(Jewish Group) How Jewish exiles from Vienna remade Hollywood in their image
When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened earlier this year, it faced criticism for neglecting the foundational role American Jewish immigrants played in the movie industry.
Its recent symposium and screening series, “Vienna in Hollywood,” planned long in advance of the opening, helped set the record straight. It highlighted the contributions of the European Jewish screenwriters, directors, technicians and actors who fled the Nazis, arriving to remake Hollywood with their own images.
“In the early 20th century, the nascent film industry in Hollywood was largely built by Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe,” the symposium and series website stated, “including many Austrians from regions of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.”
This well-known truth may seem self-evident and in no way earth-shattering. But it was a belated appreciation of the enormous impact that Jewish emigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, such as Billy Wilder, Vicki Baum, and Erich Korngold, had on Hollywood.
What Viennese and Austro-Hungarian Jews brought to Hollywood was an exiles’ and survivor’s adaptability, a world-weary cynicism borne of experience, an appreciation for breaking rules and beating the odds, and an optimism in the face of danger, death, and rejection. Examples abound in the range of Billy Wilder who shifted easily between murderous drama (“Double Indemnity,” “Sunset Boulevard”) and taboo-breaking comedies (“The Major and the Minor,” “The Apartment”) and Fred Zinnemann, who made morality plays out of Westerns such as “High Noon” as well as entertainments such as the musical “Oklahoma!”
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