cover image HEARST OVER HOLLYWOOD: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies

HEARST OVER HOLLYWOOD: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies

Louis Pizzitola, . . Columbia Univ., $34.95 (525pp) ISBN 978-0-231-11646-6

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.)