Ben Urwand attempts to prove that Hollywood studios appeased the Nazis to protect their profits in Germany, an important segment of the overseas market for American movies. Urwand alleges that George Gyssling, the German consul in Los Angeles, helped to determine which films got made or abandoned. According to Urwand, money (from Jewish financiers, supposedly) helped to finance the Nazi war machine, linking Urwand with journalist Edwin Black's book indicting Thomas Watson of IBM. Urwand presents a confusing mix of “Hollywood,” Jews, Nazis, and American culture that was supposedly already boisterously fascist, as “proven” by the scrapping of a Hollywood adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here.
The Collaboration has earned a mixed reception. Urwand accuses prominent critics of his thesis of being either protectors of “the business” (e.g., David Denby of The New Yorker) or turf-protecting authors of competing works (e.g., Thomas Doherty, whose book on...