Did Hollywood ever have culture?

Did Hollywood ever have culture?

Two Jewish film historians republish 1931 satire of the movie industry 

The fictional Rabbi Burns’s temple and his real-life creator, Aben Kandel.
The fictional Rabbi Burns’s temple and his real-life creator, Aben Kandel.

When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened four years ago, one of its central exhibits celebrated diversity in the film business. It was pretty much all-encompassing, except for one group that it left out.

There was not an exhibit on Jews, the very founders of Hollywood.

It is this omission that sparked Sam Wasson and Brandon Millan to republish a long-out-of-print satirical novel about Jewish life in Tinseltown, “Rabbi Burns” by Aben Kandel.

Mr. Wasson is a film historian and author. His bio, “Fosse,” about the director and choreographer Bob Fosse, was the basis for the television mini-series “Fosse/Verdon.” Mr. Wasson has also published many other works on film and film people. Mr. Millan has a background in talent management and as a producer.

The two founded Felix Farmer Press in 2020, “out of the feeling of frustration we had toward the contemporary Hollywood culture,” Mr. Wasson said during a joint Zoom interview with Mr. Millan. (The company is named after the producer who will stop at nothing to get his film made in Blake Edwards’ 1981 farce “S.O.B.”)

Essentially, the pair believe the industry has lost touch with its past — “an understanding about the history of what it had been,” Mr. Wasson said. Asked what’s the problem with existing Hollywood culture, he suggested “there is none.”

Which raises the question: why start a publishing company catering to folks who have no culture and whose reading habits are generally limited to summaries of film scripts?

“Well, they used to read,” Mr. Wasson said. “There used to be culture. So we’re sending out messages in a bottle to like-minded individuals who might be stranded on neighboring islands.”

Brandon Millan

The first two books the company published were “The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories” by screenwriter/novelist Bruce Wagner and a reprint of Richard Schickel’s “The Famous Mr. Fairbanks: A Story of Celebrity.”

It also spearheaded several film projects, most notably a documentary about trailblazing film scholar Jeanine Basinger (who, coincidentally, co-authored a book with Mr. Wasson). It is the first documentary directed by Alexander Payne (“Sideways,” “Election”), and is slated to be released later this year.

And there matters stood when the Academy had its “wildly irresponsible” museum opening. “It was a no-brainer that Brandon and I wanted to celebrate the Jewish legacy in Hollywood without sugarcoating it,” Mr. Wasson said. “Our book is a satire in the great tradition of Jews: by Jews and about Jews.”

Mr. Kandel (1897-1993) was a playwright, B-movie screenwriter (“I Was a Teenage Werewolf”), and novelist. “Rabbi Burns,” the book, is part roman à clef, part sociological study, and all biting.

The title character is a rabbi who leads a Los Angeles temple so Reform that congregants break for lunch on Yom Kippur. He is less concerned with matters celestial than matters financial, particularly raising enough money to build a temple that rivals Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Also, he’d like a career in the movies.

The book is populated largely by characters who are self-absorbed and unprincipled. The one exception is the editor of the local Jewish newspaper, who is very moral and of high character, as all people associated with Jewish media are. (Of course, I’m joking. He’s as bad as the rest of them.)

The book is loosely based on Rabbi Edgar Magnin (1890-1984), who for 65 years was the rabbi of the oldest Jewish congregation in Los Angeles, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple (formerly B’nai B’rith). It was under his leadership that the congregation built the famous Wilshire Center, now on the National Registry of Historic Places.

But it is also a fictional version of “Our Crowd,” discussing in detail the tensions between the established German Jews and their more recently arrived Russian and Slavic co-religionists.

Sam Wasson

The book did not do well and dropped out of sight relatively quickly. In fact, the only way the pair knew of it is because “we came across it in the Gabler book,” Millan said. The Gabler book is Neil Gabler’s “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.”

However, there were no copies of “Rabbi Burns” to be had until Mr. Millan “found a copy on eBay — and paid too much money for it.”

He added: “Jewish influence shaped the founding of Hollywood, and here you have Kandel putting Jewish life front and center in a way that hadn’t been done before. I mean this is 1931. I think part of what we tried to do in republishing was an act of cultural preservation.”

The book is genuinely funny, but it does not portray Jews in a very favorable light. “We’re positive. We’re negative,” Mr. Wasson said. “I don’t think it does anyone a service to only portray the good side of a culture.”

“I think what Kandel was trying to do is show how challenging assimilation was — and not just into WASP culture,” Mr. Millan added. “But also into the original first wave of immigrants.”

“Brandon and I talked a lot about this very thing,” Mr. Wasson said. “I kept going back to Philip Roth and all the criticism he got when he brought out ‘Portnoy’ and ‘Goodbye, Columbus.’ Roth was thought of as a traitor by so many Jews.

“But I think that inner impulse toward self-criticism is one of the superpowers of the Jews. I think to deny it is to undermine what makes the Jews powerful.”

“For me, it was Lenny Bruce and Larry David,” Mr. Millan added. The idea of self-satire “runs through us. And that’s why we think how great it was to rediscover this book after 90 years.”

Work on “Rabbi Burns” began before October 7, and I asked if that changed anything in their thinking. “We talked about it,” Mr. Millan said.

Specifically, they asked themselves “if this was good for the Jews,” Mr. Wasson said. “And we decided it was.”

read more:
comments