It was sunny 300 days a year—perfect for outdoor movie-making—and, seemingly, it was a safe distance from the New York-based crime syndicate that monopolized the infant movie industry. For just that reason, D.W. Griffith, the son of a Confederate Colonel, began making movies there in 1911. Griffith was proud of his Confederate heritage, and often bragged about his father’s military career. At the end of the Civil War, Colonel Jacob Griffith was the man assigned to escort Jefferson Davis to the last bastion of the Confederacy—a patch of Kentucky that held out in hopes the Confederacy would rise again. That’s where D.W. Griffith grew up.

Few noticed Griffith’s Hollywood film’s until the 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation, based on a book by Confederate racist Thomas Dixon, entitled The Clansman. In his autobiography, Griffith described Dixon’s inspiring effect: “I skipped quickly through the book until I got to the part about the Klansman, who according to no less than Woodrow Wilson, ran to the rescue of the downtrodden South after the Civil War. I could just see the Klansman in a movie with their white robes flying.”

The film, an unprecedented 190 minutes long, depicted post-Civil War black legislators as barefoot drunks, and told the violent story of Ku Klux Klan justice following the attempted rape of a white woman by a freed slave. Some of the films more offensive captions touting the “Aryan birthright” of whites had to be edited out to decrease the likelihood of race riots. In its final cut, it made such a splash that Confederate racist Woodrow Wilson previewed it in the White House, and said, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

The Birth of a Nation was a revolutionary blockbuster. Ticket prices were raised from 15 cents all the way to $2 dollars, to fleece the public. In spite of bitter legal battles led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, it is estimated that the film made a profit of approximately $100 million dollars—a huge sum even in today’s Hollywood dollars. Griffith became an instant legend. Meanwhile, racists across America were inspired to revive the Ku Klux Klan, which swelled to a membership of more than 1.5 million by 1923.

Among the profiteers of The Birth of a Nation was Louis B. Mayer, the son of a junk-dealer who ran a string of organized crime-controlled theatres in Massachusetts. Mayer took his windfall profits and moved to—you guessed it—Hollywood, where he hoped to produce movies of his own. In Hollywood, Mayer teamed up with movie-maker Irving Thalberg, and after a series of mergers, formed Hollywood’s legendary Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios, which he ran as a mafia Godfather. Mayer became the archetype for all movie-magnates, and soon earned the largest salary in America. Among his many successful films was the wildly popular Gone with the Wind, yet another glorification of the Confederacy.

Louis B. Mayer’s movie-making salary, however, was not his only source of income. When Prohibition began in 1920, his movie theatres were among the favorite distribution centers for bootlegged liquor. Many theatres also contained illegal speakeasies and gambling casinos that provided additional cash-flow to the bosses. Hollywood, meanwhile, was a mob haven for the likes of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegal, and John Roselli, the designated Hollywood power-brokers for the Crime Syndicate.

With the end of Prohibition in 1933, the Crime Syndicate looked to tighten its grip on Hollywood to replace its lost bootlegging income. As we will see, labor relations between the studios and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) were the immediate point of entry.

Initially, since the early days of movie-making, revenue from the theatres was the chief source of income for the studios. As a result, theatre owners, particularly if they were not under the immediate control of the Crime Syndicate, had enormous leverage in Hollywood. Labor unions, meanwhile, such as the Motion Picture Operators Union, an affiliate of the IATSE, had enormous leverage in the theatres: A strike against a movie house or a chain of movie houses could be disastrous. Hence, the Crime Syndicate employed experts in labor-racketeering, who often used crude methods such as bone-breakings and assassinations for strike-breaking operations, and the like. Or they would simply take control of the unions. For example, Hollywood mobsters Bugsy Siegal and John Roselli, in their capacities as representatives for the Crime Syndicate, also operated as “union representatives” of the IATSE.

In 1934, the Crime Syndicate put in the fix by electing a low-level crook, George E. Browne, to the chairmanship of the IATSE. Crucial votes were delivered through the strong-arm tactics of key bosses including, notably, Moe Dalitz of the Cleveland Crime Syndicate. Browne, meanwhile, had close ties to Al Capone through his business partner, Willie Bioff, a black-market meat-salesman who ran a Chicago prostitution ring on the side. Together, Browne and Bioff moved to Hollywood where they ran an extensive racket which extorted mounds of cash from the studios in exchange for labor peace. The studio bosses were willing clients. They profited from a steady pool of cheap labor supplied by the Crime Syndicate. The public, meanwhile, flocked to theatres in record numbers, where they surrendered much of their meager earnings to the mob in a vain attempt to escape the realities of the Great Depression.

No exposé of the Crime Syndicate control of Hollywood would be complete without including the role of the Music Corporation of America (MCA). MCA started out as a booking agency for jazz and pop bands that played in Al Capone’s seedy Chicago nightclubs. As MCA expanded its operations nationally, club owners who resisted MCA’s exclusive bookings often found themselves the victims of violent attack. By the mid 1930’s, MCA counted over half the major bands in the United States as their clients. When MCA moved its headquarters to Hollywood simultaneously with the Syndicate takeover of the IATSE, it branched out to represent many of Hollywood’s acting stars. MCA was so notorious that the Head of the Justice Department’s Anti-Trust Division called it an “octopus with tentacles reaching out to all phases and grasping everything in show business.”

Much of the Syndicate control of Hollywood appeared to finally come to an end with the exposure of IATSE chairman George E Brown and his Syndicate partner Willie Bioff. Angry union activists, though their lives were continually threatened, had finally uncovered Brown’s vast extortion racket. By 1940, an intense legal battle began, during which it was discovered that Bioff, among his multiple crimes, had failed to complete a jail term in Chicago for pandering. However, even as Brown and Bioff were sent to the Alcatraz Island Penitentiary, the Syndicate continued to increase its grip on Hollywood—with a whole new breed of operatives. Unlike the Prohibition-era gangsters that preceded them, the new operatives were slick, well-educated lawyers and accountants.

The slickest of all was one Sidney Korshak, an attorney who cut his teeth as a fixer for Chicago Syndicate bosses during the 1930s. According to Bioff’s own testimony, just before he was convicted, Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe told him, “Korshak is our man, and I want you to do what he tells you. He is not just another lawyer but knows our gang and figures our best interest. Pay attention to him, and remember: Any message he may deliver to you is a message from us.”

According to Teamster boss Jack Presser, “Sidney’s the smoothest son-of-a-bitch in the business. There’s nothing he can’t fix… and he doesn’t even have an office. The guy doesn’t even have a briefcase.” In fact, Korshak maintained a formal law office in Chicago, though he lived an extremely elusive life in Hollywood in order to escape prosecution. Former Paramount Pictures Studio head described Korshak, who survived into the 1990s, as follows: “Let’s just say that a nod from Korshak, and the Teamsters change management; a nod from Korshak and Santa Anita and Vegas shut down; a nod from Korshak, and the Dodgers can suddenly play night baseball. Am I exaggerating? Quite the contrary. In the spirit of confidentiality, it’s an underplay.” According to the FBI, Syndicate boss Sidney Korshak was the most powerful lawyer in the world.

If Hollywood’s financial-administrative side is not bad enough, one should consider the cultural-psychological side.

The fact that movies such as The Birth of a Nation would have a powerful influence on the psychological character of the population was understood by social-engineers from the very beginning. In 1915, the same year Hollywood revived the Ku Klux Klan, Harvard social-engineer Hugo Munsterberg, published a book entitled The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, in which he wrote “The spellbound audience in a picture house is certainly in a state of heightened suggestibility and is ready to receive suggestions… [We] cannot overlook the fact that the masses of today prefer to be taught by pictures rather than words. The fact that millions are daily under the spell of the performances on the screen is established. The high degree of suggestibility during those hours in the dark house must be taken for granted… [T]he photoplay must have an incomparable power for the remolding and upbuilding of the national soul.”

Two years earlier, Munsterberg participated in a series of historic seminars at the home of famous social-engineer Max Weber. Among the participants was Georg Lukacs, a prominent member of the Communist International, who became the Deputy Commissar of Culture and Education in the short-lived 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic. Three years later, Lukacs, together with a group of radical Communist intellectuals, gathered to meet in the German state of Thuringia. Among the topics was the failure of the revolution in Hungary, and the prospects for a lasting revolution in the West. The notorious conclusion they came to was that the reason Communism failed in Hungary, whereas it succeeded further to the East, was that the West had too much optimism. Lukacs asserted that Westerners, unlike Russians, did not believe that “the world has been abandoned by God,” and therefore, did not comprehend the need for a revolution. The key to spreading revolution was the spread of “Kulturpessimismus”—cultural pessimism.

One of Georg Lukacs’ close collaborators was Theodore Adorno, who in 1937 became the head of the New York-based ‘Radio Research Project,’ which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The purpose of the project was to test the hypothesis that radio could be used to "atomize" and manipulate the thinking of the population. Adorno had observed that people "listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear… They are not childlike… but they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded." Among the findings of the Radio Research Project were 1) People tend to become addicted to the radio based on a "what happens next?" format. 2) Listeners react to format, not content, as in the famous Orson Welles, War of the Worlds broadcast which many believed was describing an actual invasion, in spite of the fact that there were repeated clear warnings that the show was fictional, and 3) Repetition is the key to popularity. That is, if you play it enough, people will think it's good, even if it's awful, and, most importantly, they will believe it, even if it’s a lie. Any lie can become popular opinion if it is repeated enough times on the radio.

In 1941, Adorno moved to Hollywood to continue his work in what he called the “culture industry.” He immediately began a book-length sociological study entitled The Dialectics of Enlightenment, in which he identified Hollywood as the place to carry out Lukacs’ bizarre revolution. Adorno was not alone in Hollywood. Among a number of fellow revolutionaries who had migrated to Hollywood to become screenwriters and movie-maker, was Alexander Korda, who had been a member of the Peoples Directory for the Film Arts—a component of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. (Bela Lugosi, who became famous for his Hollywood role as Dracula, had also been a member.) Korda had been in Hollywood since the 1920’s, when he landed a job as a director at First National Studios, which was owned by Crime Syndicate boss Joseph Kennedy.

In 1927, Korda hired Aldous Huxley (the author of Brave New World) as a screenwriter. Huxley, perhaps more than any other person, set the pace for the “culture industry” in Hollywood. The same year Huxley was hired by Korda, he penned an article for Harpers Magazine entitled “The Outlook for American Culture: Some Reflections in a Machine Age, in which he wrote, “The rotary press, the cinema, the radio, the phonograph are used not, as they might so easily be used, to propagate culture, but its opposite. All the resources of science are applied in order that imbecility may flourish and vulgarity cover the whole earth. That they are rapidly doing so must be obvious to anyone who glances at a popular film, listens to popular music on the radio or phonograph.” It should also be obvious to anyone that all the sources of vulgarity cited by Huxley have become immeasurably worse since 1927. Huxley remained in Hollywood for decades. He became increasingly famous primarily for popularizing the use of hallucinogenic drugs.

Co-evil with the expansion of Hollywood degeneracy as the source of society's pit-fiends, was the rise of rock “music.” Beethoven once wrote to Goethe, that music is the highest form of art, because it provides the performer and the listener with the most direct, unmediated access to God’s beauty. Theodore Adorno clearly understood that the opposite could also be true. In his Philosophy of Modern Music, Adorno advocated the use of “radical” music to induce schizophrenia: “What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man… It is not that schizophrenia is directly expressed therein; but the music imprints itself an attitude similar to that of the mentally ill. The individual brings about his own disintegration.” Adorno collaborated with atonal composer Arnold Schöenberg, and popular Hollywood musician Igor Stravinsky to realize this particular branch of his “Kulturpessimismus” project. Adorno, however, could not have known just how successful this project would become; It is obvious that his brand of “music” was mild in comparison to the various forms of rock “music” produced by the Crime Syndicate-owned Hollywood studios in more recent decades.

By the 1960’s Hollywood had become a place to rival the sleaziest sections of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the words of Jeffery Steinberg, (whose skillful research forms the basis of much of this report) “Nothing exemplified that plunge more precisely than the emergence in Hollywood by the mid 1960’s of a large network of active Satanist’s… One man epitomized that process more than anyone else: Kenneth Anger.” Anger was an avante-guard film-maker who dedicated all of his work to the memory of arch-Satanist Aleister Crowley. He had close ties to the Manson cult of Helter Skelter fame. His first commercially distributed film, produced in 1947 and entitled Fireworks, included scenes of men’s genitals blowing up. Subsequent Anger films bore the tiles Lucifer Rising, and My Demon Brother. The title role for Lucifer Rising was played by Anger’s good friend, Anton LaVey, who later gained notoriety as the author of The Satanic Bible.

Though none of Anger’s films were particularly successful in the general public, they were deeply influential in Hollywood. Amongst Anger’s leading protégés was Robert Evans, who produced the revolutionary-Satanic film Rosemary’s Baby. Other Anger protégés were Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, and Dennis Hopper, who are amongst the most popular and influential Hollywood icons. Today, Anger’s work is well-known amongst film-students, and forms an integral part of the curriculum for anyone wishing to make it in Hollywood. Anton LeVay, for example, was amongst the most powerful liaisons between the studios and the recording companies, before he entered his eternal torment in 1997.

Behind the silver-screen, underneath the box-office, and inside your T.V., this is the real Hollywood.