-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.homevideo.net/FIRM/control.htm <A HREF="http://www.homevideo.net/FIRM/control.htm">FIRM - Excerpted from John Cones' book: Who Rea </A> ----- As always, Caveat Lector Om K --[1]-- Excerpt from Who Really Controls Hollywood by John W. Cones ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Individual Attributes of the Hollywood Insiders Men vs Women Women have long been recognized as one of the disenfranchised minorities in Hollywood. For example, in his book An Empire of Their Own, author Neal Gabler noted the scarcity of women in the studio's higher echelons during the industry's early years. David McClintick, writing about the Hollywood of the 1970s confirms it was dominated by men in that period, also. He said, " . . . Hollywood . . . was much like the Hollywood of old. It remained a highly oligarchical institution run by a handful of entrepreneurial businessmen . . . ." In fact, it took the industry nearly 75 years to permit the first woman president of production at a major studio. "Sherry Lansing (became) . . . the first woman president of production at Twentieth Century-Fox . . . or anywhere . . . (in) 1980." Then "Sherry Lansing (became), the first woman to run a studio (and), lasted just three years as president of Twentieth Century Fox." Subsequently, the " . . . first half of 1989 was the season of Dawn Steel. Suddenly the first woman executive star since Sherry Lansing . . . (Dawn Steel was the) first female president of a studio (October 1987--Columbia)." She had previously served as the head of production at Paramount. She was " . . . only the third woman to have a chance at (being head of production at a major studio). She was " . . . preceded by Sherry Lansing at Fox and Paula Weinstein at United Artists." Then Dawn Steel became the " . . . first woman to head an entire motion picture corporation . . . (she became) president of Columbia Pictures, October 28, 1987 . . . " Although Dawn Steel and Sherry Lansing represent the highest level of achievement in the executive suites of the major studio/distributors, and two high level women executives in the nearly 100 year existence of the industry is not a good record at all, women have not fared much better in other segments of the film industry. Daily Variety reported in 1991 that " . . . only 11 of . . . 207 feature-film directing jobs (surveyed) went to females." In addition, Howard Rodman reported in 1989, that of " . . . the 170 members of the American Society of Cinematographers, exactly one is a women." One or two brief success stories for women studio executives, are not sufficient to indicate a trend, even a trend that comes much too late. The highest level female who has truly been substantially involved in producing and directing a feature film to appear on the 1992 Entertainment Weekly annual list of the 101 most powerful people in entertainment was Barbara Streisand. But, she was only 48th on the list and actually comes from a singer/actress background. The two women who precede her on the list (Madonna at #10) is primarily a singer/dancer and Oprah Winfrey (at #11) has been a television talk show hostess). The Christopher Reynold's four-year combined report on the Premiere Magazine annual entertainment industry power lists reveal that the highest ranking female studio executive was Sherry Lansing, who ranked 11th in '93, 83rd in '92, 73rd in '91 and 42nd in '90. No other female studio executive even appears on the list which covers four years and includes 153 names in all. Only 16 women are on this combined list and twelve of those are creative people (directors or performers). The other four include one agent, two independent producers and the madam of a Hollywood prostitution ring, which says quite a bit about the value placed on women in an industry dominated by men. Thus, it appears clear that women have not fared well amongst the Hollywood "good ole' boys" when it comes to competing at the highest levels among the studio executives and in the top talent agencies, not because they cannot compete, but because they are simply not allowed to compete. Keep in mind that the top-level studio positions are where the power lies with respect to which movies get made, who gets to work on those movies and the content of those movies. On the agency side, in late 1992, a half-dozen well paid female agents departed en masse from the well-known talent agency CAA. Premiere's Corrie Brown wrote that in " . . . a town rife with appalling sexism, where women are judged the way the USDA grades lamb chops, the departure [of these women] . . . may seem relatively insignificant. But CAA stands as one of Hollywood's most influential institutions. This gender gap won't be solved overnight . . . " Brown wrote " . . . then again, neither will the just-us-guys attitude that keeps women on the periphery of power." To further illustrate one of the subtle ways in which women and others are excluded from the inner circle of Hollywood, early in 1992, " . . . CAA encouraged its young male agents to join Peter Guber and his fellow power brokers on one of Guber's 'fishing' (read 'networking') trips to Cabo San Lucas. No women were invited." In other words, women executives in the film industry were arbitrarily excluded from an important industry networking opportunity. A similar "all-boys" excursion for studio and industry players, this time a rafting adventure down the Colorado River, was held in September of 1993. Meanwhile for the record, CAA's Michael Ovitz stated that the " . . . problem of not enough women in leadership positions in the entertainment industry is an indust ry-wide problem that has existed for too many years . . . " Former studio executive Dawn Steel also ran up against the all-male recreational outing. She reports that " . . . Jeffrey (Katzenberg) organized a raft trip every year. It was all men; actors, writers and agents and directors--and these were always the most interesting men. One year Tom Cruise went. I was desperate. Forget the fact that enormous amounts of business got done on that trip, these guys had a ball! I kept saying, 'I want to go,' and Jeffrey would say, ' No girls. Noooo girls.' They never did let me go." Variety's Peter Bart reported in his September 1992 article "Rules of the Club" on a seminar which " . . . brought together high-achievers among women in showbiz . . . [for a discussion] on how to deal with the 'boys' club in Hollywood." He reported in a true understated fashion that an " . . . overall impatience [exists] among women with their status in the entertainment community." (Also see the discussion relating to "Unequal Employment Opportunities" in this book's companion volume Legacy of the Hollywood Empire.) There are several sides to the opportunities for women question in Hollywood. The opportunities for women in the upper echelons of the major studios is just one, and clearly with respect to that one gauge of the progress of women, Hollywood has not performed well. (For a discussion of how women have fared in Hollywood on the creative side, again, see "Unequal Employment Opportunities" in Legacy of the Hollywood Empire.) Even so, if we recognize, as discussed earlier, that most of the power in Hollywood to effect the kinds of movies that are made, who works on those movies and the content of those movies, rests in the hands of the top studio executives, and in some instances with a few of the more powerful talent agencies, and very few of the top studio executives and top agents are women, then it must be safe to conclude that women are generally outsiders to the Hollywood insiders' group. Otherwise, such discrepancies would not exist. It is also then clear that the Hollywood insider's group is predominantly made up of men. Political Leanings Both David Prindle and Ronald Brownstein confirm that the vast majority of people involved in Hollywood filmmaking at all levels are politically liberal. Brownstein writes in his book The Power and the Glitter --The Hollywood-Washington Connection, that in " . . . Hollywood, liberal politics began with the word. The coming of sound to motion pictures brought to California actors and especially screenwriters trained in the theater and immersed in the radical traditions of New York leftist politics . . . " Brownstein also points out that in Hollywood, there is a " . . . lack of stars willing to publicly embrace conservative causes . . . " a situation that not only reflects caution " . . . but also the community's political imbalance." The most visible Hollywood spokesman for conservative causes, Charlton Heston, admits that the " . . . Hollywood Community is probably as liberal as any community outside the university faculty . . . " This general tendency toward political liberalism does not mean that there is no political support for conservative candidates among the studios or their executives. On the other hand, that support appears to be more politically expedient than an expression of personal political orientation. As Milton Sperling recalled, "[e]ven the Warner brothers hedged their bets . . . " Sperling states: " . . . I think Jack went the other way [and supported the GOP] in 1940 . . . It was a family decision: they wanted to have one foot in each camp." Nat Perrin also reports that " . . . [e]ven at Louis Mayer's MGM, the most conservative of studios, '[t]he writers were naturally more liberal . . . " Brownstein further reports that back in more contemporary times (in the 1980s) no " . . . group on the right sought to recruit the young stars; in fact, with the exception of Heston and the handful of other conservatives defending Reagan, the right was virtually invisible in Hollywood as the Brat Pack awakened to politics . . . almost all of the activist role models in the community were liberals--not only Fonda, but figures such as Mike Farrell, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, and Ed Asner. The liberal attitudes of the young stars reflected, above all, the extent to which liberalism dominated the Hollywood artistic community." As David Prindle reported in his 1993 book Risky Business-The Political Economy of Hollywood, "Hollywood's liberal political slant influences the sorts of stories its citizens want to tell and colors the way they interpret objections to those stories." Prindle goes on to say that " . . . it is not Hollywood's willingness to embrace national problems in movies and on television that is disturbing. It is the relentless one-dimensional viewpoint that dominates the films and television that come out of the industry." Thus, the available evidence supports the conclusion that the small group of men at the top in Hollywood, and others associated with them, are politically liberal (also see the discussion under the heading "Liberal Political Slant" in another of this series of books on Hollywood, entitled Patterns of Bias in Motion Picture Content). Racial, Ethnic, Cultural and Religious Considerations Secular vs Religious Community Most of the sources of information on Hollywood listed in the bibliography for this book do not even discuss whether the community's studio executives and others are very active in church's or synagogues. According to Medved, however, the men who run Hollywood, do not appear to be very religious. Since Medved also holds himself out as a very religious person of Jewish faith, it is quite likely that he would be aware of the religious tendencies of much of the close-knit Hollywood community. In addition, however, Medved points out that the " . . . best available study of the industry establishment (for 'Public Opinion', 1983) shows that 93 percent of (the entertainment community) . . . attend no religious services of any kind . . . " Further, the patterns of bias exhibited in Hollywood motion pictures also support the thesis that Hollywood filmmakers, as a general rule, are not actively involved in organized religion (see this book's companion volume Patterns of Bias in Motion Picture Content. Thus, without conflicting evidence to the contrary, it is safe to conclude that as a general rule, the men who control Hollywood are not very religious. Dominance of White Males As recently as the summer of 1992, Los Angeles litigating attorney Pierce O'Donnell raised the question of the racial characteristics of the men who control Hollywood when he described the contemporary management of the U.S. film industry, in his Beverly Hills Bar Journal article "Killing the Golden Goose: Hollywood's Death Wish" (without consideration of religious or cultural affinities) by stating that "[a]n elite clique of two dozen white males manage the major studios and control virtually all of the movies distributed in the United States." Prindle reports similar observations relating to the racial characteristics of those who control the U.S. film industry saying " . . . Hollywood is largely peopled by young white males. Surveys conducted by various organizations in the late 1980s documented that the industry's work force barely begins to reflect the ethnic and gender composition of American society." Lawyer and former Universal Pictures business affairs executive Rudy Petersdorf echoed these observations in Fatal Subtraction saying: "[s]tudios are like a secret club. Their whole raison d'etre is to perpetuate the privileged, luxurious lifestyle of a select few white males . . . They don't care about the stockholders . . . They don't care about the talent. And they don't care about the quality of the movies. They want to perpetuate their power and huge incomes. So when a studio head falls from grace, he never falls far from the trough. He gets an independent production deal or gets hired by another studio. He is still a member of The Club." O'Donnell and McDougal later reiterated in the same article cited above that "[f]or the most part, ultimate power in Hollywood rests with an exclusive group--The Club-of two dozen white males, too many of whom have little or no taste, are not intellectually curious or well read, do not see many movies, and seldom watch plays. Almost none have been filmmakers, writers or directors; instead, Club members are self-selected from the ranks of law firms, talent agencies, television networks, and other studios." Without raising the more specific issues of religious or cultural heritage, and notwithstanding the arbitrariness and irrelevance of placing a precise number on the size of Hollywood's inner circle, O'Donnell is clearly critical of the way the U.S. film industry is run and places the primary blame directly on that a small group of "white males". O'Donnell and McDougal further observe in their 1992 book Fatal Atraction that " . . . a fired studio boss usually lands on his feet--either at another studio, his own production company or a talent agency. It is one big happy Club . . . " they say, again making reference to the fact that membership in that club is " . . . reserved almost exclusively for white males." The O'Donnell/McDougal writing team go on to say that "[b]y their bad taste, lack of creativity, biases, and anti-competitive business practices, many studio executives have abused the public trust . . . " In another variation on the same statement by McDougal and O'Donnell, the pair report that a " . . . handful of greedy men with often questionable talent ran the movie business like aprivate emirate . . . They were members of a loosely knit club who moved in and out of studio hierarchies, made mega-bomb movies and still bounced back, never seeming to lose a paycheck in the process. They held all the power, scratched each other's backs and operated the industry at the expense of others, hiding their lucrative dealings behind a cloak of accounting and contractual secrecy that rarely saw the antiseptic light of a public trial." The reference to "others" in the phrase "at the expense of others", refers to the corporate shareholders of the major studios, all net profit participants including actors, actresses, writers, producers, directors and outside investors, and even gross profit participants considering the prospects for thievery inherent in the aforementioned settlement transaction (see the related discussion in How the Movie Wars Were Won). O'Donnell and McDougal continued by saying that this " . . . Hollywood executives club surfaced as a group from time to time: during Hollywood charity dinners, labor negotiations with the guilds, Beverly Hills bar mitzvahs, (which is as close as the McDougal/O'Donnell team come to suggesting a religious/cultural heritage for the group) Motion Picture Association of America meetings and celebrity funerals. Most of the time, however, the studio cabal remained an informal network with one overriding credo: Don't rock the boat. All of that was popular knowledge in the film business, but no writer or producer or actor or director had been able to break the system's grip for almost a century because everyone who made movies was genuinely afraid of the old Hollywood a dage: if you buck the system, you'll never work in this town again." In addition, director Spike Lee actually had to "shame" Oscar-winning director Norman Jewison " . . . into backing out . . . " as the director for Malcolm X " . . . on the grounds that this crucial biography should be directed by an African-American . . . " The film subsequently " . . . went $5 million over budget . . . (and the) [c]ompletion bond company took control of the production . . . " Lee said that's when he learned " . . . how little power African Americans have in Hollywood." Lee then solicited "[c]ontributions from black celebrities (which) helped (him) . . . carry on until the studio reluctantly let him finish the film his way." Thus, it appears that McDougal, O'Donnell, Petersdorf, Prindle and Lee are all correct in asserting that Hollywood is dominated by a small group of white males. And it also appears to be true (as reported by Prindle, Brownstein, Heston and Medved) that the individuals who make up this group of white males are politically liberal. In addition, as Medved observes, the members of the Hollywood insiders' club are not very religious. Unfortunately, that is not the whole story with respect to the specific characteristics of the Hollywood insiders' club, and to limit the analysis of such characteristics to gender, race, political orientation and level of interest or involvement with religion is to engage in what is referred to in the securities field as a material omi ssion. In other words, anyone who limits their analysis to only these factors have either negligently or maliciously engaged in a twisting of the truth, by leaving out important information, that is relevant to a true understanding of who controls Hollywood and why. Hollywood's Religious/Cultural Heritage--Throughout the entire nearly 100 year history of the American film industry, there has been an ongoing economic, philosophical, cultural and religious battle raging over the film industry. As Neal Gabler reports: "In 1908 the (Edison) Trust (the original equipment manufacturers and producers) had a virtual monopoly on the movies. By 1912 the Independents had gobbled half the market and were closing in on a monopoly of their own . . . (members of Edison's Trust) . . . misinterpreted what was at stake. They never seemed to understand that they were engaged in much more than an economic battle to determine who would control the profits of the . . . film industry; their battle was also generational, cultural, philosophical, even, in some ways, religious. The Trust's members were primarily older white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had entered the film industry in its infancy by inventing, bankrolling, or tinkering with movie hardware: cameras and projectors . . . The Independents (of that time) . . . were largely ethnics, Jews and Catholics who had entered the industry by opening and operating theaters." Paul Johnson also writes in his 1987 book, A History of the Jews: "At first the Jews were not involved on the inventive and creative side. They owned the nickelodeons, the arcades, the theatres. Most of the processes and early shorts were made by American-born Protestants. An exception was Sigmun Lublin, operating from . . . Philadelphia . . . when the theatre-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 north-east, to the promised land of California. Los Angeles had sun, easy laws, and a quick escape into Mexico from the Patent Company lawyers . . . There were more than one hundred small production firms in 1912. They were quickly amalgamated into eight big ones. Of these, Universal, Twentieth-Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer and Columbia were essentially Jewish creations, and Jews played a major role in the other two, United Artists and RKO Radio Pictures." Clayton Koppes and Gregory Black express a similar view in their book Hollywood Goes to War: "Most of the early film makers were American Protestants, and their production facilities were located in the East and Midwest. From the early 1910s to early 1920s a geographic, economic, and ethnic shift was underway . . . Within a few years the industry expanded and reorganized, and the 'Big Eight' companies came to dominate the industry, these dominant corporations created a vertically- integrated industry--in this case, they controlled the entire process from casting and production through distribution (wholesaling) and exhibition (retailing). The Big Eight reaped 95 percent of all motion picture rentals in the U.S. in the late 1930s. Their control over theater chains, particularly the all-important first-run urban houses which determined a picture's future , was critical. Although the Big Eight owned only 2,800 of the 17,000 theaters in the country, that figure included 80 percent of the metropolitan first-run houses, and all exhibition in cities of more than 1,000,000 population . . . Independent exhibitors had to book the majors' pictures on a virtual take-it-or-leave-it basis, and independent producers could be frozen out if they did not cooperate with the majors . . . The men who guided the industry in its transition to big business were mostly Jewish theater owners . . . " Koppes and Black also support the thesis that the kind of movies produced and released by these film organizations dominated by Jewish males of European heritage were different than what might have been expected from their Protestant predecessors. Once established in Hollywood, these authors say, the movie moguls created and legitimated " . . . a blend of conspicuous consumption, new morals, and personal gratification that helped undermine the Eastern-dominated, WASP Victorian culture." Jill Robin goes so far as to say that Hollywood--the American Dream--is a Jewish idea. In a sense, (she observes) it's a Jewish revenge on America." As Gabler points out, " . . . one of the reasons Jews . . . were able to gain a foothold (in the movie business was because) Big money (in America at the time), gentile money, viewed the movies suspiciously--economically, as a fad; morally, as potential emb arrassments . . . (as early as) February 1906 . . . reformers had already begun castigating the movies for their deleterious effects, particularly on children. The contents of the movies supposedly undermined moral values (though the real complaint may have been that the movies existed outside the sphere of middle- and upper-class control) . . . " Gabler also reports that the " . . . original Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America . . . was founded and for more than thirty years operated by Eastern European Jews . . . The much-vaunted 'studio system,' which provided a prodigious supply of films during the movies' heyday, was supervised by a second generation of Jews . . . the storefront theaters of the late teens were transformed into the movie palaces of the twenties by Jewish exhibitors . . . The most powerful talent agencies were run by Jews. Jewish lawyers transacted most of the industry's business . . . Above all, Jews produced the movies." Carl Laemmle " . . . who had failed to scale even the lower reaches of American industry . . . presided over a considerable domain (of theatres in the early 1900s)--one built on outsiders and on the culturally disenfranchised like himself. And these would be his troops in the war that followed when the Jews would take over the movie industry for good." In the early teens a struggle for power at Universal developed between Laemmle and a " . . . producer named Pat Powers . . . when one faction came to examine the corporate ledgers, the other faction had them tossed out the window to an accomplice below. At one point Laemmle even dispatched a group of thugs to seize the studio of a member of the rival faction. The ensuing battle was so brutal that the police had to be summoned to stop it. But when the dust settled in 1915, Laemmle was firmly in control of Universal . . . From this point, (according to Gabler) the Jews would control the movies." Joel Kotkin, author of the 1993 book Tribes--How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy, also provides an analysis of the early U.S. film industry which is similar to Gabler's. "By the 1930s . . . " Kotkin reports, " . . . Jewish domination of the movie business was palpable. They controlled six of the eight largest studios and according to a 1936 study, accounted for almost two thirds of all the major producers. Jews also accounted for a large portion of the agents, and, often working under Anglicized names, many of the actors as well." Has Control Shifted? Gabler also seems to suggest, however, that in the '50s a shift in who controls Hollywood occurred. He points out, for example, that in " . . . 1927, when Paramount was riding high and (the Jewish film mogul Adolph Zukor) . . . was in control, twelve of the nineteen directors on the company's board were Jewish. In 1953 two of ten were, and virtually none of the board members were movie men. The financiers and industrialists--the genteel to which the movie Jews had always aspired--had moved in." Gabler seems to suggest that a shift in who controls Hollywood occurred, at least for this one major studio/distributor, in the '50s. Kotkin also seems to suggest that there has been some kind of a change with respect to the issue of "control" in the contemporary U.S. motion picture industry but he fails to quantify that change and only states that "[t]oday . . . Jewish direct control of the studios [is] greatly reduced . . . " On the other hand, Patricia Erens, states that during the period of the Motion Picture Project (1947-1967) " . . . most production heads were Jewish . . . " In addition, Lester Friedman, writing about the U.S. film industry in the '70s, did not agree that a significant shift in control of the movies had occurred at that time. He asserted that, "Jews had ruled the movie industry during the heyday of the vast studio empires . . . " and then goes on to point out that " . . . they maintained their positions of authority throughout the seventies." Friedman continued by reporting that "[o]ne of the most significant trends in movie-making during the seventies was that the impetus to make pictures came from a variety of sources, not just from the large companies that now owned the studios. Agents, for example, became powerful figures in Hollywood . . . Six of the decade's top production chiefs were ex-agents: David Begelman (Columbia), Mike Medavoy (Orion), Alan Ladd, Jr. (Fox), Ned Tanen (Universal), Martin Elfand (Warners), and Richard Shepard (MGM). Another three--Daniel Melnick (Columbia), Mike Eisner (Paramount), Barry Diller (Paramount)--came from television production. Of these nine executives . . . " Friedman reports, " . . . six were Jewish (Tanen, Begelman, Elfan d, Melnick, Eisner, Diller), continuing the tradition of highly placed Jews within the industry." Also looking at the Hollywood of the '70s, we can report that Alan Ladd, Jr., who was the son of Alan Ladd, the actor, and had been a talent agent and independent producer before joining " . . . 20th Century-Fox in 1973 . . . was put in charge of the studio's feature production the following year." That was such a significant event in Hollywood that it prompted Peter Bart to reveal that Alan Ladd, Jr " . . . was one of the few non-Jews ever to become a head of production." Interestingly enough, Stephen Farber and Marc Green write that the " . . . strongest influence on Laddie's (Alan Ladd, Jr.'s) career was probably neither of his natural parents, but rather his stepmother, Alan Ladd's second wife, a former starlet and agent named Sue Carol." Sue Carol's real name was Evelyn Lederer. And, Evelyn Lederer was the daughter of a Jewish merchant. Thus, even for some of the non-Jewish studio executives, it appears that their connections or relationships with Hollywood Jews help make it possible for them to rise up through the ranks. Also, it is revealing to note that Ladd's appointment occurred in 1973, some 60 years after the original small group of Jewish males of European heritage came to dominate Hollywood. David McClintick, also writing about Hollywood of the '70s reports that in a conversation with Alan Hirschfield regarding the possibility of finding someone to buy out or dilute Board Chairman Herbert Alan's controlling interest in Columbia during the Begelman affair (1977), Alan Adler (a Columbia staff attorney) said: "It would have to be somebody big--somebody willing and able to spend two hundred fifty million or three hundred million, which is what this company is worth on the open market. It would have to be somebody outside the business; the Justice Department won't let anybody in the business buy us. It would have to be somebody willing to be in business with a bunch of Jews; that eliminates a lot of Waspy companies. It would take somebody with the nerve and sophistication and stomach to fight the Allens. A big pocketbook and a strong stomach, that's what it would take. There aren't that many candidates around." Thus, even though Columbia staff attorney Alan Adler tended to over-generalize a bit about who controls Hollywood (assuming he is accurately quoted by McClintick), at the very least, he seems to be providing additional support for the contention, (or, at minimum, he was not stating anything inconsistent with the premise) that the U.S. film industry was still controlled in the 1970s by a small group of Jewish males of European heritage. On the other hand, Adler did not go on to make the important distinction between the so-called Hollywood Jews and the many other Jews in the U.S. and around the world, most of whom are not affiliated with the U.S. film industry in any way. Moving into the '80s, David McClintick wrote in 1983 that " . . . the men who vie for power in Hollywood today are the direct cultural and psychological descendants of the men who founded and ran Hollywood from the early 1900s until the fifties, men whom Irving Howe has called 'the dozen or so Yiddish-speaking (individuals) . . . who built enormous movie studios [and] satisfied the world's hunger for fantasy, [men who were] bored with sitting in classrooms, too lively for routine jobs, and clever in the ways of the world." As recent as 1984, Patricia Erens reported that "[a]s in the old Hollywood, today's producers and writers are predominantly of Jewish backgrounds whether or not they are practicing Jews." Thus, what seemed to Gabler to be a shift in control, was in reality, merely a method for those who control Hollywood to obtain additional financing from outside sources. In other words, the corporate structure, allows strong management to bring in additional corporate funding from shareholders, who do not actually control the operation of the corporation, unless they have both a majority of the votes on the board of directors of the corporation and the desire to assert their will over that of present management. When Gabler talks about the fact that the non-Jewish board members, were not "movie men", that also means those board members are not likely to be taking a very active role in running the company. Management is thus left to the so- called traditional H ollywood management, who still, by and large were Jewish males of European heritage (see discussion in How the Movie Wars Were Won relating to "The Ever Present Threat of the Studio Executive Mass Exodus".) Thus, Gabler's perceived shift in control has turned out to be illusory. Control of Hollywood Today In a more contemporary setting, as the '90s were underway, University of Texas at Austin professor David Prindle conducted a study and wrote a paper on Hollywood Liberalism (1991). Although ancillary to his main theme, the Prindle paper confirmed that " . . . a large proportion of the people [in the film industry are] of Jewish background." Also, writing about a more contemporary Hollywood (in 1992), Paul Rosenfield gets rather specific in describing the type of people who are members of the contemporary Hollywood insiders club that controls Hollywood. He states that " . . . club members are more alike than they are unalike: Most of them are white males, forty or older, Jewish for the most part, heterosexual for the most part, usually fathers, of shorter-than-average height--and they tend to go to bed early. (Usually in Pacific Palisades, north of Sunset, or in the Beverly Hills blocks of Maple or Elm, south of Sunset.)" Later in the same book, Rosenfield states that the Hollywood insiders ' club is really " . . . a small Jewish community . . . " Joel Kotkin, also writing in 1992, said that "[w]hile movies are no longer, strictly speaking, a 'Jewish' industry, the role of Jews within Hollywood and the related entertainment field remains pervasive. Although virtually all the studios have been bought out by public corporations, foreign investors and individual financiers, most of them non-Jewish, complaints about strong Jewish influence in the industry still crop up, from as diverse sources as Italian film mogul Giancarlo Parretti to black film director Spike Lee and elements of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Although not in control of the media and the arts, as some anti-Semites suggest, Jews clearly possess a disproportionate influence in movies . . . " Kotkin then goes on to point out that "[b]y 1990 the Jewish population in Los Angeles . . . had expanded . . . to some 600,000 . . . " and in " . . . this environment, Jewish performers, producers and other artists are part of a larger community, whose professional base extends well beyond Hollywood." --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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