If you want to see the former glory of a once great nation and its culture in decline, go to a museum. That is, of course, unless the art on display has been tainted or altered by the very forces causing the decay. Because a major ritual for the current Visigoths in power is to erase the accomplishments of the past, as they present both a truth that threatens their control and a quality they cannot hope to match. Hence, they can only deny their existence. Nonetheless, museums still survive and, for the art of motion pictures, one of the best is Turner Classic Movies (TCM). All this month, TCM has been celebrating the 100thanniversary of the iconic Warner Brothers studio with nonstop showings of its films. The four brothers Warner (original Yiddish name — Wonsal) founded the studio in 1923. In yet another uncountable achievement of the great American dream, three of them — Samuel (Szmuel), Harry (Hirz), Albert (Aaron) — had emigrated from Poland with little money. They combined their meager assets to buy a movie projector, with which they showed films in mining camps in Pennsylvania and Ohio, until they could buy a theater in New Castle, Pennsylvania, then later form a distribution company. This eventually led to their starting the studio with the help and acumen of their Canada-born youngest brother, Jack. I sometimes cited the Warner Brothers in my decade as a Hollywood-based screenwriter (1992-2004), when frustrated writer friends would dip into anti-Semitism as a reason for their not getting work, lamenting that Jews controlled the Industry. To which I’d answer, “They should. They built it.” Further blighting my peers’ kneejerk prejudice was the fact that several of my underemployed writer pals were Jewish. Nonetheless, Jewish moguls autonomously ran five of the six major film companies that they founded during the classic studio-system period: Metro-Goldwyn Mayer — Louis B. Mayer; Paramount — Adolph Zukor; Columbia — Harry Cohn; Universal — Carl Laemmle, later J...
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