I had taken my seat in a small upstairs screening theater at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in West Hollywood to watch a special showing of Arthur Rubinstein: The Love of Life, a documentary on the legendary pianist and the father of my friend John who had asked me and two friends to attend in his place. The theater was filled with Hollywood legends: Jack Oakie, Harold Lloyd and Edward G. Robinson were faces I remember. Nearly everyone except the three of us - me, Gordon Devol and Colin Higgins - was very old and very famous. Arthur Rubinstein was there, as well as Francois Reichenbach, the maker of the film, which ended up winning the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature that year (1969). As the Old Hollywood audience settled in to their seats, Groucho Marx walked down the aisle and shuffled in to the row ahead of us. He stopped in the seat directly in front of me. He paused, turned around and addressed the assembly: “I always hate sitting down because then you become a nonentity”. Then he sat down.
Already Groucho’s entry had begun to generate a palpable unease in the audience. He may have been funny on screen but the old parties in this Hollywood crowd didn’t find him amusing. There was a brief introduction, the lights of the screening theater dimmed and the documentary began. The first sounds were the soaring cries of the Muslim call to prayer against images of Topkapi Serai in Istanbul where Rubinstein was being interviewed. It was a haunting opening moment and there was a hush in the cinema. Then Groucho exclaimed loudly, “What a thing to show to a bunch of Jews!”
It’s funny now. It was even funny the next day but right then it was a tasteless and inappropriate remark (which, of course, is why Groucho was so funny in his movies). I have never, before or since, seen someone vibed into silence but that’s what happened. The scandalized audience sent over a silent tidal wave of opprobrium that effectively muzzled the aging comic legend. Groucho behaved himself through the remainder of the movie.
The interesting thing was that, although I was a young actor working in Hollywood at the time, I was never aware of Hollywood as a particularly Jewish place. Neither Gordon, who was a contract player at Screen Gems, Colin, who was about to become a highly successful screenwriter of Harold and Maude and later The Silver Streak and still later the writer-director of Foul Play, nor I were Jewish. It wasn’t an issue. So Groucho’s remarks were really the first time I had even thought about it. Of course, notwithstanding my blithe ignorance back in the ‘60s, Hollywood was and is a Jewish community. Yiddish is a common patois. During the 1967 War Hollywood was overwhelmingly behind Israel and against the barbarian Arab hordes.
As fate would have it I ended up many years later living and working in the Arab and Muslim world and discovered that Hollywood is viewed there as conspiratorially Jewish and Anti-Muslim. In fact there is a tendency across the region to reduce just about anything coming from the West as one form of conspiracy or another. Yes, Hollywood is Jewish or, let’s say, a Jewish sensibility prevails. But there was no plot to take over American media, as some Arabs and rabid right-wing anti-Semites would have you believe. It was an accident of opportunity for immigrants in the US whose religion precluded them from many other occupations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The fact is that Hollywood is not naturally or historically pre-disposed to attack Arabs or Islam – and did not overtly attack Arabs or Muslims until fairly late in its history (and that is another story). In early Hollywood history Arabs were seen as romantic, wise, exotic, interesting and sometimes villainous. Rudolph Valentino became the greatest matinee idol of his day playing an Arab in The Sheik. Regardless of what Jack Shaheen would have you believe today, the Valentino role was not a negative stereotype. The wartime adventure movie called Sahara made in 1943 and starring Humphrey Bogart, which was a box office hit and won an Oscar, features a Sudanese Muslim who has a sweet, sympathetic exchange with an American soldier on polygamy (the soldier assumes the Muslim has many wives but the Muslim quietly explains that he only has one, that his wife would be upset if he took another wife). The message is clearly one of understanding between cultures; the Muslim soldier is clearly sympathetic and at the end of the film heroically sacrifices his own life to save his comrades in arms.
Neal Gabler, in his book An Empire of Their Own, which is a fascinating study of the Jewish domination of Hollywood, makes it very clear that while Hollywood was founded by Jews like Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, the Warner Brothers and Harry Cohn, these movie moguls wanted more than anything else to shed their Jewish identity and assimilate in to Western gentile society. They were all, by the way, fierce anti-Zionists. In fact, Harry Cohn, whose studio, Columbia, made Sahara, was once approached by a Zionist group collecting funds for relief for Jews in Palestine. According to Gabler, Cohn yelled, ‘Relief for the Jews! How about relief from the Jews? All the trouble in this world is caused by Jews and Irishmen!’
Now my point is simply that there was not, historically, an organized conspiracy against Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood by Jews. Hollywood creates imaginal landscapes filled with stereotypes of all kinds. Always has. Always will. These are telegraphic images that make story-telling easier. In aggregate African-Americans and American Indians have been far more harshly maligned by Hollywood throughout its history, than Arabs or Muslims, and the crude stereotypes of African-Americans and American Indians were not countered until after the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s.
Stereotypes are an expression of what is ‘Other’, ‘Alien’, ‘Foreign’, ‘Exotic’ and they exist in absence of understanding and alternative images. The onus is on Arabs and Muslims to provide this understanding and the alternative images. Otherwise stereotypes will persist. The more distance Arabs and Muslims place between themselves and the mass media, the more negative stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs is likely to be.
Ironically and sadly, it took the tragedies of 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, to trigger a change in Hollywood’s shallow and often insulting insensitivity in its approach to the portrayal of Islam and Muslims. The ensuing flood of news coverage and commentary inevitably tried to come to grips with why America was so hated by Islamists. At the same time, the overreaction of the Bush administration and security services highlighted the fact that most Muslims living in America were mild, family-oriented, law-abiding citizens and residents who were being victimized over a sick criminal act perpetrated by a tiny group of foreigners. This is just the kind of subject film-makers jump at. At the same time it seems to have finally awakened the community of Muslim artists out of their long, self-involved slumbers and forced a few at least in to the mainstream.
Already Groucho’s entry had begun to generate a palpable unease in the audience. He may have been funny on screen but the old parties in this Hollywood crowd didn’t find him amusing. There was a brief introduction, the lights of the screening theater dimmed and the documentary began. The first sounds were the soaring cries of the Muslim call to prayer against images of Topkapi Serai in Istanbul where Rubinstein was being interviewed. It was a haunting opening moment and there was a hush in the cinema. Then Groucho exclaimed loudly, “What a thing to show to a bunch of Jews!”
It’s funny now. It was even funny the next day but right then it was a tasteless and inappropriate remark (which, of course, is why Groucho was so funny in his movies). I have never, before or since, seen someone vibed into silence but that’s what happened. The scandalized audience sent over a silent tidal wave of opprobrium that effectively muzzled the aging comic legend. Groucho behaved himself through the remainder of the movie.
The interesting thing was that, although I was a young actor working in Hollywood at the time, I was never aware of Hollywood as a particularly Jewish place. Neither Gordon, who was a contract player at Screen Gems, Colin, who was about to become a highly successful screenwriter of Harold and Maude and later The Silver Streak and still later the writer-director of Foul Play, nor I were Jewish. It wasn’t an issue. So Groucho’s remarks were really the first time I had even thought about it. Of course, notwithstanding my blithe ignorance back in the ‘60s, Hollywood was and is a Jewish community. Yiddish is a common patois. During the 1967 War Hollywood was overwhelmingly behind Israel and against the barbarian Arab hordes.
As fate would have it I ended up many years later living and working in the Arab and Muslim world and discovered that Hollywood is viewed there as conspiratorially Jewish and Anti-Muslim. In fact there is a tendency across the region to reduce just about anything coming from the West as one form of conspiracy or another. Yes, Hollywood is Jewish or, let’s say, a Jewish sensibility prevails. But there was no plot to take over American media, as some Arabs and rabid right-wing anti-Semites would have you believe. It was an accident of opportunity for immigrants in the US whose religion precluded them from many other occupations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The fact is that Hollywood is not naturally or historically pre-disposed to attack Arabs or Islam – and did not overtly attack Arabs or Muslims until fairly late in its history (and that is another story). In early Hollywood history Arabs were seen as romantic, wise, exotic, interesting and sometimes villainous. Rudolph Valentino became the greatest matinee idol of his day playing an Arab in The Sheik. Regardless of what Jack Shaheen would have you believe today, the Valentino role was not a negative stereotype. The wartime adventure movie called Sahara made in 1943 and starring Humphrey Bogart, which was a box office hit and won an Oscar, features a Sudanese Muslim who has a sweet, sympathetic exchange with an American soldier on polygamy (the soldier assumes the Muslim has many wives but the Muslim quietly explains that he only has one, that his wife would be upset if he took another wife). The message is clearly one of understanding between cultures; the Muslim soldier is clearly sympathetic and at the end of the film heroically sacrifices his own life to save his comrades in arms.
Neal Gabler, in his book An Empire of Their Own, which is a fascinating study of the Jewish domination of Hollywood, makes it very clear that while Hollywood was founded by Jews like Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, the Warner Brothers and Harry Cohn, these movie moguls wanted more than anything else to shed their Jewish identity and assimilate in to Western gentile society. They were all, by the way, fierce anti-Zionists. In fact, Harry Cohn, whose studio, Columbia, made Sahara, was once approached by a Zionist group collecting funds for relief for Jews in Palestine. According to Gabler, Cohn yelled, ‘Relief for the Jews! How about relief from the Jews? All the trouble in this world is caused by Jews and Irishmen!’
Now my point is simply that there was not, historically, an organized conspiracy against Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood by Jews. Hollywood creates imaginal landscapes filled with stereotypes of all kinds. Always has. Always will. These are telegraphic images that make story-telling easier. In aggregate African-Americans and American Indians have been far more harshly maligned by Hollywood throughout its history, than Arabs or Muslims, and the crude stereotypes of African-Americans and American Indians were not countered until after the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s.
Stereotypes are an expression of what is ‘Other’, ‘Alien’, ‘Foreign’, ‘Exotic’ and they exist in absence of understanding and alternative images. The onus is on Arabs and Muslims to provide this understanding and the alternative images. Otherwise stereotypes will persist. The more distance Arabs and Muslims place between themselves and the mass media, the more negative stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs is likely to be.
Ironically and sadly, it took the tragedies of 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, to trigger a change in Hollywood’s shallow and often insulting insensitivity in its approach to the portrayal of Islam and Muslims. The ensuing flood of news coverage and commentary inevitably tried to come to grips with why America was so hated by Islamists. At the same time, the overreaction of the Bush administration and security services highlighted the fact that most Muslims living in America were mild, family-oriented, law-abiding citizens and residents who were being victimized over a sick criminal act perpetrated by a tiny group of foreigners. This is just the kind of subject film-makers jump at. At the same time it seems to have finally awakened the community of Muslim artists out of their long, self-involved slumbers and forced a few at least in to the mainstream.
This new forced awareness is generating some positive changes in Hollywood and there is, finally, a sign that Muslims and Arabs are beginning to get involved and try reaching a wider audience than their own people. At the same time Hollywood is becoming impressively sensitive to its portrayal of Muslims. There is much greater authenticity evident and a genuine attempt to look at both sides of the divide. The crude stereotypes of Muslims depicted in pre-9/11 films like True Lies have been displaced by more deeply nuanced and better researched films, like Ridley Scott's remarkable Kingdom of Heaven, Syriana, Rendition, and my own favourite, The Kingdom, which is the first Hollywood film in history where the effective hero is a Saudi (yes, Jamie Foxx is the star but the character you care about is the Saudi colonel).
And now there are Arabs and Muslims entering the Hollywood fold and I don’t think they are being blocked by anti-Muslim Jews. Omar Naeem, the son of the great Lebanese theatre actress Nidal Al Ashkar, wrote and directed The Final Cut, starring Robin Williams. Ahmad Zahra recently produced an excellent film starring Tony Shalhoub and Sayed Badreya (with appearances by a terrific cast of actors including Alfre Woodard, Ray Wise, Tony Plana, Anthony Azizi and Qais Nashif) and directed by Hesham Issawi called American East all about the Arab American experience in post-9/11 Los Angeles exploring a whole range of issues in a wonderfully entertaining way. Sadly, while MGM picked up the film for DVD and television distribution it will not have a theatrical release. This is a landmark effort and anyone interested in the subject should make an effort to see this terrific movie – the first Arab-American feature film ever made.
Hollywood cares about three things: money, success and talent, probably in that order, with talent a distant third. It doesn’t matter what religion you are or where you’re from, if you can make a successful movie that makes money and if you are talented in a way that helps someone else make money, you can make a mark there. There’s no anti-Muslim or anti-Arab conspiracy. Trust me.
Hollywood cares about three things: money, success and talent, probably in that order, with talent a distant third. It doesn’t matter what religion you are or where you’re from, if you can make a successful movie that makes money and if you are talented in a way that helps someone else make money, you can make a mark there. There’s no anti-Muslim or anti-Arab conspiracy. Trust me.
(This one's for Bill Black)
1 comment:
Haroon,
What an absolutely fascinating post. I was transfixed and truly honored by the note at the end.
Your analysis was both wise and humane. The Groucho story was priceless and a perfect tone-setter.
I don't remember when I've learned so much from a blog post.
Thank you.
Bill Black
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