida, born in 1883. Mayer first moved with his family to Rhode Island, where they lived from 1887 to 1892 and where his two brothers were born—Rubin, in April 1888,[3] and Jeremiah, in April 1891.[4] Then, they moved to Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada and Mayer attended school there. He and his brothers often faced anti-Semitic bullies and Mayer was constantly involved in fights.[5] His father started a scrap metal business, J. Mayer & Son. In 1904, the 19-year-old Mayer left Saint John for Boston, where he continued for a time in the scrap metal business, married, and took a variety of odd jobs to support his family when his junk business lagged.
http://www.thewrap.com/movies/column-post/ari-emanuel-he-might-be-new-king-world-3568
Excerpt:
Ari Emanuel: He Might Be the New King of the World
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Michael Ovitz should officially hand over the keys of the kingdom to a fast-talking, trash-mouthed, steam-rolling successor to his Hollywood dominion.
It is a rare moment in time and space that allows Ariel Zev Emanuel to hold the kind of power that even Ovitz could only dream about, chronicled today on the front page of the New York Times and concurrently noted by Kim Masters at the Daily Beast.
Emanuel, 48, “has emerged in the last six weeks as the pre-eminent power player in Hollywood that has often bemoaned the sunset of powerful moguls,” said the Times.
Calling Emanuel a “don,” Masters wrote: “With the speed of what was lurking in the waters in Jaws, (Emanuel) dispatched top man Jim Wiatt to that nether region where Ovitz now resides.”
An unnamed colleague in the Times put it more bluntly: “Ari wants an empire”
Here’s what’s unique about this moment: Over 18 months of hard-selling, Emanuel has just pulled off a “merger” that had William Morris paying Endeavor millions of dollars. And in a matter of weeks he’s turned it into a takeover, firing dozens of Morris agents, while leaving Endeavor more or less intact.
He has quickly shoved Morris chairman Jim Wiatt to the sidelines, with the Times reporting that Wiatt has decided to leave the agency in the coming months and one rumor suggesting that the agency ex-chief may go work with Chase Carey at News Corp. (An individual close to Wiatt denied it.)
He already has a television avatar in Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold, who channels Emanuel’s testosterone temperament with barely a touch of hyperbole. (I nearly choked when I heard a teenager say the other day that they wanted to be just like him.)
Finally, Emanuel holds an ace in the hole that most could only dream about: His brother Rahm runs the White House.
Mike Ovitz, Lew Wasserman and Louis B. Mayer would all have to tip their hats before this kind of power play.
The media observers who know this terrain well note that Emanuel is wasting no time in -- as George Bush might say -- using his mandate. The Times chronicles a temper tantrum with NBC’s Marc Graboff over “Medium” that ended with the show landing at CBS and Emanuel threatening Graboff with “personal ruin.”
Where is Emanuel’s Achilles heel? Every power broker has one. Every mogul has his fatal flaw. Emanuel has an awful lot of them, but it’s too early to say which character trait -- which so far has catapulted him to a rare perch -- may also do him in.
With Ovitz, it was arrogance (comes with the territory) and a penchant for personal perfidy (who can forget his preempting the house purchase of his partner, Ron Meyer, by buying it first?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Zanuck
Excerpt:
In 1972, Zanuck joined up with David Brown to form an independent production company called The Zanuck/Brown Company at Universal Pictures. The pair produced two of Steven Spielberg's early films, The Sugarland Express (1974) and Jaws (1975). They went on to produce such box office hits as Cocoon (1985) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989) before dissolving their partnership in 1988. They were jointly awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1990. He has worked with Tim Burton six times, producing Planet of the Apes (2001), Big Fish (2003), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010), and Dark Shadows (2011). He and Burton connected immediately, and Zanuck remains his producer of choice.
In 2000, Zanuck and his third wife Lili Fini Zanuck co-produced the 72nd Academy Awards ceremony.[1]
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025272/usercomments
Excerpt:
The House With The Red Shield, 21 October 2005
Author: theowinthrop from United States
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD concentrates on anti-Semitism, and the struggle of the Jews to get equality and recognition from their Gentile neighbors. It's presentation of the problem is simplistic, but given the time that this film was produced it was amazing that any attempt was made to attack anti-Semitism at all. In 1934 Adolph Hitler was Chancellor of Germany one year already. Strong anti-Semitic strains were felt all over Europe and the U.S. - in fact in most of the world. It took some courage to make any jab at it, and producer Darryl Zanuck (a non-Jewish Hollywood film studio head - a rarity) had plenty of that. He would repeat this in fourteen years producing GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT.
George Arliss first plays the head of the famous banking family, Mayer Amschel Rothschild. A stereotypical Jewish money lender, he dies of a stroke after confronting the bullying, greedy tax men. Before he dies he tells his five sons two things:
1) The gentiles have prevented the Jews from competing in the regular professions leaving them in the role of money lenders. But the gentiles have thus put money into the hands of the Jews as an only weapon. So it should be used to force the gentiles to emancipate the Jews from their awful ghettos.
2) The boys should establish an international bank in London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfort, and Naples. They would be in a good position to build a mighty economic weapon to use against the Jews' foes, so that (as Mayer says) the Jews can live with dignity.
For most of the picture Arliss plays Nathan Rothschild, who is lucky enough to be set up in London. The five branch bank soon is one of the great financial institutions of the world. Nathan has managed to support the British Government and it's allies in the wars against Napoleon. But after Napoleon is sent to Elba the British and their allies (led by the German, Count Ledranz) are freezing the Rothschilds out of a major bond issue. Nathan realizes that this is due to the anti-Semitic Ledranz, and uses his position at the stock exchange to bear down on the bond issue, threatening to ruin the men who are pushing the issue. Hastily calling a meeting, Lord Baring (Arthur Byron) prevails on the aristocrats to let Rothschild in for a share of the bond issue. Ledranz does it with ill-feeling, warning Nathan that this is not the end of the matter.
Shortly afterward there are pogroms all over central Europe. As Ledranz (Boris Karloff, in a splendidly evil performance without) puts it,"The House of Rothschild - The House with the Red Shield: I'll make it RED!"
There is little Nathan can do about this. But shortly afterward Napoleon escapes from Elba, throwing the alliance (especially Ledranz) off balance. They need Nathan to stabilize the stock exchange, or the Little Corsican will win an easy victory against them. And (although they don't know this) Napoleon has already reached out to Nathan with a counter-proposition: help him and Jewish Emancipation is assured.
That Nathan throws his support to the alliance is no real surprise. He feels that if he supports Napoleon the image of the Jews suffers with the bulk of the Gentiles - they traffic in human lives and blood. But he does save the stock exchange, and he ends having proved that the Jews can be as good citizens as their Gentile counterparts.
How true is the story? Well I recommend Frederic Morton's classic book THE ROTHSCHILDS to get the accurate story. Mayer Rothschild was the financial agent of the Prince of Hesse-Cassel. The money made from the renting of Hessian troops was shepherded by Mayer into a vast fortune, and he got a commission. It staked out (and trained) his five sons, who did make their private bank the biggest in the world.
The French Revolution had announced that the Jews were equals of the Gentiles (the bill ending French legal discrimination against the Jews was presented by Maximillian Robespierre!). Napoleon reestablished it, and (in 1807) called the first meeting of the Jewish Sanhedrin since 70 A.D. Whether he did this for publicity or he meant it is still debated. The spread of the reform by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies achieved was hurt by the reaction in Europe after Napoleon's final defeat in 1815.
Ledranz is a splendid villain (and a German one, for all that). But he appears to be based on Prince Claus Von Metternich, the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire. In fact, although he probably had some social anti-Semitism, Von Metternich was quite friendly to the Rothschilds, and he figured out a way of allowing them to be ennobled in Austria and in the German states.
The film does seem a little simplistic. There is no reference to the blood libel as such, or to the blame Christianity placed on the Jews for the death of Jesus. And to make a case that economic muscle alone would change people's minds was silly and short sighted. It could equally awaken jealousy and hatred for a successful people. But that it was advanced at all in 1934, and that the film was an attempt to confront a hideous, growing problem, was deserving of praise. Ironically it was too little, too late. Goebbels would produce an anti-Semitic film called THE ROTHSCHILDS during World War II, and his pet director Veidt Hartmann would direct THE ETERNAL JEW (where Jews were compared to rats, and scenes from HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD appear to have been cut in). Hartmann would also direct JUD SUSS, regarding another Jewish financier of an earlier period, who was hung for "crimes" - of course, Hartmann insisted he Jud Suss Oppenheimer was guilty of those crimes. So, for all the good intentions of Zanuck and Arliss and the others, history had a dreadful commentary awaiting in the wings.
12 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
The House of Rothschild was the most lavish film by Daryl F. Zanuck, 25 January 2003
Author: whpratt1 from United States
In the person of Nathan Rothschild, overlord of the international banking house that shaped the destiny of Europe, George Arliss has found his most congenial role since Disraeli. The story provides a fasinating study of internatinal intrigue in the nineteenth century. It is presented straight-forwardly, without apology or sentimentality. Because of its lack of dramatic sequence, the picture lapses into passages that become monotonous. The injection of a romantic episode between Nathan's daughter and a Gentile British office, with its mixed-marriage problem during those years, is tritely handled. This film is rarely shown over the years in America and is controversal at times. On the whole, the picture has been skillfully cast, and there are good performances by George Arliss, Reginald Owen and Boris Karloff who gives an excellent performance as Baron Ledrantz.
It is a rare moment in time and space that allows Ariel Zev Emanuel to hold the kind of power that even Ovitz could only dream about, chronicled today on the front page of the New York Times and concurrently noted by Kim Masters at the Daily Beast.
Emanuel, 48, “has emerged in the last six weeks as the pre-eminent power player in Hollywood that has often bemoaned the sunset of powerful moguls,” said the Times.Calling Emanuel a “don,” Masters wrote: “With the speed of what was lurking in the waters in Jaws, (Emanuel) dispatched top man Jim Wiatt to that nether region where Ovitz now resides.”
An unnamed colleague in the Times put it more bluntly: “Ari wants an empire”
Here’s what’s unique about this moment: Over 18 months of hard-selling, Emanuel has just pulled off a “merger” that had William Morris paying Endeavor millions of dollars. And in a matter of weeks he’s turned it into a takeover, firing dozens of Morris agents, while leaving Endeavor more or less intact.
He has quickly shoved Morris chairman Jim Wiatt to the sidelines, with the Times reporting that Wiatt has decided to leave the agency in the coming months and one rumor suggesting that the agency ex-chief may go work with Chase Carey at News Corp. (An individual close to Wiatt denied it.)
The stage has been set for some time. Emanuel cannily figured out how to create positive spin in the blogosphere as he plotted -- with a hotline to agency-central’s Deadline Hollywood Daily that guaranteed Nikki Finke’s scoops, while ensuring Emanuel positive coverage throughout the merger-takeover process.
He already has a television avatar in Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold, who channels Emanuel’s testosterone temperament with barely a touch of hyperbole. (I nearly choked when I heard a teenager say the other day that they wanted to be just like him.)
Finally, Emanuel holds an ace in the hole that most could only dream about: His brother Rahm runs the White House.
Mike Ovitz, Lew Wasserman and Louis B. Mayer would all have to tip their hats before this kind of power play.
The media observers who know this terrain well note that Emanuel is wasting no time in -- as George Bush might say -- using his mandate. The Times chronicles a temper tantrum with NBC’s Marc Graboff over “Medium” that ended with the show landing at CBS and Emanuel threatening Graboff with “personal ruin.”
Where is Emanuel’s Achilles heel? Every power broker has one. Every mogul has his fatal flaw. Emanuel has an awful lot of them, but it’s too early to say which character trait -- which so far has catapulted him to a rare perch -- may also do him in.
With Ovitz, it was arrogance (comes with the territory) and a penchant for personal perfidy (who can forget his preempting the house purchase of his partner, Ron Meyer, by buying it first?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Zanuck
Excerpt:
Life and career
Born in Los Angeles, California, to actress Virginia Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck, the famed head of 20th Century Fox. While studying at Stanford University, Richard began his career in the film industry working for the 20th Century Fox story department. In 1959, Zanuck got his first shot at producing with the film Compulsion. In the 1960s Zanuck became the president of 20th Century Fox; one year of his tenure, 1967, is chronicled in the John Gregory Dunne book The Studio. Richard was later fired by his father and joined Warner Bros. as Executive Vice President and one year later formed The Zanuck/Brown Company. In 1968 he married model and actress Linda Harrison; they later divorced in 1978.In 1972, Zanuck joined up with David Brown to form an independent production company called The Zanuck/Brown Company at Universal Pictures. The pair produced two of Steven Spielberg's early films, The Sugarland Express (1974) and Jaws (1975). They went on to produce such box office hits as Cocoon (1985) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989) before dissolving their partnership in 1988. They were jointly awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1990. He has worked with Tim Burton six times, producing Planet of the Apes (2001), Big Fish (2003), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010), and Dark Shadows (2011). He and Burton connected immediately, and Zanuck remains his producer of choice.
In 2000, Zanuck and his third wife Lili Fini Zanuck co-produced the 72nd Academy Awards ceremony.[1]
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025272/usercomments
Excerpt:
The House With The Red Shield, 21 October 2005
Author: theowinthrop from United States
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD concentrates on anti-Semitism, and the struggle of the Jews to get equality and recognition from their Gentile neighbors. It's presentation of the problem is simplistic, but given the time that this film was produced it was amazing that any attempt was made to attack anti-Semitism at all. In 1934 Adolph Hitler was Chancellor of Germany one year already. Strong anti-Semitic strains were felt all over Europe and the U.S. - in fact in most of the world. It took some courage to make any jab at it, and producer Darryl Zanuck (a non-Jewish Hollywood film studio head - a rarity) had plenty of that. He would repeat this in fourteen years producing GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT.
George Arliss first plays the head of the famous banking family, Mayer Amschel Rothschild. A stereotypical Jewish money lender, he dies of a stroke after confronting the bullying, greedy tax men. Before he dies he tells his five sons two things:
1) The gentiles have prevented the Jews from competing in the regular professions leaving them in the role of money lenders. But the gentiles have thus put money into the hands of the Jews as an only weapon. So it should be used to force the gentiles to emancipate the Jews from their awful ghettos.
2) The boys should establish an international bank in London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfort, and Naples. They would be in a good position to build a mighty economic weapon to use against the Jews' foes, so that (as Mayer says) the Jews can live with dignity.
For most of the picture Arliss plays Nathan Rothschild, who is lucky enough to be set up in London. The five branch bank soon is one of the great financial institutions of the world. Nathan has managed to support the British Government and it's allies in the wars against Napoleon. But after Napoleon is sent to Elba the British and their allies (led by the German, Count Ledranz) are freezing the Rothschilds out of a major bond issue. Nathan realizes that this is due to the anti-Semitic Ledranz, and uses his position at the stock exchange to bear down on the bond issue, threatening to ruin the men who are pushing the issue. Hastily calling a meeting, Lord Baring (Arthur Byron) prevails on the aristocrats to let Rothschild in for a share of the bond issue. Ledranz does it with ill-feeling, warning Nathan that this is not the end of the matter.
Shortly afterward there are pogroms all over central Europe. As Ledranz (Boris Karloff, in a splendidly evil performance without) puts it,"The House of Rothschild - The House with the Red Shield: I'll make it RED!"
There is little Nathan can do about this. But shortly afterward Napoleon escapes from Elba, throwing the alliance (especially Ledranz) off balance. They need Nathan to stabilize the stock exchange, or the Little Corsican will win an easy victory against them. And (although they don't know this) Napoleon has already reached out to Nathan with a counter-proposition: help him and Jewish Emancipation is assured.
That Nathan throws his support to the alliance is no real surprise. He feels that if he supports Napoleon the image of the Jews suffers with the bulk of the Gentiles - they traffic in human lives and blood. But he does save the stock exchange, and he ends having proved that the Jews can be as good citizens as their Gentile counterparts.
How true is the story? Well I recommend Frederic Morton's classic book THE ROTHSCHILDS to get the accurate story. Mayer Rothschild was the financial agent of the Prince of Hesse-Cassel. The money made from the renting of Hessian troops was shepherded by Mayer into a vast fortune, and he got a commission. It staked out (and trained) his five sons, who did make their private bank the biggest in the world.
The French Revolution had announced that the Jews were equals of the Gentiles (the bill ending French legal discrimination against the Jews was presented by Maximillian Robespierre!). Napoleon reestablished it, and (in 1807) called the first meeting of the Jewish Sanhedrin since 70 A.D. Whether he did this for publicity or he meant it is still debated. The spread of the reform by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies achieved was hurt by the reaction in Europe after Napoleon's final defeat in 1815.
Ledranz is a splendid villain (and a German one, for all that). But he appears to be based on Prince Claus Von Metternich, the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire. In fact, although he probably had some social anti-Semitism, Von Metternich was quite friendly to the Rothschilds, and he figured out a way of allowing them to be ennobled in Austria and in the German states.
The film does seem a little simplistic. There is no reference to the blood libel as such, or to the blame Christianity placed on the Jews for the death of Jesus. And to make a case that economic muscle alone would change people's minds was silly and short sighted. It could equally awaken jealousy and hatred for a successful people. But that it was advanced at all in 1934, and that the film was an attempt to confront a hideous, growing problem, was deserving of praise. Ironically it was too little, too late. Goebbels would produce an anti-Semitic film called THE ROTHSCHILDS during World War II, and his pet director Veidt Hartmann would direct THE ETERNAL JEW (where Jews were compared to rats, and scenes from HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD appear to have been cut in). Hartmann would also direct JUD SUSS, regarding another Jewish financier of an earlier period, who was hung for "crimes" - of course, Hartmann insisted he Jud Suss Oppenheimer was guilty of those crimes. So, for all the good intentions of Zanuck and Arliss and the others, history had a dreadful commentary awaiting in the wings.
12 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
The House of Rothschild was the most lavish film by Daryl F. Zanuck, 25 January 2003
Author: whpratt1 from United States
In the person of Nathan Rothschild, overlord of the international banking house that shaped the destiny of Europe, George Arliss has found his most congenial role since Disraeli. The story provides a fasinating study of internatinal intrigue in the nineteenth century. It is presented straight-forwardly, without apology or sentimentality. Because of its lack of dramatic sequence, the picture lapses into passages that become monotonous. The injection of a romantic episode between Nathan's daughter and a Gentile British office, with its mixed-marriage problem during those years, is tritely handled. This film is rarely shown over the years in America and is controversal at times. On the whole, the picture has been skillfully cast, and there are good performances by George Arliss, Reginald Owen and Boris Karloff who gives an excellent performance as Baron Ledrantz.
