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(JTA) — Within the hit present “The Sopranos,” veteran actor Jerry Adler performs mob-adjacent Jewish businessman Hesh Rabkin, who made a fortune within the music enterprise a long time earlier. In a primary season episode, Hesh is confronted by a rapper looking for “reparations” for a late Black musician who he says Rabkin didn’t pay pretty for successful file.
When Hesh responds by bragging that he wrote the hit songs he labored on again within the day, Tony Soprano corrects him: “A few Black children wrote that file, you gave your self co-writing credit score since you owned the label.”
The grasping Jewish music mogul has been a standard trope, from the acclaimed work of Spike Lee to the rants of Kanye West. “Stroll Arduous: The Dewey Cox Story,” a 2003 parody of music biopics, made enjoyable of the trope itself by making the file executives into Hasidic Jews, led by Harold Ramis. (They had been depicted as pleasant and never so grasping, and the movie’s writers, Judd Apatow and director Jake Kasdan, are each Jewish.)
The brand new film “Spinning Gold,” which opened in theaters final week, tells the real-life story of Neil Bogart, the founding father of Casablanca Data and a prime music govt of the Nineteen Seventies. It breaks from the mildew of most different music biopics in a few key methods: The protagonist is a music govt, not an artist or a bunch, and the music mogul character — on this case, one other Jewish one — is just not handled as a villain.
The Jewish Brooklyn native whose given identify was Neil Scott Bogatz helped promote bubblegum pop and early disco, signing artists comparable to Donna Summer season, Gladys Knight, Cher and the Village Folks. A notable rock signing was Kiss. In a single scene of “Spinning Gold,” the Bogart character (performed by Jewish actor Jeremy Jordan, who starred within the Broadway hit “Rock of Ages”) implies to Kiss’ Gene Simmons that he signed the band, partially, as a result of Simmons’ and guitarist Paul Stanley’s actual names are Chaim Witz and Stanley Eisen. He pertains to them, the movie argues, as fellow Jewish guys who hailed from the outer boroughs of New York Metropolis. Bogart died of most cancers in 1982.
The film covers an extended span in Bogart’s life and profession, and it reveals him struggling for a few years earlier than hanging gold by shepherding Donna Summer season’s single “Like to Love You Child” to hit standing. Timothy Scott Bogart, the mogul’s son and the movie’s director, didn’t need to depict Bogart as an unambiguous hero. Within the story, the elder Bogart is proven dishonest on his first spouse with the lady who would turn into his second, and the movie additionally makes clear that his file label was closely in debt for a few years. It does typically present him at odds with the expertise, comparable to when the members of Kiss complain to him that their profession hasn’t taken underneath Bogart’s tutelage.
“I don’t know that I checked out it as protagonist or antagonist, I believe he was a little bit of each,” Timothy Scott Bogart instructed the Jewish Telegraphic Company.
“However I do suppose the character of the manager, normally, has been a much-maligned character… actually within the music biopic world,” he added. “And that’s not who Neil Bogart was.”
He added that the private relationships between his father and the label’s artists had been at all times valued. He remembers his household happening trip with Donna Summer season, and Gladys Knight and members of Kiss being at his residence.
The youthful Bogart, who beforehand produced the 2019 Vietnam Conflict drama “The Final Full Measure,” stated that somewhat than counting on any e book or article, he constructed the movie based mostly on interviews he did along with his artists, executives and others concerned within the story over a number of years.
Jews have been a part of the enterprise facet of the American music business for many of its existence, partially due to the best way they had been shut out of many professions within the first half of the twentieth century. Music govt Seymour Stein, who handed away this week after an extended profession of working with the likes of Madonna and The Ramones, stated in a 2013 interview that “music is one thing Jews had been good at and so they might do. All immigrants into America tried their hand at show-business.”
Some executives within the early days of the music business — Jewish and non-Jewish — did exploit their artists, doing all the pieces from underpaying Black artists to denying them songwriting credit or royalties. Moguls of the previous with reputations for doing so included Herman Lubinsky of Savoy Data. Others, just like the not too long ago deceased Stein and Milt Gabler of Commodore Data, had higher reputations. Historians have differing opinions on particular people.
Neil Bogart is proven with The Isley Brothers in June 1969. (Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Pictures)
“There’s a scholarly controversy between those that have a look at the moguls and say that they exploited the [Black] musicians and those that say that they inspired and made doable Black success in music,” stated Jonathan Sarna, the professor of American Jewish historical past at Brandeis College. “Each use the identical information, however some level to the cash Jews made and others level to the musicians that Jews found and promoted.”
Spike Lee drew fireplace for his depiction of fictional Jewish music executives Moe and Josh Flatbush (performed by John and Nicholas Turturro) in his 1990 film “Mo’ Higher Blues.”
“Within the historical past of American music, there haven’t been Jewish folks exploiting black musicians?” Spike Lee stated in his protection to New York Journal in 2006. “Within the historical past of music? How is that being stereotypical?”
Different “dangerous man” examples embrace Paul Giamatti’s Jerry Heller in 2015’s “Straight Outta Compton” and David Krumholtz’s Milt Shaw in 2004’s “Ray.” “Cadillac Data,” from 2008, starred Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess, the Jewish founding father of the legendary Chess Data who, the movie implied, gave his largely Black artists Cadillacs, however not at all times the cash they had been owed. “Get On Up,” the 2014 biopic of James Brown that starred the late Chadwick Boseman, forged Fred Melamed as famed Cincinnati mogul Syd Nathan (a mentor to Seymour Stein); journalist RJ Smith criticized the movie for depicting Nathan as a “bumptious racist.”
Actor Seth Rogen mentioned the trope in his 2021 memoir “Yearbook.” He tells the story of working into comic Eddie Griffin, who at a late level in his profession had been struggling to get film roles. Griffin instructed Rogen to “inform your Jews to let different folks make some motion pictures!”
Rogen known as this “insane as a result of he’s actually ignoring the truth that if there’s one factor that Jewish individuals are NOT above, it’s creating wealth producing issues which are fronted by Black folks. Anybody who’s ever seen a biopic of any Black musician is aware of the character I’m speaking about, and he’s normally very appropriately performed by my pricey pal David Krumholtz.” (Krumholtz performed one of many Hasidic producers in “Stroll Arduous.”)
“It’s actually true that, within the post-war U.S. music business, Jews had been extra more likely to be producers and impresarios than performers. And, given the significance of African-Individuals within the post-war U.S. music business, that inevitably created a selected type of relationship with sure Jews within the music business,” sociologist and music critic Keith Kahn-Harris instructed JTA.
“That relationship begins to be put underneath scrutiny and underneath pressure from the late Sixties, because the civil rights coalition began to crumble and folks of shade started to say their company,” he added. “It’s additionally true that the post-war music business was an unregulated area with an almost-normative sample of exploitation of performers. Put all that collectively and you’ve got all of the components for vital African-American-Jewish stress. Plus, the rapacious Jewish impresario sits simply with ingrained antisemitic stereotypes.”
“Spinning Gold” isn’t the one counterexample to the development in movie. In final 12 months’s Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance With Any person,” the Jewish label honcho character, Clive Davis (performed by Stanley Tucci), is handled as a benevolent guiding mild. In that case, Davis was among the many producers of the film.
“Jewish promoters, like all music promoters, had been and are before everything enterprise folks promoting a product. Their objective: promote a performer to reap earnings. The performers have clearly a distinct stake within the transaction, though each rely on the opposite,” stated Hasia Diner, an American Jewish historical past professor at New York College.
“If the hero of the movie is the performer then her/his perspective is the main target and virtually by definition the promoter’s perspective has to mirror the antagonist encounter. Does that advantage being known as antisemitism? Not in my estimation. By doing so it undermines actual antisemitism. It additionally ignores the inherent enterprise transaction concerned,” Diner stated.
How can filmmakers navigate this?
“With nice care,” Kahn-Harris stated. “It does imply listening to how such a portrayal will be correct and never feeding on deeper antisemitic stereotypes. There’s no a method of doing this. It requires care and a focus to the historic file.”
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