Fatherhood Quote by Lew Wasserman

The sentence reads like a piece of casual logistics, but it’s really a miniature portrait of old Hollywood power: the reflex to treat other people’s sacred milestones as movable parts in someone else’s schedule. Wasserman, the producer-as-kingmaker who helped turn talent agencies into empires, speaks in the language of control: “not available,” “only other,” “I needed,” “I would pay.” The moral universe is simple and transactional. Scarcity is solved not by compromise but by purchase.

The detail that it’s “a Jewish bar mitzvah” matters, and not just as scene-setting. It’s a rite of passage anchored in community obligation and religious tradition, the opposite of a corporate meeting that can be rescheduled. By naming it, Wasserman signals he knows exactly what he’s displacing. The subtext isn’t open antisemitism so much as something colder: assimilationist entitlement. A Jewish mogul (Wasserman was Jewish) leveraging money and status to override another Jewish family’s moment suggests the way Hollywood’s insiders sometimes replicated the very hierarchies they’d escaped. Success becomes permission.

The “adjoining room which was smaller” is the punchline without a joke: you can keep your ceremony, just reduced. That’s the producer’s worldview in one move - the show must go on, but someone else’s show can be downsized to make space for yours. It’s also a reminder of how institutional power hides inside polite verbs like “move,” making domination sound like coordination.