Neal Gabler: Last News

Disney was desperate to find a way to make “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,”the first feature-length animated movie ever made, actually feel like a feature-length movie. He’d been doing his best to ignore the naysayers who christened the very idea of the film as “Disney’s folly.” But they did trigger a nagging concern for the 35-year-old studio chief: Audiences might reject an animated movie if it remained stuck in the realm of the flat, two-dimensional shorts that had propelled Mickey Mouse to worldwide celebrity.

It was an imposing opening, and Hollywood loves openings that are grand in concept, star-studded and famously over budget. The new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures finally is complete, and key industry players have paid homage and faithfully scrutinized its exhibits.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesSeveral years ago, a non-Jewish film producer turned to me and announced, casually and with an air of arrogance and ignorance reserved particularly for bigots, “Jews control Hollywood.”He assured me this was a compliment, as many antisemites are wont, trotting out Neal Gabler’s seminal text on the subject, “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” as evidence. But it was clear that said producer had either never read Gabler’s book, or missed one of its key points entirely: the founding producers of the film biz were Jewish, most of them Eastern European immigrants, excluded and ostracized from virtually every other industry in America.William Fox, Carle Laemmle, Louis B.