The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust Review

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The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust ReviewIt sounds like a good premise if a bit of a tall order, examine Disney's animated features for the role that their themes have played in the moral and spiritual development of generations of children. The idea being that these themes originated in the minds of Walt Disney and his successors, who were not entirely motivated by a bottom line, but had certain political and social agendas to advance.
Unfortunately, Mark I. Pinsky, the religion reporter for The Orlando Sentinel, conducts his analysis of the Disney animation world like a reporter running late for a press run deadline. Mostly this consists of a cursory viewing of 31 Disney films, plucking out a few nuggets of content that support his theme, and creating short chapters speculating on the symbolism within each film.
At the end is a non-philosophical analysis of the 1990's boycott by the Southern Baptist Contention.
Shortly into the book it becomes obvious that Pinsky has made little if any attempt to examine the source material for each film, attributing each relevant element to Disney rather than to the source material from which each screenplay was adapted.
This becomes especially glaring when a reader is familiar with the source material. A more useful approach would have been to compare and contrast the original material with its adaptation; identifying which elements Disney elected to keep, to cut, and to alter. It is likely that what was excluded is just as important as what was included in understanding the motivational forces at work within the Disney empire.
For example, the animated film "Alice in Wonderland" (1951) was more inspired by than adapted from the original Lewis Carroll story. Little more than title, some character names, and the basic premise (little heroine dreaming about going down a rabbit hole into a strange wonderland) was utilized by the Disney movie. That most viewer's believe it was a closer adaptation stems from the use of John Tenniel's original prints as inspiration for the character sketches.
Pinsky details several scenes in the film that were not even part of Carroll's story, then states: "For all the complaints about Disney's tinkering with and sanding down the edges of fairy tales, "Alice in Wonderland" demonstrates the pitfalls of fidelity to the original, of illustrating a classic story rather than transforming it and making it your own". As anyone even vaguely familiar with the book and the film know, on this point Pinsky is totally incorrect. Only someone unfamiliar with Carroll's original could have reached such a faulty conclusion. The failure (be it error or laziness) to do basic research in this case should set off reader alarm bells regarding most of the other assertions Pinsky makes in this book. No doubt some are valid but readers would do well to not accept any of Pinsky's points at face value.
Which doesn't mean that Pinsky's ideas are totally useless. They introduce fresh ways to examine many elements within Disney's features and might actually provide some useful insights to anyone motivated to aggressively explore his cursory assertions.
Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust Overview

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The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood Review

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The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood ReviewMy library is filled with books about the inner workings of the entertainment industry, but none of them have even hinted at the massive power and influence of MCA, Dr. Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman. For over thirty years they controlled what Americans were entertained by. As agents, they handled the vast majority of important actors, musician, singers and writers. And you couldn't hire an MCA talent without agreeing to hire others. In addition, they had insider deals with the unions that no other talent agency or television production company enjoyed. In addition, MCA invented the dubious practice of setting up production companies for entertainers so that they could avoid paying taxes. Of course later, when the star's career started to fade, that same production company became an ever-hungry money pit. I don't think it is possible to truly understand why entertainment is what it is in the twentieth century without reading this book. Despite being published by a major house and receiving rave reviews, you are unlikely to see this author on your local talk shows or to find his book in any of the major chain stores, because so many still fear the subject of this book. Do yourself a favor and order the book from Amazon. It is a must-read for any fan of entertainment books.The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood Overview

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The Brothers Warner Review

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The Brothers Warner ReviewI read "The Brothers Warner" with great interest and curiosity. Author, Ms. Cass Warner Sperling has kept her unspoken "promise" made to Grandpa Harry (patriarch of the Warner brothers) at his deathbed when she was a ten year old girl, to convey to others his deep beliefs and ideals.
I rate it 5 stars because the story and writing style paints an incredible picture of not just another "rags to riches" story but one of tragedy and great sacrifice leading to an enduring legend of the motion picture industry directly because of the "can do and make it go right" attitudes of the Warners.
From the family gold watch (later to be hocked in order to secure payment for the brothers first projector) placed in 1883 into the secret pocket of Benjamin Warner for his immigration to America into New York and the arrival of wife Pearl and children less than a year later, to a realization of a movie empire that had as its motto "Educate, entertain, and enlighten" which is a Hollywood legacy.
A must read for movie buffs and those interested in the beginnings of Hollywood. This is a book that has "all the right stuff" for the making of a fascinating mini-series as told by granddaughter Cass and others.
Shelley Abate, movie buff and avid reader.
The Brothers Warner OverviewThe BROTHERS WARNER, formerly titled "Hollywood Be Thy Name:The Warner Brothers Story", is the definitive family biography and intimate portrait of the four legendary Warner brothers. It unfolds and is told through the eyes of Harry Warner's granddaughter, Cass Warner Sperling and in the voices of others who knew them.

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An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood Review

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An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood ReviewNeal Gabler explores the fascinating question of how Hollywood was created primarily by a remarkable group of men who fit into a remarkably small demographic: European Jewish immigrants, most of them poor, most of them from Manhattan's lower east side, none of them practicing Jews, most of them from families with weak father figures. But together they moved to an almost completely protestant city and created the most successful form of popular entertainment in America, presenting an idealized version of American life for a nation in a constant for new national myths. The most fascinating thing about the book is the gap between the mythical world that they were presenting and their own backgrounds. For Louis B. Mayer, Andy Hardy's America was for him the real America, an America where there were strong nuclear families headed by strong fathers, doting neo-Victorian mothers, and obedient, respectful children. Economically most people were Middle Class, the tenor distinctively Middle American, and almost always Christian. Gabler argues that for most of these men, what they provided was not America as it existed, but the America that they wanted to be a part of.
Almost all of the major studios were founded by men who more or less fit Gabler's description. There are a number of major and minor characters in Gabler's story, the most prominent being Adolph Zukor, who was instrumental in creating Paramount; Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal; William Fox of Fox Pictures, which later merged with Twentieth Century; Louis B. Mayer, who built MGM into Hollywood's largest studio; Harry and Jack Warner of Warner Brothers; and the belligerent Harry Cohn of Columbia. There are in addition a number of crucial supporting characters, none more important than the legendary Irving Thalberg (I knew very slightly Thalberg's son, also Irving, an academic philosopher who spent his career in Chicago and who quietly funded liberal political causes--he paid for the Chicago Seven's legal bills at their trial--while quietly pursuing his university career), the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald's last novel THE LAST TYCOON. We also meet the Schenck brothers, Nicholas and Joseph, the Rabbi of Hollywood Edgar F. Magnin, theater chain owner Marcus Loew, and an uncountable number of smaller figures.
One of the most striking aspects of the biography is how utterly these men suppressed their Jewish backgrounds in their films. Although THE JAZZ SINGER is the story of the son of a Jewish son rejecting the culture of his cantor father (Gabler points out that the son's story was also the story of the moguls), the vast majority of movies produced by Hollywood in the twenties, thirties, and forties contained no identifiably Jewish characters. Although an astonishing number of the people producing the movies were Jewish, it was as if they felt compelled to completely erase Jews from their idealization of American life. The was more than mere assimilationist aspirations; it was as if they were trying to expunge the weak fathers of their youths, the poverty they knew growing up, and become a part of a nation that largely rejected them. For two or three decades, at least, they could maintain this myth, but in the forties and the HUAC committee of the U.S. House of Representatives they found their fiefdom increasingly under attack for the industry's supposed inculcation of un-American (i.e., Communist) values. Many of their attackers persisted in the fascist depiction of Communism as an essentially Jewish cast of thought (in Hitler's writings there is no clear distinction between Jews and Communists, and at least one part of his motivation in attacking Russia was to attack what he weirdly considered a Jewish nation).
This is not a perfect book. For one thing, the scope is simply too large for any one book to undertake. And inevitably there are either serious omissions or details that don't quite tell the whole story. For instance, Gabler attempts to characterize the more plebian tendencies at Warner's by mentioning that one of their stars was Rin Tin Tin, which seems to hint at how far down the ladder they were in the Hollywood pecking order, but failing to note that for most of his life Rin Tin Tin was the number one box office star in Hollywood. Also, there is amazingly little discussion of the many Jewish performers in Hollywood. Some are mentioned in passing (such as Groucho Marx, noting his famous reply to the attempt by the Jewish country club Hillcrest to recruit new members following the stock market crash, that he wouldn't want to be a member of a club that would accept someone like him as a member), and Edward G. Robinson gets a few mentions, but for the most part actors are ignored. This is overwhelmingly a book about the top brass. And one can take issue with some minor depictions, such as the long discussion of the nature of Universal in the thirties, but no mention of the man who is most responsible for the visual look of those films and the director of all their major achievements, James Whale. The implication is that the distinctive look of Universal films was not determined by the former art director Whale. But this is all nitpicking.
I do have to take strong issue with one of the current featured reviews that criticizes the book because he believes that the American depicted in the movies was very much the America he knew in the forties and fifties. First, the book deals mainly with America in the twenties and thirties, a bit less with the forties, and the fifties almost not at all, so the time framework of his criticism is off. Second, how can anyone argue that the movies were not an idealization if one knows any American history at all? Certainly the poverty that my parents and grandparents knew growing up in Arkansas during those decades was almost completely ignored, THE GRAPES OF WRATH aside (and the subject of that film were very much my people). Any informed demographic study of the period will show that the depiction of women in the films was wildly out of kilter with the actual lives of women, many of whom had to take jobs even in the thirties, forties, and fifties to enable families to make it financially (the fifties is the only decade in American history of which the so-called traditional American family is even somewhat true). And Hollywood films of the period are notorious today for their depiction of race relations. Anyone stating that the Hollywood film in any conceivable sense depicted America as it really existed beggars credulity.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone either interested in the history of the movie industry or how immigrants sought to integrate themselves in their new nation. The book contains a wealth of information and I can't imagine anyone know coming away from it not merely entertained but better informed.An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood Overview

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