Long article.......and an excerpt...
http://jameslbreese.blogspot.com/2009/02/james-l-breese-pie-girl-dinner-by-jim.html

"The Pie Girl Dinner" -- This one, just entering the fantasy stage of pre-production development, is a major studio release based on a concept by a fledgling (ahem) screenwriter. Preliminary casting proposals include David Caruso as Stanford White, Nicholas Cage as William Randolph Hearst, Ben Kingsley as Joseph Pulitzer, Alicia Silverstone as Susie Johnson, and Don Imus as Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

A description of how William Randolph Hearst would play a part in this movie...
"A few months after the Pie Girl Dinner, in an attack on the New York high society that refused to admit its publisher, Joseph Pulitzer's World blasted the "bacchanalian revels in New York fashionable studios" and men who corrupted young girls for their pleasure. This opinion was contradicted by one of the participants, Edward Simmons, who wrote that the whole affair was "very moral and dignified." Simmons' benign account of the event is worth a look.

Pulitzer had additional reasons to be agitated. By the end of 1895, William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal had passed 100,000 in circulation and the World was beginning to feel the competition. Hearst (as depicted in the movie "Citizen Kane") was pursuing a course of luring away Pulitzer's able staff with offers of greatly increased compensation. Journalists of the day were well aware that an increase in personal fortune was in the offing for those who received a card reading: "Mr. Hearst would be pleased to have you call."

In January 1896, having been much impressed by Merrill Goddard's handling of the "Girl-In-The-Pie" story, Hearst sent him such a card. Hearst and Goddard met at the Hoffman House, where Hearst regularly enjoyed his breakfast. According to one account, upon being offered editorship of the Sunday Journal, Goddard observed that he would be handicapped without his staff of writers and artists. "All right," Hearst replied. "Let's take the whole staff."

Having raided Pulitzer's Sunday staff, acquiring not only Goddard, but also R.F. Outcault and his popular "Yellow Kid" comic strip, Hearst so enraged Pulitzer that a heated struggle ensued. The two titans went to court over rights to the Yellow Kid and waged such a battle, publishing more and more sensational items in an attempt to build circulation, that the style of coverage which emerged has ever since been referred to as "yellow journalism." The battle raged on for years, culminating in the legal tug-of-war over rights to the famous Katzenjammer Kids, the longest running comic strip in history, having recently celebrated its 100th birthday.



-- Edited by Oom at 18:37, 2009-02-22