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Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies. By Louis Pizzitola. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 540 pp. Cloth, $34.95. ISBN 0-231-11646-2.
Reviewed by Pennee Bender
The need for another biography of William Randolph Hearst, so soon after David Nasaw's The Chief. The Life of William Randolph Hearst, is dubious, but in Hearst Over Hollywood Louis Pizzitola chooses to focus on Hearst's often neglected role as film producer. He merges Hearst's life story with the development of Hollywood and makes a strong case for the rich intersection of yellow journalism and the development of early film form, as well as Hearst's role as a power broker within the emerging film industry. Organized as a traditional life history, Hearst Over Hollywood parallels Hearst's attraction to the cheap amusements of New York City's Fourteenth Street, his early experiments with motion-picture cameras, and his growing financial involvement in silent film production alongside his print journalistic interests in mass entertainment, news as melodrama, and the use of sensationalist photo series. One of his first movie ventures in 1914, The Perils of Pauline, a twenty-part adventure serial, combined Hearst's penchant for melodrama and his relentless promotion of his films and their actresses in the pages of his newspapers. The Perils of Pauline, with its spunky female heroine, also reflected Hearst's merging of entertainment and politics, in this case his progressive position on women's independence.
The new film industry grew in tandem and became intertwined with Hearst's media empire, which relied on...