Hollywood.

In January 2026 James Sewell published The Stolen Screen. He writes for a project he calls Ethnic American. He says Hollywood was stolen from the people he ties to the Naturalization Act of 1790, which opened citizenship to free white persons of good character. He calls the men who built the studios gangsters. He says they were Jews. He says their tribesmen still reign, from the silent lots to Harvey Weinstein.

The essay is his. This page is not a reprint. The desk read the years he writes about, and it says what it will stand behind. What the project means by Ethnic American is on its own page. His second part, on Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, is here.

One correction before the story. This house has already said that a man of 1800 was often wrong about who counted as a neighbor. We do not take the 1790 Act as a birthright. Ancestry is not a crime, and it is not a title to a screen.

Thomas Edison was born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio, to a father of Dutch ancestry and a mother of Scottish descent. He left school almost at once. He held more than a thousand patents. The phonograph. A practical lamp. In the 1890s, with William Kennedy Dickson, he built a camera and a peephole viewer, the Kinetoscope. The Black Maria, in West Orange, New Jersey, was the first studio.

The early films are short enough to watch on purpose. Blacksmith Scene. Fred Ott’s Sneeze, the one the Library of Congress still treats as the first copyrighted picture. A sneeze, a smith, a record that a machine could keep a motion. That is the spark. It is not a nation.

In December 1908 the Motion Picture Patents Company licensed Edison’s side of the machine and tried to keep unlicensed film out of the theaters. Sewell calls that a safeguard, not a grab. A federal court in 1915 found that the trust had violated the Sherman Act, and said it had reached for the cameras, the projectors, and the trade in film. The decree came down in 1916. In April 1917 the Supreme Court, in Motion Picture Patents Co. v. Universal Film, cut the patent’s power to dictate which film a sold projector could run. Sewell folds those into one Supreme Court day in 1915. They were two cases. Both went against the trust.

Edison built the machine. The company he joined then tried to own the trade. A safeguard that seizes a rival’s camera is also a monopoly. Both sentences are on the record.

Around 1905 the nickelodeon arrived. A nickel, a storefront, a short picture. By 1907 there were thousands of them, many in immigrant streets, because that is where the cheap rooms were. The operators who would not take a license copied prints, notched the film, and used cameras the trust had not blessed. When the trust’s lawyers and detectives raided, some of them sued, some paid, and a number of them left for Los Angeles.

Southern California then was far from the East Coast marshals. The county was thin. Local officers could be bought. That flight is real. Sewell calls it a cabal of gangsters plotting in a back room, and he adds scandals, frame-ups, and unsolved murders as if the flight itself were a murder charge. The patent evasion is documented. The murders, as a plan, are not. William Desmond Taylor was shot in 1922. Nobody was convicted. The desk will not assign a killing it cannot name.

Neal Gabler wrote the history and called it An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. The founders on Sewell’s list were Jewish immigrants, or the children of Jewish immigrants. Gabler wrote that as a history of outsiders who built a picture of America because the older rooms would not have them. Sewell writes it as a heist.

The men, as men:

• Adolph Zukor

  Born in 1873 in Ricse, Hungary. He came at sixteen and worked as a furrier. Nickelodeons followed. Famous Players became Paramount. Paramount is still a company. It is not his.

• William Fox

  Born Wilhelm Fuchs in 1879 in Tolcsva, Hungary. Garments, then unlicensed theaters, then Fox Film in 1915. The 1935 merger made 20th Century Fox. Disney bought those assets in 2019.

• Louis B. Mayer

  Born Lazar Meir in 1884, in what was then the Russian Empire. Scrap, then a nickelodeon in 1907, then Los Angeles. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was assembled in 1924. Amazon owns MGM.

• Carl Laemmle

  Born in 1867 in Laupheim, Germany. A bookkeeper, then a nickelodeon in Chicago. He founded Independent Moving Pictures to fight the trust. That became Universal. Comcast owns it.

• Harry Cohn

  Born in 1891 in New York, to parents from Germany and Russia. With his brother Jack he built what became Columbia Pictures in 1924. Sony owns Columbia.

• Samuel Goldwyn

  Born Szmuel Gelbfisz in 1879 in Warsaw. He co-founded Goldwyn Pictures in 1916. The company went into MGM. He went out on his own and produced pictures, including Wuthering Heights.

• Marcus Loew

  Born in 1870 in New York, to Austrian Jewish parents. He left school as a boy. Fur, then nickelodeons, then a theater chain. Loew’s was the parent of MGM.

• Jesse Lasky

  Born in 1880 in San Francisco. Vaudeville, then a partnership with Zukor. Famous Players-Lasky is the other half of what became Paramount.

• The Warner brothers

  Harry, Albert, and Sam were born in Poland. Jack was born in Ontario after the family had come over. A nickelodeon in 1903, Warner Bros. in 1923, and The Jazz Singer in 1927, the picture that made sound ordinary. The company is now Warner Bros. Discovery.

Sewell says the theft was ethnic. A Jewish people took a white Protestant industry and kept it. He says the line runs from a duped print to the boardroom, and that nothing, not even Weinstein, matches the depravity of those first moguls.

The desk will not say that. A man can infringe a patent. A people cannot. A furrier who buys a storefront theater is not a gangster because he is a Jew. The license-breaking was real. The word for it is infringement, flight, and then a company. It is not a tribe.

The companies’ names lasted more than a hundred years. The families did not keep them. A shareholder in a conglomerate is not a grandson, and a grandson is not a people. To talk as if “they” still reign is to stop looking at the contract and start looking for a bloodline. That is the error on this page, and it is the same kind of error as renting 1800 as a costume.

Before the lots closed over the work, there was a comedy factory. Mack Sennett, born Michael Sinnott in 1880 in Quebec, to Irish Catholic parents, learned the camera under D. W. Griffith at Biograph. In 1912 he opened Keystone in Edendale, now Echo Park. In a few years the name meant American slapstick. The Keystone Kops. A pie. More than a thousand shorts by the time the war came.

Mabel Normand, born in 1892 in New Brighton, New York, directed and acted. She was funny with her whole body. Roscoe Arbuckle, born in 1887 in Smith Center, Kansas, came in 1913, light on his feet for a big man, and he taught. In 1917 he put Buster Keaton, born in 1895 in Piqua, Kansas, into The Butcher Boy. Keaton called him his best teacher. Chaplin passed through Keystone in 1913 and 1914 and was taught there too.

That room was collaborative, physical, and American in the plain sense: people who had come from somewhere, working the same stage. It does not require a racial heir to be worth keeping. Sennett’s second chapter is Sewell’s. The work itself is older than his project.

Billie Ritchie was a Scottish comedian in Fred Karno’s music-hall company, the same company that sent Chaplin to America. Ritchie played a drunk in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane, and a mustache, on British stages, before the Tramp was a film. Chaplin’s Tramp debuted at Keystone in 1914. The costume is close enough that Ritchie said it was his, and papers at the time printed the fight.

Sewell treats the theft as settled, and he has Chaplin dead of on-set injuries in Ritchie’s place. Ritchie died in 1921 of a cancer, after injuries had already taken him off the stage. His widow later worked in Chaplin’s wardrobe, which is a strange ending for a mortal feud. A 2010 study of the claim found that neither man’s exclusive ownership can be proved from what the public record holds. Shared stages produce shared costumes. The likeness is real. The verdict is not.

What the desk will say is smaller, and harder to dodge. The man who was there first is the man audiences forgot. Forgetting is the ordinary crime of this industry. It does not require a cabal. It requires a bigger poster.

The 1920s gave the studios a moral panic, and a panic is a useful broom.

Virginia Rappe died in 1921 after a party in San Francisco, of a ruptured bladder and peritonitis. Arbuckle was tried three times. No jury convicted him of killing her. The industry barred him anyway. An acquittal that does not restore a man is not justice. It is a studio protecting the trade. Sewell calls the case a frame arranged to remove a rival. The trials do not prove a frame. They do prove a ban after an acquittal. That is enough to indict the machine.

On February 1, 1922, William Desmond Taylor was found shot in his bungalow. Mabel Normand had been there earlier. Mary Miles Minter, nineteen, was pulled into the telling, a young actress set against Mary Pickford in the papers. No arrest ended it. Normand’s career did not survive the rumor, nor her health. She died in 1930, at thirty-seven, of tuberculosis, with cocaine in the gossip. The gossip is not the death certificate.

Louise Brooks was born in 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas. She danced at Denishawn, where Martha Graham was building a harder American dance, and she wore the bob people still mean when they say the twenties. She did not invent the flapper, and she did not co-found modern dance. Pandora’s Box, the picture people mean, was made in Germany in 1929. By the early thirties Hollywood was finished with her, and she with it. She blamed Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst for closed doors. A newspaper owner could close doors. That is a power, not a proof of every slight she named. Kansas forgetting her is a small-town failure of memory. It is not evidence of a plot against a race.

Frances Farmer, of Seattle, worked opposite Crosby and Grant and would not play the star system. Arrests in the early forties, a scene in a courtroom, then years in institutions, including Western State Hospital, with her mother among those who put her there. She got out in the fifties. The career did not come back. Books and a 1982 film added a lobotomy and years of sexual violence. Those charges have not held up. The desk repeats the commitment, not the legend. Shutting a difficult woman away, and calling her mad for the trouble she made, is an old use of a hospital. It is wicked on its own. It does not get worse, or truer, by being given to a people.

The Hays Code, written in 1930 and forced in 1934, told every studio which stories were allowed. It was sold as morals, after Arbuckle and after Taylor. It also taught the companies to agree with each other. A code can be both a blush and a cartel.

In 1927 Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks made Oswald the Lucky Rabbit for Universal, through Charles Mintz. The contract gave Universal the character. Disney made twenty-six shorts. In 1928 he went to New York for more money. Mintz offered less, and had already hired away most of the animators. Disney would not own the rabbit he had drawn, because the paper said he did not.

Sewell calls that theft, and he sets it inside a Jewish system of control, with Laemmle’s name on the door. The contract is the part that does not need a villain of blood. Disney had signed it. He then refused the next one. On the way home he started the mouse. Steamboat Willie, late in 1928, is the picture where the mouse has sound. The train story is the one the studio tells. The lesson in the paper is plainer: do not sign away the character if you mean to keep him.

Later he fought the 1941 strike, called some of the organizers communists, joined the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, and in 1947 told the House Un-American Activities Committee names. That is on the record. Opposition to a union, and to communists, is not the same sentence as a people’s plot. Sewell adds the second sentence. The desk leaves it with him.

MGM was put together in 1924 out of Metro, Goldwyn, and Mayer. Paramount came out of Famous Players-Lasky. The studio system owned production, distribution, and the theaters, and it owned the actors with contracts that did not let them walk. In 1948, United States v. Paramount Pictures, the Supreme Court broke the chain. The theaters had to come off the studios.

The names returned by purchase, not by grandson. Sony took Columbia in 1989. Disney took the Fox film assets in 2019. Amazon took MGM. Comcast holds Universal. Paramount and Warner are still called that, inside larger companies. Sewell says the children of the nickelodeon gang play on. The children do not. A board does. A board is cold enough without a bloodline.

Men who could cast a picture have always been able to name a price that is not money. Mayer and Cohn had that power, and they used fear as a tool. That is the old accusation, and it fits what a closed lot can do to a person who needs the lot. It fits a powerful man. It does not fit a synagogue.

Harvey Weinstein was born in 1952 in New York. Miramax in 1979. The Weinstein Company in 2005. Pictures that won prizes, including Pulp Fiction. In 2017 more than eighty women accused him of harassment, assault, and rape across decades. He used private investigators and quiet contracts to keep them quiet. A California jury convicted him. Gabler’s point, which Sewell repeats, is that Weinstein play-acted the old mogul.

The method rhymes. Silence, a contract, a ruined name. The rhyme is the power of a gatekeeper, which any people can hold and any people can suffer. Calling it a tribal inheritance lets every other gatekeeper off the page.

David Wark Griffith, born in 1875 in Kentucky, taught the picture how to come close and how to cut between two actions. The Birth of a Nation, in 1915, is part of that teaching, and it is also a film that dresses the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and plays black Americans as a threat. It made money. The NAACP protested it. It was used by the men who revived the Klan. Sewell puts Griffith with the truth-tellers the industry destroyed. The industry did not destroy him in 1915. The film was a hit. His later trouble was also the size of what he spent. And the Klan on that screen is not a truth this desk will defend. We do not put the film on.

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, in 2004, took in more than six hundred million dollars and was accused of aiming the blame at Jewish leaders. In 2006 he was arrested for drunk driving and said antisemitic things to the officer. The town grew cold. He was not erased. Hacksaw Ridge came ten years later. A cold shoulder is not a proof that the film was prophecy. The words in the arrest were his.

History rhymes when a powerful room punishes a heretic. It also rhymes when the heretic is wrong about his neighbor. The desk can say both. Sewell’s parallel keeps only the first.

He ends with names he says were taken. Some were ruined. Some were only forgotten, which is the more ordinary fate. Remembering them is the right instinct. Remembering them as casualties of a race war is the part the desk will not sign.

• Billie Ritchie

  A Scottish comedian in Fred Karno’s company. The tramp argument is his.

• Thelma Todd

  A comic star. She died in a garage in 1935. The death was never settled to anyone’s satisfaction.

• Al St. John

  Keystone. Arbuckle’s nephew. Fuzzy Q. Jones, after the lot had moved on.

• Ben Turpin

  The crossed eyes were his, and so were the Keystone shorts.

• Olive Thomas

  She died in Paris in 1920. The papers could not leave it alone.

• Peggy Pearce

  Keystone. She was in Chaplin’s early shorts. Some bills spelled her Pierce.

• King Vidor

  The Big Parade. Our Daily Bread. A director who kept a hand on his own pictures.

• Ford Sterling

  The first chief of the Keystone Kops.

• Hal Roach

  The other comedy lot. Laurel and Hardy. Our Gang.

• Thomas Ince

  Called the father of the Western. He died in 1924 after a weekend on Hearst’s yacht. The official cause was his heart. The rumor was a bullet. A rumor is not a finding.

• Jean Darling

  Our Gang. A child on a lot that used children.

• Edwin S. Porter

  Edison’s cameraman. The Great Train Robbery, 1903. The story picture, before the studios had a name for it.

The desk scores a story on eight questions. Work. A home. Faith. Courage. Freedom. Self-control. Telling the truth. What you leave behind. Hollywood fails them often. The work is real and then it is stolen by the credit. The home on screen is a set. Faith is a costume or a target. Courage is allowed when it photographs. Freedom belongs to the company that owns the negative. Self-control is what the Code pretended, and what the couch mocked. The truth is whatever the poster needs. What gets left behind is a catalog, not a people who can still tell their own evening.

That failure is the company and the appetite. It is the same smoothing named on the politics page: one scale, one product, a household that receives and does not answer. It is not a bloodline. Edison’s light through a projector does not belong to the heirs of a racial act. It belongs to whoever will tell the truth with it and then turn it off and go be with the people in the house.

Sewell’s last line is that the gangsters stole the kingdom and never owned the light. The kingdom, as a company, was built as much as it was taken, and the taking that is proved is a patent, a contract, a ban, a couch. The light is not Ethnic American property. It is a story, and a story can be refused.

The desk has not scored Hollywood. It has not sat a century down and printed a number. The number, when we give one, is a judgment. This page is the reading.