"We should never forget that Hollywood was built by Europeans, and the old Jewish boys from Eastern Europe"
About this Quote
Hollywood loves to sell itself as a homegrown factory of dreams, but Schell yanks the curtain back and points to the immigration story underneath the myth. As an actor who moved between European art cinema and American studio culture, he’s not making an abstract history note; he’s staking a claim about who gets remembered when an industry writes its own origin story. The line “We should never forget” isn’t nostalgic, it’s corrective, aimed at a selective amnesia that turns Hollywood into a purely American triumph instead of a patchwork built by outsiders.
The phrase “built by Europeans” widens the frame, then “the old Jewish boys from Eastern Europe” sharpens it into something more pointed and personal. “Old Jewish boys” carries a deliberate double edge: affectionate shorthand for the scrappy, hustling founders, but also a wink at how power in Hollywood has long been described in insider, vaguely tribal terms. Schell is acknowledging that a group shaped by displacement and exclusion helped design America’s most influential fantasy machine - and that their outsider status was part of the engine. They knew how to package reinvention because they had to live it.
Context matters: European talent has often been welcomed for prestige while simultaneously treated as foreign decoration; Jewish founders have been alternately celebrated, stereotyped, or erased depending on the politics of the moment. Schell’s intent is memory as leverage: if Hollywood was made by immigrants and minorities, today’s gatekeeping and culture-war purity tests look not only hypocritical, but historically illiterate.
The phrase “built by Europeans” widens the frame, then “the old Jewish boys from Eastern Europe” sharpens it into something more pointed and personal. “Old Jewish boys” carries a deliberate double edge: affectionate shorthand for the scrappy, hustling founders, but also a wink at how power in Hollywood has long been described in insider, vaguely tribal terms. Schell is acknowledging that a group shaped by displacement and exclusion helped design America’s most influential fantasy machine - and that their outsider status was part of the engine. They knew how to package reinvention because they had to live it.
Context matters: European talent has often been welcomed for prestige while simultaneously treated as foreign decoration; Jewish founders have been alternately celebrated, stereotyped, or erased depending on the politics of the moment. Schell’s intent is memory as leverage: if Hollywood was made by immigrants and minorities, today’s gatekeeping and culture-war purity tests look not only hypocritical, but historically illiterate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|
More Quotes by Maximilian
Add to List
