Louis B. Mayer, the Hollywood mogul who co-founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the film studio still around today as Amazon’s MGM, was born Lazar Meir in Dymer, Ukraine, before emigrating to Canada and then the United States.
William Fox, whose name remains emblazened on a media empire almost 100 years after he lost control of the showplace cinemas and film production company known as 20th Century Fox, was born Wilhelm Fuchs in Tolcsva, Hungary.
Jack L. Warner, Harry Warner and Sam Warner were siblings who formed the scrappy, scrambling “Poverty Row” studio Warner Bros. which became the glossiest film production and distribution company in the movie business and remains so to this day. But the founding brothers were born Jacob, Hirsz Mojżesz Wonsal and Szmuel Wonsal, all from a family of Polish Jews, most of them born in the 19th century Russian Empire. And there was a FOURTH brother, Albert (Aaron Abraham Wonsal).
These folks were among the founders of the entertainment Mecca that became the world’s gold standard for cinema, Hollywood. And those facts about this “kingdom” that people like them, pioneering mogul Carl Laemmle (Karl Lämmle, German Jewish) and the first film superstar, Mary Pickford (born Gladys Louise Smith, in Canada) are among the most glaring, blundering omissions in “Titans: The Rise of Hollywood,” a Curiosity Stream series only now reaching the vast audience that Netflix offers.
Using early cinema footage and archival silent era newsreels and a cast of unknown-to-little-known actors playing the parts of assorted Founding Fathers and Mothers, producers Stephen David and Vince P. Maggio (and credited director Patrick Reams) set out to tell the story of the American cinema’s birth.
Researched, but nobody’s idea of over-researched, flatly-scripted and acted, with most every actor who could get his hands on one leaning on that do-something-with-your-hands-prop, the cigarette (some seemingly as first-time smokers), “Titans” can be almost laughably bad.
Almost. “Boring” is its default mode.
“Titans” focuses on the pioneer’s pioneer, Universal founder Laemmle (David Davino), upscale movie palace innovator Fox (Eric Rolland), the struggles of the “three” Warners, the rise of Pickford (Christina Leonardi), narrated to the camera by Adolph Zukor (Grant Masters), the successful producer who eventually absorbed and squeezed out partners and rivals to run Paramount, and eventually gets around to Mayer (Mike Backes).
The series ticks off historic “firsts” — the first film star (Stephanie Granade plays Florence Lawrence, “The Biograph Girl”) and first attempts at making “feature” length films (“Birth of a Nation” is utterly ignored) in a business that began as a cut-rate carnvival and storefront novelty before those storefronts became nickelodeons.
It was a colorful, seat-of-the-pants history made by hustlers who violated Thomas Edison’s (Steve Schroko) many patents and efforts to license and “control” (via a Motion Picture Trust) his inventions and went so far as to found the industry town on the far off West Coast to evade paying that trust.
As “Babylon” showed us, it was a rowdy, gaudy journey these Wild West “outlaws” and their hedonistic employees made to respectability.
“Titans” isn’t rowdy or colorful or complete. It is, in every case, the opposite of what the many better feature films and documentaries that touched on this era have been — colorless, tame, tepid and gratingly superficial.
A “tell” might be in the use of the word “kingdom” by narrator Zukor to describe what these entrepreneurs were setting up. Our producers avoid almost to the point of erasing the Jewish ethnicity of the folks who created “An Empire of Their Own,” as Neal Gabler titled his definitive history of these figures and their era.
Did our producers contort their narrative to avoid buying the rights to that book? Avoid the word “Jewish” like the plague? Fear of charges of anti-Semitism, seeing as how more than a few of those moguls were unscrupulous and played the victim card (especially as regards “The Trust”) until the end?
In any event, all this series accomplishes is a proof-of-concept for Netflix to act on. Get Derek Waters on the phone. Write him a check.
“The Drunk History of the Birth of Hollywood?” I’d binge six episodes of that in a heartbeat.
Cast: David Davino, Grant Masters, Christina Leonardi, Nicolas J. Greco, Steve Schroko, Stephanie Granade and James M. Reilly.
Created by Stephen David, Vince P. Maggio and Patrick Reams. A Curiosity Stream production now on Netflix.
Running time: Six episodes @:50 minutes each
