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The commercial distribution of films has always been premised on a round trip: movies go out, money comes back. Most scholarly attention to distribution-itself a neglected area of study compared to production and exhibition-has tended to ignore the return trip of revenue back to the studio. This article examines the distribution operations of two Hollywood studios, United Artists and Warner Bros., in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. The author discusses numerous challenges the studios faced in collecting and transferring revenue from Japanese exhibitors back to the United States and considers the significance of the studios' decisions in the context of imperial Japan and the lead-up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

[Ben Urwand]'s interpretation of the relationship is disputed by other scholars of the period. He claims that Hollywood studio chiefs, many of them recent eastern European Jewish refugees, enthusiastically worked with Hitler's censors to alter films or even cancel productions entirely in order to protect access to the German film market. \"In the 1930s the Hollywood studios not only collaborated by not making films that attacked the Nazis, they also did not defend the Jews or touch on Germany's persecution of the Jews,\" Urwand said. About his research, Urwand said: \"I wouldn't want what I write to be generalisable about Jews, but specific Jews in the movie business made decisions to work with Nazi leaders.\" Urwand has uncovered evidence that as late as January 1938 the German office of 20th-Century Fox was requesting Hitler's views about American movies. The letter was signed \"Heil Hitler\". By 1932, Urwand writes, Nazi-inspired regulations allowed for film studios to have their permits revoked if films considered damaging to German prestige were shown not only in Germany but anywhere in the world. Hollywood, he claims, enthusiastically acquiesced to Hitler's demands to shape the content of movies to meet Nazi propaganda goals. \"The excuse of ignorance can be ruled out,\" he writes. \"Hollywood executives knew exactly what was going on in Germany, not only because it had been forced to fire its own Jewish salesmen but because the persecution of the Jews was well known at the time.\"

The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler By Ben Urwand Harvard University Press 336pp, Pounds 19.95 ISBN 9780674724747 Published 16 October 2013 Of Hollywood and of Hitler, both fascinating subjects, it seems we can never get enough. Yet the 1940 film The Mortal Storm, for example, which was adapted from a novel about the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, somehow managed to avoid stating just who was being persecuted.

  While \"The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact With [Adolf Hitler]\" contributes to our knowledge about U.S. films in the Nazi era, a surprising dearth of context undermines the author's central thesis and leaves major questions unexplored. For instance, was there Hollywood \"collaboration\" with other fascist governments? A larger point all but ignored in \"The Collaboration\": Hollywood was used to tailoring its product to avoid political and social criticism. [Ben Urwand] doesn't consider the uncomfortable parallels between the censorship sought by Nazi Germany and that practiced by the U.S. film industry's own Production Code, the Roman Catholic Church's Legion of Decency, and state and local film boards.

[...]Doherty characterizes Gyssling's interventions as \"meddling\" rather than terrorizing. [...]for the remainder of the decade, the studios still doing business in Germany were very careful to remain on good terms with Georg Gyssling ... they made all the cuts that he requested ... they were collaborating with Nazi Germany\" (58). According to Urwand \"Bottome emphasized that the question of Jewish pride was 'the crux of the book and the world today'\" (215). [...]she wrote to Franklin, the question, \"What is a Jew?,\" and its answer (Bottome held that Jewish contributions were foundational to Western civilization) \"is the crux of the book and . . . of the world today-to leave it out is to betray . . . how criminally ignorant Nazi anti-Semitism is.\"

A debate is raging over Hollywood's alleged collusion with the Nazis. At stake: the moral culpability of Jewish studio heads during cinema's golden age. Some of the allegations made in the upcoming book The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler by Ben Urwand, are discussed.

In The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler, Ben Urwand reveals that some movie moguls chose to do business with the Nazis instead of making films about them. He discusses his research on the book, why it took so long to write the book, translating the findings into the book and what surprised him most from his research.

Como diz o bordão, a história narrada pelo australiano Ben Urwand parece coisa de cinema: na década de 1930, quando os judeus já eram marginalizados e perseguidos pelo governo de Hitler, os estúdios de Hollywood fizeram acordos com os nazistas em que concordavam em retirar de seus filmes qualquer referência negativa à Alemanha. A história piora quando se recorda que a maioria dos diretores dos estúdios eram, eles próprios, judeus. Piora ainda mais quando se descobre, lendo \"A colaboração\", livro de Urwand lançado no Brasil pela Leya, que o motivo que levou ao acordo foi puramente econômico: o interesse dos magnatas da indústria do cinema no mercado alemão, levando a uma mancha na história de Hollywood difícil de apagar. - Percebi naquele momento que havia uma história que precisava ser contada sobre a relação de Hollywood com a Alemanha nazista - diz Urwand, por e-mail. - A partir dali, tentei contatar a Disney, a MGM e outros estúdios para pesquisar em seus arquivos, mas não obtive acesso. Então voltei a pesquisar em arquivos na Alemanha, e também nos EUA, e cheguei aos relatórios da década de 1930 de um cônsul alemão em Los Angeles que era membro do partido nazista. Ele se encontrava frequentemente com os chefes dos estúdios e informava quais cortes deveriam ser feitos nos filmes para que pudessem continuar fazendo negócios na Alemanha. Confrontei esses relatórios com os roteiros originais dos filmes, e então ficou comprovada a colaboração entre as duas partes. A situação de \"Sem novidade no front\", dirigido por Lewis Milestone, levou seu estúdio, a Universal, a fazer um acordo com o governo alemão em que se dispunha a cortar as cenas incômodas, não só para exibição por lá, mas para todo o mundo. O caso levou à criação de uma lei na Alemanha, em 1932, com concordância dos estúdios de Hollywood, que permitia \"recusar autorização de filmes de produtores que distribuem no mercado mundial filmes cuja tendência ou efeito seja pernicioso ao prestígio da Alemanha\".