During his early 20th-century heyday as a New York City showman, B.S. Moss (1878-1951) lived a professional life that was likely more intense than that of any modern movie executive. He found himself with more than a dozen theatres to stock with daily entertainment. Each hybrid show—part film, part live act—might involve hundreds of moving parts, from live dancers, jugglers, tumblers and musicians, to the technicians required to operate the still finicky and unreliable technology used to project films. Vaudeville content turned over rapidly, and critics could be scathing, taking pains to point out if a pretty actress looked overweight or a comedian seemed hung over.
Since many homes, businesses and hotels didn’t have telephones, merely getting hold of an actor or projectionist to fill an open date might take days. In one episode that made its way to a New York City entertainment columnist, a famous comedian touring the Midwest found out that he’d be starring in a B.S. Moss vaudeville show only after he saw his face staring back at him from an advertisement contained in a local newspaper.
Another complicating factor was the fragmented nature of the entertainment marketplace. The mass market was still in its infancy. Moss had to monitor and accommodate the particular tastes of each neighborhood in which he exhibited. New York City was a patchwork of immigrant languages. And what slayed the Irish might fall flat with the Germans. His publicity scrapbooks, some of them surviving in archives to this day, contain clippings in a dozen different melting-pot languages.
A dearth of quality films continued to present yet another problem. Even by World War I, the industry was taking its time about graduating from shorter novelty reels. Until the early 1920s, few Hollywood producers were making feature-length dramas. And when they did finally produce them in volume, another problem arose: the industry organized into vertically integrated anti-competitive trusts, which played their own movies at their own theatres so as to freeze out “independents” like B.S. Moss. It was a fundamentally anti-competitive arrangement that eventually would lead to a landmark 1948 Supreme Court judgment, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., which had the effect of busting up Hollywood’s exploitative old-time studio system.
And so Moss and his successors were required to navigate the industry’s vertically integrated, oligopolistic structure until well into the modern blockbuster era. The principal way of doing so was having enough seats in a circuit that the producers couldn’t ignore it. This made the struggle for market share all the more ruthless: You couldn’t get an audience without good films. And if you lost the audience, you’d lose the films, too.
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B.S. Moss’ life began in what is now the Polish town of Wisnicz. He’d come to America as a small child, and began adulthood as a humble cloth sponger in one of New York’s many sweatshops. Having achieved success and respectability in the entertainment business, he’d become a so-called “model immigrant,” and one who found his calling at a turning point in the history of North American Jewry.
Until the late nineteenth century, there had long been a relatively small, generally well-assimilated Jewish population in urban centers such as New York and Boston, making up a baseline community of about 300,000 in total. But these well-established Jews were completely dwarfed in number by the much poorer arrivals who showed up en masse during the last two decades of the twentieth century—men and women fleeing the anti-Jewish pogroms that tore through Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine, Latvia, and Poland.
The Warsaw pogrom, which took place just months after B.S. Moss and his family set sail for America in 1880, had played out in typical fashion: a fire scare at a crowded church had given rise to a deadly stampede which some claimed had been the deliberate work of pickpockets looking to prey on a panicky crowd. When a baseless rumor spread that a pair of Jewish criminals had been spotted at the church, a mob attacked Jewish homes and businesses, and days of violence followed.
To the small, largely wealthy population of established American Jews, many of whose ancestors had come over from Germany generations earlier, these freshly arrived co-religionists could seem like migrants from another planet: tailors, peasants and laborers who grew up in ghettos or impoverished farming communities, often beaten down psychologically and physically within the semi-feudal societies of eastern Europe.
As Hadassa Kosak wrote in Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881-1905, many German Jews “regarded the East European immigrants as clannish, incorrigibly dirty in their everyday habits, overly inclined towards peddling, at best a source of social embarrassment, at worst a cause of antisemitism.” For their part, the new arrivals tended to reject the top-down bureaucratic oversight of established Jewish organizations in favor of the more informal, kin-based, landsmanshaft mutual-aid societies that grew out of their villages in the old country.
There was also a concern, foreshadowing more modern anxieties about Muslims, that the new arrivals would exhibit, in the words of one activist from the period, an excessively “rigid adherence to the rites of Judaism.” And so a sort of de facto segregation sprouted up within North American Jewry, with synagogues and civic institutions being dominated by either the old guard or the new arrivals. In most communities, this intra-Jewish cultural gulf wouldn’t be fully bridged until well into the twentieth century.
The divide between the two groups was not as simple as rich uncle versus poor cousin. Despite the massive gulf in wealth and refinement, the new arrivals brought with them a feisty capitalist spirit, a resource common to all waves of immigrants whose faculties are unleashed in lands of opportunity where they suddenly are unburdened by old-world tethers of faith, race and caste.
More generally, these Jews also brought with them a profound sense of the epic possibilities that the idea of the United States represented. Native-born Americans of the Gilded Age had witnessed numerous financial busts and panics, epic political scandals and the murder of two presidents within sixteen years, not to mention the Civil War, which had taken 620,000 lives (one in 50 Americans). Their America wasn’t the paradise that Hollywood’s largely foreign-born architects would encode in film.
B.S. Moss bridged the two Jewish worlds as a sort of perfect hybrid. On one hand, the historical record suggests that he spoke, dressed and wrote as a well-mannered gentleman of the era, essential qualities for a business manager seeking to lease and buy respectable theatres, raise capital and lure top talent into unproven new fields. On the other hand, he channeled the ambition, imagination, and patriotism of a man with humble roots, whose relationship with America remained in its honeymoon phase. This compound skill seems to have defined B.S. Moss’s personality. His entry in a century-old who’s-who volume called Distinguished Jews of America informs us that “Mr. Moss makes no pretenses…No frocks or frills about him; no affected airs…He looks down upon no one and treats everyone as his equal…a keen, intelligent and sober-minded man.”
Adapted, with permission, from Magic in the Dark: One Family’s Adventures in the Movie Business, by Charles B. Moss and Jonathan Kay. Published by Sutherland House.