Hollywood comes to you
100 Years of Hollywood – “The Laemmle Effect”
The story of Hollywood and the motion picture industry is perhaps America’s most quintessential immigrant success story. All of the major film studios during Hollywood’s Golden Age were founded by German and Eastern European immigrants or their descendants. Nearly all of them were of Jewish heritage; Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Studios, the Fox Film Corporation, and Columbia pictures stand as some examples. Universal Studios, one of the most iconic, was founded by German immigrant Carl Laemmle. Hollywood’s story would be very different without the “Laemmle Effect”—the vision of a pioneering German immigrant who built the largest film studio in the world at that time on a chicken ranch in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles a century ago.