Visionary Carl Laemmle, affectionately known as Uncle Carl by many, lived a truly remarkable life. This documentary does a fine job of sharing his life story with the audience.
Raised as one of the youngest children in a poor Jewish family in Germany, seventeen-year-old Carl emigrated to the United States for a better life with fifty dollars in his pocket in 1884, before the Statue of Liberty was there to greet him. He lived a fairly uneventful life as a bookkeeper in Michigan until he was thirty-nine, at which point he began buying nickelodeons in Chicago after falling in love with movies. Carl, a visionary, saw great things for the future of movies and their potential to entertain to a degree that others did not yet envision.
As Laemmle's success in the film industry increased, Thomas Edison hit him with a slew of lawsuits, claiming a monopoly on moving pictures. Laemmle found ways to challenge Edison, including innovating the star system, which promotes individual actors and garners them a following. This enticed the top actors to work with the independent studios. After founding Independent Motion Pictures in New York, Laemmle wanted to get away from Edison's legal hounding, so he put distance between them by moving to Los Angeles.
In California Carl was a maverick in the Hollywood film business; he formed Universal Pictures and built Universal Studios in the San Fernando Valley, utilized nepotism to employ many in his large family, and made classic, hit films about monsters, (including Dracula and Frankenstein), as those on screen were better than the real life political monsters the world was dealing with.
Oh and nothing much else except that Uncle Carl also worked tirelessly to get Jews out of Hitler's Germany -- he saved over 300 Jewish families.
This film is interesting and inspiring. I saw it on Kanopy. I think it's streaming on various platforms.