Paul Newman in Exodus
Michael Oren: Holywood: The Birth and Death of a Vision
Thanks to Clarity with Michael Oren
The following essay was written in the late summer of 2023, pre-October 7, in the period we in Israel now regard nostalgically. What a luxury it was, in retrospect, to lament the lack of an international film hub in Israel and to recall my abortive efforts to create one. What an indulgence it was to speculate what it’d been like to film Hollywood blockbusters in Eilat and Tel Aviv instead of, say, Budapest and Malta, and to have the industry’s brightest lights illuminating Dizengoff’s cafes. And yet, precisely now, with Israel’s global image at an all-time nadir, with Israeli soldiers already being portrayed as evil in American-made productions (see, for example, Netflix’s Messiah), the article is hyper-relevant. Not only to the Situation Room, to classrooms, and media, but to the Silver Screen, clarity is urgently needed.
The credits to the season’s blockbuster, starring Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawerence, and Emma Stone, would read, “Filmed on location in the State of Israel.”
That was my dream, one that I’d had for many years but was not in a position to realize, not before I was elected to Knesset. There, and in my capacity as Deputy Minister for Diplomacy, I set about seeking revolutionary ways to improve Israel’s image.
It desperately needed improving. Tarnished by a half-century of what most of the world called “the occupation of the West Bank,” by too-frequent wars, by the growing influence of the country’s Ultra-Orthodox and radical rightwing constituencies, and by inimical campus trends—post-colonialism, anti-racism, wokeism, intersectionality—Israel’s approval ratings, especially among young Western liberals, was plummeting. The old methods of what generations of Israeli diplomats called “hasbarah”—an untranslatable word meaning, roughly, “Israel-explaining”—no longer worked. Needed was an out-of-the-box approach that impacted public opinion in the most profound and time-tested way.
That’s when I remembered history’s greatest single feat of “hasbarah,” one that has never since been replicated. This was the movie, Exodus, based on the internationally bestselling book by Leon Uris and directed by Otto Preminger—both Jewish—and starring the half-Jewish Paul Newman. Hailed by the New York Times as “dazzling, eye-filling, nerve-tingling… a fine reflection of experience that rips the heart,” the film became an instant box office success. It told the story of Holocaust survivors yearning to reach their ancestral homeland, of the Zionist fight against its British occupiers, and the rivalry between two brothers—modeled on David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin—battling with one another as they struggle to be free. There are good Arabs who cooperate with the Zionists and bad Arabs who do not. Fast and loose with facts—the blockade-busting ship “Exodus” never in fact reached Palestine—the plot was widely accepted as history. Exodus was, as a damning review in Film Quarterly claimed, “the best promotion Israel ever had.”
And it couldn’t have been timelier. Exodus hit the theaters a few years after the 1956-57 Suez Crisis in which Israel, in collusion with Britain and France, invaded Egypt. Condemned by Washington as an act of imperialist aggression, the Europeans were forced to withdraw their troops in humiliation and Israel was nearly sanctioned by the United States. The Jewish State’s popularity plummeted. Then, deus ex machina, came Exodus.
Instantly, Israel became all the rage. Actors, famous musicians, artists streamed there. Leonard Bernstein conducted the Israel Philharmonic and Placido Domingo sang for the Israel Opera (I saw next to him once at gala and he spoke to me in Hebrew). The American Jewish community could not have been prouder. Though only five years old at the time, my father rushed to take me to see the film. The doors of the Ark at the Reform Temple in our town opened with its Academy Award-winning theme, by Jewish composer Ernest Gold. It’s lyrics—“This Land is mine, God gave this Land to me”—would be politically unpalatable today.
Ari Ben Canaan, the unflappable, Holy Land-loving Sabra portrayed by Newman, became the image of the Israeli harbored by an entire generation of movie-goers. That image was reenforced in 1966 by the cringeworthy Cast a Giant Shadow, purportedly the story of Israel’s American volunteer general Mickey Marcus, with an all-star cast of Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Angie Dickenson, and John Wayne. The Six-Day War, fought the following year, was seemingly won by an army of Aris. But then, after the Yom Kippur War trauma of 1973, the oil boycott and the West’s awakening to the Palestinian problem, Ari became something else—a put-on, in the best of cases, and in the worst, an oppressor. Newman would later be quoted as saying that Exodus was the one movie he regretted making.
Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow were not the first major motion pictures to be filmed in Israel—that distinction belongs to Kirk Douglass’s Judith from 1953—but they were very much the last. Thereafter, the industry went the way of American liberal politics and, in films such as The Little Drummer Girl (1984) and Munich (2005), drew a moral equivalency between Mossad agents and Palestinian terrorists. Israeli filmmaker Menachem Golan made several forgettable action films, among them Delta Force, in the 1980s and 1990s, shooting at his Cannon Group studios in Nevei Ilan and Jaffa, but those, too, folded.
Thirty years passed, during which time many countries—Hungary, the Czech Republic, Jordan, and Malta—established lucrative production centers. Dozens of movies, among them Men in Black, John Wick, and Indiana Jones, were made in Morocco. Disney’s latest remake of Aladdin was filmed in Aqaba, just across the bay from Eilat. I found this situation unbearable. Israel had everything these locations offered and more—diverse landscapes and populations, expert film crews and first-class facilities, plus the great hotels, restaurants, and beaches that big-time actors prefer. Why wasn’t Israel the go-to place for making movies, I asked. Why weren’t Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawerence, and Emma Stone shooting here?
The question was especially gnawing for me, and not just because of my involvement with hasbarah. I’d had some Hollywood experience, much of it rather unusual. It started at age 17, when I wrote, produced, and directed a six-minute World War I movie that won the first prize in the PBS National Young Filmmakers’ Competition. A few years later, I moved to Los Angeles to try my hand at production. Standing at the corner of Vine Street, the place where Hollywood was purportedly born, I overheard two producers discussing a shoot. “How would you like to have a smart East Coast college kid working on your set?” I asked them. They gaped at me, then at one another, and nodded.
The set was for a series of Paul Mason wine commercials starring the legendary director Orson Welles. TV viewers of my generation will remember him toasting, “No wine before its time”—words for which I held the cue-cards. Though outrageously well-paid for this task, I ultimately realized that my place was in Israel, not Hollywood, made aliya, and joined the IDF. My involvement in film didn’t end, though. I wrote a script based on the life of storied British general Orde Wingate, which was twice-optioned, as was my book, Six Days of War. A cartoon series, SpaceWaste, was also considered for production. None of these projects came to fruition, alas, but they deepened my knowledge of how Hollywood worked. By the time I entered the Knesset, I felt I knew the business fairly well—well enough, certainly, to undertake a bold initiative I called Holywood.
Everyone’s heard of Bollywood, the multi-billion-dollar Indian film industry that long ago surpassed Hollywood’s ticket sales, and many Israelis unfortunately know Paliwood, the Palestinian propaganda machine dedicated to delegitimizing the Jewish State. Israel’s answer to both of them—creating a dynamic film hub of its own and effectively fighting BDS—would be a bold initiative I called Holywood.
In preparation for launching it, I undertook several diplomatic visits abroad. One of them took me to Malta, where I toured the island’s state-of-the-art studios and listened to Maltese leaders praise film production as a source of national wealth. In India, I met with some of the most famous Bollywood directors and producers, all of them ebulliently pro-Israel. “We want nothing more than to make movies in Israel,” they told me. “Why won’t your government help?” Back in Israel, meanwhile, I commissioned a feasibility study from KMPG, the international advisory group, on the steps necessary for creating a national film industry. The final report, running several dozen pages, was fascinating.
To establish that industry, Israel had to emulate other countries and meet three essential conditions. The first was to provide insurance for cancelled productions. This is crucial for countries prone to natural disasters or military coups or to others, such as Israel, that occasionally find themselves at war. The second criterion was the creation of a national film board to handle all the production companies’ requests. This, too, was vital for Israel. In contrast to New York, for example, where the mayor’s office has all the authority it needs to shut down a major street for a day of filming, doing so in Tel Aviv would require securing permission from the municipality, the national police, the Ministry of Culture and Sport, and perhaps even the Internal Security Service. Israel’s national film board would include representatives from each of these offices and—in theory, at least—coordinate between them. Finally, there was the downpayment. Host countries traditionally pay 25 to 35 percent of production costs up front. This sum, refunded if the film proved profitable, served as an incentive for the studio to make its movie in Jerusalem, say, rather than Marakesh.
These conditions seemed difficult for Israel to meet, but not impossible. Insurance, I was confident, could be obtained, and a national film board empowered. The biggest challenge was financial. But here, at least, I had an advantage in the form of the finance minister who just happened to be the head of my party in Knesset.
A former small business owner, a professional politician with all the imagination of a jackhammer, the minister immediately said no. “If we have $25 or $35 million, we’re going to invest it in a new technology, not in a Hollywood film,” he stated. “There’s a much greater return on our investment.”
Not so, I replied, reminding him that film tourism—the flocking of millions of visitors to locations popularized in movies—was a major industry. And the profits cannot be computed in dollars and cents alone. When the leading Hollywood stars come to Israel and film here, when their movies end with the credit, ‘Filmed in Israel,’ the diplomatic value was would be incalculable, I explained. “It’d be a death blow to BDS.”
The minister was unmoved. Though tantalized by the prospect of a photo-op with Brad Pitt, he ultimately refused to release the funds. If Hollywood was born on LA’s Vine, Holywood died on Israel’s.
More movies would continue to take place in Israel while being shot elsewhere. Golda, starring Helen Mirren, was filmed in North London. Brat Pitt would star in the blockbuster horror film World War Z, key parts of which are set in the Old City of Jerusalem, but which was made almost entirely in Malta. The Spy, about Israeli spy Eli Cohen played by Sasha Baron Cohen but by an otherwise all-Israeli cast and production team, was shot in Hungary. The production of the murder mysteries series Dig, began in Jerusalem in 2014, but, due to the previous war with Hamas in Gaza, was completed in Croatia.
Several years have passed, the last of which has witnessed a war that has traumatized Israeli society and isolated us throughout much of the world. Anti-Semitism has moved from society’s unsavory margins to its acceptable center. Never before—not even in the post-Suez era—has Israel needed Hollywood more. Never before, has Hollywood been less inclined to meet that need.
Future films about Israel will undoubtedly focus on the conflict and strive, at best, for even-handedness. A harbinger of this genre was the 2019 HBO series, Our Boys, written, produced, and filmed in Israel, which won multiple prizes but wounded and enraged a great many Israelis by downplaying Palestinian terror. Movies about the Gaza War, while glancing over the horrors of October 7 and the myriad acts of Israeli heroism that followed, will surely spotlight Palestinian suffering.
Now, then, is the time to revisit my Holywood vision. Now is the time to imagine another Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow. Even in the Internet age, films and television programs are major drivers of public opinion. Just think of the impact of a series about Israeli paramedics—Jews, Arabs, religious and secular—rescuing people on motorcycles (think: ER meets Sons of Anarchy meets the Middle East), or Jewish computer geeks helping the FBI interdict attacks on synagogues, churches, and mosques (Silicon Valley meets Law and Order). Think about it all and don’t refrain from dreaming. After all, 120 years ago, that’s how Hollywood was founded.
