MY HOLLYWOOD JOURNEY     

                  .

​​​My life story was defined by events that occurred before I was born.  My parents fled Vienna, Austria in 1938 when the Nazi's invaded. The effects of that experience on my parents would define my daily existence for my entire life.

 

My Hollywood journey started when I was  three years old and I found myself in the midst of the Elvis Presley organization. On the right is my mom’s first boss, Elvis with her in 1956. The second picture is my mom, me  and her other boss, Elvis' Manager Colonel Parker in 1958, who took my gun and pretended to hold me hostage. A metaphor for what he did to Hollywood during Elvis early career there.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

During my middle school days, I watched my mom and her film production partner Adolph Zukor 2nd produce some shows. In my Bar Mitzvah picture above, Adolph is standing to the right side. His grandfather started Paramount Studios and I learned a lot about the workings of the entertainment industry from watching Adolph and my mom work together. 

 

After college I started producing documentaries. My first feature was created during my mid 20’s, Ticket to Hollywood which was hosted by Jackie Cooper, who inadvertently also found himself serving as my career mentor.

 

I would go on to produce dozens of projects about Hollywood that would be licensed by the Discovery Channel, A and E, Cinemax, Starz/Encore, PBS, Pearson Education and multiple sales abroad. My second feature doc was Hollywood Ghost Stories. My third feature documentary, Hollywood Uncensored (1986) looked at how Hollywood tried to avoid dealing with racial and sexual issues during its ‘golden age’ and how it sometimes couldn’t avoid it, with censorship battles being fought in print, radio, by morality groups and the government.  

 

In 1989, as part of my 26-part series, Hollywood Chronicles for the Discovery Channel, I did an episode on the subject of race in movies and how censorship battles occurred from coast to coast.

​

​​ 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 After nearly two decades of producing, I got tired of the Hollywood shuffle and in 1997, I began to teach communication and filmmaking courses at the college leveI. One advantage my students had was my background as a producer and I found myself on several occasions taking my classes to Hollywood and showing them how the town operated.

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I retired from full time teaching in 2012 and began producing and teaching.  Over the past few years, I revisited the subject of censorship in my hour documentary Roddenberry's Trek  (2019), which focused on the challenges Gene Roddenberry faced by showing a future with a mixed racial group during the same time Jim Crow was alive and well in America’s deep south. I also had the opportunity of developing and narrating a show about my mom and Elvis for the Austrian TV Network ORF, Elvis und das Madschen aus Wien ( Elvis und das Mädchen aus Wien (Doku) - YouTube 

​

In 2023 I received a Botstiber Fellowship that took me to the Central European University in Budapest,  where I began writing and editing the first cut ofThe Hollywood Mogul Wars, a documentary examining the relationship between antisemitism and Hollywood thru the life story of Paramount founder Adolph Zukor -a bucket list project had haunted me since the early 1960's. Inadvertently, it also opened my eyes to my own career and the battles I've fought and others I've avoided. This has become the focus on my current project, The Long Awakening.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​​​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a lifetime of experiencing our pop culture first-hand, I realized I have collected enough evergreen material to tell a unique story of how Hollywood has operated over the past 7 decades; the good, the bad and the truly ugly.

​​

Jim Forsher