Hearst Over Hollywood Power,,Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies
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✶ ✷ ✶ ✶ ✷ ✶ ✷ H earst over Hollywood Power,, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies Film and Culture John Belton, Editor Film and Culture A series of Columbia University Press Edited by John Belton What Made Pistachio Nuts? Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Henry Jenkins Sexuality,and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Rhona J. Berenstein Tradition of Spectacle Martin Rubin This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age Projections of War: Hollywood,American Gaylyn Studlar Culture, and World War II Thomas Doherty Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Robin Wood Horror and Comedy William Paul The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music Laughing Hysterically:American Screen Jeff Smith Comedy of the s Ed Sikov Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture Michael Anderegg Primitive Passions: Visuality,Sexuality, Ethnography,and Contemporary Chinese Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality,and Cinema Insurrection in American Cinema, – Rey Chow Thomas Doherty The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Magisterial Vision and the Figure Perception, Representation, Modernity of Woman James Lastra Susan M.White Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Black Women as Cultural Readers Cinema and Its Contexts Jacqueline Bobo Ben Singer Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, Wondrous Difference: Cinema,Anthropology, National Identity,Japanese Film and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture Darrell William Davis Alison Griffiths ✶ ✷ ✶ ✶ ✷ ✶ ✷ egggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggh Hearst over Hollywood Power,,Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies Louis Pizzitola mooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooop ✶ ✷ ✶ ✶ ✷ ✶ ✷ Columbia University Press New York Columbia University Press Publishers Since New York Chichester,West Sussex Copyright © Louis Pizzitola All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pizzitola, Louis. Hearst over Hollywood : power, passion, and propaganda in the movies / Louis Pizzitola. p. cm. — (Film and culture) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index isbn ––– (cloth : alk. paper) . Hearst,William Randolph, –. .Motion picture producers and directors— United States —Biography. Publishers and publishing— United States—Biography. .Motion picture industry—California— Los Angeles—History. I. Series PN..H P .''—dc [B] Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c For my mother and Spence Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv . Behind the Scenes, s–s . The Artist-Journalist, – . Film News, – . Medium for a New Century, – . It Pays to Advertise, – . When Men Betray, – .Perils of Passion, – .Trader, – . The Perils of Propaganda, – . Fits and Starts, – .Over Production, – .Fire and Smoke, – . Industry, – . Above the Law, – . Remote Control, – . Hollywood Isolationist, – . No Trespassing, – Notes Index Preface During my research for Hearst Over Hollywood,I interviewed the late Edward L.Bernays,a nephew of Sigmund Freud and widely recognized as the father of public relations. Bernays, who was over one hundred years old when I spoke with him, had spent a lifetime developing techniques of persuasion and creating publicity schemes that promoted corporate America and sold the public on things they never knew they needed.While some might have seen a dubious honor in being known as the creator of spin, Bernays proudly called himself a propagandist. Apparently, Bernays was never close to William Randolph Hearst, but he did work for the Hearst organization, and he was close at least in spirit to Hearst’s brand of communication. In the s Bernays was hired as a consultant to Hearst’s Good House- keeping and Cosmopolitan magazines and for a corporation called Inter City Radio that was Hearst’s initial attempt to form a network of radio stations that would enable him to channel his political ambitions into the nation’s largest urban centers. As early as the s Bernays enjoyed yellow journal- ism as a medium of information and entertainment. He visited the Hearst newspaper offices in New York and looked on in amusement as the paper’s drama department made sure that “publicity a play received matched the amount of advertising [it purchased].”Over the years Bernays formed friend- ships with a number of Hearst associates.A Hearst reporter named Karl Von Weigand told Bernays over dinner in that he had just seen a copy of the spin master’s book Crystallizing Public Opinion on Joseph Goebbels’s “propa- ganda library” shelf and that he believed the Nazi Party was using Bernays’s theories to guide their policies aimed at the destruction of the Jews. In his autobiography, Bernays described the film industry as “a crude, crass, manufacturing business, run by crude, crass men,” but he never dis- x ✶ Preface missed its significance. He immediately understood my interest in exploring Hearst’s impact on American culture through Hollywood—how and why the man, the film medium, and the film industry were so intrinsically related. Because of Bernays’s advanced age, my interview with him was brief, but there was a hint of his earlier enthusiasm for his work when he closed our conversation with a question for me. Bernays was eager to know what title I had chosen for my book.When I told him, he responded like a true public relations counsel.“That’s good,”he said,“it sounds like power.” While Hearst appears to be a man of unfathomable contradictions when viewed in the context of journalism, as a force in and of Hollywood his life is a more constant marriage of passion, action, and meaning. In an interview with biographer William Swanberg in the late s (never included in his book Citizen Hearst), Hearst’s widow, Millicent, summed up her husband in these words: “He was a showman, like his mother.” Indeed, Hearst, always something of petulant child,was a master of show-and-tell.In the s,as an adult, his passion for putting on a show and telling a story took a leap toward the cinema with experiments in photography.Hearst took hundreds of pho- tographs, developing some as stereopticon images to be projected on a screen and others to be looked at through a stereo viewer that suggested images in three dimensions. Even as late as the s Hearst was still viewing (moving) images onscreen or, as one visitor to San Simeon recalled, retreating from his Hollywood guests to view -D scenes of Bad Nauheim,Venice, and Nurem- berg through the black peepholes of a darkly stained stereopticon. The earliest sections of Hearst Over Hollywood explore the relationship between Hearst’s burgeoning communications empire and the development of film. As the story unfolds, Hearst’s exploits with the novelist Stephen Crane, his drama-driven exploitation of the Spanish-American War, his connections to Tammany Hall politics and vice, and his perfection of dubi- ous advertising practices take on an increasingly profound meaning. In yel- low journalism, Hearst found a showplace to satisfy his desire to re-create for others the sensations he experienced. His newspapers became print moving-picture screens, and in turn the movies in the nickelodeons and storefronts became a reflection of Hearst newspapers.As cinema became the dominant medium of the twentieth century, Hearst latched on to it with gusto, knowing that he had found a new way to expand his power over the masses. He used film to entertain himself and to explore fantasies and myths about women,history,and religion.Hearst also used film as a weapon against those he feared, those he believed stood in opposition to his way of life and those against whom he held petty grudges. Preface ✶ xi It is a common myth—perpetuated by parallel situations in the film Citi- zen Kane and even by recent biographies—that Hearst became and remained a film producer mainly to boost the career of his mistress,Marion Davies.This romantic but myopic view does disservice to both Davies and Hearst and is certainly not how Hearst’s relationship to Hollywood was always perceived.In ,two years before Davies appeared in a Hearst film production, a San Francisco journal called The Lantern was already drawing attention to Hearst’s deepening film influence, describing how he was “employing the cinema as a means of moulding [sic] public opinion.”This was a whole year before Hearst took virtual control of the Committee on Public Information, the film unit of the government’s World War I propaganda machine,and nearly two decades after Hearst first utilized film to promote his political agenda. In A Million and One Nights (), one of the earliest and most compre- hensive film histories, author Terry Ramsaye heralded Hearst journalism as the muse of the film medium and Hearst as a multifaceted producer.The film historian made only a couple of passing references to Marion Davies. Although Davies played an important role in Hearst’s life, her career was often a glamorous show window for the more complicated inner workings of Hearst’s film ventures.She was only part of his Hollywood legacy.Hearst’s influence cast a much wider net, helping to shape cinema into a popular medium and Hollywood into an industry of publicity,prejudices,artifice,and excess that was a mirror image of his interests and a vehicle serving his per- sonal and political desires. My goal in writing this book is to tell a story about Hollywood’s first fifty years while simultaneously telling Hearst’s life story from a Hollywood per- spective. Hearst Over Hollywood does not purport to be a definitive biogra- phy of Hearst or a comprehensive history of the cinema but perhaps more of a biography of Hollywood and a journey into the essential Hearst.While this book will include analyses of many of the scores of films produced by Hearst and other films that he influenced but did not produce, its primary focus is the impact and context of films and film genres. I will avoid bur- dening the reader with my own opinions on the artistic or lasting value of individual films.