Motion Pictures

Actors, directors, producers, and other people from diverse heritages have contributed to America's film industry. Hollywood films have always been a sort of a mirror of the United States— although often a controversial and simplified one—and have always dealt with the representation of American society, of which multiculturalism is a key element.

Most of the classical Hollywood studios were founded by Jewish émigrés from Europe, and after World War I, when Hollywood became the world's top movie producer, practitioners and artists from all over the globe moved to California. Among the first-rate cinematographers of Hollywood's Golden Age were Warner Bros.’ Sol Polito, MGM's James Wong Howe, and Universal's Karl Freund, respectively a Sicilian, a Cantonese, and a Bohemian.

However, when Hollywood portrayed American society, it tended to show the different groups as assimilated to the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture and values, or to promote such assimilation more or less explicitly. For example, although Jewish, studio moguls were reluctant to portray overtly Jewish themes. In The Life of Emile Zola (1937), references to Captain Alfred Dreyfus's Jewish heritage were carefully omitted.

Comedian Danny Kaye (born Kaminsky) was even encouraged to undergo surgery to correct his “Semitic” nose. Similarly, Italian-born director Frank Capra never mentioned his roots in his films but instead became one of the foremost promoters of American values.

Hollywood believed society had to be cohesive under the American WASP values. In the early musical King of Jazz (1930), the final “melting pot” number shows immigrants from various countries entering a giant pot, from which they eventually emerge as Americans. Minorities marked by traits or customs that were too divergent from the mainstream model became the targets of stereotypical portrayals; that is, they were featured in films as minor characters with an either comic/ridiculous or negative nature.