Of course, in the old Hollywood, run by those Jewish moguls like it was their fish stall or schmutter shop on the Lower East Side, things would never have got this far. You think Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor (Paramount) or the Warner brothers, Jack and Harry, would have let the mask they were carefully making slip so grievously? Sony Films, run at a distance by a Japanese corporation, have certainly besmirched that culture's honour and their reputation is now at rock bottom, lying in smithereens of disrespect, unveiled as a toxic culture.
It is generally accepted that the Jewish moguls founded Hollywood to create an American dream that aided their own dreams of assimilation. "The outsiders who dreamt up America" is how the group has been labelled and the names of MGM, Columbia, Warners and Paramount can basically be traced to within an 800km radius of Vilnius, as my old Observer colleague Philip French first revealed in his now classic 1969 book The Movie Moguls.
Excluded by what they came to see as a WASPish East Coast elite, so the story goes, these businessmen found fertile ground in the sunny climate of California. Many idealistic images of American life depicted in early Hollywood movies are an immigrant's dream of a brave new world, stories of the triumph of the determined little guy battling overwhelming odds.
There's a story about Louis B. Meyer told in Neil Gabler's book An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, that says he was so desperate to become an American that he officially changed his birth-date to July 4.
The litany of stars who changed their names to disguise Jewish roots is well known - Betty Perske (Lauren Bacall), Bernie Schwarz (Tony Curtis) and Issur Demsky (Kirk Douglas) - and stands as testament to the determination of the moguls to ensure the continuation and growth of their businesses and their visions to give the public what they thought they wanted.
In the heyday of their studios (roughly 1924 until the early 1960s), things were run with an iron hand and a ruthlessness that came from the streets, from the scrap-metal yards where Meyer first laboured, or the meat markets where the Warners hardened their business sense and sharpened their knives - not for nothing did their studio become known as the "working class" studio during the hard-scrabble recovery of the early 1930s.
Particularly, it was the stars' images that were protected by press agents. No scandals leaked out, even in the days of gossip writers such as Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons. The playground, social-media-age emails between Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin about Angelina Jolie and Barack Obama simply would not have occurred back in the heyday.
"I made a series of remarks that were meant only to be funny, but in the cold light of day, they are in fact thoughtless and insensitive - and not funny at all," explained Rudin. Can you imagine the old moguls making such mealy-mouthed, lawyer-scripted, corporate-crawling mea culpae? Never. Humble pie was not on the old menu.
Sony may have belatedly recouped some money by releasing The Interview - incidentally, written and directed by Jews - online and through various new platforms. Some may come to view this as smart operating by Sony. I mean, they could hardly have paid for greater publicity. Yet Sony's brand lies in bits, accused of not supporting its film-makers, of betraying free speech, of being petty, two-faced, untrustworthy and cowardly. Oy vey!
The old moguls ran their shops like family businesses, or like Friday-night dinners. Sure, there'd be arguments and shouting, but it stayed indoors. Never would such vulnerability have been allowed to be shown in public. Faced with global mockery and systemic meltdown, the old boys would simply have stubbed their cigars out in fury and ordered some new clichés.
