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remarkable thing about Hollywood in 1939: how successful it was. While the rest of the country wallowed along through the remnants of the Depression, Hollywood kept making more and more money. Several major studios went bankrupt and had to be “reorganized,” but the movie industry as a whole flourished. Perhaps it was because movies were still a novelty, and still cheap (and some, of course, were good), or perhaps because they offered people an escape from their troubles. “When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time, during this Depression,” President Roosevelt said of Shirley Temple, “it is a splendid thing that for just fifteen cents an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby. . . .” Perhaps, on the other hand, Hollywood’s success was based on the cruder fact that it required no expensive ingredients like coal or steel, that its largely nonunionized employees could be not only dismissed on a producer’s whim but made to take pay cuts for the good of the studio. Or perhaps it was simply because the studios had gradually established what amounted to an illegal cartel, controlling both their actors and writers at one end of the process and their distributors and exhibitors at the other end. They couldn’t lose.
    In 1939, there were more movie theaters (15,115) than banks (14,952), and the number of theaters per capita was about twice as high as it is today. More than fifty million Americans went to the movies every single week of the year. There were about four hundred new movies per year to watch. The box office receipts that poured into Hollywood (into New York, actually, for it was always New York that quietly ruled and controlled Hollywood) totaled $673,045,000. The movies were the nation’s fourteenth-biggest business in terms of volume ($406,855,095), the eleventh-biggest in terms of assets ($529,950,444), bigger than office machines, bigger than the supermarket chains.
    The creation of fantasy made the creators rich. Though Hollywood was not among the ten biggest American industries, it ranked second in the percentage of sales and profits that it awarded to its own executives. It even paid its grumbling writers remarkably well. If Nathanael West’s $350 per week seemed small, it nonetheless compared very favorably to the average newspaper reporter’s wages of about $50. Scott Fitzgerald was making $1,000 during his last years of ruin, while Ben Hecht once got a contract guaranteeing him $15,000 a week. The highest-paid stars, like Bing Crosby and Claudette Colbert, earned more than $400,000 per year. Shorter contracts were even more lucrative. Douglas Fairbanks once received a stunning $37,000 per week, Walter Huston an even more stunning $40,000.
    But the lords of creation were those studio executives who could still remember their boyhoods as penniless immigrants from Eastern Europe, and who, having defeated Thomas Edison’s “Trust,” formed a trust of their own, and, as lords, paid themselves accordingly. Samuel Goldwyn, born Shmuel Gelbfisz, a former glove salesman from Lodz; Joseph Schenck, of Rybinsk, Russia, the founder and chairman of 20th Century–Fox, and his younger brother, Nick, president of Loew’s, Inc.; Lewis Selznick, born Zeleznik, a jewelry dealer from Kiev; “Uncle Carl” Laemmle, the founder of Universal, a clothing store manager from Laupheim, Germany; Adolph Zukor, the head of Paramount, a furrier from Ricse, Hungary—these were the legendary rulers of Hollywood. And those who were not themselves penniless immigrants were generally the sons of penniless immigrants: the ruthless Cohn brothers, sons of a German tailor, founders of Columbia; the Warner brothers, all four of them, sons of a Polish cobbler. Benjamin Warner taught his sons, among other things, to save shoe nails and to store them between their lips while they worked. Many years later, Jack Warner