Organized crime’s connection to the film industry actually predates Tinseltown, being present for the foundation of the medium itself, when inventor Thomas Edison sicced his hired goons on competitors in an attempt to maintain total control over early motion picture technology. As covered in Hollywood Crime Story, this resulted in said competitors – mostly Jewish businessmen from the east coast – fleeing westward and establishing the town and studio system that would become synonymous with movies as we know them. That same period also begat the rise of organized crime syndicates on the other side of the country – The Outfit in Chicago, the mafia in New York – a result of the criminal economy created by Prohibition.
It didn’t take long for the two worlds to collide. Combining archival footage with talking head interviews, Hollywood Crime Story charts the interdependent relationship between the mob and the movies from development of cinema through to the year 1990, when the dual releases of The Godfather Part III and Goodfellas, per Patterson, “put a nice cap on that era of Hollywood”. Episode one covers the dawn of the motion picture through the 1960s, a period that saw the ascension of the Chicago kingpin Al Capone, who dispatches one of his underlings, Johnny Roselli, out west to explore new business opportunities.
Roselli finds a Hollywood ripe for the picking, quickly establishing himself among its top stars and moguls, including and especially Harry Cohn, the vicious co-founder and president of Columbia Pictures. It was thanks to a half-million-dollar loan from Roselli that Cohn was able to buy out his partners at Columbia, thus giving the mob its first real stakes in one of the major studios. We learn about Capone’s short but lively trip to Hollywood and his initially antagonistic but ultimately positive reception to the loose biopic made about him in 1932, Scarface.
We meet suave but volatile gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who moves to town and immediately starts rubbing shoulders with the industry elite; his underling and future replacement as head of vice in LA, the brutish Mickey Cohen, who got his start in crime at age nine when he held up a movie theater; Cohen’s abusive thug Johnny Stompanato, who dated movie star Lana Turner and was eventually stabbed to death by her teenage daughter; and the corrupt union officials whom the mob inserted as heads of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the Teamsters. We get the startling tale of the bosses putting a hit out on the Screen Actors Guild president, James Cagney, when he wouldn’t hand his union over to them (his life only spared thanks to Scarface lead Paul Muni personally asking Capone to intervene) and a funny anecdote about Cohen robbing leading lady Betty Grable only for her to laugh it off when they reunite years later. Most of these violent characters meet violent ends, but nature abhors a vacuum, so it isn’t long before new shady figures take the reins.
Episode two of Hollywood Crime Story is set between the late 60s and the early 80s. Mount recalls listening to these men “carve out” parts of Hollywood for themselves. Wasserman and Korshack are two of the central figures in this middle chapter, as they were at the heart of a cadre made up of Jewish gangsters and businessmen known as the Supermob, or, alternatively, “the Kosher Nostra”.
The Supermob ran every aspect of Hollywood, from casting to funding to unionizing – as well as off-the-books wheeling and dealing, such as negotiating the release of Frank Sinatra’s kidnapped son – but, as summed up by series narrator Jeff Rechner, “where the mob once used violence to exercise control, these new figures wield the boardroom as their weapon.” Their story leads directly to the creation of the most iconic mob movie of all time: The Godfather. Shepherded by Korshack protege and maverick president of Paramount Pictures Robert Evans, secretly funded in part by mafia and Vatican banker Michele Sindona, and given an unofficial greenlight by crime boss and Italian civil rights campaigner Joe Colombo (who’d be gunned down during a public speech while the film was in production), the huge success of The Godfather went on to reshape how both film-makers and criminals operated. But even as this second generation of shadowy powerbrokers are either dragged into the light or snuffed out for good, they manage to reshape the future of entertainment.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
