High on a hill in Solebury Township, Pa., not far from the river road that snakes its way north from New Hope, Mark Rosenthal has carved out a thriving patch of Hollywood.

A successful screenwriter for the past 25 years, the 57-year-old Rosenthal traded the glitz of Los Angeles for the greenery of Lower Bucks County a decade ago. But he never stopped spinning his daydreams.

Over the years, he has earned screenwriting credits for a variety of big studio films — The Legend of Billie Jean, The Jewel of the Nile, Superman IV, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered County, Mighty Joe Young, Mercury Rising, Mona Lisa Smile, and Flicka, among others.

Working with his partner, Lawrence Konner, he is currently adapting Gregory Freeman’s Sailors to the End, the story of the deadly 1967 fire aboard the USS Forrestal, for Fox 2000 Films and writing the screenplay for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice for actor Nicolas Cage at Disney.

On Friday evening, Feb. 23, following 7:30 kabalat Shabbat services, Rosenthal will be guest speaker at Kehilat HaNahar, the Little Shul by the River in New Hope, the Reconstructionist congregation where he and his family have been members for the past eight years. He will discuss the ways in which the Jewish roots of the movie business have shaped America’s vision of itself.

“The movie business was essentially founded by Jewish immigrants,” Rosenthal observed as he relaxed in the second-floor studio at his home, where he lives with his wife, Kim, and their two children — Hayley, 15, and Harry, 13, who will celebrate his bar mitzva in Israel in June.

“Every major Jewish studio was founded by Jewish businessmen who fell in love with the new technology,” Rosenthal said. “Most had come from Europe, where there was a lot of anti-Semitism. One of the ideas they invented was a world in which there were no classes…, [a world in which] bad people were punished and good people found success.

“This vision the original founders of the studios had is still with us,” he said. “Most Americans expect their heroes not to kill a dog on screen — and if they do kill a dog, they should be punished for it. It’s a justice these entrepreneurs wanted their country to have.”

Neil Simon once advised his colleagues to write their characters Jewish, but to give them non-Jewish names, said Rosenthal, who holds a doctor of arts degree from the University of the Pacific.

“I think what he meant was, let them have all the humor and neuroses and confusion that we associate with urban, sophisticated people, but don’t tie it to their religious background,” he said. “Make it universal and apply it to the country as a whole. I think everyone does it.”

He pointed to Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump. “He may be a fool,” he said, “but he’s a holy fool out of a Sholom Aleichem story.”

In just such a way, Jewish values have made their way into American culture, according to Rosenthal.

“Certain progressive values at the core of Judaism are also at the core of Hollywood movies,” he said. “Hollywood movies tend to champion legal justice, integration, the little guy against the corporation. Yet Hollywood movies don’t espouse revolution. Those same Jewish businessmen were always afraid of political turmoil, because in times of political turmoil, Jews always suffered. So they’re nicely liberal, rather than shockingly revolutionary.”

By the time Rosenthal, a native of Philadelphia, had made his way to Los Angeles in the early ’80s, most of the original movie moguls — Samuel Goldwyn, Marcus Loew, Louis B. Mayer, Jesse Lasky, Adolph Zukor, David O. Selznick — had passed away.

“If anything, I got to Hollywood in the last days of the individually owned studios,” he said. “When I first got there, Lew Wasserman owned Universal. He could wake up in the morning, fix a bagel, and make all the decisions he wanted. Now, the movies are owned by international conglomerate media entrepreneurs, and they have no relationship to the product other than selling it — none whatsoever.”

As a consequence, the life of a screenwriter has become an even more stressful one, according to Rosenthal. “In my experience, it has always been an extremely difficult business — not a business for the faint of heart, not a business where being Jewish makes it easier for you.

“As a veteran screenwriter, you realize over time it is amazing just to survive in it,” he said. “On the other hand, it gives you some amazingly unusual pleasures.”

Take, for example, the day he casually decided to set a chase scene for the Bruce Willis movie Mercury Rising on a train that barrels into Chicago down the middle of Route 90.

“A year later, they actually shot that scene and caused the largest traffic jam in the history of Illinois,” Rosenthal said with pleasure. “It’s amazing to see your ideas done as only a Hollywood studio can do them. There’s a certain dreamlike pleasure in it.”

In Rosenthal’s stressful, peripatetic, dreamlike, deadline-driven life, one of the constants has been Kehilat HaNahar, where he has become very active.

“In a small, arts-oriented community like New Hope, everyone is extremely proud of its unique sensibility,” he said. “It’s an extremely diverse and progressive place that reflects the artistic sensibility of the area. It’s a very warm, community-oriented congregation. It’s run almost like a family. We have a real commitment to progressive political issues.

“For people like myself, it’s just a perfect place,” he added. “It really is the center of Jewish life in New Hope.”

For information about the Feb. 23 program, call Kehilat HaNahar at 215-862-1912.