Jews played a prominent and often leading role in much of the historical development of the film industry in the United States.
The New York period
According to a standard work by Huberman and Chandler, ""The Lower East Side...was the cradle of the movie industry...The origins of Hollywood were to be found in the new, substantially immigrant mass audience, and its founding fathers among the entrepreneurs of New York's preeminent pre-world War I Jewish neighborhood."
The paradox is that the American film industry, ...was founded and for more than thirty years operaated by Eastern European Jews... The ..."studio system"... was supervised by a second generation of Jews. p. 1
Hollywood
As the American film industry moved west, centering on Hollywood in California, Jews were quite involved in the film industry, in all facets, from executives and producers, to creatives like directors, writers, and performers. Even contributing to the development of the studio and star systems.
Many of the men who created Hollywood were Jewish. Adolph Zuckor, one of the three founders of Paramount Pictures, was a Jew from Hungary. Another Jew from Hungary, William Fox, founded Fox Film Corporation. Louis B. Mayer, born in Russia, although he was never quite sure where, co-founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with another Jew, this one with parents from Austria, Marcus Loew. And Warner Bros. was founded by the brothers Warner: Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack, three of whom were born in Krasnosielc, Poland (Jack was born in Canada). With David Sarnoff, a Russian Jew who founded RKO, these were the five major studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. In addition, two of the three minor studios of the time, Universal Pictures and Columbia Pictures, were founded and run by Jews. Carl Laemmle, one of the founders of Universal Pictures, was a German Jew from Laupheim in Germany; while Harry and Jack Cohn, along with Joe Brandt were Jews from New York City who founded Columbia.
At the time that Hollywood was developing, antisemitism was widespread in the United States, and due to that, it played a major role in the development of the film industry.
Jews were drawn to the film industry, partly because they were accepted in it. As first and second generation Jewish immigrants attempted to assimilate into American culture, they found many avenues barred to them. The power structures of the country were closed to them, occupied by the "New England-Wall Street-Middle West money". The film industry was not one of them. Roadblocks found in other professions were not present in movies.
The "Golden Age" of American cinema
There is no definitive time-frame of when the "Golden Age" in the American film industry. While some film historians feel that it began with The Birth of a Nation in 1915, the mass production of films really took off in the 1920s and 1930s, two decades when more films were produced than during any other decade. Other sources point to the "Golden Age" as being during the 1930s and 1940s, and some say it continued through the 1950s. The nascent film industry in Hollywood created the studio system, and those studios controlled the entire film process. They owned the contracts of the writers, directors, actors, producers; they controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of films; they owned the film rights, and all the major cinema chains; and they developed the major advancements in film during this time, like sound films, studio lighting, new cameras and lenses, and, of course, the introduction of color.
During the 1930s and 1940s the rise of Nazism in Europe saw large migrations of Jews, particularly to the United States. Hollywood saw its share of the influx during those years, including talent like Billy Wilder, Hedy Lamarr, Peter Lorre, Paul Henreid, Sam Spiegel, and Vicki Baum, all of whom fled Austria.
However, Jewish studio heads, afraid of the backlash of showing ethnic Jewish characters, shied away from portraying Jews in film. The result was the likes of The Life of Emile Zola and They Won't Forget, two films about Jews which never mention the word, "Jew".
During World War II, Hollywood shied away from discussing the Holocaust in film, with the exception of 1940s The Great Dictator.
Modern film industry
With the burgeoning civil rights movement in the United States, by the late 1950s, more notable Jewish characters began to appear. Some of those included the Morgensterns in Marjorie Morningstar, the heroine of the eponoymous The Diary of Anne Frank, and the main protagonists of two biblical epics: Moses in The Ten Commandments and Judah Ben-Hur in Ben-Hur.