Herbert Yates

Herbert John Yates (August 24, 1880 – February 3, 1966) was the founder and president of Republic Pictures, who had John Wayne, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers in their pictures. Under Yates' leadership between 1935 and 1959, Republic made 956 feature films and 849 serial chapters, some of which are classics screened on television and released on DVD.

Yates was born in Brooklyn in 1880. He started his business career at an early age, building a newspaper sales business on the streets of Brooklyn. Later, he ascended rapidly through the ranks of the American Tobacco Company, retiring from that business with a sizable fortune before the age of 30.

Focusing on the movie and recording business, he built a small empire, acquiring record companies and film laboratories. In the twenties, he provided financing for Mack Sennett and Fatty Arbuckle.

In October 1929, his Consolidated Film Industries took control of ARC (American Record Corporation, a company created as a result of a merger between a number of dime store record labels). In the following years, the company was very involved in a very depressed market for phonograph records, buying failing labels at bargain prices to exploit their catalogue. (In December 1931 Warner Bros. leased Brunswick Records, Vocalion Records and associated companies to ARC.) In 1932, ARC was king of the 3 records for a dollar market, selling 6 million units, twice as much as RCA Victor. In an effort to get back on top, RCA launched the low priced Bluebird Records label. ARC bought out the Columbia Records catalogue in 1934. In the 1930s ARC produced Brunswick and Columbia at 75c and Oriole (for McCrory), Romeo (for Kress), Melotone, Vocalion, Banner, Conqueror (for Sears) and Perfect at 35c or 3 for $1.00.

In December 1938, the entire ARC complex was purchased from Consolidated Film for $700,000 by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). After CBS brought back Columbia as their flagship label and they brought back the inactive OKeh Records label to replace Vocalion, which allowed the rights to the Brunswick and Vocalion labels to return to Warner Bros. They sold the rights to those labels to Decca Records in the early 1940s (but in a complicated move, CBS managed to keep the rights of ARC material from 1931 through 1938.)

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