Charley Weber Portfolio

Another brilliant book that contextualises and explains the creation of cinema, mostly by East European immigrants, which then created the basis of all visual storytelling in media.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History, this “wonderful history of the golden age of the movie moguls” (Chicago Tribune ) is a provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America’s motion picture industry.

The book follows a number of characters – some real and some fictional but based on real figures – who fleeing the oppression of racist ideologues spring up across Europe in the twenties and thirties emigrate to America.

While down and out, combining their best assets – the ability to tell interesting stories for some, combined with the business acumen of others – went on to develop what arguably became the defining new art and mass medium of the 20th century: film and cinema. Initially through penny arcades using inventions such as the Zoetrope, flip books and comics.