MovieChat Forums > The Last Tycoon (2016) Discussion > Subplot about Nazis was absurd and inacc...

Subplot about Nazis was absurd and inaccurate because...

posted 7 years ago by SuCue
2 replies | jump to latest

1) Hollywood has always made different versions of films for foreign markets. During the time of segregation they even made different versions of their films for the South. Pat Brady would not have insisted the entire Minna Davis film be rewritten to appease Nazi censors - just would have cut or rewritten a few scenes specific calls for the German market.

2) The most powerful men in Hollywood at the time were all Jewish - Sam Goldwyn, Louis B Mayer, Jack Warner, David O Selznick and of course Irving Thalberg, the model for Monroe Stahr. It's laughable that they would suck up to some totalitarian Nazi envoy; he wouldn't have even been allowed on the lot!

3) Not sure what year this is supposed to be, but when Germany and Russia signed their non-aggression pact in the late 30s, left wing screenwriters actually started to write positive things about Germany in their screenplays (as noted by Budd Schulberg, a former Communist, in his Hollywood memoirs.) They only switched sides when Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded Russia.

In addition, this subplot doesn't appear anywhere in the book. As an experienced screenwriter of the era, Fitzgerald would have known better.

[–] Nobbsy 7 years ago

Unusually interesting post. Thank you!

[–] whoanelly (1558) 4 years ago

1.) Additionally, Hollywood had a practice of changing a film’s title in a foreign market, so that was another non-issue.

2.) Exactly. In fact, the Hollywood moguls all being Jewish was an important plot point in the HBO film, RKO 281 — which tells the story of Orson Welles making Citizen Kane (CK). When William Randolph Hurst tried to block the release of CK, one of the tactics he employed was not-so-subtle criticism in his newspapers about the heads of studios all being Jewish, to try to get the other studios to pressure Schaefer into shelving/burying CK. Louella Parsons, with her lifetime contract to Hurst’s newspapers, wrote disparagingly about the “ethnic” and “swarthy” studio heads.