Hearst Over Hollywood

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.