Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies » (1st Edition)

Louis Pizzitola is a visual artist and an amateur filmmaker.

Hearst Over Hollywood draws on hundreds of previously unpublished letters and memos, FBI Freedom of Information files, and personal interviews to document the scope of Hearst's power in Hollywood. Louis Pizzitola tells the hidden story of Hearst's shaping influence on both film publicity and film censorship as well as the growth of the "talkies," and the studio system.

Publishers Weekly

This admirable addition to Columbia's expansive Film and Culture series explores an underreported facet of William Randoph Hearst's media dominance: his command of early cinema. Although Citizen Kane etched W.R. in popular memory as a newspaperman, Hearst understood film's "enormous attention-getting potential for communication for the masses" and used it to create fiction and nonfiction forms in the medium that promoted positions ranging from pro-German WWI sentiment to anticommunism. His efforts spanned multiple studio affiliations and international film alliances, and all demonstrated Hearst's overriding aim of exercising worldwide influence. Befitting that reach, Pizzitola's book sports big names like Edison, L.B. Mayer, Hitler, Mussolini and Hearst paramour Marion Davies. And making the requisite nod to Citizen Kane, amateur filmmaker Pizzitola analyzes differences between Welles's Kane and Hearst, but also opens up the subject to discuss earlier film satires of Hearst and how Kane endures in part as "a reluctant homage to Hearst's significance" that employs Hearst's own yellow-journalistic techniques in its storytelling. Other neat film analyses pepper the text, with many, like that on the pro-FBI `G' Men, illustrating the intertwining of government-related aims (a positive view of law enforcement) with movie realities (the need for a new Cagney vehicle) and the print media (a Hearst newspaper anticrime campaign). While the book's massive detail, long citations, discourses on tangential players and lack of a simple, driving thesis will deter lightweights, it stands as a comprehensive examination of how movie truth is created and how Hearst helped set its boundaries. 46 photos. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Preface: Ourselves as Others See Us
1. Behind the Scenes, 1880s—1890s
2. The Artist-Journalist, 1895—1898
3. Film News, 1898—1906
4. Medium for a New Century, 1900—1907
5. It Pays to Advertise, 1907—1914
6. When Men Betray, 1914—1916
7. Perils of Passion, 1915—1917
8. Trader, 1915—1918
9. The Perils of Propaganda, 1917—1918
10. Fits and Starts, 1917—1919
11. Over Production, 1919—1922
12. Fire and Smoke, 1922—1925
13. Industry, 1925—1929
14. Above the Law, 1929—1934
15. Remote Control, 1934—1940
16. Hollywood Isolationist, 1940—1947
17. No Trespassing, 1947—1951