A more barbaric portrayal of the German soldiers and Germany as a whole on the screen could not be imagined as March 1918's "My Four Years In Germany." Based on the reminisces of the U. S. ambassador to Germany, James W. Gerard, from 1913 until 1917, the movie paints a brutal picture of the German aggressors, including rounding up and massacring scores of civilians.
"My Four Years In Germany" was one in a number of propaganda movies produced by the American film industry geared towards justifying the sacrifice in terms of lives and economic well-being for the country's involvement in a faraway continent. Although the government's Committee on Public Information (CPI), a U. S. propaganda branch within the Wilson Administration, wasn't directly involved in producing Hollywood films (it did release three documentary feature-length films in 1918), it did encourage making movies with a very pro-American/anti-German slant.
"My Four Years In Germany," was the first movie the four Warner brothers had ever produced. Previously, the brothers' enterprise was strictly a film distribution company, which allowed the four to make a lucrative career out of disbursing other studios' movies to theaters nationwide. Investing $50,000 in their debut film, the Warners discovered "My Four Years In Germany" to be a financial sensation, raking in well over one million dollars. Realizing the movie production business was potentially far more profitable than mere distribution of other people's motion pictures, the Warner brothers embarked on building their own film studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and to concentrate on filmmaking.
