“Forgotten Hollywood”- A Movie Studio with Substance…
Manny P. here…
One Hollywood film studio has commanded A-list talent since its inception — Elizabeth Taylor, Morgan Freeman, Sandra Bullock, Michael Douglas, Nicole Kidman — and they all worked for free. What studio head has such pull? It’s Rabbi Marvin Hier, the mini-mogul of Moriah Films, the movie division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Founded by Hier in 1981, Moriah Films has won two Academy Awards for their historical documentaries. He established the movie studio a few years after opening the Wiesenthal Center in 1977. He planned a slide show about the Holocaust, when Fay Kanin, then president of the film academy, suggested he consider making a movie instead. US Senator John Warner was involved with the Wiesenthal Center at the time, and was married to Elizabeth Taylor. She became the narrator for Genocide, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
The dozen movies Moriah Films has made attracted such notables as Michael York, Kevin Costner, Whoopi Goldberg, Brooke Shields, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Richard Dreyfuss, Patrick Stewart, Ed Asner, Martin Landau, and Ben Kingsley. Its latest production, The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers, featuring the narration of Sandra Bullock and Christoph Waltz, opens Wednesday in Los Angeles, and travels to more cities next month. Kingsley, Douglas, and Waltz, have offered their talents a couple of times.
The Wiesenthal Center, a human-rights organization providing Holocaust education and fights anti-Semitism, began its deep ties to Hollywood when Frank Sinatra and Taylor were on the original board of directors and made introductions throughout Hollywood. Today, movie moguls Jeffrey Katzenberg and Ron Meyer link the Wiesenthal Center to the film community. Moriah’s productions have been screened theatrically, and broadcast around the world on Showtime, HBO,Starz/Encore, as well as, German, French, Russian, Chinese, and Israeli television outlets.
Hier has fond memories of watching Roy Rogers’ pictures at New York’s Palestine Theater as a boy, and remains a movie fan today. But Moriah Films aims to do more than entertain. He said it’s important to put Jewish history on film to reach worldwide audiences for years to come.
We have to agree…
Until next time> “never forget”
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 2nd, 2013 at 1:35 am and is filed under Blog by Manny Pacheco. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
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