By Alexander C. Kafka
Cambridge, Mass.
A debate is raging over Hollywood's alleged collusion with the Nazis. At stake: the moral culpability of Jewish studio heads during cinema's golden age.
The catalyst is a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press, The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact With Hitler, by the 35-year-old historian Ben Urwand. The book is still several months from publication, but emotions are running high after an early review in the online magazine Tablet, followed by an exchange of rhetorical fire in The New York Times between Urwand and Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University who this spring published his own account of the era, Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press). The clash comes during a period of heightened scholarly attention to Nazi infiltration and counterinfiltration in Depression-era Los Angeles, complicating the story of Hollywood's stance toward fascism.
Urwand's Hollywood-Hitler focus began in 2004, when, while pursuing his doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, he saw an interview with Budd Schulberg in which the screenwriter mentioned that in the 1930s, the head of MGM would show movies to a German consular official in LA and they'd agree on cuts. Urwand knew that anti-Nazi pictures didn't start appearing until 1939, and he suspected that indifference or passivity couldn't fully explain that. He smelled a dissertation topic. "It was the spark," he says, and he spent the next nine years traveling to dozens of archives, piecing the story together.
At Sandrine's Bistro, off Harvard Square, Urwand, a slender junior fellow in Harvard University's Society of Fellows, sits down to lunch in short sleeves on a hot, humid day. The Sydney, Australia, native's accent sounds as though it has been gently sanded by a decade and a half in the States. He is affably intense, no less so after a two-espresso appetizer to his gazpacho and lobster salad. The lunch is a break from sorting out his book's index while navigating a steady stream of press calls and e-mails in English and German, although The Collaboration is not due out until October. (In response to the controversy, the press bumped up the release from mid- to early October.)
Urwand's forthright, deadpan expression bursts intermittently into an engaging smile. Should you wish to see that smile vanish, mention Doherty. You'll get a somber look, a mild shake of the head. Urwand won't discuss Hollywood and Hitler specifically, only the more general "mythology," as he puts it, of the studios' staunch antifascism.
Yes, after the Anschluss, in March, 1938, the Munich Agreement, in September, and Kristallnacht, in November, Hollywood's stance toward the Nazis changed, though even then, the films strangely ellipted explicitly Jewish characters. But why did it take so long for the studios to cross cinematic swords with the Führer?
For Urwand, the answer is in the archival evidence: bald complicity with the Nazis. For Doherty, whose book covers some of the same topical ground as Urwand but largely from the standpoint of the era's trade press—Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Motion Picture Herald, Box Office—it came down to hardheaded business decisions during a time of more ethical, political, and economic complexity than moralistic hindsight allows.
Goldberg McDuffie, a New York publicity firm hired by Harvard University Press, is not as tight-lipped as Urwand when it comes to discussing Doherty. Promotional materials for Urwand's book deride Doherty's as relying on "flawed, superficial accounts in domestic trade papers." Doherty fired back in the Times: Urwand's use of the word "collaboration" he said, was "a slander." "You use that word to describe the Vichy government," he said. "Louis B. Mayer was a greedhead, but he is not the moral equivalent of Vidkun Quisling," a reference to the Norwegian traitor who ran a Nazi-backed regime.
Urwand says he welcomes mitigating evidence. But he's dug through some two dozen archives on two continents (taking classes to bring his high-school German up to "a good reading level" for the task). He's viewed more than 400 films made from 1933 to 1940. (Seeing four or five films a day, many of them quite bad, got "a bit weird," he says.) Ultimately, collaboration is what he found—and collaboration, Zusammenarbeit, is what the studios and the Nazis called it.
It's long been known that the major studios—Columbia, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, United Artists, Universal, Warner Bros.—all tailored and blanched their 1930s product in response to the Motion Picture Production Code; to an American suspicion of Jews generally, and particularly of the Jews who ran Hollywood; and to motion-picture business interests abroad.
But here's the arguable game-changer: Urwand unearthed evidence that suggests the studios were not merely self-censoring in an effort to keep their shareholders, audiences, and industry and government monitors happy. Rather, he says, the studios began working in detailed coordination with Nazi officials, putting profits above principles. ...

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