Herbert Yates, 1880-1966

Today marks the birthday of Herbert Yates, another one of those old Hollywood names that sounds familiar, but you can't quite remember where you came across it. It turns out the man had quite an interesting life.

Before getting involved with movies, he apparently became reasonably wealthy in the tobacco wholesale business, enough so to get into Hollywood. He wanted to produce movies, but found that it was more profitable to do the film processing and development, in the process making quite a bit of money with his Consolidated Film Industries. At this point, Yates became a bit of a Jonathan Shields, in that he got a bunch of the Poverty Row studios in hock to CFI, allowing them to pay off their debts to the studio with stock in the company. Eventually, in the mid-1930s, Yates would cash in on all those debts, foreclosing on a bunch of studios, and consolidating them into Republic Pictures.

Republic was somewhere between Poverty Row and the respectability of the major studios, producing a lot of cheap westerns that could be churned out quickly -- making first Gene Autry, and then Roy Rogers into stars. However, Republic also put out a few movies that could pretty well be considered "prestige" movies, such as The Quiet Man and Orson Welles' version of Macbeth.

Yates' career took a turn for the worse when, like Welles' Charles Foster Kane, he married an "actress" (Vera Ralston) and tried to turn her into a real actress, casting her in several Republic pictures that didn't do well probably in part because of Mrs. Yates' inability to act. That, and the failure to embrace television would eventually doom Republic as an actual producer of motion pictures. Yates still died wealthy, though, thanks to all the CFI money and the fact that, with the changes in motion picture production, studios didn't need their back lots and all the Los Angeles land was better for real estate. Republic Pictures' studios wound up as TV production facilities that are still in use today.