Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

African Americans and Jews in Hollywood \\ 261
know they are the last word in smartness when this game is concerned." Yet
Johnson's perception of the entry of Jews into race moviemaking scared him as
much as it tutored him. "The Jews are making ready for an attack upon the Negro
field in the Movies," he warned the Black publisher, Robert L. Vann, only months
after the Great War had ended. 11
Meanwhile, the war had set in motion forces that transformed moviemaking
in ways that defined a classical Hollywood style, opened up the entire war-weary
world to the resulting products, and brought into national consciousness the
image of the omnipotent Jewish mogul. Much worse news for the few Black
moviemaking firms was a nationwide influenza epidemic that wiped out marginal
companies while it left stronger survivors in position to form the oligopoly that
became the Hollywood system of script-to-screen dominance of the marketplace.
Moreover, the survivors enjoyed unaccustomed access to funds as a result of their
new hegemony, with the result that the Jewish Wall Street brokers Kuhn and
Loeb, Goldman and Sachs, and others, as well as the San Francisco immigrant
banker, A. P. Giannini, routinely lent capital.
Still other factors joined with fiscal matters to diminish Black access to the
process of moviemaking. Almost every one of the emerging "majors" took on as
advisors on regional and racial matters nativeborn white Southerners—Steve
Lynch and Y. Frank Freeman at Paramount, Lamar Trotti and Nunnally Johnson
at Fox, Francis Harmon in the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
itself, among others. This meant that whenever Black material sailed "over the
transom" into producers' hands it went immediately to some white man such as
King Vidor whose Hallelujah! (1929) derived from "his own observations., .on
the everyday life of the Negro," or to Marc Connelly who directed his own Green
Pastures (1935) which he had drawn from his reading of Roark Bradford's book of
Southern Black fables, Old Man Adam and His Chillun. 12
Reinforcing these conservative trends was the Production Code
Administration of the MPAA, eventually a creature of Catholicism rather than of
Jews in that its "don'ts and be carefuls" that segregated Black characters from
white in order to assuage white fears of miscegenation were drafted by the Jesuit,
Fr. Daniel Lord of the St. Louis Province; the Catholic layman and tradepaper
publisher, Martin Quigley; and Joseph Breen who succeeded to the office of "czar"
of the MPAA following the retirement of its first ruler, the Presbyterian
Republican, Will Hays. 13 Together with the Hollywood Blacks who played the
only roles that emerged from this politically conservative system, the MPAA provided
the most structured ideological control over the Black image on the
screen—without the intrusion of a single Jewish hand.
To take only one instance of this system in process, we could do no better than
to turn to the old Fox lot in 1929 (before it became "the goy studio" in 1935 as
a result of a merger with Darryl F. Zanuck's 20th Century studio). Winfield
Sheehan, a veteran manager of the studio founded by William Fox and led by
Joseph Schenck, drove onto the lot where he brushed against Clarence Muse, a