Hearst over Hollywood - Louis Pizzitola

Before Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner, there was William Randolph Hearst, the first man who understood how to use the mass media to exploit the public's desire for entertainment. Essential to Hearst's success was his passion for the cinema and his understanding of how it creates power and propaganda. Hearst sent movie cameramen to the inauguration of William McKinley and the front lines of the Spanish-American War, and he played a role in organizing film propaganda for both sides fighting World War I. By the 1910s, Hearst was producing his own pictures - he ran one of the first animation studios and made some of the most important movie serials, including The Perils of Pauline (for which he wrote the scenario as well as the catchphrase title). As a feature film producer, Hearst was responsible for some of the most talked about movies of the 1920s and 1930s. Behind the scenes in Hollywood, Hearst had few equals - he was a power broker from the Silent Era to the Blacklisting Era. Hearst Over Hollywood draws on hundreds of previously unpublished letters and memos, FBI Freedom of Information files, and personal interviews to document the scope of Hearst's power in Hollywood.;Pizzitola tells the hidden story of Hearst's influence on film censorship, film publicity, the growth of the "talkies," and the studio system. He exposes Hearst's secret film deal with Germany on the eve of World War II and details Hearst's anti-Semitism and anti-Communism, used to retaliate for Citizen Kane and to maintain dominance in the film industry. The author also presents new insights into Hearst's relationships with Marion Davies, Will Hays Jr., Louis B. Mayer, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler. Hearst Over Hollywood is a tour de force of biography, cultural study, and film history that reveals as never before the brilliance and darkness of Hearst's prophetic connection with Hollywood.