100 books like Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939

In 1988, a book on film history became an unexpected cultural classic. This book tells how a handful of Jewish immigrants from a very small area of central Europe became Hollywood moguls, effectively creating the screen imagery depicting the American dream.

The moguls’ identity as migrants and marginalized people was crucial to their success. As Gabler writes, precisely because of their striving and desire to belong, a former peddler, cobbler, junk seller, and other impoverished transplants concocted the gilded fantasies of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As a group biography and industrial history of Hollywood illusion, An Empire of Their Own is not usually considered in the same vein as The Power Broker’s bricks-and-mortar history.

Yet, in today’s screen-driven world, the legacy of these early media titans is more obvious than ever. The movie moguls’ quintessentially American story of immigration, success, and reinvention is also a prescient, more fully inclusive history of… show more.

This book was my first foray into social and political history of Hollywood.

Sklar covers early film industry battles with Thomas Edison, the impact of censorship in Hollywood, the monopoly-like integration of the studios, and the overarching mythology that Hollywood sold through their movies.

I read it as an undergraduate when I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. Looking back as an author and professor, I can see this book as planting seeds that continue to blossom through my own work in the classroom as well as in books and articles that I publish. 

No list of important books on Hollywood is complete without a reference to Kevin Brownlow.

Kevin was there in the 1960s and 1970s, when many of the silent-era Hollywood stars were still alive. He met and interviewed them all. His book brings that era to life in a way that no other book or film has been able to accomplish. Kevin is also a major supporter of other authors.

He was kind enough to blurb two of my books. He also read drafts of my Warner Brothers book – twice! Each time with increasingly helpful, thoughtful, and supportive feedback. Kevin is the one historian that every film historian is in debt to. I don’t think Kevin knows how important he is, but he certainly deserves a spot on my list. 

Wasson and Basinger are two other authors where you simply want to read everything they’ve written.

The reason I picked Hollywood: The Oral History for this list is that you have several hundred pages of Hollywood players telling their own stories. What could be better?? We get the scoop from stars, grips, screenwriters, carpenters, producers, directors, publicists, and everything in between.

What was it like to work in Hollywood in 1949? This book has your answer. What was the transition from Old Hollywood to New Hollywood like, this book has the goods. 

An editor of my book, Brian Neve has written extensively on the Hollywood Left, with many books, articles, and chapters devoted to filmmakers such as Cy Endfield, Elia Kazan, Robert Rossen, and Joseph Losey, or more broadly to politics and American cinema. A useful complement to the Ceplair & Englund volume, this astute, engaging, and empirically-grounded study explores how a generational cohort of radical and liberal creative practitioners—including Kazan, Losey, Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, John Huston, and Orson Welles—were energized by the political culture of the Depression era and sought, in different ways, to navigate the industrial and commercial constraints of Hollywood to produce socially-engaged films. This project was brutally stifled by the blacklist, with many filmmakers forced to choose between exile or collaboration. 

Only a small fraction of the millions of Americans in uniform during World War II were engaged in combat operations. Harris’s well-researched account zeroes in on the service of five Hollywood directors, who, like many other professionals, were asked to adapt their civilian skills to wartime needs.

Tacking back and forth between Washington and other stateside locales and posts far afield—from Midway and the Aleutian Islands to North Africa and Italy—the book’s carefully drawn action conveys the far-flung exploits of filmmakers during the war as well as how those experiences impacted their craft.

Cinema of Paradox is a captivating journey into the intricate world of French cinema during the challenging years of the Nazi occupation of France. This book offers a unique window into a period when the French film industry not only survived but flourished, producing enduring classics like Carne's Children of Paradise.

Evelyn Ehrlich's meticulous exploration guides us through the tapestry of French filmmaking from the outbreak of World War II in 1939 to the liberation of France in 1944. What sets this book apart is its comprehensive approach, delving into the political, cultural, and social context that shaped the cinematic landscape in occupied France. It also sheds light on the occupiers' perspective, revealing the surprising encouragement from the Nazis for the French to maintain their high cinematic standards for their own purposes.

Though the book doesn’t approach the problem of veiled representations of Jewish characters in French cinema, Cinema of… show more.

Bordwell is an academic who is encyclopedic on Hollywood.

He has written several definitive works on Hollywood and despite their depth and learnedness, they are very readable and enjoyable to absorb. So when he turned his attention to ‘classical’ Hollywood story telling, I knew it would be a good one, and I was not disappointed. 

Most story theorists have an approach that they are arguing for. Bordwell is analysing from a pure perspective, without ‘skin in the game’, so the result is balanced, critical, and highly enlightening for the aspiring writer. 

This book coined the maxim far and away the most quoted in Hollywood to this day: “Nobody knows anything.” I first read it the year before I broke in. My copy is heavily annotated with yellow highlighter and red pen; a black paperclip still marks the second of Goldman’s two capitalized maxims, “Screenplays are structure.” The value of this book to anyone wanting to understand – or survive in – Hollywood is that, ironically, Goldman, one of the most successful screenwriters and novelists in Hollywood history, knew almost everything, not only about screenwriting, but also the psychology, cautious care, and perilous feeding of actors, directors, executives, and the rest of the Hollywood zoo. It’s both a textbook and survival guide, illustrated with a veteran’s vivid stories about life behind the tinsel.

We’ll be honest. We don’t really remember the romantic drama Up Close & Personal (1996), starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. But we won’t forget this book by Dunne, who wrote the film with his wife, Joan Didion. This is a forthright look at the writer’s lot in Hollywood. It’s a manual for massaging egos and dealing with conflicting notes, told with bracing honesty.

Sometimes, you take a job because you need health insurance. Sometimes, a movie that starts out based on the tragic true story of newscaster Jessica Savitch becomes a glossy sudser in which she lives. Sometimes, a troubled project becomes a hit despite itself. That’s always show business.