The names Har­ry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemm­le, Louis B. May­er, Jack and Har­ry Warn­er, and Adolph Zuck­er are giants in the his­to­ry of con­tem­po­rary Hol­ly­wood, out­siders who dared to invent their own vision of the Amer­i­can Dream. Even to this day, the Amer­i­can val­ues defined large­ly by the movies of these émi­grés endure in Amer­i­can cin­e­ma and cul­ture. Who these men were, how they came to dom­i­nate Hol­ly­wood, and what they gained and lost in the process is the exhil­a­rat­ing sto­ry of An Empire of Their Own.