Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films 9781501351594, 9781501351624, 9781501351617

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Shadow Cinema

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Shadow Cinema The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films Edited by James Fenwick, Kieran Foster and David Eldridge

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 This paperback edition published in 2022 Volume Editor’s Part of the Work © James Fenwick, Kieran Foster, David Eldridge Each chapter © of Contributors Cover design by Namkwan Cho Photograph © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fenwick, James (Film historian), editor of compilation. | Foster, Kieran, editor. | Eldridge, David (David Nicholas), 1973– editor. Title: Shadow cinema : the historical and production contexts of unmade films / edited by James Fenwick, Kieran Foster and David Eldridge. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020029973 (print) | LCCN 2020029974 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501351594 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501370960 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501351600 (epub) | ISBN 9781501351617 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Unfinished films—History and criticism. | Motion pictures—Anecdotes. Classification: LCC PN1995 .S465 2020 (print) | LCC PN1995 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/75—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029973 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029974 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5159-4 PB: 978-1-5013-7096-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5161-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-5160-0 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in the United States of America To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

Contributors viii

Introduction

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Part I Producers and production companies

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1 A production strategy of overdevelopment: Kirk Douglas’s Bryna Productions and the unproduced Viva Gringo! 17 James Fenwick

2 Gone with the winds that never were: The David O. Selznick archive and unmade historical cinema

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David Eldridge

3 Parting the Iron Curtain: Michael Klinger’s attempt to make A Man and a Half 57 Andrew Spicer

Part II Directors and auteurs

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4 Unfinished business: Godard, cinema and theatre in the 1960s 73 Michael Witt

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5 Ken Russell’s unfinished projects and unmade films, 1956–68: The BBC years 91 Matthew Melia

6 Ghatak in the shadows: Films that struggled

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Sanghita Sen

Part III Questioning the unmade

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7 Herding Cats; or, the possibilities of unproduction studies 129 Peter C. Kunze

8 Assembling Frankenstein

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Kieran Foster

9 Burning bright: Samuel Fuller’s Tigrero and accidental ethnography 171 Andrew Howe

10 Clouzot’s L’Enfer

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Lucy Mazdon

11 Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and its shadow: Rescue and resistance 199 Sue Vice

Part IV Reconstructing the unmade

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12 The never Alice: Marilyn Manson, gothic girlhoods and Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll 217 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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13 The movie producer, the feminists and the serial killer: UK feminist activism, misogynist 70s film culture and the (non) filming of the Yorkshire Ripper murders 235 Hannah Hamad

14 The unmade undead: A post-mortem of the post-9/11 zombie cycle 251 Todd K. Platts Index 267

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CONTRIBUTORS

David Eldridge is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Hull. He specializes in American history and Hollywood cinema. He has published major volumes on the cultural history of the 1930s and Hollywood’s construction of history, along with papers on subjects as diverse as the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project, the musicals of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, and the film adaptations of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. James Fenwick is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. His research focus includes urban media in and media representations of Sheffield, unmade media and creative failure, and the life and work of Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas. He is the author of Stanley Kubrick Produces (2020) and Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry (2021). He is editor of Understanding Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: Representation and Interpretation (2018) and co-editor of special issues of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and Cinergie. He is editor of the book series Unmade Film and Television (Intellect). Kieran Foster is Teaching Associate in Film and Media Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. He was previously a lecturer at De Montfort University and Nottingham Trent University in Film Studies and Media Studies. His research specialism is unmade films. He is the writer of the forthcoming monograph Hammer Goes to Hell: The Unmade Films of Hammer. He was the principal investigator on an AHRC/M4C postdoctoral project that produced a live script reading of the unmade Hammer script Vampirella (1975), staged before a capacity audience at the Regent Street Cinema in London, UK in October 2019. Hannah Hamad is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Cardiff University. She is the author of Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film:  Framing Fatherhood (2014), the co-editor of special issues of Critical Studies in Television and Television & New Media on contemporary medical television and the cultural politics of Friends, respectively, and the author of numerous other articles and chapters on gender and race in popular cultures of film and television and contemporary celebrity culture. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is an Australian film critic, author, programmer and academic who has written seven books on cult, horror and exploitation

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cinema, including Masks in Horror Cinema:  Eyes Without Faces (2019), which was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Non-Fiction. Alexandra is an adjunct professor at Deakin University, a board member of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies and a programmer at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. Andrew Howe is Professor of History at La Sierra University, where he teaches courses in American history, popular culture and film/television studies. Recent scholarship includes book chapters on fan identification and cultural artefacts associated with Game of Thrones, the role of cemeteries and burial rites in the western genre, and the re-examination of Manifest Destiny in the wake of the Passenger Pigeon’s extinction. Peter C.  Kunze is Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. He is on the boards of the Literature/ Film Association, Studies in American Humor and Studies in Musical Theatre, and he co-founded the SCMS special interest group for children’s and youth media and culture. He edited The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon and Conversations with Maurice Sendak, and he co-edited American–Australian Cinema: Transnational Connections. His current book project, Staging a Comeback:  Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance, examines the creative and industrial relationships between Hollywood and Broadway. Lucy Mazdon is Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education. From 2006 to 2010, she led the four-year AHRC-funded project tracing the history of French Cinema in Britain. The results of this research are published in a book co-written with Catherine Wheatley, French Cinema and Britain: Sex Art and Cinephilia (2013). She is the co-editor of a collection of essays exploring Franco-British Cinematic Relations, Je t’aime, moi non plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations (2010). Matthew Melia is Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Media, and English Literature at Kingston University. He has research interests in the work of Stanley Kubrick and Ken Russell and has published on both. In 2017, he convened the UK International conference ‘Ken Russell:  Perspectives, Reception and Legacy’ at Kingston University and in 2018 ‘A Clockwork Symposium:  A Clockwork Orange  – New Perspectives’ at University of the Arts London. He is the co-editor of The Jaws Book: New Perspectives on the Classic Summer Blockbuster (2020) and editor and co-editor of the forthcoming Re-Focus:  The Films of Ken Russell and Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange. Todd K.  Platts is Associate Professor of Sociology at Piedmont Virginia Community College. He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on horror movies and zombie films. His recent publications include

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a comparative analysis of American and Italian zombie cinema in the late 1970s and early 1980s and a box office analysis of American horror cinema from 2006 to 2016, a biocultural analysis of slasher films (with Mathias Clasen) and an analysis of Get Out’s reviews by white and non-white critics (with David Brunsma). Sanghita Sen received her second doctoral degree from the University of St Andrews in 2020 for her thesis Recovering Indian Third Cinema Practice: A Study of the 1970s Films of Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and Satyajit Ray. She was previously an associate professor of English in the West Bengal Education Service. Her research interests include postcolonialism, Marxism, gender, Indian culture, the history of Indian cinema, political cinema and documentaries. Sen curated the first Ritwik Ghatak Retrospective in Scotland in May 2017 and helped in programming Ghatak’s films, collaborating with other UK and European programmers. She also provides English subtitling for Hindi- and Bangla-language films. Andrew Spicer is Professor of Cultural Production at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His research investigates the cultural and creative industries in the UK, with a focus on media production cultures in film and television. He has written extensively on British producer Michael Klinger, with the Klinger archive based at UWE Bristol. His publications include The Man Who Got Carter:  Michael Klinger, Independent Production and the British Film Industry, 1960–1980 (2013), co-authored with A.T. McKenna. He is currently concluding a monograph, Sean Connery:  The Labour of Stardom. Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her recent publications include the BFI Modern Film Classics volume on Shoah (2011), the co-edited volume Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2013) and, with David Forrest, Barry Hines:  ‘Kes’, ‘Threads’ and Beyond (2017). Her book on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah outtakes will be published in 2021. Michael Witt is Professor of Cinema and Co-director of the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures at the University of Roehampton. He is the co-editor of For Ever Godard (2004), The French Cinema Book (2004) and Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (2006), and the author of JeanLuc Godard, Cinema Historian (2013).

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A true history of cinema must include all the histories of the films that were never made. jean-luc godard, HISTOIRE[S] DU CINEMA, 1988

What is and what might have been In the very same month that Bloomsbury commissioned this volume, Orson Welles’s final film, The Other Side of the Wind, was released by Netflix on November 2018, thirty-three years after the director’s death and almost fifty years after he originally began photography on it. Then, as we submitted our manuscript in early 2020, another epic filmmaking quest came to an end with the distribution in the UK of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), twenty-nine years after Terry Gilliam first started developing his project. Both productions had long been among the most famous ‘unfinished’ films, seemingly ‘cursed’ never to be completed, yet extensively written about and speculated about by cineastes. Fascinatingly, both movies also turned out to be highly self-reflexive works:  films about filmmaking and indeed ‘how movies can damage people’ in the process (White 2020). The Other Side of the Wind is constructed as a mock-documentary, recording the last day in the fictionalized life of a legendary director who (like Welles himself when making this movie) returns to Hollywood to try and raise funds to finish his avant-garde ‘comeback’ film. The film-within-the-film (itself also titled The Other Side of the Wind) remains unfinished after the leading man walked off the set and studio executives pulled the plug, though footage from it is screened to various audiences during the course of the director’s seventieth birthday party. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote likewise

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features an arrogant but supposedly ‘genius’ director, trying to make a film about Don Quixote in Spain and enduring the ‘same nightmares of delay that [had] tried Gilliam’s faith’ when he was forced to abandon his original shoot in November 2000 (Bradshaw 2018). However, as much as both films ‘gave new meaning to the phrasing “longawaited” ’, there was something anticlimactic about their actual exhibition. There was certainly some critical acclaim, especially for The Other Side of the Wind, but there was also an undercurrent in the reaction of many commentators and viewers that suggested that the stories of failure and the speculation over ‘what might have been’ provided greater fascination than the films that eventually materialized. The Other Side of the Wind had been wrecked by circumstances that involved the embezzlement of most of the budget by an unscrupulous investor, a fierce struggle over the rights between Welles’s daughter and his lover, and even the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. Gilliam had been floored by the illnesses of two of his hoped-for Quixotes (Jean Rochefort and John Hurt), fighter jets roaring overhead that ruined his soundtrack and flash floods that destroyed sets and equipment, which resulted in the rights to his screenplay being in the hands of insurance companies. Indeed, the dramatic ‘unmaking of’ these particular films had already generated books (Josh Karp’s Orson Welles’ Last Film (2015)) and documentaries (Lost in La Mancha (2002)) that have themselves become celebrated works. The obsessive drives of Gilliam to complete his film and of Peter Bogdanovich and Bob Muraswki to rescue and reconstruct Welles’s vision from over one hundred hours of footage are themselves striking examples of filmmaking histories in their own rights. Yet neither film could quite live up to the weight of expectations these long gestations had generated. ‘As long as this wonderful dream remained a dream,’ wrote one Welles fan on imbd.com, ‘it could be anything you wanted: you could imagine the most beautiful, mysterious, moving work of art ever … This is most decidedly not it’ (Fiahm n.d.). Similarly, in reviewing The Man Who Killed Don Quixote for Variety, Peter DeBruge felt that ‘after setbacks more epic than anything described in the novel itself … the sad truth is, the reality can never live up to the version that has existed in [Gilliam’s] (and our) imagination for so long’ (DeBruge 2018). While the intensity of interest in these two productions was perhaps greater than that accorded to most unmade films, in many ways it was only typical of the popular fascination exerted by imagining ‘what might have been’. Various websites list and herald the top 10, 25 or 50 ‘Greatest Movies Never Made’ and ‘Classics That Might Have Been’, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Kaleidoscope (test footage of which abounds on Hitchcock fan forums) or Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, providing synopses designed to tantalize the reader into picturing the thwarted possibilities. Several popular books have sustained this further, including The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made and Tales From Development Hell, both by

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David Hughes, and a volume entitled The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See, compiled by Empire magazine’s editor Simon Braund. The latter employed artists to visualize what the posters for each movie might have looked like, highlighting the latent creativity still inherent in these unmade films. Indeed, unfinished films have often provided creative inspiration, as in the case of Unfolding the Aryan Papers (2009), an exhibition commissioned by Animate Projects and the British Film Institute (BFI) with the Stanley Kubrick Archive (SKA), University of the Arts London to accompany a retrospective of Stanley Kubrick films. Drawing on research materials from SKA concerning Kubrick’s unmade film about the Holocaust, artists Jane and Louise Wilson produced a sensational art installation designed to create ‘the ghost of a film’ for a new audience. More directly, in 2015, the BBC dramatized for radio a series of ‘legendary lost scripts’ (Unmade Movies, BBC Radio 4), including Welles’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, The Blind Man by Ernest Lehman and Alfred Hitchcock, and Hammer’s The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula. The latter was also staged as a live script reading for audiences at Nottingham’s Mayhem Film Festival in 2015, part of a burgeoning practice of public engagement with unfinished films. Yet the studies and creative projects that respond to the urge to revivify these dormant film ideas have almost exclusively been concerned with the unrealized works of canonical auteurs. The subtitle of Braund’s volume is telling of this:  Unseen Masterpieces by the World’s Greatest Directors. Indeed, when unmade films have been considered by film historians, it is most often in the context of biographies of filmmakers and artists, when ‘building up a picture of their subject’s triumphs and failures’ (North 2008: 1).1 Commonly this results in an emphasis being placed on the role of personalities in filmmaking, putting the clashing egos of directors and actors at the heart of the ‘failures’ or recounting stories in which the artistry of the filmmaker was ‘compromised’ by the demands of studio bosses and investors who were unable to appreciate their visions. It is the stories behind the unmade which therefore dominate existing writing on unmade movies. Harry Waldman’s gossipy Scenes Unseen:  Unreleased and Uncompleted Films From the World’s Master Filmmakers was explicit in this, stating that ‘people’s failures often contain stories more compelling than their successes’ (Waldman 1991:  2). David Hughes’s exploration of ‘Development Hell’ likewise emphasized the ‘tales’ that can be told, rather than the lessons to be learned; working from the premise that ‘the stories behind many unmade movies were more interesting than the movies themselves would ever have been’ (Hughes 2012: 9). And in the focus on ‘master filmmakers’, the tendency to lament ‘lost classics’ is pronounced. Braund’s book selected unmade films ‘either because they represented thwarted artistic ambition or the kind of goggle-eyed folly that can only be gazed on in mesmerized wonder’, and noted that ‘both of which are reason enough to mourn their

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absence’ (2013: 8). In all cases, the ‘what if’ scenario is placed at the forefront of the appeal of discussing the unmade film. From a scholarly perspective, however, this level of treatment is unsatisfactory. Few accounts analyse these films-that-never-were, the paths they might have taken and what their unproduction actually means for our conceptions of film studies, film history and beyond. Which is where Shadow Cinema emerges, making the case for the serious study of unmade, unfinished, unseen and unreleased projects from across film history as a vital element of academic inquiry.

Studying shadow cinema The term ‘shadow cinema’2 is derived from the observation made by film scholar Peter Krämer about the uneven levels of financing within the American film industry towards project that never reach production (2015:  381). His case study was based on filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s renowned ‘lost’ projects  – Napoleon, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Aryan Papers and many more besides – which have often been emphasized in popular volumes like those by Braund and Hughes. However, rather than treating Kubrick as an exceptional auteur, Krämer suggests that Kubrick’s body of unrealized projects was, in fact, ‘normal’ and characteristic of an historical trend in the American film industry: Behind its steady output of hundreds of films every year, there is a shadow history of the different shapes these films were, at some point, meant to have taken, as well as of countless projects … that never saw the light of day at all. All these are a legitimate and arguably necessary subject for the writing of film history … but so far they have received comparatively little attention in academic publications. A  sustained research effort in this area is, I think, long overdue. (ibid.) Commentators within the film industry, such as Oscar-winning screenwriter Larry McMurty, have also called upon film scholars to ‘attack’ the ‘history of unmade films’ (2010: 100). This collection aims to take up the challenges of Krämer and McMurty, to initiate just such a sustained research effort. We are not suggesting that there have been no previous scholarly attempts to understand this shadow history of cinema. Dan North’s collection, Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films (2008), was one of the first key examples of an attempt to understand the underlying contexts as to why so many film projects fail rather than succeed. Its focus, as implied in the title, was on the British film industry; in contrast, Shadow Cinema deliberately brings together scholarship on American, British, French and Indian cinemas,

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indicating that across the globe and across history, filmmakers and cinema industries have typically invested more time, money and creative energy in projects and ideas that never get produced than in the movies that actually made it to the screens. This context alone underpins the importance of studying unmade films. However, our criteria for evaluating what actually constitutes unmade cinema consciously remains as loose as that described by North, in ranging across unfinished screenplays, unmade screenplays, aborted filming or fleeting ideas ‘discarded at the back-of-an-envelope stage’ (North 2008: 1). It is difficult to be precise about what should or should not constitute an unmade film, and we do not think it productive or desirable to be so. What of, for example, the myriad film titles registered with the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) Title Registration Bureau, most of which were never used? Many of these titles were just that: titles, with no attributed script or fully formed idea. They were registered by studios and producers as a means of protecting intellectual property. Similarly, what of trade press mentions of a producer’s stated intention to film adaptations of classic or bestselling novels? At times, this was just a means of generating trade press attention and gossip within the industry. More intriguing, what about the rushes that remained on the cutting room floor, despite a producer or director’s desire for a particular version of their film to be released? Jennifer Cazenave, in her comprehensive history of the unused footage from Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust epic Shoah (1985) – the outtakes total over two hundred hours – argues for a relationship of coexistence between ‘the finished film and the excluded material  – of the definitive Holocaust documentary Lanzmann created and all the other possible films that could come into existence and that subsist today in the form of 220 hours of outtakes’ (Cazenave 2019:  47). This concept of the coexistence between the made and the unmade, in whatever form the latter takes, extends to the myriad of draft scripts and fragmentary treatments and outlines that are now in archives around the world. After all, do draft scripts that are substantially different to the eventual released film constitute the unmade? And what of the hundreds of unsolicited or speculative scripts that reach the desks of producers across the globe? Not to mention the tidal wave of unproduced scripts that circulate online, particularly through websites such as The Black List; the latter is an ‘annual survey of Hollywood executives’ favorite unproduced screenplays’ (‘About the Black List’). The website allows writers to submit their screenplays for them to be read by other writers and, they hope, by Hollywood producers. The site has hosted upwards of fifty thousand scripts since its founding in 2012. And while some of the scripts from The Black List have been produced and gone on to find commercial and critical success, the majority remain unmade. After all, as was made clear to Abraham Riesman of the New York magazine:

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Black List scripts are not really meant to be produced. They’re biopics of people who haven’t sold their life rights, or based-on-a-true-story accounts that would never clear any studio’s legal department but still serve as effective calling cards for their authors – showy work that can put them on the map, demonstrate their skill at dialogue, character, and/ or structure, and improve their chances to be hired for a project a film company wants to make. (Riesman 2018) Not wanting to stifle such debate, this collection aims to explore these issues and the various definitions of unmade cinema  – of creative failure  – and how we can even approach any kind of definition. As Matthew Harle notes in his study of abandoned work across literature, architecture, and film, ‘the term “unfinished” leaves us intrigued about what kind of work has been produced, or how much has gone unfinished’ (2019: 6). But as Harle convincingly argues, while terms like ‘unmade’, ‘unfinished’, even ‘unseen’, can be problematic, underlying these terms is the principle that there was some kind of creative effort that left behind artefacts, however fragmented. They refer to a state of being or a condition in which creative ideas and projects remain ‘in a rudimentary and embryonic form (ibid.). And Harle is right in that for something to be unmade or unseen it must exist in some form, that there must be a ‘conjectural image’, or spectral remain (ibid.). The paradigm for the study of shadow cinema and the unmade is that there must be a text of some kind, however simple and skeletal, that can form the basis of academic inquiry. The collection endeavours to present a series of case studies in how we can approach the study of the unmade and, given the paradigm set out, takes as its natural starting point the use of archives. A  substantial portion of the research into shadow cinema is based on film archives now deposited at universities and museums across the world. As Andrew Spicer (2010:  299–300) has argued, many ‘lost’ films now only exist within an archive, often in fragmented forms of outlines, draft scripts, correspondence or even scraps of notes. But perhaps the continued neglect of these archives with respect to shadow cinema is because of their often-incomplete nature, with frustrating gaps in the data present. After all, does an unmade film even exist in an archive when there is no script? How can we know what a film was about without any decisive creative material? While unmade film scripts are undoubtedly alluring, particularly to fans and the media, they in themselves don’t tell us as film historians that much. Instead, it is the other ephemera – the notes, the correspondence, the contracts, the budgets – particularly when placed into wider contexts that allows media historians to understand the industrial, political, social and cultural constraints within which producers and productions work. We can even look to the afterlives of unmade projects to understand audience and fan interaction, particularly online.

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Arguably, that is the key contribution of the study of shadow cinema: to take a revisionist approach in order to provide a holistic perspective on the ongoing industrial, political and cultural history of film industries around the world. Perhaps we’ve been asking ourselves the wrong questions for far too long. Instead of thinking about why a film was made, we should be asking why so many films were never made and think about the implications of the Hollywood that might have been, or the British film industry we never saw, or the hidden history of Bollywood. This revisionist approach to film history can be based on textual readings and interpretations from a variety of contexts: adaptation, political history and censorship, industrial relations, social history, critical media industry, biographical, feminist, queer, postcolonial criticism, production studies and many more besides. While the study of shadow cinema undoubtedly allows for a greater understanding of the constraints and parameters of film production (Spicer 2010: 300), it is still largely a textual-based approach, even when utilising so-called empirical evidence such as archival sources. David Bordwell argues that the interpretive process is about using what is available, including theory or primary sources, ‘to build an acceptable and original interpretation’ (1989:  250). This is an important consideration in the study of shadow cinema, particularly if we are suggesting that it is an area of inquiry largely based on the use of archives (or other forms of textual material) that will invariably be incomplete. How do we account for the gaps, or of the lack of creative material? Will we ever have a total account of the amount of abandoned or unmade films, even for just one filmmaker, let  alone an entire studio or national industry? What if a project was merely a series of telephone discussions, with no notes or written correspondence? We always have to be mindful, therefore, of relating the made to the unmade: hence the title Shadow Cinema. This is not a history that replaces the existing knowns but rather adds shade and complexity to our established interpretations and knowledge.

Organization of Shadow Cinema Part One of the collection is primarily approaching shadow cinema from a producer studies context, in which the role of the producer is foregrounded. Spicer has been at the vanguard of this push to recover the neglected role of the producer, a role that has typically been bypassed in favour of the director and the allure of auteur theory (Spicer et  al. 2014:  4–5). But in studying the producer, we can discern how it is a role that is more closely linked to wider industrial contexts than any other role and in turn how it is a role that responds to changing economic structures (see Fenwick 2020:  5–6). An examination of the producer leads to a fuller understanding of how industrial contexts impact and shape creative processes.

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Chapter 1 considers Kirk Douglas’s role as a producer and his management of Bryna Productions, a company he incorporated following the critical and commercial success of Champion (Kramer 1949). Making extensive use of archival material from across a range of sites, the chapter provides a process for thinking through how to relate business papers and correspondence about an unmade project – in this case, the western Viva Gringo! – to wider industrial business strategies, what James Fenwick terms overdevelopment; independent producers and production companies of the 1950s and 1960s were purposely developing more projects than they could feasibly produce due to the changing mode of production in Hollywood. The chapter thereby highlights how a micro case study of an unmade film can be correlated to wider structural forces at an industrial level. Similarly, Chapter  2 also considers the ways in which industrial forces shaped the creative processes of one of classical Hollywood’s most influential independent producers, David O.  Selznick. Via a comprehensive survey of the David O.  Selznick Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, David Eldridge considers case studies of unproduced scripts and story ideas with which Selznick engaged between 1935 and 1943, questioning at what point archival material assumes historical value and intrinsic academic worth. Eldridge focuses his study on Selznick’s fascination with historical epics and considers the ways in which censorship and morality were factors that heavily influenced whether a producer and a studio would risk moving a project into active production. Chapter 3 focuses on the independent British producer Michael Klinger and his attempts to develop the unmade war film A Man and a Half as an international co-production. By considering the economic retrenchment of the British film industry in the 1970s, Spicer reveals how film industries and producers beyond Hollywood faced numerous financial barriers in the development of new projects. Klinger attempted to initiate a co-production deal with Eastern European studios that were still under the state control of the Soviet Union. Spicer considers the complex contractual negotiations involved in film deals, shedding light not only on the role of the producer but also, perhaps more importantly, on the murky, ‘shadow’ world of the film agent. Part Two presents a series of case studies of directors who could be considered the most important auteurs of their respective national film industries:  Jean-Luc Godard (France), Ken Russell (United Kingdom) and Ritwik Ghatak (India). Each case study presents the ways in which intellectual, artistic and commercial imperatives collide, impacting on what is left unmade. Michael Witt, in his study of Godard, focuses on adaptation and how the director remained interested in the production of films based on stage plays such as Pour Lucrèce and Bérénice. What Witt’s chapter reveals is the scale of the challenge facing shadow cinema scholars: Witt estimates there to be over two hundred unmade Godardian projects between 1949

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and 2020. In order to even understand such a vast amount of material, Witt attempts an auteurist mode of categorization, by focusing on Godard’s fascination with adaptation of screenplays and his overriding fascinating – maybe even obsession – with Jean Giraudoux’s Pour Lucrèce, considering what it reveals about his production practices and how it can add nuance to the way in which we understand his produced oeuvre. Matt Melia takes a similar approach in his chapter on Ken Russell’s unmade projects. Again, working from an extensive catalogue of unproduced projects, Melia instead focuses on the emergence of Russell as a director in the British film and television industry in the 1960s. The unmade Russell projects in the 1960s demonstrate the director’s attempts at a career progression, eager to move beyond being seen as an amateur confined to working in the television industry, instead keen to develop his own artistic and intellectual ideas as a film director. Melia presents a partial career survey to show how an individual director’s career can lead to a proliferation of unmade projects, in the process demonstrating how biographical accounts need to consider both the produced and the unmade. Sanghita Sen also takes an auteur approach in her study of the unproduced scripts of one of India’s most celebrated filmmakers, Ritwik Ghatak. Sen takes a survey approach, exploring the totality of Ghatak’s career to contextualize the abundance of unproduced scripts that now reside in his archive. But Sen situates her study within the wider political discourse of Indian cinema and society, including a discussion of some of Ghatak’s unpublished manifestos. Part Three presents case studies that question what even constitutes as shadow cinema. While our paradigm argues for surviving artefacts, however fragmentary, this doesn’t answer the existential nature of the unmade. Does an unmade film have to be a film script that was never produced, or is it more about the avenues and forks of development that all creative projects take? Chapter 7, Peter Kunze’s examination of Cats – an updated version of his original 2017 article published in The Velvet Light Trap – is an exemplar of the uncertain nature of the unmade. When his article was originally published, Cats was very much an unmade project. However, a feature film has subsequently been released, directed by Tom Hooper in 2019. Kunze reflects upon this and suggests that the Cats based on Tom Stoppard’s script remains unmade and that a broader conversation is needed about the nature of unproduced media. Kunze’s chapter is included and updated for this collection due to its influential methodological framework. Kunze sets out a clear understanding of the study of the unmade and of creative failure within the broad fields of production studies and new film history, in the process attempting to coin a catch-all term for this burgeoning field of study: unproduction studies. Kieran Foster’s chapter examines the industrial contexts of Hammer’s horror productions, both in film and television, in the 1950s. Specifically,

10

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Foster, utilizing business correspondence and other archival sources, considers the ways in which the traces of an aborted project can ultimately be found in successfully produced work. This raises questions around creative development and the way we can employ textual analysis of unmade projects to enhance our understanding of produced projects and provide a more holistic perspective of established film histories. At the same time, Foster also raises questions as to the status of unreleased works, specifically a pilot for an aborted Hammer television series, and what this can tell us about the production and business imperatives of international film companies. The final two chapters in this section pick up on this point of unreleased work and its relationship with shadow cinema. Lucy Mazdon provides a case study of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Enfer, a project that was abandoned three weeks into filming after the director suffered a heart attack. The footage that Clouzot obtained was later incorporated into the documentary L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (2009) by directors Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea Annonier, alongside newly filmed interviews. Mazdon raises fundamental questions as to the nature of shadow cinema, with a focus on unreleased and unedited footage now found in archives. How do we now make sense of such material? How is it catalogued by archivists? And what meaning does it possess, including in its artefactual form? Presumably, most unreleased and unedited footage is not in any kind of linear form, meaning that others intervene in order to reconstruct and create meaning. This raises the need to think about the concept of internal history, as used by archive historian Paolo Cherchi Usai and studied by Katherine Groo in her exploration of film archives in Bad Film Histories: He [Usai] uses the term internal history to describe ‘the history of the places where it was shown and kept,’ the history of its preservations, and ‘the history of the changes that have taken place within the object.’ (Groo 2019: 29) Mazdon’s case study is a key example of the history of an archival object and the new meanings it creates, arguing that Bromberg’s documentary, in making extensive use of Clouzot’s footage, ‘both is and is not Clouzot’s L’Enfer’. This is an idea picked up by Sue Vice in her chapter on the over 250 hours’ worth of outtakes from Claude Lanzmann’s epic Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985). Given the sheer volume of outtakes, Vice argues that Shoah has a shadow history that can be found in Lanzmann’s editing process, while the outtake footage has been ‘held in waiting to be turned into an artistic artefact’. Indeed, over the years there have been multiple new documentaries produced by Lanzmann that make use of the outtakes. But as Vice makes clear, the editing strategies employed on Shoah lead to a specific history of the Holocaust being recalled, with numerous untold shadow histories now remaining in an archived form.

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INTRODUCTION

11

The final part of the collection, ‘Reconstructing the unmade’, presents a series of case studies of innovative ways of uncovering and telling the stories of unmade films, ranging from reconstructions through newspaper sources to the use of feminist archives and political history. In doing so, the chapters show the breadth of possibilities and sources available to the shadow cinema historian and the creative ways they can be used to reconstruct the unmade. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s chapter reconstructs Marilyn Manson’s unmade Alice in Wonderland-inspired Phantasmagoria:  The Visions of Lewis Carroll by looking at the way his produced music and music videos had previously been inspired by the Lewis Carroll story. Hannah Hamad explores the social and cultural history of the English serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper by the UK press in the 1970s. Hamad’s chapter situates a series of unmade projects based on Sutcliffe’s crimes within the broader cultural history of Jack the Ripper and the murderer’s marketability across a range of media products. But the projects about Sutcliffe most probably failed due to the ‘consciousnessraising work done by feminists in 1980 to resist and ward off mythologizing narratives’ about serial killers. Hamad uses political archives of feminists groups to demonstrate her argument, in the process revealing how, quite often, we have to look beyond just film-based archives in order to reconstruct the unmade and to account for the range of factors that contribute to shadow cinema. Todd Platts’s chapter makes use of newspapers and trade journals such as Variety to reconstruct the numerous unmade zombie films within Hollywood in the 2000s. Platts’s chapter situates these unmade films within production studies and the framework of cycles, arguing that ‘groups of similar films are produced and released within a limited span of time before falling back to typical production queues or disappearing altogether’. Platts analyses the emergent post-9/11 discourse within the trade press in regard to the new zombie production cycle and traces its rise and fall over the course of a decade. Rather than focus on any one film, Platts instead presents a survey of unmade films within one sub-genre to demonstrate the wider industrial and cultural imperatives at play within the American film industry.

Coda Of course, while this collection now exists as a produced text, it has a shadow history of its own; in the ghost of the volume it might have been, could have been and perhaps should have been. The original call for contributions prompted responses ranging across unmade films by David Lynch or Satayajit Ray, the Superman films that never were, the impact of government policy on film production in Flanders and rushes for a short

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film based on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘MS Found in a Bottle’ which actor Terence Stamp deposited with the British Film Institute. However, a selection process had to be instituted, by which we sought to ensure as much as possible that diverse different methodologies and angles on shadow cinema were explored. The stories of how other chapters fell by the wayside as personal issues and other academic commitments intervened are familiar to anyone who has edited a collection, but they took on a different resonance when we were immersed in accounts of directors, actors, editors and screenwriters having to juggle shooting schedules, contractual commitments, financial considerations, health issues and the myriad other elements that compelled them to change their best-laid plans. We hope this may have given us more understanding and empathy with our contributors – and thank all of them, whether included in the final cut or not, for the role they played in this production. One consequence of the unforeseen developments that occurred during the making of this collection is that we regrettably lost some of the chapters that would have extended our transnational perspective, or given more of a place to women and minority filmmakers in this shadow history. However, a constant theme of this volume is that perceived ‘failures’ are vitally important in themselves, and the analyses which ultimately did not make it into this collection for whatever reason continually demonstrated to us how much of a burgeoning avenue of scholarly inquiry shadow cinema already is and how insightful and productive its further development will be in transforming our understanding of film histories around the world.3

Notes 1. See, e.g., David Freeman’s The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock (1999), Michael Schumacher’s Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life (1999), Daisuke Miyao’s ‘Hollywood Zen: A Historical Analysis of Oshima Nagisa’s Unfinished Film’ (2017), or Whitney Strub’s ‘The Lost, Unmade, and Unseen Film Work of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’ (2015). 2. Shadow cinema will forthwith be referred to throughout the manuscript without the use of quote marks. 3. The sheer interest in shadow cinema was made clear not only through the number of proposed contributions submitted for this collection but also from the international breadth of submissions to the two-day conference Unmade, Unfinished, Unseen: Shadow Histories of Cinema and Television, co-organized by Ian Hunter and James Fenwick in September 2020 (https://unmadefilms. movie.blog/). The interest that has been generated has also led to the founding of a new book series by Fenwick, Unmade Film and Television (Intellect), while the concept of creative failure continues to inform a whole range of new collections, including the special issue on failure and cultural participation edited by Leila Jancovich and David Stevenson for the Conjunctions journal

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13

and the monograph Afterlives of Abandoned Work: Creative Debris in the Archives (2019).

References ‘About the Black List’, The Black List. Available online: https://blcklst.com/ (accessed 24 February 2020). Bordwell, D. (1989), Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bradshaw, P. (2018), ‘First Look Review: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’, The Guardian, 18 May. Braund, S. (ed.) (2013), The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See: Unseen Masterpieces by the World’s Greatest Directors, London: Aurum Press. Cazenave, J. (2019), An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Albany: State University of New York Press. Chapman, J., Glancy, M., and Harper, S. (eds) (2007), The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DeBruge, P. (2018), ‘Film Review: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’, Variety, 18 May. Fenwick, J. (2020), Stanley Kubrick Produces, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Fiahm (n.d.), ‘Review of The Other Side of the Wind’, IMDb. Available online: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4433327/ (accessed 22 June 2020). Freeman, D. (1999), The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock, Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press. Groo, K. (2019), Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harle, M. (2019), Afterlives of Abandoned Work: Creative Debris in the Archive, New York: Bloomsbury. Hughes, D. (2012), Tales from Development Hell: The Greatest Movies Never Made, London: Titan Books. Krämer, P. (2015), ‘Adaptation as Exploration: Stanley Kubrick, Literature, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence’, Adaptation, 8 (3): 372–82. McMurty, L. (2010), Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood, New York: Simon and Schuster. Miyao, D. (2017), ‘Hollywood Zen: A Historical Analysis of Oshima Nagisa’s Unfinished Film’, Mise au Point 9, doi: 10.4000/map.2385. North, D. (ed.) (2008), Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Riesman, A. (2018), ‘Best Movies from the 2018 Black List’, New York, 24 December. Schumacher, M. (1999), Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life, London: Bloomsbury. Spicer, A. (2010), ‘Creativity and Commerce: Michael Klinger and New Film History’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 8 (3): 297–314.

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Spicer, A., McKenna, A. T., and Meir, C. (2014), ‘Introduction’, in A. Spicer, A. T. McKenna, and C. Meir (eds), Beyond the Bottom Line: The Producer in Film and Television Studies, 1–24, London: Bloomsbury. Strub, W. (2015), ‘The Lost, Unmade, and Unseen Film Work of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’, Black Camera, An International Film Journal, 7 (1): 273–87. Waldman, H. (1991), Scenes Unseen: Unreleased and Uncompleted Films from the World’s Master Filmmakers, 1912–1990, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. White, A. (2020), ‘The Curse of Don Quixote’, The Telegraph, 30 January. Available online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/curse-ofdon-quixotetimeline-everything-went-wrong-terry-gilliams/ (accessed 22 June 2020).

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PA RT ONE

Producers and production companies

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1 A production strategy of overdevelopment: Kirk Douglas’s Bryna Productions and the unproduced Viva Gringo! James Fenwick

In 1969, after nearly twenty-five years in the business and over fifty screen appearances starting with The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Milestone 1946), Kirk Douglas took the decision to begin donating his personal and business papers to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR). Over the next decade, Douglas continued to donate his papers, leading to the division of the original collection into seven broad categories:  correspondence and personal papers; financial and business records; television; theatre; radio; motion pictures – produced; and motion pictures – unproduced. Taken together, the Kirk Douglas Papers cover one of the most important and transformational eras in American film history, commencing with the twilight years of the studio system in the 1940s, through its break-up in the 1950s and the eventual conglomeration of the Hollywood studios in the 1960s. At the same time, the papers reveal Douglas’s own centrality to these transformations following the incorporation of his own independent production company in 1949, Bryna Productions. Douglas was one of the first actors to form his own company in the post-Second World

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War era, precipitating an industrial trend that reached its apogee in the mid-1950s. The Kirk Douglas Papers (KDP), as the collection was eventually named, are quite revealing, with correspondence and other documents that unveil the man behind the screen-persona. What we find is an actor, producer, writer, philanthropist and diplomat who frequently displayed a furious level of perfectionism, determined to ensure his projects  – in all their forms – possessed a long-lasting quality and that (increasingly so, from the late 1950s onwards) they contained deeper intellectual and social themes. Douglas had been encouraged to donate these papers at the invite of film historian and academic Tino Balio. At the time, Balio was the director of the WCFTR and was instrumental in growing its archival acquisitions. Balio set about obtaining the United Artists Corporation Records, a vast collection of films, production files, business papers and more. Balio’s success in securing such major archival donations was a result of his pitch, convincing potential donors that ‘UW–Madison was a serious research institution looking to provide students and scholars with resources to study the history of film, television and theater, and that it would take the steps necessary to archive and preserve those materials’ (Price 2007). The intention of this chapter is to demonstrate how and why such archival material, even the most mundane, incomplete and trivial of records, is a vital and necessary source that can help researchers uncover new perspectives, histories and even dynamics within the American film industry. The chapter will serve as a guide for the reconstruction of lost film texts as well as raise questions as to what even constitutes a ‘text’ in the murky and dusty scholarly domain of shadow cinema. The chapter will examine Douglas’s unmade project Viva Gringo!, situating its development (and eventual abandonment) within the wider industrial and cultural contexts of the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as in the broader business history of Douglas’s Bryna. It will explore the creative and business decisions that led to both the development and abandoning of the project, and, more importantly, it will show how we can use the scant archival material of a project like Viva Gringo! to reconstruct a wider history of industrial and cultural logic of failure that informed Hollywood production processes in the 1950s and 1960s.

Kirk Douglas and Bryna Productions Before undertaking the case study of Viva Gringo!, I want to explore the wider history of Douglas’s productions in the 1950s and the archival category of ‘motion pictures – unproduced’ within the KDP. In doing so, the aim is to understand more broadly the management processes of Bryna and of Douglas as a producer. It also serves to show the extent of overdevelopment taking place at the company:  the way in which Douglas was committing

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19

to more projects than Bryna could ever feasibly produce, given its limited resources as a small, independent production company, and in turn how this led to a surplus of unproduced films. Table 1.1 surveys the KDP category of ‘motion pictures – unproduced’, with fifty-nine separate unproduced projects from the incorporation of Bryna in 1949 through to the mid-1970s. The table also contains information about the years attributable to the respective archival documentation, but this does not necessarily correlate to the years in which the project was in active development. For example, The Shadow contains documentation from 1944, but this relates to contracts that detail previous literary rights to the property on which the project was based prior to Douglas actively looking to develop the project. Table 1.1 is by no means a complete record of all the unproduced projects with which Bryna or Douglas were associated. Despite forming his own production company, Douglas still regularly starred in the productions of other producers and production companies. At the same time, other archival documents contained in the KDP refer to projects that Douglas/Bryna were developing (Norton 1957) but which are not present within the unproduced section, while newspaper and trade journal articles, such as Variety, detail the names of projects Douglas was – however briefly – associated with. Following its incorporation in 1949, there were attempts by Bryna to produce several films, including The Shadow, a project that was to be filmed in the UK and co-star Jane Wyman alongside Douglas (Fenwick 2020a: 96). But Bryna did not enter active production until the mid-1950s with the release of The Indian Fighter (1955), following the signing of a six-picture, non-exclusive contract with United Artists (UA). Yet, between the ‘dormant’ years of 1949 and 1955, there were frequent reports of potential properties being developed by the company. Producer Richard Sokolove worked for this earliest iteration of Bryna between 1950 and 1951. Sokolove would read twelve to fifteen stories and scripts per week and provided Douglas with reports so that he could consider what projects Bryna might develop (Sokolove 1951). But Sokolove appears to have grown increasingly frustrated at the inactivity of Bryna, which he deemed to be a result of Douglas’s own heavy workload; since the incorporation of Bryna in 1949, through to Sokolove expressing his frustration in 1951, Douglas had appeared in eight films, none of which were produced by Bryna. Sokolove was frank in his assessment of the situation at Bryna, telling Douglas, ‘No project should depend upon your acting in it. As willing and interested as you might be, you have neither the time nor the strength. Each project should stand on its own’ (Sokolove 1951 – emphasis in the original). Following his intervention, which largely went unheeded, Sokolove left Bryna’s employment in 1952. By March 1952, Boxoffice was reporting that Douglas finally intended to activate Bryna, with plans for two projects to enter immediate production, followed by an

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Table 1.1 Film listed in the ‘Motion pictures – unproduced’ category of the KDP Title

Year(s)

Title

Year(s)

The Man Without a World

1950

Something for Nothing

1966

The Travelers

1950

Lie Down, I Want to Talk to You

1967

Allison Brothers

1955

Shady Baby

1967

The Syndicate

1954–6

Seat of Power

1967–70

Shadow of a Champ

1955–9

The Piano Sport

1968

A Most Contagious Game

1955–7

The Bronc Rider

1968–9

Mavourneen

1956–67

Charlemagne

1968–9

The Shadow

1944–72

Chaka

1969

Deliver Us from Evil

1956

Project II

1969

Quality of Mercy

1956

A Last Valley

1969

Silent Gun

1956–66

Fling!

1969

Man on a Motorcycle

1956–7

Adam’s Garden

1969

The Golden Triangle

1956

Alimony Jail

1969

I Stole $16,000,000

1957–60

The Photographer

1969

Montezuma

1957–60

The Stranglers

n.d.

The Sun at Midnight

1957–61

Catch Me a Spy

1972

The Incredible Yanqui

1951

The Black Box

n.d.

The Beach Boys

1958

The Heroine

n.d.

The Disenchanted

1958

The Changing Man

n.d.

The Mound Builders

1958–61

Jamie

n.d.

Port of Call

1958

Aces ‘n Eights

n.d.

Viva Gringo!

1958

Brief Madness

n.d.

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Title

Year(s)

Title

Year(s)

Masters of the Dew

1958–9

Fuzz

n.d.

The Indian Wars

1961

The Glory of Love

n.d.

King Kelly

1955–63

The Many Loves of Jerome

n.d.

Trapeze

1961

Marauder

n.d.

Walls of Jolo

1963

The Milk Run, or the Aerodynamic Love Song of Eddie MacLean

n.d.

Automation

1964

The Rustler and the Prostitute

n.d.

The Confessor

1964–5

Yatra: A Beginning, A Pilgrimage

n.d.

Bolivar!

1966

Miscellaneous stories

21

annual slate of three pictures (though Douglas planned on appearing in only one picture per year, perhaps taking on board Sokolove’s suggestion) (‘Kirk Douglas Activating’ 1952: 30). William Schorr was brought on board as a producer to replace Sokolove and commence development of The Shadow and The Fear Makers (‘Kirk Douglas Activating’ 1952: 30). But once again Bryna stalled and neither project entered production. The latter was an adaptation of Darwin Teilhet’s 1945 novel of the same name, a thriller about a communist plot to infiltrate America. Douglas’s lawyer, Sam Norton, optioned the novel in 1948, with Douglas intermittently seeking ways to adapt it throughout the early 1950s (Williams 1949; Teilhet 1950). By the summer of 1950, Douglas’s assessment of the project was that he was not ‘in a hell of a rush. I have waited too long to do anything with “Fear Makers” to louse it up by rushing into it now’ (Douglas 1950). The project was eventually sold to Pacemaker Productions, who produced it for UA as a low-budget thriller directed by Jacques Tourneur in 1958. A combination of factors may have contributed to this initial period of dormant activity at Bryna. First, Douglas, as the company’s CEO, had no contractual motivation, with none of his projects being signed to any one studio. The 1955 contract with UA, however, provided both creative and financial incentive (Fenwick 2020a:  96–7). Second, Douglas himself was overworked and overcommitted, and, therefore, he was unable to provide his full attention to the projects being developed by Bryna. Table 1.1 does show an increase in archival documentation from the mid-1950s, after Bryna entered active production, while there is a lack of documentation

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relating to the early years of the company. And yet, as discussed above, there are still trade journal reports of potential titles associated with Douglas/ Bryna. This may indicate that Bryna and Douglas wanted to be seen to be developing projects in order to be part of trade journal ‘gossip’. Bryna’s six-picture contract with UA was signed in January 1955. Between the signing of the contract and the end of the decade, Table 1.1 shows that there were at least twenty-one projects that Bryna considered in one form or another. Not all of these would have been for UA financing, as Bryna entered contracts with a variety of other studios, including Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) (Lizzie (Haas 1957)) and Paramount (Last Train from Gun Hill (Sturges 1959)). Moreover, between 1955 and 1960, the company only produced eleven feature films: The Indian Fighter (Toth 1955), Spring Reunion (Pirosh 1957), Lizzie, The Careless Years (Hiller 1957), Paths of Glory (Kubrick 1957) (this was a production by the Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation, produced by James B. Harris, but as part of the contractual arrangements to secure Douglas in the leading role, Bryna was given the production company credit), Ride Out for Revenge (Girard 1957), The Vikings (Fleischer 1958), Last Train from Gun Hill, The Devil’s Disciple (Hamilton 1959) (this was a co-production with Hecht-Hill Lancaster Productions), Strangers When We Meet (Quine 1960) and Spartacus (Kubrick 1960). Bryna also produced a 39-episode television series, Tales of the Vikings (United Artists Television 1959–60), based on the The Vikings feature film. Douglas only starred in seven of the eleven productions, but he also appeared in five further productions for other producers in the same period:  The Racers (Hathaway 1955), Man Without a Star (Vidor 1955), Lust for Life (Minnelli 1956), Top Secret Affair (Potter 1957)  and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (Sturges 1957). Reflecting on this period of activity, it becomes apparent that there is a discrepancy between the number of projects that Bryna was considering for development and the number of films that were actually released, attributable in part to two key factors: the first, as already discussed, was Douglas’s overcommitment to appearing in leading roles, and the second, and arguably more important, was Bryna’s model of overdevelopment. The idea of overdevelopment as a model of production for independent producers and production companies in the 1950s is not altogether uncommon. There is evidence of other independent production companies operating a similar business model, including the Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions, the Mirisch Corporation and Seven Arts. The idea was predicated on the notion that a constant flow of projects always needed to be in development because of the anticipated failure (or rejection) of most of them by the studios. The new industrial conditions of Hollywood had led to the rapid incorporation of independent production companies by actors, directors, writers and other creative talent, in the process becoming their own producers. Financing and distribution

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for the projects of these production companies largely came from the major studios, especially from UA during the 1950s. The independent production companies were therefore managed on the assumption that most of their projects in development would ultimately be abandoned and left unproduced. The high volume of unproduced projects in the KDP would account for such a business model: Bryna never intended to produce most of these projects but rather acquired property and developed screenplays as insurance against the failure of other projects. Other production companies that operated a strategy of overdevelopment in the 1950s included the Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation. The company had brief contractual affiliations with the likes of UA and MGM, as well as a three-picture contract with Douglas’s Bryna that was never fulfilled (see Fenwick 2020b:  80–2). Recent research has investigated the number of unproduced Harris-Kubrick projects, with estimates of between twentyfive and thirty projects in development during the course of the company’s seven-year history (Ulivieri 2017: 111–12). And yet the company only ever produced three films that were released:  The Killing (Kubrick 1956), Paths of Glory and Lolita (Kubrick 1962). The discrepancy between unproduced and produced projects at Harris-Kubrick can be explained by what Peter Krämer has described as practical considerations, that is, the number of projects that were developed in one way or another by Harris-Kubrick were ‘to do ultimately with keeping their company afloat by getting project funding and generating income’ (Krämer 2017:  383–4). Harris-Kubrick, just like Bryna, seemed to operate a strategy of overdevelopment as means of insurance. Overdevelopment also acted as a means of guaranteeing a constant flow of product ready to enter production should a deal be arranged with a financier-distributor. But overdevelopment was also used to offer projects as part of a participation deal in return for securing the financing of a larger project. And the costs of overdevelopment could be substantial. Take, for example, the Mirisch Company. It had an ongoing contract between 1957 through to the mid-1960s with UA. During that time, Mirisch accrued various debts for unproduced films, including ‘$30,300 on Saddle and Ride, $14,250 for The Bridge at Remagen, $12,200 for Counselor-at-Law and $9,800 for Gargantua’ (Hannan 2015: 249). The specific contexts for overdevelopment are unique for each company and therefore it is necessary to undertake archival research that takes account not only of the production and business files of a specific film but also of primary sources beyond the host archive of the unproduced film. In doing so, it is possible to begin to understand why, in the model of overdevelopment, one project might be favoured over another and the various vested interests at play. What follows is an investigation of the archival sources of Viva Gringo!, with a case study of the research methods taken to understand how and why it was a victim of overdevelopment.

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Unarchiving Viva Gringo! Tucked amidst the many files in the ‘motion pictures – unproduced’ of the KDP category are two slim, not altogether atypical folders for a project named Viva Gringo!. While other folders in the unproduced category may bulge with overflowing correspondence and draft scripts, Folders 22 and 23 that make up Viva Gringo! are noticeable for their svelte appearance. The Viva Gringo! folders are themselves divided into three categories: 1) Folder 22: Correspondence, 1958 August–November 2) Folder 22: Titles, clippings 3) Folder 23: Budget, 1958 May At first glance, there appears to be nothing of real substance within these folders, not even a script. Therefore, how plausible is it to reconstruct a project with the absence of creative material? The Viva Gringo! files also raise questions about the need for ongoing archival research, often beyond the limits of the archive in which the material is located. The way this case study will proceed is to assume that you, the reader, is approaching the material in the same way that I, the researcher, did so: with no knowledge as to what Viva Gringo! was about and who was to appear in it. Only by the end, after unarchiving the contents of Folders 22, 23 and beyond, can we begin to reveal such details. Let us commence with Folder 22, the catalogue entry for which is somewhat misleading:  ‘Correspondence, 1958 August–November’. But the file contains documents beyond the stated 1958, largely ranging from between 1960 and 1965. A breakdown of the nineteen documents contained in the folder shows that only five pertain to 1958, with the majority coming from 1959 and beyond (see Table 1.2). This is significant due to one of the items contained in the folder:  a news clipping which suggests the project may have been abandoned as early as September 1958 (‘News Clipping’ 1958). Therefore, what are these documents, and, if the project had been abandoned so early on, why do most of the contents relate to the years after 1958? The makeup of the folder is a combination of mainly memoranda and letters, but there is also a proposed publicity plan for the project, proposed titles for the released film, several clippings from newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, and contracts between Bryna and UniversalInternational, and between Bryna and the author and screenwriter Borden Chase. The contents are not organized chronologically and, so, the first task must be to rearrange the documents in date order. In doing so, a picture begins to emerge that brings to life Viva Gringo!, even in the absence of any creative material.

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Table 1.2 Contents of Folder 22, Box 56, KDP Year

Number of Documents

1958

5

1959

1

1960

3

1961

5

1962

0

1963

0

1964

4

1965

1

In June 1958, Bryna contracted Chase to write a new film, or as the first key document (the contract between Chase and Bryna) describes it, ‘to create and write for us as we may desire and designate such changes, revisions and / or additions in and to our screenplay now entitled “VIVA GRINGO” ’ (‘Contract of Employment between Bryna Productions and Borden Chase’ 1958). Chase was given a time limit to complete his work, with delivery needed in advance of the contemplated shooting dates of 1–30 November 1958 (ibid.). The contract compensated Chase with $50,000 for his services upon either the completion of principal photography or, should the production be postponed, after 15 January 1959 (ibid.). In signing the contract, Chase granted Bryna all rights to the literary property created and any work that was derived from it. This last point is an important context given what unfolds in the remaining documents in Folder 22. Chase’s employment also entitled him to 4 per cent of any Producers’ Gross proceeds derived from the film should it be released (Sattler 1958). The documents show that Bryna was keen to secure a contract with Chase and to grant him favourable terms of employment. Of course, without any further context, the folder does not make it clear as to why Bryna had chosen Chase or, indeed, who he was. Chase had previously written the screenplay for Man Without a Star (Vidor 1955), the highly successful western that had featured Douglas in the lead role. In reference to the film in his autobiography, Douglas states that Chase was a ‘good writer’ who had created a ‘simple, fun, commercial western’ (Douglas 1989: 255). Chase was a significant writer of the western genre in Hollywood; he devised the story for Vera Cruz (Aldrich 1954), a Hecht-Lancaster Production scripted

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by Roland Kibbee and James R. Webb, and which performed exceptionally well at the box office and featured in Variety’s Top Film Grossers list of 1955 (‘1955’s Top Film Grossers’ 1956:  15); he also co-wrote the screenplays to critically acclaimed westerns including Red River (Hawks 1948)  and Winchester ‘73 (Mann 1950). The documents in Folder 22 suggest Viva Gringo! would very much be the next Bryna production to feature Douglas. Proposed pre-publicity plans were put together by Universal in July 1958 that suggested using the project as a means to celebrate Douglas’s screen career to date, with the picture – when (and if) released  – being his thirtieth (that accolade eventually went to The Vikings, released in the summer of 1958). A potential angle for the story was to have Douglas, ‘donning the different make-ups and clothes used in his most famous pictures. … Douglas has done just about everything in movies and this re-cap would make a good picture story’ (Sullivan 1958). The publicity plans hint towards some of the potential creative thinking behind Viva Gringo!, including for the film to feature ‘really sexy pin-ups’ in leading females, in order to challenge ‘such sex-pots as Brigitte Bardot, Loren, Martine Carol and so forth’ appearing in other films (Sullivan 1958). It also notes that Douglas was to play a leading role in the film alongside Rock Hudson and that it was to be filmed in Mexico; a proposed publicity stunt was for the two actors to appear in a photofeature titled ‘How to Learn Spanish Quickly’, exploiting the locale of the film (Sullivan 1958). Accompanying the publicity plan, and despite Bryna having assured Chase that the film would be named Viva Gringo!, was a document headed ‘Title Suggestions for “Viva Gringo” ’ (1958). The list had been sent to Bryna by Universal, with titles taken from a ‘master list’ kept by the latter company. This was a common business approach within the industry, with producers, production companies and the major studios registering hundreds of titles with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Title Registration Bureau, even if they had no story to attach. There is no surrounding context as to why Universal supplied the list, which included variations on Viva Gringo!, such as ‘Viva Americano!’, ‘Viva Badman!’, ‘Viva Joe Daylight’ and ‘Viva Outlaw!’. However, the presence of the title list suggests that the project was still moving forward by the end of July 1958. This is confirmed by a news clipping from the Los Angeles Times contained in the folder. Dated 8 August, the clipping reveals a new context to the Viva Gringo! project, one that hints that this was no western in the vein of Man Without a Star or Vera Cruz: Kirk Douglas’ Bryna company has tied in with U-I for two epic-type movies. First is “Spartacus,” by Howard Fast, in which Sir Laurence Olivier will direct Douglas, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov and himself, starting in October. The budget on this one is $4,000,000. The second

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will be “Viva Gringo,” by Borden Chase, with Hudson and Douglas. (Scheuer 1958) Presumably, the author of this item, Philip Scheuer – the Los Angeles Times’s film critic – based the story on a press release from either Bryna or Universal. It reveals that the plans for Viva Gringo! were for an ‘epic-type’ film on the scale of Spartacus and, therefore, would have a similar budget. At least that is what the article implies. Moreover, Bryna’s earlier pledge to Chase, in the contract with the author, had stated the production was planned for November 1958, but the above article suggested that Spartacus would now be filmed in October 1958. One must assume, particularly given the lack of any details of production dates in the story, that Viva Gringo! had been delayed until 1959. The documents that follow the above news clip suddenly seem to indicate a slowdown in the development of Viva Gringo!. Responding to a press enquiry in early August 1958, Stan Margulies, the head of Bryna’s publicity unit Public Relations, stated that there was no news, nor any available photos, in relation to Viva Gringo! ‘since the screenplay is still being revised. We hope to go into production around the 1st of the year’ (Margulies 1958). There is a further news clipping in the folder, dated a month after the letter from Margulies. The article featured a quote from Hudson – who was filming This Earth Is Mine (King 1959) at the time – in which he said, ‘I was supposed to do “Viva Gringo” next with Kirk Douglas … but I understand the picture is being postponed until next year’ (‘News Clipping’ 1958). Innuendo was being applied in the discussions about Viva Gringo!. Postponed meant the project was still in development and more than likely would remain there. After all, Margulies had admitted that the screenplay was being ‘revised’ as of August 1958. The next set of documents in Folder 22 confirm that somewhere between August 1958 and the end of 1960, Viva Gringo! had been officially abandoned by Bryna. Extensive correspondence takes place over the next five years, 1960–5, on how best to compensate Chase for his services, how to transfer rights to the literary material of Viva Gringo! back to him and how to account for the funds spent on development of the project as part of the budget for The Last Sunset (Aldrich 1961). Chase had written considerable material for Viva Gringo!, including a 169-page treatment, a 36-page synopsis and a 160-page first draft screenplay (‘Letter of Contract between Bryna Productions and Borden Chase’ 1960). But in order for the rights to the material to be transferred back to Chase, the author first had to repay $50,000 advance to Universal before Bryna could initiate the compensation clause of his original 1958 contract, along with issuing him a quitclaim to transfer all intellectual property rights for Viva Gringo! into his name. This process would not be completed until 1965.

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In the meantime, Bryna was concerned that the nearly $75,000 incurred in the development of Viva Gringo! would be incorporated as part of the budget for The Last Sunset, a western (set in Mexico) that finally saw Hudson and Douglas on screen together. In a letter of contract between Bryna and Universal from June 1961, Bryna stated that ‘we have mutually abandoned any plans to produce a motion picture based on the property [Viva Gringo!] and we mutually desire to agree upon the share each of us will pay of such indebtedness and the manner in which payment shall be made from us to you of our portion’ (‘Letter of Contract between Bryna Productions and Universal Pictures’ 1961). The solution was to ensure that the costs of Viva Gringo! were offset by any profits made by The Last Sunset which were owed to Bryna; the company had a 37.5 per cent interest in The Last Sunset. In calculating the means by which the costs of Viva Gringo! would be absorbed by The Last Sunset, it ensured that they were not officially recorded as part of that film’s production budget and therefore impact on any potential producer’s profits owed to either Universal or individuals at Bryna (ibid). Folder 22 raises various questions about the production of Viva Gringo!. Most notably, what on earth was the proposed ‘epic-type’ film about and why was it abandoned? And was it ever even a serious project? There was substantial creative material devised for it (not available in the KDP) and, moreover, a draft budget was created. This latter item is contained in Folder 23, the sole content of the file. Dated 16 May 1958, the document is a pre-production budget that put the production cost for Viva Gringo! at $1,979,875, ‘predicated on a shooting schedule of 36  days in Mexico, 13 days at the studio, plus 1 day travel to Mexico and 1 day travel to the studio’ (‘Pre-Production Budget’ 1958). The eighteen-page budget breaks down the above-the-line, shooting and completion period costs in fine detail; in fact, the level of detail suggests that a draft script was already available. A  breakdown of the talent budget, for example, reveals that character names had been set, including the lead characters of Joe Daylight (Douglas) and Traveler (Hudson), alongside a lengthy list of other characters. The breakdown of ‘Bits, Extras, Vehicles & Livestock’ reveals that scenes had already been written and suggests an extensive cast (‘Pre-Production Budget’ 1958). Still, even with such a detailed budget, broken down by a draft script that must have existed prior to the signing of a contract with Chase, we are still left with little context as to what Viva Gringo! was about. Taken together, the Viva Gringo! files held at the KDP reveal that a project, most likely a western set in Mexico and written by Chase, starring Hudson and Douglas, was given brief consideration for production by Bryna and Universal. But another, much larger project, most likely Spartacus, postponed Viva Gringo! indefinitely. Finally, the files show the financial and legal repercussions that

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result from an unproduced film and how the costs can be recouped by absorbing them into the production costs of a produced film.

Beyond the KDP There are clear limits to the material held in some archives for unproduced projects. This does not mean files like Viva Gringo! are useless to film history. Rather, we must look beyond the files themselves, often beyond the archive in which they are located, to further understand and contextualize the information they contain and the questions that they raise. Two key sources emerge to understand more broadly the contexts of Viva Gringo! that also allow us to place it within the wider history of Douglas and Bryna. The first is the MPAA Production Code Administration (PCA) records held at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles. The PCA records are vast, measuring at 240 linear feet with nearly twenty thousand records spanning 1927–67 (‘Production Code Administration Records’ n.d.). Producers submitted material, including draft screenplays, treatments, synopses, entire novels and more to the PCA to ascertain the sensitivity of the proposed project and whether it would encounter any censorship issues. Quite often the material submitted to the PCA was never produced, and the PCA records therefore serve as a key source for the shadow cinema historian. Sure enough, the PCA records have a Viva Gringo! production file, which covers the years 1957–8. Intriguingly, the PCA production file begins a whole year earlier than the files held at the KDP. The contents of the PCA file are made up of two documents: a memo from Vice President Geoffrey M. Shurlock and a carbon copy of a letter to Kathryn McTaggart (Universal) from Shurlock. The former, a memo for the files, is dated 28 May 1957, with a copy forwarded to the Universal offices. The letter offers the first real sense of what Viva Gringo! the film would have been like: It is the story of an American bank robber who flees to Mexico with his loot, buys a large ranch, and later joins up with Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution. By the end of the story both he and Villa have reformed and have become good Revolutionary Mexicans. (Shurlock 1957) The story that was submitted to the PCA, and of which it largely approved, was a synopsis based on an unpublished novel by Chase. The correspondence is between the PCA and Universal, suggesting it was a property that had been submitted by them, not by Bryna. Therefore, it is plausible to assume that Universal had acquired the option rights to the unpublished novel and

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had suggested it to Bryna as a potential film in the spring of 1958 as part of a two-picture contract that commenced with Spartacus. A year later, on 9 May 1958, the PCA received a draft screenplay of Viva Gringo!, and, again, it largely approved of the story apart from one key element: We refer to the fact that some of the wholesale thievery in this story is passed off rather casually, and without proper moral recognition. There is a clear intimation that Daylight [Douglas’s character] secured the money to buy the hacienda by robbing a bank. There is also the question of the wholesale appropriation of other people’s cattle in the later stages of the story. (Shurlock 1958) The PCA felt that the draft screenplay needed revisions that would allow for the main characters to reform by the end of the story and to recant for their early misdemeanours. Shurlock, in a letter to Kathryn McTaggart at Universal, believed this could be achieved by ‘some adequate restitution … inasmuch as our leading characters are sympathetic’ (Shurlock 1958). One final piece of information held at the Margaret Herrick Library points towards another key source to help reconstruct Viva Gringo!:  newspaper and trade journal clippings. One such clipping is attached to the PCA files for Viva Gringo!. Dated 12 May 1958, three days prior to the above letter from Shurlock, it is a story from the Los Angeles Times detailing Universal’s plans to finance a proposed Bryna production of Viva Gringo!. The story was based on an official press release put out by Universal. The story confirms that Bryna and Universal had recently signed a multi-picture contract and, following on from that, Bryna would produce Viva Gringo! as its first feature for the studio, which would ‘provide $2,500,000 [and] later distribute the picture’ (PKS 1958). The story in the Los Angeles Times would seem to confirm that it had been Universal that had initially developed Viva Gringo! and had submitted the screenplay to the PCA. Perhaps keen to announce the contract with Douglas, particularly given his prominent star power at the box office and the fact that Bryna was one of the key independent production companies in Hollywood at the time, Universal most probably suggested Viva Gringo! to Bryna as the first property for production as part of the contract. Such an approach, announcing a new contract with a key industry player like Douglas/Bryna and the financing of a project that would never be made, was not uncommon. Douglas and Bryna had undergone a similar experience when they signed a contract with UA in January 1955; UA subsequently announced several projects that were never made (Fenwick 2020a: 97). Universal was certainly keen to make it industry knowledge that it had signed Douglas and to signal that it was in the process of transitioning to the increasingly dominant new mode of production in Hollywood: the financing

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of independent producers and production companies. The Los Angeles Times story confirms this fact, stating that Universal, in signing a contract with Bryna, ‘becomes the last of all the major producing-distributing companies to finance the work of independents’ (‘U-I to Finance Bryna Feature “Viva Gringo” ’ 1958). Therefore, the real story here was not that Viva Gringo! might, or might not, be produced but rather that Universal was, somewhat belatedly, responding to the industrial flux underway in Hollywood and would begin to finance ‘other independent producers’ as well as ‘a series of other features, with and without Douglas as acting lead’ (ibid). At this point, we can now reflect on how the PCA production file has shaped our understanding of the Viva Gringo! folders held at the KDP. Viewed in isolation, the Viva Gringo! folders detail the fallout of a film that was never produced. But they don’t detail the origins of that project or why it might have been left unproduced. The PCA production file fleshes out considerably our understanding of the wider contexts of Viva Gringo! and hints towards its origins as an unpublished novel by Chase that Universal seem to have acquired in 1957. More important, the PCA file contains material that suggests Viva Gringo! was a victim of overdevelopment. The project was announced as part of a series of films between Douglas and Universal, for which negotiations would be ongoing. In the process, projects would be announced that more than likely would remain unproduced. One final archival source, newspapers and trade journals of the time, helps to reveal a much fuller picture of the production contexts of Viva Gringo! and the extent to which it was part of a model of overdevelopment at Bryna. What quickly becomes apparent when looking at trade journals like Variety and Boxoffice, or newspapers such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, is that Douglas and Bryna repeatedly featured in stories throughout 1958 linking them to an ever-increasing number of potential projects, most of which now languish in the ‘motion pictures  – unproduced’ category at the KDP. In fact, there is a clear escalation of development at Bryna between May and November 1958, as detailed in the following timeline: ●

●

●

12 May 1958: The New York Times reports that, alongside Viva Gringo!, Bryna was developing Michael Strogoff and was conducting negotiations to shoot the film in Soviet Russia (‘U-I to Finance Bryna Feature “Viva Gringo” ’ 1958). 19 May 1958: The New York Times reports that Bryna and Universal had agreed a deal for the ‘financing and distribution of Spartacus with a budget of $4,000,000’ (Pryor 1958: 18). A provisional shooting date for Spartacus was given as September 1958. This would change as the year progressed. 21 May 1958: Milton Rackmill, president of Universal, is accused of making public announcements about new productions that would

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never be produced. In response, Rackmill stated that ‘Universal will not deal in fantasies and rumors, but only in statements of fact’ (‘No Fantasies, Just Facts’ 1958: 15). He denied that he ever made announcements about new projects without firm production plans being in place. Somewhat ironically, the article concludes, ‘No starting date is listed for “Viva Gringo!” ’ (15). ●

●

3 September 1958: Variety reports that Bryna was developing a ‘topbudget picture’ called Simon Bolivar, with Douglas in the leading role (‘Couple of Bolivars’ 1958: 19). In addition, Bryna was also developing three other new feature films: an adaptation of Edward Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy (1956), an adaptation of Samuel Grafton’s A Most Contagious Game (1956) and The Shadow, a story by Ben Hecht. In addition, Bryna had announced plans for two television series, The Indian Fighter and The Vikings, both based on previous Bryna feature films. November 1958: There are various news stories about an exponential increase in development at Bryna, including by the New York Times and Variety. The latter reported a 60 per cent increase in project development at Bryna as part of a business strategy to ‘elevate it into the position of one of Hollywood’s top indie outfits’ (‘Kirk Douglas Plotting Future Productions’ 1958: 3). On top of the projects that had previously been announced throughout 1958, Bryna was now also developing a screenplay based on the short story And the Rock Cried Out (1953) by author Ray Bradbury, The Indian Wars, The Silent Gun and an original screenplay by Bryna vice president Ed Lewis titled The Sun at Midnight. In addition, a further television series was being developed, titled Report from Space (‘Kirk Douglas Plotting Future Productions’ 1958: 3).

Taken together, this spate of development announcements by Bryna totalled an estimated $25,000,000–30,000,000 in production costs (‘Kirk Douglas’ Firm Schedules 11 Features’ 1958:  15). And yet, while the announcements look impressive in terms of output and potential subject matter, the majority had no financial backing or distribution agreement with a major studio. Bryna could not finance and distribute the projects itself and, therefore, the projects can only represent a purposeful strategy of overdevelopment. Of the eleven features announced between May and November 1958, including Viva Gringo! and Spartacus, only two were ever actually produced and released:  Spartacus and the adaptation of Edward Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy, released as Lonely Are the Brave (Miller 1962). So, while there may have been a reported 60 per cent increase in development at Bryna in 1958, 82 per cent of the projects announced remained unproduced.

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The impact of this increase in overdevelopment was to push the proposed shooting date for Viva Gringo! ever further back. By mid-1959, it became an increasingly confused picture as to what Bryna would produce as the co-starring vehicle for Hudson and Douglas. Variety reported that the pair would co-star in both Viva Gringo! and a film called The Day of the Gun (‘Universal, Unchained from Studio’ 1959: 5); the latter was the provisional title for what was eventually released as The Last Sunset. By May 1960, the regular ‘Hollywood Production Column’ in Variety was listing The Day of the Gun as in production, signalling that Viva Gringo! had been abandoned altogether (‘Hollywood Production Pulse’ 1960: 22). One further piece of evidence emerges in newspaper and trade journal stories of the time that suggests neither Universal nor Bryna ever intended to produce Viva Gringo! – or, at the very least, were never fully committed to the project. Towards the end of the 1950s, Universal was experiencing financial and managerial turmoil, culminating with the temporary shutdown of production on its backlot in the spring of 1958. What followed was a gradual takeover of Universal by the Music Corp of America (MCA), a talent agency run by Lew Wasserman. Douglas himself was represented by MCA and Wasserman was instrumental in securing the financing of Spartacus (Douglas 1989: 306–7). Douglas had been consumed with Spartacus since at least 1957, and it is probable that, in exchange for Universal financing the film, he agreed to co-star in a project alongside Hudson, who was exclusively contracted to the studio at that time. Keen to exploit the contract with Bryna and Douglas in the press and the wider industry, Universal suggested Viva Gringo! as an initial project to advertise. And if the company was to attract further independent producers, as was its stated intention, then Hudson and Douglas were an ideal way of showboating Universal’s transition to financing independent productions. Variety speculated as much in a story from November 1958: Universal’s status as a film company able to attract independent producers apparently depends on the strength of a few key star personalities still under contract to the company. So far it seems that this has been the only inducement the company has been able to offer since it changed its policy and put out the welcome mat to the indies. (‘Milton Rackmil Must Study Charm’ 1958: 3) The ‘few key star personalities’ was in fact just one: Hudson. He had been instrumental in finalizing all four participation deals made by Universal, including Viva Gringo! Hudson was arguably the biggest box-office star of the time and was able to command loan-out fees of over $1,000,000 (‘Milton Rackmil Must Study Charm’ 1958:  3). Arguably, in return for financing Spartacus, Universal expected Bryna to produce a western

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to co-star Hudson and Douglas (‘Milton Rackmil Must Study Charm’ 1958: 3). Bryna may have agreed to the deal to allow Universal to advertise the project with the aim of ensnaring further independent producers; as a result of the deal, apparently ‘other indie deals soon found their way to the company’ (‘Universal, Unchained from studio’ 1959:  5). But Bryna most likely never intended to produce the project. Viva Gringo! was nothing more than window dressing for both Bryna and Universal, with the real prize – for Douglas at least – being Spartacus.

Conclusion In all probability, Viva Gringo! was always destined to remain unproduced. The project, while at Bryna, found itself part of an escalating production strategy of overdevelopment. Amidst a swell of other potential projects, all with various vested interests and personal commitments, Viva Gringo! never looked like a project that appealed to those who would be making it. It was one of many pictures Bryna held in development, with the anticipation most would never be produced. If other projects failed, then Viva Gringo! may have been fortunate enough to enter production. Indeed, it may have been the backup insurance should Spartacus fail. But the increasing backlog of films at Bryna led to ever diminishing hope for the project. Instead, it became a means of promoting Bryna and Universal, and their respective key assets, Hudson and Douglas. Whether Viva Gringo! would ever be produced was arguably not a key aim for Universal; rather, the participation deal with Bryna allowed Universal to advertise that it was now open to signing with independent producers, and this deal was the flagship contract to attract others. Viva Gringo! was a means of buoying confidence in Universal’s outlook and its new business strategy. At the same, for Bryna, Viva Gringo! acted as a bargaining chip, one used to secure a long sought-after participation deal for Spartacus. But what of the creative material that was generated for Viva Gringo!? Chase eventually released a novel of the same name in 1961 with Bantam, while the creative material produced for the proposed film production are now housed at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center as part of the Borden Chase Papers (Series III, Boxes 32 and 36). As for the feature film, the project was loosely adapted into an MGM Eurowestern, Gunfighters of Casa Grande (Rowland 1964), with the screenplay written by Clark Reynolds. The producer Lester Welch located the production in Spain as part of the low-budget nature of the film, with Welch reporting that ‘he could not make ends meet by producing the same action Western in Hollywood’ (‘U.S. Westerns Went “Thataway” ’ 1963: 5). So, there was an afterlife for Viva Gringo! but in a different production context, one that would allow it to act as a precursor to the emerging Spaghetti western.

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This chapter has raised a fundamental question for shadow cinema research and film studies more generally:  can a film even exist with such little archival information available? The two folders held at the KPD, when viewed in isolation, provide only traces of the Viva Gringo! project, hinting towards wider industrial and production contexts, including the strategy of overdevelopment adopted by Bryna. Instead, what is necessary is a much wider survey of archival material. This involves going beyond the source archive and trying to understand the limited material available within a larger narrative of film history from an industrial, cultural and political perspective. Only when we begin to understand the vested interests both at Universal and at Bryna can we begin to see Viva Gringo! as a tool for some larger project. Viva Gringo! was dispensable, but its use now as an archival artefact is in revealing a more holistic perspective of the production and managerial strategies of independent producers in Hollywood in the 1950s. And for that, it, and many other unproduced projects like it, is an indispensable record of the production and business history of the American film industry.

Acknowledgements Part of the research for this chapter was funded by the European Association for American Studies Transatlantic Travel Grant. The grant funded a research visit to the KDP housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison in June–July 2017.

References Key KDP = Kirk Douglas Papers, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research MHL = Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles ‘Contract of Employment between Bryna Productions and Borden Chase’ (1958), 2 June, Box 56, Folder 22, KDP. ‘Letter of Contract between Bryna Productions and Borden Chase’ (1960), 18 November, Box 56, Folder 22, KDP. ‘Letter of Contract between Bryna Productions and Universal Pictures’ (1961), 15 June, Box 56, Folder 22, KDP. ‘Couple of Bolivars’ (1958), Variety, 3 September, 19. Douglas, K. (1950), ‘Letter to Darwin Teilhet’, 19 June, Box 32, Folder 5, KDP. Douglas, K. (1989), The Ragman’s Son, London: Pan Books. Fenwick, J. (2020a), ‘“Look, Ma, I’m a Corporation”: United Artists and Kirk Douglas’s Bryna Productions 1955–1959’, in T. Balio, G. Needham, Y. Tzioumakis and P. Krämer (eds), United Artists, 94–111, London: Routledge.

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Fenwick, J. (2020b), Stanley Kubrick Produces, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hannan, B. (2015), The Making of the Magnificent Seven: Behind the Scenes of the Pivotal Western, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ‘Hollywood Production Pulse’ (1960), Variety, 20 July, 22. ‘Kirk Douglas Activating Own Production Unit’ (1952), Variety, 22 March, 30. Kirk Douglas’ Firm Schedules 11 Features’ (1958), New York Times, 8 November, 15. ‘Kirk Douglas Plotting Future Productions’ (1958), Variety, 5 November, 3, 20. Krämer, P. (2017), ‘Stanley Kubrick: Known and Unknown’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 37 (3): 373–95. Margulies, S. (1958), ‘Letter to Dave Crown’, 11 August, Box 56, Folder 22, KDP. ‘Milton Rackmil Must Study Charm’ (1958), Variety, 26 November, 3. ‘News Clipping’ (1958), 23 September, Box 26, Folder 22, KDP. ‘1955’s Top Film Grossers’ (1956), Variety, 25 January, 1, 15. ‘No Fantasies, Just Facts’ (1958), Variety, 21 May, 15, 20. Norton, S. (1957), ‘Letter to Kirk Douglas’, 3 September, KDP. PKS (1958), ‘U-I to Finance Bryna Feature, “Viva Gringo” ’, Los Angeles Times, 12 May, MPAA/PCA Production Files, MHL. ‘Pre-Production Budget’ (1958), 16 May, Box 56, Folder 23, KDP. Price. J. (2007), ‘A Glimpse into Kirk Douglas: Film Center Shares Online Collection’, University of Wisconsin-Madison News, 30 October. Available online: https://news.wisc.edu/a-glimpse-into-kirk-douglas-film-center-sharesonline-collection/ (accessed 31 January 2019). ‘Production Code Administration Records’ (n.d.). Available online: http:// digitalcollections.oscars.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15759coll30 (accessed 15 April 2019). Pryor, T. (1958), ‘Movie Is Planned of Novel by Fast’, New York Times, 19 May, 18. Sattler, M. (1958), ‘Memorandum to Samuel Norton’, 15 July, Box 56, Folder 22, KDP. Scheuer, P. (1958), ‘U-I Resumes with Imposing Titles’, Los Angeles Times, 8 August, Box 56, Folder 22, KDP. Shurlock, G. (1957), ‘Memo for the Files, Re: Viva Gringo!’, 28 May, MPAA/PCA Production Files, MHL. Shurlock, G. M. (1958), ‘Letter to Kathryn McTaggart’, 15 May, MPAA/PCA Production Files, MHL. Sokolove, R. (1951), ‘Letter to Kirk Douglas’, 14 September, Box 11, Folder 29, KDP. Sullivan, J. (1958), ‘Notes on Publicity Requirements for Viva Gringo!’, 22 July, Box 56, Folder 22, KDP. Teilhet, D. (1950), ‘Letter to Kirk Douglas’, 13 June, Box 32, Folder 5, KDP. ‘Title Suggestions for “Viva Gringo” ’ (1958), 22 July, Box 56, Folder 22, KDP. ‘U-I to Finance Bryna Feature “Viva Gringo” ’ (1958), Los Angeles Times, 12 May, MPAA/PCA Production Files, MHL.

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Ulivieri, F. (2017), ‘Waiting for a Miracle: A Survey of Stanley Kubrick’s Unrealized Projects’, Cinergie, 6 (12): 95–115. ‘Universal, Unchained from Studio’ (1959), Variety, 19 August, 5. ‘U.S. Westerns Went “Thataway” ’ (1963), Variety, 18 September, 5. Williams, A. L. (1949), ‘Letter to Samuel Norton’, 25 April, Box 32, Folder 5, KDP.

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2 Gone with the winds that never were: The David O. Selznick archive and unmade historical cinema David Eldridge

In the fall of 1935, David O. Selznick left Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) to launch his own independent production company, Selznick International Pictures (SIP). Determined to ‘compete with the best’, his blueprint was to release just a handful of high-cost prestigious films annually, personally supervising each one (Schatz 1996: 178). In fact, SIP produced merely eleven titles before it was liquidated in 1940, only a few months after its most monumental picture, Gone with the Wind (GWTW), swept the Academy Awards. Yet during its brief existence, SIP’s team of readers scouted countless books, plays, magazines and radio broadcasts as inspiration for potential movies. On the East Coast, Kay Brown covered the New York publishing and theatre worlds, while Selznick’s story editor in Los Angeles, Val Lewton, submitted a constant stream of synopsized ‘promising material’ for his boss’s consideration (Miller 1986: 11). As a result, for every A Star is Born (1937) or Rebecca (1940) that SIP made, there were hundreds of unproduced story ideas and proposals, now preserved in the David O. Selznick Collection, at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in the University of Texas at Austin.

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With over three million items, the Selznick archive is the fullest record of independent film production from the classic Hollywood era, documenting every aspect of SIP operations. It contains a mass of correspondence, financial records, treatments, scripts, set and costume designs, call sheets and publicity material, as well as Selznick’s legendary lengthy memos which attest to his ‘fanatical attention’ to the ‘thousands and thousands of details that go into the making of a film’ (Lambert 1976: 35; Behlmer 1989: xxv). Film historians have already used this documentation to challenge the longstanding perception that GWTW emerged as a masterpiece almost in spite of Selznick being a ‘troublesome meddler’ who chopped and changed writers and directors on a whim (Vertrees 1997: x). Rather, archive-based studies like Thomas Schatz’s Genius of the System (1996), Ronald Haver’s David O.  Selznick’s Hollywood (1980) and especially Alan Vertrees’s Selznick’s Vision (1997) have demonstrated how Selznick was the ‘chief architect and prime mover’ at every stage of the films made by SIP and that GWTW in particular was very much the determined product of his ‘personal vision’ (Vertrees 1997:  xi–xii). Indeed, use of the collection has led not only to a greater appreciation of Selznick himself but also consequently informed debates in film studies about the director-oriented concept of the auteur, as well as generating invaluable material for scholars of adaptation studies, star studies, the studio system and film history in general. Rarely, however, has the extensive material relating to unrealized projects been drawn upon; and this chapter considers the additional insights which can be gained from research into the film ideas which SIP did not pursue. Some attention has been given to the ‘sinking’ of Selznick’s project about the Titanic, which was intended to be Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘American debut’ after he signed a contract with SIP in 1938 (Schaefer 1986: 57). However, this perpetuates the notion that shadow cinema is only of interest when it concerns the ‘unmade masterpieces’ of canonical directors; whereas a crucial significance of the Selznick collection is that it reveals just how much time, energy and creative talent is devoted by filmmakers to unmade ideas and works. The major part of the archive, which spans the years 1916 to 1966, is arranged on the basis of the departmental division of the studio:  Administrative (containing 1094 boxes of material), Casting (36), Distribution (248), Financial (847), Legal (332), Music (116), Production (214), Publicity (268), Research (53), Story (1012) and Talent (18). Most material relating to unrealized projects is to be found in the Story Department series, which includes 89 boxes labelled as ‘Scripts 1935–54’. The files within are organized alphabetically, starting with a copy of Robert Sherwood’s play Abe Lincoln in Illinois and ending with Mark Reed’s comedy Yes, My Darling Daughter (both of which eventually became films produced by other studios in 1940 and 1939, respectively). Also, an additional 366 files in the Story Department series consist of an alphabetical run of synopses of plays, novels, short stories and non-fiction

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publications, with commentary by the readers. At the most conservative estimate, at least 45 per cent of the Story Department records pertain to unproduced projects; and this does not take into account correspondence in other boxes which are organized according to the person heading each of Selznick’s different story offices (the most important of those being the offices of Lewton and Brown, as well as scenario assistant Barbara Keon and Elsa Neuberger on the East Coast). Furthermore, there are also five boxes in the Administrative Series concerned with all of the stories Selznick considered while at MGM, dating from 1933 to 1935, with many unrealized projects among them (some of which such as ‘Lloyd George’ or ‘S.S. Morro Castle’ are substantial enough to have a file of their own). An additional 11 boxes catalogued likewise under ‘Administrative’ are ‘Story Files 1936–1953’, ranging from ‘American Cavalcade Film’ to ‘Young Man with a Horn’. These concern most any project where the idea progressed beyond an initial synopsis of source material to at least the assigning of writers or the consideration of casting possibilities. The organization of the archive therefore requires the researcher to range across many boxes, files and series in order to piece together the different memoranda and material pertaining to a particular title or subject, but the fullness of the collection as a whole certainly rewards that detective work in enabling an effective reconstruction of just how far a project did or did not progress at any given time. Indeed, the huge number of ideas for screenplays brought to Selznick’s attention by Lewton, Brown and others, and his reasons for passing them over, are highly informative both of Selznick’s own modus operandi and of the forces acting on (and against) independent filmmakers in an industry dominated by the major studios. They also raise questions about what constitutes shadow cinema, since often Lewton’s team submitted ‘only the germ of a workable idea’ to their boss (Miller 1986: 7). How should film historians regard such ‘germs’ or determine which, out of the thousands of ‘workable ideas’ documented in the archives, merit further research? For the purposes of this chapter, I have taken my lead from GWTW itself, to focus on some of the events and figures from American history about which Selznick professed himself to be ‘crazy’ and in which he saw the potential for ‘showmanship’ (so often the decisive, if nebulous, factor in the productions he pursued most vigorously). Infamously, GWTW was very nearly an unproduced film itself, after Selznick initially told Brown that he was ‘most sorry to have to say no’ to her enthusiastic entreaties to acquire the rights to Margaret Mitchell’s novel (Haver 1980: 3). Indeed, although this epic of the American Civil War was ultimately to fulfil his desire to make ‘The Great American Motion Picture’, the archive shows that even as GWTW was being filmed, Selznick continued to consider the possibility that other American histories might have served that ambition instead (Vertrees 1997: 184).

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Andrew Jackson and the censoring of history In the first weeks of SIP’s existence, Selznick listed the key impediments to the company’s prospects of developing projects with compelling ‘showmanship possibilities’. A key factor was the lack of established stars under contract to him. Then there was ‘the public’s ennui with all the old story formulas’. ‘Legal difficulties’ in acquiring rights to material were a particular challenge for any new operator given that major studios had already registered so many titles with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (the MPPDA, headed by Will Hays). Also, among ‘an increasing number of obstacles placed in producers’ paths’, Selznick highlighted the matter of censorship, especially the industry’s own self-regulatory system, administered since July 1934 by the MPPDA’s Production Code Administration (PCA) (Selznick 1935b). Though each of these elements would be significant in discouraging the development of at least one of Selznick’s American history projects, censorship was a bête noire which preceded the formation of SIP. Enjoying the considerable artistic freedom at MGM which led to such moneymakers as Manhattan Melodrama (1934) and David Copperfield (1935), Selznick had proposed in February 1934 a historical subject that he saw as brimming with showmanship:  a ‘daring treatment’ of the life of President Andrew Jackson. Alexander Korda had recently scored an unprecedented success for a British film in the US market with his saucy The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), convincing Selznick that ‘a sex story dealing with an actual outstanding American historic figure, against the background of the White House, was a sensational idea that would have the same appeal’ (Selznick 1934b). Jackson’s biography offered two sex scandals to exploit. First, Jackson’s political opponents had accused him of encouraging Rachel Robards to desert her husband, Lewis Robards, and live with Jackson adulterously for two years before she was officially divorced. The second drew on gossip that, following the death of Rachel just days after his election in 1828, Jackson had taken as his mistress Peggy Eaton, the wife of his secretary of war. With his imagination fired with the prospect of showing how ‘Jackson actually forced his mistress down the throats of Washington society and fired his cabinet members when their wives would not receive her’, Selznick was quick to inform MGM’s head, Louis B. Mayer, that he was ‘very hot about the possibilities’ (Selznick 1934a). Understandably, the Production Code administrators were less than ‘hot’ when they got wind of the idea. The Code had been adopted by the MPPDA in 1930 as a set of guidelines to encourage higher standards of morality in Hollywood movies and thereby deflect the pressures building externally for federal film censorship laws. One central tenet of the Code was that adultery should never be ‘explicitly treated or justified or presented attractively’ (Leff and Simmons 2013: 287). Selznick would have contravened this in his plan

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to depict ‘Jackson’s marriage to a woman who hadn’t been divorced’ as an ‘amusing’ but ‘romantic’ episode, and with his idea for a ‘three-cornered love story between Jackson, his mistress, and some young man’ (Selznick 1934a). It was precisely because producers like Selznick were ignoring the Code and reawakening the spectre of government-endorsed censorship being imposed on the industry that, on 5 February, Joseph Breen was appointed by Will Hays to take over the Studio Relations Committee (SRC, soon to become the PCA) and bring filmmakers into line. Selznick’s Jackson project was thus one of the very first problems Breen encountered. Determining how best to proceed, Breen dispatched staffer Islin Auster to the Los Angeles Public Library to investigate the historical truth. Reporting on the accusations of ‘improper conduct’ levelled at Jackson, Auster clarified that Jackson and Rachel had married in 1788 in the mistaken belief that Lewis Robards had already divorced her. Once this unintentional bigamy was realized and the divorce properly secured, Jackson had immediately remarried his beloved Rachel. This less ‘sensational’ truth was unlikely to rile potential censors and could be handled under the Code. On the ‘main punch’ of Jackson’s ‘relations’ with Peggy Eaton, however, Auster had been ‘unable to locate but little’ (Auster 1934). The MPPDA therefore cautioned Selznick that ‘it was our unanimous opinion that it was a dangerous policy to portray the irregular living of a past president of the United States’. Audiences could be ‘offended at the dragging in of a scandal of a past president’s life’, and the MPPDA would not countenance setting a precedent for an ‘objectionable cycle of films’ which might, for instance, revisit the alleged mistresses and illegitimate children of Grover Cleveland or Warren Harding. Apparently with no knowledge (or at least no irony) concerning President Franklin Roosevelt’s own extramarital affairs, the SRC also warned that Roosevelt ‘might himself object to having presidents portrayed as practicing adultery in the White House’ (‘Memoranda for the Files’ 1934). Further, as Breen insisted with specific regard to the cinematic portrayal of Jackson, ‘his importance as a heroic figure in American history must be kept in mind throughout’ (Breen 1936). Faced with this obstacle, Selznick responded in two ways which were to prove characteristic in his career. First, the notion of creating an original screenplay was supplanted by the search for a suitable pre-existing narrative in popular historical fiction. When adapting such material, Selznick could try to argue with the Code administrators that the American public had already accepted its version of events without taking offense. Second, Selznick switched the focus onto the women in Jackson’s life. Rather than ‘besmirching’ the public image of Old Hickory, this strategy would enable filmmakers to present Jackson as the chivalrous defender of the reputations of ‘wronged’ women (Lewton n.d.). The pending publication of Samuel Hopkins Adams’s fictionalized novel about Peggy Eaton, The Gorgeous Hussy, proved the catalyst for aligning these two approaches. Inspired by

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Eaton’s own memoirs, Adams’s book scotched rumours of the affair between her and Jackson (along with earlier allegations of adultery with John Eaton while she was married to her first husband). Instead, Peggy was presented as the innocent victim of slanders spread by Jackson’s political enemies; and Jackson was depicted as ‘indefatigable’ in ‘corralling proofs to annihilate each insinuation’ against her ‘female virtue’ (Pollack 2011:  92). Adapting this solved the censorship problem, absolving both figures of any ‘sin’, and Selznick quickly acquired the rights. Yet this version of history also reduced Jackson to a secondary figure in what was now Peggy’s story. Selznick retained some initial passion for The Gorgeous Hussy, as he could see showmanship value in such ‘a marvellous title’ if it became a vehicle for MGM’s ‘sex goddess’ Jean Harlow (Selznick 1934b). At one point he even contemplated casting Mae West simply because such a title, linked with the comic actress’s reputation, would ‘draw the crowds’ (even if it would mean writing ‘an entirely new story’) (Lewton n.d.). But by the time MGM made the decision to cast Joan Crawford, the impact of adapting to the demands of censorship had clearly eroded Selznick’s enthusiasm. He had resigned in 1935 while The Gorgeous Hussy was in pre-production and did ask his agent to see if the studio might sell the option to him in December, so as to make it one of the first releases for SIP (Selznick 1935c). However, he did not push hard for it and readily brought Little Lord Fauntleroy from MGM instead. That MGM did eventually release The Gorgeous Hussy (with Lionel Barrymore playing Jackson) raises the question of whether a film idea which evolves into a different movie ought to be classed as shadow cinema. However, in this case, Selznick’s original vision of a film centred on the life, career and presidency of Andrew Jackson was one which remained unrealized. Moreover, as the first of a run of possible biopics concerning other male figures in US history upon which Selznick fixated, it warrants particular attention. It is also the case, that Selznick was later to gain a reputation for ‘pushing back’ at the Production Code, famously fighting for Rhett Butler to be able to say the word ‘damn’ in his parting line in GWTW, and for railing against it as ‘insane, inane and outmoded’ during the making of Rebecca (Selznick 1939b; Doherty 2009: 134). The files of this unmade Jackson project pointedly suggest that Selznick’s attitude towards the Code originated much earlier, in the disappointing compromises occasioned by one of his very first ‘Great American Motion Picture’ ideas.

Canfield, Colman and costumes Another preoccupation of SIP’s story discussions stemmed from Selznick’s association of showmanship with ‘sensational’ casting. In contrast to MGM’s boast that it had ‘more stars than there are in the heavens’, SIP faced particular challenges as a ‘company without stars’ (Selznick 1935b).

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It was not until the end of the decade that Selznick was able to assemble his own stock company of contracted performers, including the likes of Vivien Leigh, Ingrid Bergman, Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck within ‘The Selznick Players’ (Bowers 1976:  15–16). Prior to this, SIP had to secure the services of stars on loan from the major studios or find projects which would entice non-contracted players to sign picture-based deals. Therefore, potentially prestigious historical films – and the leading roles within them – were often considered as good bait for actors Selznick wanted to work with. Several archival files therefore identify historical figures as hypothetical matches for particular stars. One document, for instance, lists ‘historic women … prominent at the age of fifty’, including the founder of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton, social reformer Jane Addams and French actress Sarah Bernhardt (Bucknall 1934). The older actress Selznick evidently had in mind remains unidentified in the document, but when he was seeking to entice stage actress Maude Addams out of retirement, the notion of her playing Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, was similarly advanced. There are also various lists like ‘Material for Mae West’ (Lucretia Borgia being one surprising suggestion) or ideas for ‘an Amelia Earhart story for Katharine Hepburn’ (Wright and Lewton 1935a; Lewton 1938c). Readers were also frequently instructed to keep certain actors in mind when evaluating novels and plays. Synopsis files are full of comments such as ‘Alexander Hamilton’s life should make a fine screen story, perhaps for Leslie Howard, since Hamilton was inherently English’ (Seilaz 1937). As evidence of performances that ‘might have been’, these were often just ideas in the ether, but they still represent telling commentary on how an actor’s star persona was perceived within Hollywood. Moreover, when some historical projects did progress further as potential star vehicles, their eventual failure to be produced revealed some of the limitations of SIP’s set-up. A notable example was evident in the studio’s work on a biopic of Richard Albert Canfield, the ‘Prince of Gamblers’ who in the 1880s established America’s most prestigious (and illegal) casinos in New  York and Rhode Island. Canfield was also known for investing his wealth in art, being the patron of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Selznick (a compulsive gambler himself) first displayed interest in early 1936, when searching for a project to tempt actor Edward Arnold, who had just played the lead in Universal’s Diamond Jim, the biography of another legendary gambler and entrepreneur, Jim Brady. Arnold was under personal contract with independent producer B. P. Schulberg, who had previously been Selznick’s boss at RKO Pictures, and SIP evidently hoped to capitalize on this relationship. Kay Brown was already trying to buy the screen rights to Alexander Gardiner’s 1930 biography, Canfield:  The True Story of the Greatest Gambler, and was clearly thinking of Arnold’s performance as Brady when she argued strongly that Canfield should be his next role (Brown 1936). Selznick, however, was cautious about this being ‘so close to Arnold’s other pictures’, especially

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when Schulberg informed him that Arnold was also going to play yet another nineteenth-century tycoon, railroad baron Jim Fisk, in RKO Pictures’ The Toast of the Town (1937) (Selznick 1936b). When it transpired that Diamond Jim had not been as big a hit as Universal had anticipated, Selznick grew even colder on the idea (Selznick 1936c). By then, however, SIP had invested considerable money in paying writers Oliver Garrett and Parker Morell for treatments on a Canfield screenplay. Consequently, Selznick’s thoughts soon turned to casting another actor: Ronald Colman. Selznick had worked very successfully with Colman when making MGM’s A Tale of Two Cities (1935), nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. Colman was contracted with Samuel Goldwyn at that time but then signed with 20th Century-Fox, where he starred in Clive of India and Under Two Flags. When the latter proved a ‘slowing moving’ flop, Colman’s contract was not renewed and he struck out as an independent. SIP thus negotiated with him to play the dual roles of Rudolf Rassendyll and King Rudolf V in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), and, thrilled with Colman’s performances, Selznick signed him to a seven-year contract (Smith 1991:  141–2). The Canfield project was thus resurrected specifically with this actor in mind. Yet, as made clear by Morell’s contribution of ‘Four Ideas on Canfield Story’, it proved challenging to tailor the biographical reality to Colman’s persona (Morell n.d.). The ‘virtues of uncompromising integrity, strength of purpose and generosity of mind’ were those which ‘defined [Colman’s] character and sustained his popularity’ throughout his most successful performances (Smith 1991:  291). Morell could see how Colman’s ‘British’ image was somewhat suited to ‘the character of Canfield as he actually was in his later days … a very cultured gentleman’. However, integrity and honour had featured little in the youth of the real Canfield, who appeared driven only to make money (and ‘lots of it’). Having lived ‘riotously’ at Europe’s best gambling houses, he had spent several years learning their tricks, only returning to America in order to then exploit the ‘sucker money’ at home (Morell n.d.: 1–4). Morell therefore devised a variety of possible openings for a screenplay, which would recast Canfield as a sympathetic character with values more aligned to Colman’s image. One scenario invented a rival suitor to the girl young Canfield loves. Said suitor then conspires to get Canfield ‘out of the way’, having him arrested unjustly as a ‘common gambler’. Another involved Canfield’s employer similarly ‘framing’ him, this time for the embezzlement of company funds which the employer himself had lost in games of cards. In both cases, after his release from prison, the embittered Canfield would decide ‘he might as well have the game as the name’ and embark on his career as the calculating ‘Prince of Gamblers’. Only at the end would he find redemption, giving it all up for the love of a good woman (Morell identified this woman as Genevieve Martin, whom Canfield did indeed marry; yet somewhat inconveniently for Morell’s purpose, the real Canfield continued

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his gambling career while married to Martin, opening his famous clubhouse in Saratoga Springs the year after their wedding). Another suggestion reflected Morell’s awareness that Colman was to play the medieval poet Francois Villon in Paramount’s If I Were King (1938), resulting in the idea that ‘it might be possible to do a very interesting Coleman [sic] story’ by making Canfield ‘a Villon type, an engaging, gay, devil-may-care fellow who spends a lot of his time playing an excellent game of cards’ in New York’s cafes. When ‘one day he becomes aware of the fact that the poor people of the neighbourhood are being fleeced of their savings by certain unscrupulous bankers and brokers’, Canfield would then become a latter-day ‘Robin Hood’, using his talents to win back ‘huge sums of money’ to return to the victimized poor (Morell n.d.:  1–6). Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of these ideas persuaded Selznick that the role of Canfield was right for Colman, illustrating the drawback SIP faced in having few actors under contract. The studio’s scope for successfully developing movies was restricted by having to weigh up material against its small (sometimes singular) selection of available players. Moreover, SIP also lacked the leverage over actors that major studios possessed. Various other historical figures were considered for Colman. Theatre impresario David Garrick was seen as appropriately ‘gallant’, and the actor Edwin Booth, brother of Lincoln’s assassin, was also thought right for Colman, though his life story was deemed too ‘episodic’ (Wright and Lewton 1935b; Wright 1936). However, a biopic of Sir Robert Peel, founder of the British police force, was quickly rejected with the simple statement that ‘Colman wasn’t interested’ (Lewton 1938b). Indeed, one historical idea on which Selznick was most ‘hot’ clearly demonstrated the ability of actors to derail his plans. Exploring the ‘possibility of a tie-up with the U.S Navy’ for an epic film, Selznick saw ideal material in the biography of John Paul Jones, the ‘great naval hero’ of the Continental forces during the American Revolution (Lewton 1936a). If that was not enough, Jones’s subsequent role in the victory of the Imperial Russian Navy during Catherine the Great’s war against Turkey would have given the film a truly international and epic scale. Brown and Lewton shared their boss’s passion for the project, especially after reading F.A. Golder’s John Paul Jones in Russia, which recounted the hero’s rivalry with Catherine’s lover and Commander-in-chief Grigory Potemkin. Sidney Howard (who was engaged in writing GWTW) was apparently ‘extremely enthusiastic’. Selznick himself was sold on the ‘marvellous casting opportunities’, envisaging flamboyant Russian star Alla Mazimova as Catherine and, of course, Colman as Jones (Selznick 1936a). Yet there it floundered. For while everyone else at SIP agreed John Paul Jones in Russia would be a ‘splendid Colman’, Colman did not. As an exasperated Lewton explained in May 1936, ‘Mr Colman, after the signal failure of Clive of India, feels that the uniforms of that time are unbecoming to him’ (Lewton 1936b).

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That such a ‘trivial’ objection killed off John Paul Jones might be dismissed as one of the odd contingencies by which many films are undone. However, Lewton’s disappointed acceptance that ‘we must bear in mind that [Colman] is an actor and such things seem important to him’ represents a marked difference to MGM’s handling of Clark Gable after Selznick cut the deal for him to play Rhett Butler (ibid.). Illustrating the limitations of an independent filmmaker faced with the Hollywood’s established star system, SIP was almost entirely dependent on Selznick’s personal ability to persuade an actor that an individual production was of significant value to their career. The performer essentially had the final say. In fact, despite his contract, Colman never did take a role in another Selznick production after Prisoner of Zenda, also rejecting the leads in Intermezzo and Rebecca. In contrast, while Gable initially resisted the role of Rhett, telling Selznick it was ‘too big an order’ and that he didn’t want ‘any part of him’, he ultimately had little choice (Haver 1980:  17). Once MGM agreed terms with SIP, Gable was contractually obliged to take the part; a suspension and loss of income was his only alternative. Ironically, for what was to become the reluctant Gable’s career-defining role, Selznick’s first choice had been none other than Ronald Colman (Smith 1991: 143).

Benedict, Burr and struggling with the story Even without the pressure of trying to make a historical figure into a ‘good fit’ for a specific actor, the histories that most absorbed Selznick proved challenging to adapt. Documents spanning the years 1935–51 demonstrate that, throughout his career, Selznick showed far more interest in the American Revolution and the early Republic than the Civil War period of GWTW, and that two characters in particular ‘fascinated me more for years more than any other[s] I know’ (Selznick 1940). Both Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr had reputations as the ‘bad guys’ of early American history. This was especially true of Arnold, once the most successful general in the Continental Army, having won pivotal victories in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 and at Saratoga in 1777, yet infamous for subsequently plotting to surrender West Point to the British. Burr was likewise accused of treason in 1807, charged with conspiring to provoke a war with Spain and establish his own rule over Mexican territory in the Southwest. This followed his effort to wrest the presidential election from Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and his killing of Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Selznick was evidently drawn to the complexity of these figures and their motivations, rather than the straightforward hagiography surrounding Washington or Lincoln, and believed that biopics about them would challenge the ‘old story formulas’ (Macconnell 1946). However, his writers struggled to find a balance between

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making Burr and Arnold empathetic while not alienating a public that ‘does not like to be deprived of its villains’ (ibid.). The development of original screenplays about both men was attempted as soon as SIP was formed. Having heard the playwright Philip Barry was ‘enthusiastic’ about Burr, Selznick tried, without success, to entice him to Hollywood in early 1935 (Selznick 1935a). He had more luck with writer Oliver Garrett, whose co-authored screenplay for Selznick’s production of Manhattan Melodrama at MGM had won an Oscar earlier that year. When Garrett agreed to write a treatment about Arnold with the working title ‘Sir Judas’, Lewton sent staff to the libraries to provide the author with research materials. They returned with notes on such subjects as ‘Arnold’s wooing of Peggy Shippen’ or ‘General Procedure in Court Martials’, along with a detailed summary of the conspiracy between Arnold and the British major John Andre, who had been executed as a spy (Harris 1935). The treatment delivered in February 1936 drew on this work and tried to find some ‘positive’ aspects within Arnold’s treachery, such as his loyalty to George Washington shown in the refusal to hand his friend over to the British, and emphasized his desire to ‘end the bloodshed’ of the war (Garrett 1936; Meyer 1936). Yet, without whitewashing Arnold entirely, it was impossible to overlook the motives attributed to him in most histories: of his ‘monetary distress’; of his anger at the charges of financial malfeasance brought against him by Congress; of his wounded pride in having been passed over for promotion despite his acumen in the field. Certainly American viewers would have found it difficult to empathize with the man in Garrett’s suggested ending, which had Arnold claim, with thwarted ambition, that had his plans succeeded, ‘I might have been the savior of the British Empire, perhaps Royal Governor of America’ (Meyer 1936). Denting Selznick’s certainty that audiences would be as ‘crazy’ about Arnold as he was, the project stalled at this point (Selznick 1934c). As accounts of the making of GWTW attest, perhaps the greatest challenges faced by SIP arose from delays created by Selznick himself. As Thomas Schatz suggests, Selznick was simultaneously ‘supremely confident and insecure’. This duality was evident in his obsessive tinkering with scripts even when shooting was underway, demonstrating simultaneously his level of engagement and his feeling that ‘no script was ever quite ready for production’ (Schatz 1996: 179). This was a prime reason why SIP completed so few films. As the projects concerning Burr and Arnold also indicate, Selznick lacked confidence in entirely original screenplays, feeling far more secure when adapting books or plays (or remaking films) that had already been tested on the public. The sheer volume of readers reports in SIP’s archives is itself evidence of this. While Garrett’s ‘Sir Judas’ sat on the shelf, Selznick’s interest was revived each time a new book on Arnold was brought to his attention, hoping that it might contain a solution. From Edward

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Dean Sullivan’s Benedict Arnold:  Military Racketeer in 1937 through to a 1946 ‘sketch’ of Charles Burr Todd’s The Real Benedict Arnold, various accounts were ‘rushed out’ to Lewton’s team for review (Lewton 1937b; Macconnell 1946). One of the more promising candidates came in March 1938, when Frank O’Hough’s Renown was published. Reader Dorcas Ruthenberg thought this fictionalized biography had ‘great possibilities’ as ‘capable of fine treatment in the hands of a gifted actor’ (Ruthenberg 1938). However, while Selznick prevaricated, MGM beat SIP to the chase, buying an option on O’Hough’s novel. As Lewton reflected forlornly to Selznick, if MGM was to act upon its purchase, it would ‘destroy one of your cherished plans’ (Lewton 1938a). Yet, once MGM producers read the novel they too got ‘cold feet’ about casting a major star like Gable or Spencer Tracy as a turncoat. In the end, for all of Selznick’s personal fascination with ‘the bizarre career of a military genius and a traitor’, and for all the ‘fortune’ he had invested in pursuing it, he never could find a version of Arnold’s story that overcame his uncertainty about potential public antipathy (Selznick 1940). In the case of Aaron Burr, the drive to find an adaptable pre-sold story was even more pronounced. Selznick first expressed interest in Burr as a possible role for Lionel Barrymore while at MGM, but it was in 1936–7 (by which point the Benedict Arnold project had hit a dead end) that it became one of SIP’s priorities. Among the works considered were Booth Tarkington’s play, The Aromatic Burr (read by the story department in July 1936), Holmes Alexander’s fictionalized biography, Aaron Burr: The Proud Pretender (February 1937), and a play by John Francis Larkin and Anthony Edward O’Beirne, entitled Aaron Burr, Corsair of Empire, which concerned ‘the fiasco of Burr’s attempt to conquer Mexico’ (June 1937)  (Lewton 1936c, 1937a; Wilson 1937). Even Gertrude Atherton’s The Conqueror, though primarily about Alexander Hamilton, was evaluated for its account of his fatal rivalry with Burr (Lewton 1941). As Lewton was to note, by the summer of 1938, he had read ‘literally dozens of Burr stories’ (Lewton 1938d). Yet none were quite right. Corsair of Empire, for example, made Burr an honourable and sympathetic man but achieved this by showing him as being manipulated by the Machiavellian General James Wilkinson. In this plot, even the fatal duel against Hamilton became something contrived by Wilkinson, who calculated that ‘Burr will be more easy to seduce into the Mexican venture if, politically, he is disgraced for firing a gun’. As SIP’s reader observed, this unsatisfactorily reduced ‘friend Aaron’ to little more than a ‘puppet and complete victim of others’ cleverness’ (Wilson 1937). In June 1938, however, Lewton thought he had ‘finally’ found a story ‘that seem[ed] to solve most of the difficulties’ through the ‘very simple device of marking Theodosia Burr, his daughter, the heroine’. Born in 1783, and later the wife of the governor of South Carolina, Joseph Alston, Theodosia had shown a fierce devotion to her father, publicly defending Aaron against all accusations of impropriety even to the detriment of her own husband’s

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political career. Following the lead of a play by William Perlman and John Dennis Keyes simply titled Theodosia, Lewton argued that in telling Burr’s story from her perspective, it could become ‘a very human tale of a daughter’s passionate attachment to her father and her deep-rooted feeling that he can do no wrong’ (Lewton 1938d; Ruthenberg 1939). Theodosia’s anguish when she then discovers that the charges against her father were based in truth might inspire a great performance from an actress. This deflecting of narrative attention onto a sympathetic female protagonist mirrored the strategy earlier adopted with The Gorgeous Hussy. It had also been mooted as an option for the Arnold story, to tell it through the eyes of his wife, Peggy Shippen. Selznick himself, however, opposed this move. It is often claimed that GWTW, A Star is Born and later productions such as Duel in the Sun reveal Selznick as a ‘women’s producer’, with a distinctly ‘feminine sensibility’ (Leff 1999: 188). However, the unproduced Burr and Arnold projects suggest that this view needs qualification, for a crucial reason they never got made was because Selznick refused to countenance making them ‘women’s pictures’. While Selznick recognized the value of Lewton’s suggestion regarding Theodosia Burr, for him it was ‘the story of the man’ himself which was ‘inherently exciting and unusual’ and that any showmanship for an ‘outstanding picture’ about Aaron Burr would reside in the more ‘direct approach’ (Selznick 1938). Yet without a property in which he possessed full confidence, the life story of Burr (like that of Arnold) never made it to the screen. Or rather, it never made it as the epic biopic Selznick envisaged. In 1946, Universal Pictures did release a film starring David Niven as Burr, directed by Frank Borzage. But their Magnificent Doll reduced Burr to secondary importance in exactly the way the ‘Theodosia’ project might have done; in this case making him the dashing but selfdestructively ambitious rival for the affections of Ginger Roger’s Dolley, the future wife of President James Madison. Magnificent Doll indicated that Lewton may have been correct in his appraisal of the narrative solution; however, its disappointing critical and box-office performance seemingly proved Selznick right in his assessment as well.

Conclusion That in the end GWTW was the only major SIP production to focus on American history was, of course, the result of other factors too. The archive demonstrates, for instance, that the actual registration of titles for possible historical subjects became an unanticipated source of vexation on many occasions. While MPPDA regulations stated that ‘the names of historical … characters … as original titles cannot be pre-empted by any registrant’, Selznick was frustrated and concerned that MGM had registered ‘The Life

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of Benedict Arnold’ long before him and that Warner Bros. appeared to even ‘own’ the very name ‘Benedict Arnold’ (Lewton 1937b, 1937c). Similar anxieties arose, as Schaefer has documented, in the case of the planned Titanic movie (Schaefer 1986: 57–74). Moreover, given the length of time it took SIP to develop a project, Selznick was always apprehensive that registering particular titles would disclose to other producers the subjects he was considering. Such disclosure carried the risk of the major studios being able to put a similar movie into production ahead of him. This actually occurred after SIP registered the title ‘Billy the Kid:  Story of a Killer’ in 1937, when MGM’s announcement that it was then going to develop a remake of its 1930 Billy the Kid eventually compelled Selznick to drop the idea (Selznick 1939a). In fact, the papers relating to SIP’s unmade version of ‘Billy the Kid’ also show how archival materials relating to unproduced films are of value in film history in adding to our understanding of why other movies actually did get made. It has long been established that Selznick famously ‘lost’ the classic John Ford western Stagecoach (1939) after he pulled rank on executive producer Merian Cooper (Roberts 1997: 151). Schatz records how Selznick’s ‘nixing’ of Stagecoach, as a film for SIP’s sister company, Pioneer Pictures, led to a fallout which prompted Cooper to resign and dissolve the partnership. Cooper and Ford then set up Argosy Pictures and made Stagecoach in conjunction with Walter Wanger and United Artists (Schatz 1996: 273). The Selznick Collection, however, demonstrates that prior to this, Cooper was planning the ‘Billy the Kid’ project as the next release for Pioneer Pictures, with Selznick’s productive input and support. Indeed, Selznick had director William Wellman ‘wild’ on Cooper’s idea and had taken inspiration from Wellman’s earlier seminal gangster film, The Public Enemy (1931) (Selznick 1936d). His conception was to exploit the ‘great showmanship’ inherent in making ‘what would amount to the first debunked Western’ in its ‘portrait of a cold-blooded killer who had great charm’ (Selznick 1936e). However, as with the Canfield, Burr and Arnold projects, finding the right script proved difficult. In January 1937, Jock Whitney reviewed the scenarios then written and found them lacking both in ‘epic quality’ and ‘originality in theme and treatment’. As the chief financial backer of the company, Whitney (not Selznick) took the decision that ‘this is not for Pioneer in its present form’ (Whitney 1937). Considering the contingencies on which shadow cinema rest, if Whitney had not made that decision, if a suitable screenplay for ‘Billy the Kid’ had been developed in 1937, then Cooper would not have been searching that spring for alternative material for an original western; and it might have been Stagecoach which never got made. Of course, GWTW itself was also one of the biggest reasons why films about Billy the Kid, Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, John Paul Jones or any number of other historical figures never progressed to completion at SIP. That film’s prioritization and sheer ambition simply absorbed so much of the

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company’s energies, talent and resources, as well as Selznick’s personal focus. As Selznick’s obsession with GWTW grew, he developed the conviction that ‘a single block-buster, if properly exploited and released, could outperform a dozen top features combined’ (Schatz 1996: 273). Though the archives prove that Selznick’s ambition to surpass D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) and ‘make the greatest motion picture to date’ could have resulted in very different epics of American history, that conviction ultimately meant there was only room within SIP’s schedule for one GWTW (Vertrees 1997: 184).

References Key DOSC: David O. Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin PCA: Production Code Administration records, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles Auster, I. (1934), Auster to Joseph I. Breen, ‘Memoranda for the Files’, 13 February, Andrew Jackson (Unproduced) file, PCA. Behlmer, R. (1989), Memo from David Selznick, New York: Samuel French. Bowers, R. (1976), The Selznick Players, South Brunswick, NJ: A.S. Barnes. Breen, J. (1936), Breen to Louis B. Mayer, 10 March, The Gorgeous Hussy file, PCA. Brown, K. (1936), Brown to David O. Selznick, 7 January, Story File: Canfield, 3352-23, DOSC. Bucknall, N. (1934), Bucknall to David O. Selznick, ‘Historic Women’, 6 January, MGM Research Department Interoffice, 655-10, DOSC. Doherty, T. (2009), Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, New York: Columbia University Press. Dutton, J. (1936), Synopsis of John Paul Jones in Russia by F.A. Golder, 21 January, Synopses 1934–56: Joanna – The Jones, 2988-1, DOSC. Garrett, O. (1936), ‘Sir Judas: Second Treatment’, 14 February, Story File: Benedict Arnold, 510-10, DOSC. Harris, A. (1935), ‘Benedict Arnold (Sir Judas)’, 23 December, Story Files 1936– 1953: Benedict Arnold, 3078-3, DOSC. Haver, R. (1980), David O. Selznick’s Hollywood, New York: Knopf. Lambert, G. (1976), GWTW: The Making of Gone with the Wind, New York: Bantam. Leff, L. (1999), Hitchcock and Selznick: The Rich and Strange Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick, Berkeley: University of California Press. Leff, L., and Simmons, J. (2013), The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship and the Production Code, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Lewton, V. (n.d.), ‘Notes on The Gorgeous Hussy’, Story Files 1936–1953: Gorgeous Hussy, 3354-18, DOSC.

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Lewton, V. (1936a), Lewton to David O. Selznick, 6 January, Lewton-Selznick Correspondence, 2587-4, DOSC. Lewton, V. (1936b), Lewton to Kay Brown, 9 May, Lewton: Correspondence: Katherine Brown, 2584-8, DOSC. Lewton, V. (1936c), Lewton to Kay Brown, 31 July, Story Files 1936–1953: The Aromatic Aaron Burr, 3351-19, DOSC. Lewton, V. (1937a), Lewton to David O. Selznick, 19 February, Lewton-Selznick Correspondence, January–June 1937, 2587-6, DOSC. Lewton, V. (1937b), Lewton to David O. Selznick, 7 December, Lewton-Selznick Correspondence, January–March 1938, 2588-2, DOSC. Lewton, V. (1937c), Lewton to David O. Selznick, 13 December, Lewton-Selznick Correspondence, January–March 1938, 2588-2, DOSC. Lewton, V. (1938a), Lewton to David O. Selznick, 8 March, Lewton-Selznick Correspondence, January–March 1938, 2588-2, DOSC. Lewton, V. (1938b), Lewton to David O. Selznick, 11 June, Lewton-Selznick Correspondence, April–June 1938, 2588-3, DOSC. Lewton, V. (1938c), Lewton to David O. Selznick, 21 June, Lewton-Selznick Correspondence, April–June 1938, 2588-3, DOSC. Lewton, V. (1938d), Lewton to David O. Selznick, 22 June, Lewton-Selznick Correspondence, April–June 1938, 2588-3, DOSC. Lewton, V. (1941), ‘Story Correspondence Notes’, 18 February, Lewton-Selznick Correspondence, 2589-8, DOSC. Macconnell, F. (1946), ‘Benedict Arnold: Research Material’, 17 April, 1027-5, DOSC. ‘Memoranda for the Files’ (1934), 16 February, Andrew Jackson (Unproduced) file, PCA. Meyer, E. (1936), Synopsis of Sir Judas by Oliver Garrett, 10 April, Lydia Schiller Files, 1119-15, DOSC. Miller, J. M. (1986), ‘Frankly My Dear I Just – Don’t – Care: Val Lewton and Censorship at Selznick International Pictures’, Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, 36: 10–31. Morell, P. (n.d.), ‘Sucker Money (Four Ideas on Canfield Story)’, Script Development 1936–46: Canfield Story, 390-4, DOSC. Pollack, Q. (2011), Peggy Eaton: Democracy’s Mistress, Rockville, MD: Wildside Press. Roberts, R. (1997), John Wayne: American, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ruthenberg, D. (1938), Synopsis of Renown by Frank O’Hough, 31 January, Synopses 1934–56: Relay Race – Retreat from Love, 3005-6, DOSC. Ruthenberg, D. (1939), Synopsis of Theodosia by William Perlman and John Dennis Keyes, 30 August, Synopses 1934–56: That Lady – There Are Thirteen, 3013-5, DOSC. Schaefer, E. (1986), ‘The Sinking of David O. Selznick’s Titanic’, Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, 36: 57–74. Schatz, T. (1996), The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era, New York: Henry Holt. Seilaz, A. (1937), Synopsis of The Conqueror by Gertrude Atherton, 2 January, Synopses 1934–56: Concealed Weapon – Conspirators, 2970-2, DOSC.

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Selznick, D. O. (1934a), Selznick to Jerry Sackheim, 9 February, Story Files: Jackson, Andrew, 3355-9, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1934b), Selznick to Robert Rubin, 26 February, Story Files: Jackson, Andrew, 3355-9, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1934c), Selznick to Kate Corbaley, 20 July, MGM Files 1933–5 Story Department (Interoffice), 655-19, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1935a), Selznick to Val Lewton, 30 January, MGM Files 1933–5 Story Department (Interoffice), 654-7, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1935b), Selznick to John Wharton, 12 November, Story Files 1936–1953: Captain Macklin, 3352-24, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1935c), Selznick to Kay Brown, 2 December, Story Files 1936– 1953: Gorgeous Hussy, 3354-18, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1936a), Selznick to Kay Brown, 6 February, Lewton-Selznick Correspondence, 2587-4, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1936b), Selznick to Kay Brown, 25 February, Story Files 1936– 1953: Canfield Story, 3352-23, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1936c), Selznick to Kay Brown, 10 March, Story Files 1936– 1953: Canfield Story, 3352-23, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1936d), Selznick to Merian C. Cooper, 23 December, Story Files 1936–1953: Billy the Kid, 3352-9, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1936e), Selznick to John Hay Whitney and John Wharton, 28 December, Story Files 1936–1953: Billy the Kid, 3352-9, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1938), Selznick to Val Lewton, ‘Theodosia Burr’, 5 July, LewtonSelznick Correspondence, July–Sept 1938, 2588-5, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1939a), Selznick to Val Lewton, 7 March, Story Files 1936– 1953: Billy the Kid, 3352-9, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1939b), Selznick to John Hay Whitney, ‘Hays Code’, 6 September, Production Files – Rebecca – Censorship, 170-15, DOSC. Selznick, D. O. (1940), Selznick to Norman Taurog, 16 February, Consolidated Files 1936–54, Benedict Arnold, 846-8, DOSC. Smith, R. D. (1991), Ronald Colman, Gentleman of the Cinema, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Vertrees, A. D. (1997), Selznick’s Vision: Gone with the Wind and Hollywood Filmmaking, Austin: University of Texas Press. Whitney, J. H. (1937), Whitney to David O. Selznick, 16 January, Story Files 1936– 1953: Billy the Kid, 3352-9, DOSC. Wilson, L. (1937), Synopsis of Aaron Burr, Corsair of Empire, 11 June, Synopses 1934–1956: Aaron Burr – Alibi, 2968-10, DOSC. Wright, W. (1936), Wright to David O. Selznick, 29 September, Story Files 1936– 1953: Booth, Edwin Story Idea, 3352-14, DOSC. Wright, W., and Lewton, V. (1935a), ‘Material for Mae West’, 14 August, LewtonSelznick Correspondence, Prior to 1935, 2587-3, DOSC. Wright, W., and Lewton, V. (1935b), ‘Material for Ronald Colman’, 14 August, Lewton-Selznick Correspondence, Prior to 1935, 2587-3, DOSC.

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3 Parting the Iron Curtain: Michael Klinger’s attempt to make A Man and a Half Andrew Spicer

Between 1967 and 1984, Michael Klinger attempted to make a war film A Man and a Half. It was to be an international production through which Klinger intended to establish himself as an important independent producer. Although the film was unrealized, its failure is instructive, revealing a great deal about the difficulties Klinger experienced as a British filmmaker during a period of crisis and retrenchment in the UK film industry. His pioneering, if unsuccessful, attempt to work with Eastern European studios sheds light on the little understood history of UK co-productions, especially ones that involved not the obvious Western European partners but the state-controlled industries of the Eastern Bloc. Producers are fertile ground for the study of shadow cinema as their modus operandi can be characterized by everchanging portfolios of projects they hope might work for varied budgets and different markets, and their careers are often littered by an array of unrealized projects alongside the occasional successes. Although my central focus is on the role of the producer as the pivotal point in a highly volatile industry, with their activities encompassing the entire production process from genesis to exhibition, the account that follows also aims to shed light on the work of film agents whose activities have been barely recognized

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within film scholarship, let alone scrutinized in any detail. In understanding film production, I suggest we need to attend carefully to power relationships. Producers can often exert a high degree of localized control, but they have to negotiate with much more powerful actors in the shape of financiers, distributors and studio heads. This chapter therefore explores the complex and mutable nature of agency in the production process and of the constant struggle for creative control, contextualized within an understanding of the influence of film policy regimes and more fundamental shifts in cultural or political discourses and ideologies. This account is based on wide-ranging documentation in the Michael Klinger Papers housed at the University of the West of England, which enables the aborted production process of A Man and a Half to be reconstituted in detail. Unfulfilled projects tend to leave extensive material traces because their instigators, as in this example, cherish the dream that one day they might be accomplished; and in this instance I was also fortunate to glean additional insights from an extended conversation with the producer’s son, Tony Klinger, who was closely involved in this aborted production and who has gone on to become an award-winning writer and filmmaker in his own right. I should stress that that my purpose is not to try to recreate, from the extant material in the archive, an abandoned masterpiece, or to consider how A Man and a Half might have worked as a film – although inevitably that will be part of the analysis – but to use this unrealized production as a way to try to understand the precise nature of the challenges facing UK filmmakers during a turbulent period of British film history.

The independent producer and the property: Michael Klinger and A Man and a Half Klinger’s emergence as an independent producer came after a five-year partnership with fellow Jewish entrepreneur, Tony Tenser, running a production-distribution company, Compton-Tekli. Klinger broke with Tenser in 1967 because he had aspirations to make more artistic productions than the sexploitation features, like That Kind of Girl (1963), which had characterized Compton’s output. Klinger formed a solo production company, Avton Films, through which he exercised personal control over every aspect of filmmaking, including choice of subject (Spicer and McKenna 2013: 11–70). As he remarked in interview, ‘If you do a film independently, you are the master of your fate. You can fight for the things you believe in. You do the best deals you can with independent or major distributors, territory by territory’ (Falk 1981). Klinger’s portfolio of projects reflected

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his desire to exploit different markets. The low-budget ‘Confessions’ series of sex comedies were for indigenous consumption; the expensive actionadventure thrillers such as Shout at the Devil (1976), designed to rival the Hollywood studios, for the international marketplace; crime thrillers such as Get Carter (1971) that might succeed in both; and a mid-tier of what he referred to as ‘unusual films’  – made by talented young directors Klinger cultivated  – Peter Collinson, The Penthouse (1967); Alastair Reid, Baby Love (1968) and Something to Hide (1972); Mike Hodges, Pulp (1972); and Moshé Mizrahi, Rachel’s Man (1974) – that had no clear generic label. None of these films represented an obvious commercial proposition but they were ones in which Klinger had a high personal investment. As will be discussed, A Man and a Half falls partially into the last category. Guy Elmes’s screenplay for A Man and a Half was commissioned by Klinger in November 1968 based on Elmes’s earlier treatment entitled The Parachute.1 Elmes’s own career had encompassed conventional generic fare – Nor the Moon by Night (1958) – and more ‘unusual films’ such as The Stranger’s Hand (1954) and the Grahame Greene adaptation Across the Bridge (1957) – as well as adapting Italian screenplays for the British market (Falk 2000: 83). A Man and a Half is set in German-occupied Northern Italy towards the end of the Second World War. An American Major, David Stone, is seriously injured while parachuting into the area on a mission to support the partisans. He is found by Angelo, a 10-year-old boy, who lives with his beautiful mother Leda in a remote mountain farmstead where several Germans are billeted. Angelo’s father has been executed by the Germans for his part in the Resistance. The boy hides the Major in the barn under the Germans’ noses, while his mother contacts the partisans led by Captain Piero to arrange for his rescue. The German soldiers die in a gun battle with the partisans and the Major, Leda and the boy flee to safety on a steam train pursued by the German Army. Elmes is at pains in his original treatment to emphasize that the ‘story is a development of truth. An incident of this nature did actually take place.’ Tony Klinger confirmed that his father was always attracted to war stories that had authenticity, notably Greenbeach, another long-nurtured but unrealized project (Spicer 2010). Greenbeach offered the opportunity to celebrate the role of an unrecognized Jewish war hero in the Dieppe landing, A Man and a Half the role of the Resistance in a European setting. Neither is the conventional paean to the courageous officer class that dominated British war films but which had little appeal for Klinger who considered himself an outsider from the British establishment. In his correspondence about the screenplay, Klinger was at pains to emphasize its qualities as a story irrespective of its setting:  how Elmes convincingly develops the growing relationship between the boy and the wounded soldier who relies on him that becomes Angelo’s rite de passage into manhood; the underlying sexual tensions between Leda and the soldiers; and the thrilling denouement

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in which the train destroys a partially repaired bridge previously sabotaged by the partisans. Klinger wrote to one potential investor, ‘I believe it is a fine story with tension, excitement and, most important, a beautiful relationship between a helpless man and the little boy who saves his life’ (Klinger 1968a). In another letter, he described A Man and a Half as ‘very close to my heart … which … could be made into a beautiful and commercial picture’ (Klinger 1969). Throughout all the protracted efforts to realize this film, Klinger’s prime concern was to preserve the integrity and strengths of Elmes’s story, even though it is clear from archived correspondence that Elmes had no further involvement once he had submitted the screenplay. Because of its subject matter and treatment, Klinger was convinced that it needed a British or European director who would attend to the subtleties of the relationships as well as the action elements. He considered Alastair Reid who had directed Baby Love and Somewhere to Hide with imagination and sensitivity to the subtle resonances of the story, and Peter Collinson whose work on The Penthouse demonstrated his ability to bring out the darker undercurrents and the explosive tensions that make A Man and a Half a distinctive war story. He also looked to European talent, including Robert Enrico, the French writer-director of the celebrated An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1963) whom Klinger had met briefly at the Cannes Film Festival when the film was screened. He told Enrico, ‘I have watched your work with great interest’ and hoped he might consider directing A Man and a Half (Klinger 1968b). Another possibility was Maurizio Lucidi, an editor and writer who had worked with Orson Welles and who had just directed Si può fare… amigo (1972) with Jack Palance, which had a boy in one of the leading roles. These possibilities indicate the extent of Klinger’s familiarity with European cinema. In interview, Mike Hodges, who collaborated with Klinger closely on both Get Carter and Pulp, recalled a man who was ‘very European … He had some instinct to actually move towards art cinema in many ways, but still concentrate on good storytelling’ (Hodges 2010). However, choice of subject matter, treatment and director were all aspects of what I have labelled localized control in which the producer is sovereign. A Man and a Half, this ‘beautiful and commercial picture’, straddles the permeable divide between one of Klinger’s ‘unusual films’ in which character development is pre-eminent and a more straightforwardly commercial picture, an exciting war film, where the action elements dominate. Klinger understood that A Man and a Half would be an expensive production as it had to be filmed on location in the winter in remote areas where snow could be guaranteed throughout the shoot. Steam trains and a large number of extras were required for the explosive finale, as well as the construction of models of the bridge. He therefore needed a major studio to invest in the production or seek out alternative sources of money wherever they could be found. It is the search for production finance that often dominates a

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producer’s activities and is frequently the locus of a protracted struggle for creative control in which the producer is no longer the most powerful agent. In the following sections I will trace those struggles – with the Hollywood majors, Eastern European studios and potential Italian co-producers – but they have been separated for analytical clarity. It is important to keep in mind that these negotiations took place concurrently, a testament to Klinger’s extraordinary energy and charisma as well as his industry nous.

Raising production finance I: The Hollywood studios The obvious source of finance for British producers was the American majors, which were the principal investors in British films in the 1960s (Walker [1975] 1986). Elmes’s screenplay had an American lead and it was through casting a major international star in the role of Major Stone that Klinger hoped to secure studio interest. Charlton Heston, Lee Marvin, Anthony Quinn and Rod Steiger were all approached, and Tony Klinger, then working in Los Angeles, made direct representations to Richard Dreyfuss. Telly Savalas, whom Klinger had met personally, raised the possibility of investing in the film if it went ahead as an independent production (Klinger 1968c). Klinger’s choice for the part of Leda, the emotional centre of the film, was Italian stars with an international reputation: Gina Lollabridgida, Claudia Cardinale or Sophia Loren, who was interested in having her own son play Angelo (Klinger 1968d). Klinger was under no illusions that it was a ‘talent package’ that was the best way to secure Hollywood’s interest rather than A Man and a Half’s storyline. Indeed, despite these possible inducements, Elmes’s screenplay presented particular problems for American investors. Although various studio readers acknowledged its qualities, the general consensus was that the role of the American Major Stone was too passive and also less important than Angelo and Leda, therefore lacking the scope and substance deemed necessary to attract a major star. One agent opined that he would find it impossible ‘to interest a Charlton Heston’ (Howard 1969). Crucially, what Klinger considered to be the story’s essential quality  – a small, intimate narrative that unfolds slowly – became its central weakness for the US market. One reader judged it was more suited to a TV movie than a theatrical one:  ‘I don’t think it would attract a big audience in the cinema, it’s not that sort of film’ (‘A Man and a Half’ n.d.). Paramount, which had purchased Klinger’s earlier film The Penthouse (1967) after completion, did not regard A Man and a Half as commercially viable. Michael Flint, Head of Paramount’s London office, considered that it needed some more ‘powerful ingredients to carry the story’, though he failed to suggest what these might be (Flint

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1968). To potential American investors, one of the story’s major stumbling blocks was its generic status as a war film. Disney’s London manager Bill Dover rejected the script because of the sexual threat to the boy’s mother and considered that a Second World War incident was ‘somewhat dated to be attractive in today’s market’ (‘Bill Dover to Eddie Evans’ 1970). Klinger tried his best to argue otherwise – ‘Why do people think this is a World War II film? It is really a film about a man and a boy that happens to be set in World War II’ (Klinger 1970a) – but to little effect.

Raising production finance II: Opening up the Eastern Front At the same time as he tried to solicit American finance, Klinger explored the possibilities of European investment. This was a highly unusual and imaginative move as the principal orientation of most British producers, with some exceptions such as Simon Perry, has been towards North America: ‘British cinema has always been facing the US, while its back, so to speak, was turned to Europe’ (Elsaesser 2005: 62). This reluctance to engage with Europe is partly the result of a Eurosceptic UK film policy that has consistently urged British producers to think of America as the ‘prime market’ and almost never actively encouraged European co-productions (Higson 2015; Spicer 2018). However, as a diasporic Jewish entrepreneur and Europhile, Klinger saw Europe as both a marketplace and a potential alternative source of finance to Hollywood, particularly given the subject matter and setting of A Man and a Half. At Compton, Klinger and Tenser had built up an extensive network of foreign distributors, exhibitors and sales agents, and Klinger was an assiduous attendee of European film festivals at which he met numerous producers’ agents looking for business. These agents, who represented a number of clients including the Eastern European state-run film studios, were an important and little understood aspect of the way the European film industry operated during this period. Although Cold War tensions were rife during this period, Klinger saw the potential of Eastern Europe even though there were no established channels for negotiations, nor could he expect the British government, which was reluctant to support the film industry, to assist his efforts. Thus, it was through the knowledge that Klinger gleaned from sales agents, festivals and the pages of the trade press that he became aware that Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were all interested in attracting Western productions. Variety commented that ‘Titoland’ (Yugoslavia) was relatively liberalized and hospitable to Western trade and noted how the programme of political and economic liberalization initiated by

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Alexander Dubček at the beginning of 1968 meant that Czechoslovakia intended to rival Yugoslavia as a centre for foreign film production (‘Review of Pobed (The Trek)’ 1968). In contrast to American sensibilities, Eastern European studios could be expected to understand the relevance and audience appeal of a story about the Axis occupation and partisan resistance. ‘Partisan films’ were a popular genre, particularly in post-war Yugoslavian cinema (‘Pula Film Fest Reviews’ 1968). Although often derided as formulaic, Variety’s reviewer discerned a growing emotional maturity and willingness to ‘probe the war in a human light without the posturing and heroics that marked the many partisan Yugoslav pix of yore’ (ibid.). A Man and a Half shared a similar preoccupation with the ‘experiences and suffering of ordinary people caught up in the war, allied with the vital transposition to high tragedy or drama’ as well as the ‘more robust out-and-out action elements’ which Variety’s reviewer deemed essential ‘for more than mainly local chances’ and which was missing from indigenous productions (ibid.). In addition to ideological compatibility, Klinger, again through conversations with sales agents and his reading of the trade press, was aware of the potential cost advantages:  Eastern European studios offered complete ‘packages’ of below-the-line services and, as Variety, reporting on the shooting of the Second World War epic The Bridge at Remagen (1968) in Czechoslovakia pointed out, ‘a state-run economy can do things that simply would not be permitted in a capitalist society’, such as closing a major bridge to traffic for three months while filming took place and providing an abundant supply of military hardware together with cheap extras (Byron 1968). Michael and Tony Klinger had been in Czechoslovakia during the shooting of this film and witnessed at first hand some of the advantages. Klinger’s turn eastwards thus made commercial as well as artistic sense and he opened up negotiations with studios in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, all of which responded positively to both the logistical and the aesthetic requirements of the script, producing detailed reports on possible locations, accompanied by photographs and, in one case, a portfolio of sketches (‘Report from Boris Rotovnik’ 1970). However, negotiations with Eastern European studios may have been relatively straightforward for a Hollywood studio such as United Artists that produced The Bridge at Remagen – though even here production was halted by the Russian Occupation of Czechoslovakia (August–September 1968)  – but were far harder for an independent producer. Tony Klinger recalled the endemic corruption that attended every element of the potential package and the abiding sense that they were chasing phantoms, as deals that appeared concluded started to dissolve on closer inspection. Eastern European economies were notoriously bureaucratic and the film industry was ridden by obfuscation and clogged by convoluted channels of communication. Klinger had dispatched Harry Fine, with whom he had

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co-produced The Penthouse, to explore the possibilities in Bulgaria. Fine found a ‘confused situation’ in which the Bulgarian state studio, although well equipped, was at a standstill because of a disastrous co-production, The Viper, which had ‘cost the heads of studio their jobs’, their successors not yet having been appointed (Fine 1967). He advised against any deal, concerned by the apparent disarray in the industry and also his suspicions about the bona fides of Malcolm Nixon, the producer’s agent who was acting as the broker between himself and the authorities (ibid.). The exact role of these agents, the extent of their powers and the strength of their promises is a recurring theme in what follows. In acting as intermediaries, these agents clearly often exceeded their brief and exaggerated their own importance. At the same time, Klinger engaged directly in negotiations with the much larger Czechoslovakian film industry. At this point, individual Czech studios had a high degree of autonomy within the overall system and therefore Klinger negotiated directly with the Barrandov Studios in Prague, sending a copy of Elmes’s script to Antonin Bedřich, who had negotiated the deal for Remagen. Klinger assured Bedřich that he was ‘discussing this project with a major American company, who are very interested, and it is contemplated the film will be made with an international star cast and that shooting will commence about January 1st, 1969’ (Klinger 1968e). Rudolf Wolf, production manager of Barrandov Studios’s Foreign Film Production Unit, replied on Bedřich’s behalf, pointing out some logistical difficulties and suggested Klinger went to Prague to discuss the production (including script changes), inspect the studio facilities and possible locations (Wolf 1968). Although the trip was apparently cordial and productive, Klinger was disappointed by Barrandov’s subsequent written offer in which the price for its services had risen from the figure he thought he had negotiated, $140,000, to $200,000 (Klinger 1968f). Similar difficulties dogged Klinger’s negotiations in Yugoslavia, having been assured by another form of intermediary, Julius Potocsny, the US and UK representative for Central Film Studios Kosutnjak (CFSK) that there were plans to make it ‘the motion picture capital of Europe’ (Potocsny n.d.). Potocsny considered the screenplay ‘an excellent property’ and offered to take Klinger to Belgrade to set up a deal (Potocsny 1969a). However, here too costs – considerably higher than the sum quoted by Barrandov – were a major stumbling block. Klinger tried to secure a better deal by negotiating directly with Žika Vojčić, the managing director of CFSK, who came to meet him in London. Following the meeting, Vojčić sent an enthusiastic letter enclosing a rough schedule, budget and the offer of $35,000 towards below the line costs (Vojčić 1970). However, this was far lower than the $80,000 figure Klinger thought he had negotiated, and he urged Vojčić to make a higher offer that would be a ‘great inducement to prospective financiers as a gesture of your confidence in the subject’ (Klinger 1970b).

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Clearly, Klinger was attempting to entice American investment by securing an attractive production package in Eastern Europe. Four years later, in June 1974, Klinger reopened negotiations with CFSK through another producer’s agent, Jon Acevski. However, Acevski had unintentionally misled Klinger into anticipating that CFSK was able to finance all the belowthe-line costs, whereas it was actually interested in ‘financing of part of services in Yugoslavia, up to a maximum of 50%’ (Acevski 1974). In the intervening time, Vojčić’s attitude to the film seemed to have hardened. He considered that A Man and a Half’s subject matter would only be commercial for another two years or so in the international market (Vojčić 1974). Klinger encountered similar problems with other Yugoslav studios. Acevski also advised that Jadran Films in Zagreb was prepared to cover all the Yugoslavian costs of A Man and a Half subject to receiving a portion of the worldwide revenue of the film equal to its total investment; but this too proved illusory (Klinger 1974). Tony Klinger was dispatched to investigate only to find that, like CFSK, Jadran Film was only prepared to provide 40 per cent of the Yugoslav budget (Peruzovic 1974). The problem that overshadowed all Klinger’s negotiations was his inability to secure American investment. Thus, Branimir Tuma, the head of another Yugoslav company, Triglavfilms, in Ljubljana was also enthusiastic about the screenplay and confident that Yugoslavia could provide all the necessary locations and the ‘required amount’ of snow, as well as steam engines, which still operated in the country. But he wanted reassurances that Klinger had some financial backing because ‘our Bankers [sic] are not very enthusiastic about financing film production without some guarantees from distribution or other sources and we should feel obliged by receiving some explanations in this regard’ (Tuma 1970a). Klinger was forced to admit that despite funding Get Carter, MGM was not prepared to part-finance A Man and a Half as part of a three-picture deal (Klinger 1970c). Tuma’s reply acknowledged that Klinger’s difficulties in obtaining US finance were typical but that it was therefore up to Klinger to finance the film himself, which, of course, was impossible (Tuma 1970b). Ideally he was looking for something more substantial from Eastern Europe than just the provision of services, namely, a co-production (Klinger 1968g). However, this never materialized. The nearest he got to this was an arrangement suggested by Potocsny, ‘Cooperative Film Production’, which would commit CSFK to leasing one or two of its six large sound stages on an annual basis for $780,000, complete with a fifty-member crew, set designers and builders, all necessary studio and location equipment, transportation, recording, postsynch and dubbing facilities, editing facilities and office space. Producers could take on the lease jointly and could shoot as many films as they could programme in a year (Potocsny 1969b). This was a more ambitious scheme than Klinger could commit to as a sole producer.

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Raising production finance III: An Italian job? Alongside negotiating with the Hollywood majors and Eastern European studios, Klinger opened up a third front:  an Anglo-Italian co-production. Given A Man and a Half’s setting, Italy was the obvious partner, especially as a film agreement between the two nations had been signed in 1967, which Klinger considered had been woefully underexplored by British producers even though it meant that the possibilities of securing state support and subsidies were doubled. Other producers may well have been deterred by the British Film Producers Association warning against making ‘hybrid films’ (Barber 2012:  15–16). Klinger negotiated with the Italian producers Carlo and Roberto Bessi and Roberto Haggiag of Dear Film in Rome about the possibility of shooting the film in Domodossola in the Italian Alps, which Klinger had recently visited to look for locations, his overtures brokered by another polyglot intermediary, Leslie Maylath, managing director of the European Film Agency based in Amsterdam. By 30 July 1971, Klinger had prepared a preliminary budget for an Italian shoot which, at $970,552 belowthe-line, was markedly higher than the Eastern European figures (‘Michael Klinger Productions Limited’ 1971). Another film agent, John C.  Mather, thought he could arrange a co-production deal with 50 per cent financing if the budget were reduced to $600,000 (Mather 1972). Mather found potential Italian partners, Massimo and Ferruccio Ferrara, and tried to broker a deal on the basis of a reduced budget with 50 per cent provided by Switzerland, 30 per cent by Italy and 20 per cent by the UK (‘A Man and A Half’ 1972). However, Klinger was again unable to interest the London-based offices of the American majors (that would qualify as UK finance) in providing investment. Klinger also negotiated with Joe de Blasio of the Italian production company BGA, who worked on Pulp that had also been considered as an Italian partnership, though the principal financiers were United Artists (Spicer and McKenna 2013:  84–5). De Blasio thought the script made ‘interesting reading, though a bit slow’ and advocated that if the Major could be given a definite mission with a time schedule, ‘a lot more suspense would be added’ (Blasio 1972a). However, in a suggestion which took discussions full circle, he recommended that such a potentially expensive picture should be shot in Bulgaria, with which Italy also had a co-production agreement. De Blasio, unnecessarily as far as Klinger was concerned, emphasized the benefits of working with a state-controlled film industry, ‘The government gives all types of co-operation and would make available trains, armored cars etc., a type of co-operation which is very difficult to get from the Italian government’ (ibid.). Having learned that there was an Italo-Yugoslav co-production agreement, which was more liberal than the Italo-Bulgarian

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one, de Blasio then recommended Klinger consider Yugoslavia rather than Bulgaria, but he emphasized that in either case one of the stipulations was that there could be no outside participants (Blasio 1972b). In view of the film’s anticipated costs, this was never a feasible option. It indicates Klinger’s difficulties as an independent in dealing with agents who were much more used to negotiating with major companies that had considerable financial resources. The conspicuous absence in all the negotiations around A Man and a Half are any overtures for finance from major UK film companies – Rank and ABPC  – or to the indigenous ‘film bank’ the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC). This is particularly surprising as the project stuttered on into the 1970s, a decade in which American studios concentrated on producing films in the United States and closed their London offices (Smith 2008). Klinger may have considered that the subject matter and setting  – there has only been one British film about partisan resistance, Undercover (1943), filmed by Ealing Studios in Wales!  – or perhaps because A Man and a Half had an American lead, were unlikely to attract indigenous interest. However, he had contemplated rewriting the part of Major Stone for Richard Burton who, he hoped, would also bring in Elizabeth Taylor as Leda (Klinger 1972). The more probable reason for Klinger’s reluctance to approach British sources is that he knew very well that, for a production of this magnitude, Rank or the NFFC would have required him to demonstrate that he had an American distribution deal which, if he had secured one, would have rendered their involvement unnecessary (for an account of Klinger’s attempts to secure a four-film deal with Rank, see Spicer and McKenna 2013:  151–71). Although Klinger was the most successful independent British producer during this period, he never once secured indigenous funding. In the absence of homegrown sources, Klinger continued to pursue foreign investors, notably ones in Canada where he had been successful with other productions (ibid.:  174–84). He also tried to generate interest in a radical rewrite of the script by his son Tony – originally called The Earthling and later renamed Stone – that replaced the original war story with a science fiction one in which Stone comes from outer space. By the mid-1980s, Klinger had reverted to the original A Man and a Half script and renewed his efforts to interest Eastern European studios or secure an Anglo-Italian co-production, but without success. One of Klinger’s Italian correspondents expressed the view that A Man and a Half’s moment had passed: ‘The story is about a period and topic which has been vastly and repeatedly exploited in Italy over the years. And at such a distance of time since the end of the World War II, I doubt that the Italian audiences would still be interested in it’ (Lucisano 1985). Klinger refused to accept this judgement and was still trying to get the film made shortly before his death in 1989.

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Conclusion Although producing A Man and a Half was not one of Klinger’s most urgent priorities as the 1970s progressed, it nevertheless remained a film that he would have dearly liked to make. However, as I  have shown, the key to understanding why it was never made is to explore in detail the asymmetrical power relations that are embedded in the network of relationships that constitute the production process, which often have little to do with the particular qualities of the property itself. Although the character of Major Stone is under-developed as the studio script reviewers diagnosed, that fault could have been corrected had the project proceeded. The reasons it did not get made have much more to do with the varied forces at work in the international film industry during this period over which a UK independent producer could exercise very different degrees or levels of control. Klinger had more or less complete management of the script and choice of director, but this was outweighed by the necessity to raise production finance and the prospect of an international distribution deal, where his ability to exert his influence was severely circumscribed. Klinger understood that A Man and a Half was not a straightforward commercial proposition but a hybrid project, part intricate study of relationships, part action film. It reflected his desire to be an important international producer and his showmanship, but also, as Mike Hodges commented, his aspiration to be part of a European art cinema with its attendant cultural capital. To try to realize this production, Klinger therefore used his extraordinary networks of contacts and boundless energy to pursue a range of options as he negotiated simultaneously with the Hollywood majors, Eastern European studios and potential Italian co-producers in the attempt to create an investment package that would enable him to retain creative control and preserve the integrity of Elmes’s story. As has been shown, these relationships were often further complicated by the interventions of a range of intermediaries several of whom did not hold the power and influence they claimed and by the particular difficulties presented by each of these three potential sources of finance. However, at a deeper level his efforts were frustrated by the general withdrawal of American capital that had underpinned British production for a decade, a process which neither he nor any other individual producer could influence. Without securing a deal with a Hollywood studio, the other elements fell away and there was no countervailing support available for British producers in a period when state assistance for filmmakers had been largely abandoned. There were also even deeper processes at work:  the fluctuations of Cold War politics and different cultural attitudes to the Second World War. It is by attending to these different levels – economic, political and ideological – that we can appreciate the actual nature of film production. And it is through

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archival documentation, often most plentiful for projects that never came to fruition – in this case the voluminous traces that this unrealized film has left in the Klinger Papers – that enable the researcher to understand these processes in all their depth, complexity and precariousness.

Note 1. The Michael Klinger Papers (MKP) (http://michaelklingerpapers.uwe.ac.uk/) contain copies of both treatment and finished screenplay. The details of Elmes’s commission are contained in the letter from Sally Shuter, William Morris Agency, to Klinger, 8 December 1967.

References ‘A Man and a Half’ (n.d.), Summary of screenplay, signed ‘Per’, MKP. ‘A Man and A Half’ (1972), Mather, 20 September, MKP. Acevski, J. (1974), Letter from, 6 June 1974, MKP. Barber, S. (2012), ‘Government Aid and Film Legislation: “An Elastoplast to stop a haemorrhage” ’, in S. Harper and J. Smith (eds), British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure, 10–21, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ‘Bill Dover to Eddie Evans’ (1970), Inter-office communication, Walt Disney Productions London, 7 April 1970, MKP. Blasio, J. (1972a), Letter to Klinger, 13 March, MKP. Blasio, J. (1972b), Letter to Klinger, 13 April, MKP. Byron, S. (1968), ‘Czechs Want Western Production; Package Deals, But Problems Too’, Variety, 21 August, 16. Elsaesser, T. (2005), European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Falk, Q. (1981), ‘Counting the cost of independence’, Screen International, 19 September. Falk, Q. (2000), Travels in Greeneland, London: Reynolds & Hearn. Fine, H. (1967), ‘Facilities for Filming in Bulgaria’, March 1967, MKP. Flint, M. (1968), Letter to Michael Klinger, 7 March, MKP. Higson, A. (2015), ‘British Cinema, Europe and the Global Reach of Audiences’, in I. Bondebjerg, E. N. Redvall and A. Higson (eds), 127–50, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hodges, Mike (2010), ‘Interview with Andrew Spicer’, 4 July. Howard, S. (1969), Letter to Michael Klinger, Sandy Howard Productions Corporation, 5 August 1969, MKP. Klinger, M. (1968a), Letter to Robert Solo, Carthay Center Productions Ltd., 15 March, MKP. Klinger, M. (1968b), Letter to Enrico, 1 April 1968, MKP. Klinger, M. (1968c), Letter to Peter Collinson, 22 March 1968 MKP.

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Klinger, M. (1968d), Letter to Peter Collinson, 4 May 1968, MKP. Klinger, M. (1968e), Letter to Bedřick, 16 April, MKP. Klinger, M. (1968f), Letter to Wolf, 28 June 1968, MKP. Klinger, M. (1968g), Letter to Wolf, 30 August, MKP. Klinger, M. (1969), Letter to Potocsny, MPO Productions, 9 July 1969, MKP. Klinger, M. (1970a), Letter to Flint, 12 January 1970, MKP. Klinger, M. (1970b), Letter to Vojčić, 27 April, MKP. Klinger, M. (1970c), Letter to Tuma, 24 November 1970, MKP. Klinger, M. (1972), Letter to Reid, 6 September, MKP. Klinger, T. (1974), Letter to Jurica Peruzovic, 23 September, MKP. Klinger, Tony (2018), Interview with Andrew Spicer, 23 August. Lucisano, F. (1985), Italian International Film, Rome, to Klinger, 1 February, MKP. Mather, J. (1972), Letter to Klinger, 24 May, MKP. ‘Michael Klinger Productions Limited’ (1971), A Man and a Half Below the Line Preliminary Budget, 30 July, MKP. Peruzovic, J. (1974), Letter from, 9 October, MKP. Potocsny, J. (n.d.), ‘Central Film Studios “Kosutnjak”, Belgrade, Yugoslavia’, MKP. Potocsny, J. (1969a), Letter to Klinger, 14 April, MKP. Potocsny, J. (1969b), Letter to Klinger, 16 September, MKP. ‘Pula Film Fest Reviews’ (1968), Variety, 21 August, 6. ‘Report from Boris Rotovnik’ (1970), Art Director, Triglavfilms, Ljubljana, 23 November. ‘Review of Pobed (The Trek)’ (1968), Variety, 21 August, 6. Smith, J. (2008), ‘Glam, spam and Uncle Sam: funding diversity in 1970s British film production’, in R. Shail (ed.), Seventies British Cinema, 67–80, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Spicer, A. (2010), ‘Creativity and commerce: Michael Klinger and new film history’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 8 (3): 297–314. Spicer, A. (2018), ‘ “Being European”: UK Production Companies and Europe’, Studies in European Cinema, 16 (1): 55–72. Spicer, A., and A. T. McKenna (2013), The Man Who Got Carter: Michael Klinger, Independent Production and the British Film Industry 1960–1980, London: I.B. Tauris. Tuma, B. (1970a), Letter to Klinger, 4 November, MKP. Tuma, B. (1970b), Letter to Klinger, 21 December, MKP. Vojčić, Z. (1970), Letter to Klinger, 16 April, MKP. Vojčić, Z. (1974), Letter to Klinger, 15 June, MKP. Walker, A. ([1975] 1986), Hollywood, England: the British film industry in the Sixties. London: Harrap. Wolf, R. (1968), Letter to Klinger, 17 June, MKP.

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PART TWO

Directors and auteurs

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4 Unfinished business: Godard, cinema and theatre in the 1960s Michael Witt

A recognition of the significance of unmade or abandoned film projects has been central to Jean-Luc Godard’s view of his own work for over forty years. In the mid-1970s he attempted to get an autobiographical film project titled Mes Films (My Films) off the ground devoted to his many abandoned films of the 1960s and 1970s (Godard 2014: 202, 402). However, finding himself overwhelmed by the project, it remained uncompleted and he ended up returning the production funds (ibid.: 202). He revisited the idea in 1993 in one of the scripts for his autobiographical essay film JLG/JLG autoportrait de décembre (JLG/JLG:  Self-Portrait in December, 1995), in which he envisaged devoting a sequence to the many fleeting ideas he had had for films over the years but not pursued, as well as to those projects for which he had developed scripts, cast actors, mounted budgets and in some instances started shooting before abandoning them (Godard 1998a). In the final version of JLG/JLG, the notion is condensed into a brief scene in which he argues that his uncompleted films are the most significant feature of his filmography. He has often elaborated on these ideas in interviews (Maillet and Gibert 2010). Around the time of Mes Films, Godard was also beginning to think about cinema history more broadly through the prism of unrealised and abandoned projects. If a cleaner, he suggested, had retrieved the scraps from the screenwriters’ rubbish bins in the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, one would have an archive of much more interesting scripts and ideas for films than those that were actually made (Godard 2014: 305). He pursued this idea in the 1980s in the opening chapter, Toutes les histoire(s) (All the

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[hi]stories), of his audio-visual history of cinema, Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), in which he argued through reference to a range of unfinished projects – notably Max Ophuls’s L’École des Femmes (The School for Wives, 1941), Orson Welles’s Don Quixote (1955–85) and Sergei Eisenstein’s !Que viva México! (1931–2) – that a true history of cinema must include ‘all the histories of the films that were never made’. We might identify three key reasons for his insistence on including this perspective:  even if they were never developed beyond the level of ideas the projects can nonetheless be contemplated and enjoyed as stimulating aesthetic propositions; although the films may not have been finished, they often generated interesting artefacts in the form of photographs, correspondence, treatments, scripts and even footage; and this material, together with the invisible work of meetings, negotiations, deal-making and interpersonal human relations that lies behind it is as much a part of cinema history as the completed films that were made, distributed and consumed. In the script for JLG/JLG, Godard jokes that the only area in which his filmography rivals and perhaps even outdoes that of Raoul Walsh is in the number of their respective unmade and abandoned projects. Although the figure he throws out of 1,300 or 1,400 is a humorous exaggeration, I have nonetheless identified over 200 unmade or uncompleted Godardian projects from 1949 to the present, which range from adaptations of books and plays to original screenplays. Since there is no dedicated Godard archive, I have collated details of these unmade projects primarily from interviews with and articles about him, as well as from the archives of those with whom he has collaborated that are housed in the Bibliothèque du Film and Bibliothèque du cinéma François Truffaut in Paris. The projects vary in form from shorts and feature films to documentaries, television programmes and series, standalone videos, books, plays and exhibitions. Very little research has been conducted on this extensive corpus, and it would be impossible to do justice to it in single chapter. In what follows, I  shall focus on one category within it: Godard’s unrealized adaptations of plays in the 1960s. In particular, I  will explore a project that he nurtured for many years:  a film based on Jean Giraudoux’s Pour Lucrèce (Duel of Angels).1 Although he ultimately failed to bring this to fruition, traces of it are visible in Les Carabiniers (The Soldiers, 1963) and especially – as Joel Schechter (1970) observed in a perceptive short article – in a number of scenes in his most explicitly theatrical film of the decade, La Chinoise (1967).

Godard’s theatrical projects of the 1960s Discussion of Godard and theatre in the 1960s has tended to focus on his engagement with the work of Bertolt Brecht. However, his unrealized projects of this decade reveal a much broader spread of theatrical interests. Between

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1962 and 1964, for example, he sought to make films based not only on Pour Lucrèce but also on Charles Ferdinand Ramuz and Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale, 1918), Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Jean Racine’s Bérénice (1670), Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961) and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896).2 In addition, Godard expressed a desire in 1962 to make a film based on an unspecified play by Sacha Guitry, was announced in 1963 as preparing to direct for the stage an adaptation by the actor and screenwriter Jean Gruault of the ‘Banquet of Trimalchio’ section of Petronius’s The Satyricon (under the title Le Festin chez Trimalcion) the following year in Paris, and around 1964 sought to buy the theatrical rights to stage George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923) (Collet 1962 [1985]; ‘Jean-Luc Godard: une mise en scène théâtrale’ 1963; Delorme 2008: 148). Finally, he invested a good deal of energy between 1962 and 1964 in trying to get a film version of Pour Lucrèce off the ground, and in the summer of 1963 he appeared as an actor in a minor role (that of Clerk of the Court) alongside Anna Karina in the lead role in director and actor Antoine Bourseiller’s staging of this play at an outdoor theatre festival at the château de Guingamp in Brittany (Bourseiller 2008: 235–7). Prior to this, in the winter of 1962, Godard had approached Bourseiller with an unusual proposition:  that of mounting a theatrical production at the theatre run by the latter (the Studio des Champs-Elysées on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris), to be produced by Godard, of a play based on Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse (Memoirs of a Nun) that would be directed by Jacques Rivette with Karina in the lead role (Bourseiller 2008: 229–33). The project was conceived as a theatrical sketch for the film that Rivette would seek to make in the summer of 1963 based on the same source. The publicity flyer for the play sought to attract theatregoers not only by emphasizing the modernity of Diderot’s themes but also by pitching the play as a unique experiment:  Jacques Rivette wants to create straight away, in the theatre, a sort of sketch of the film ‘La Religieuse’ that he is going to direct this summer. You are therefore going to participate in an experiment of a completely new type  – at the same time as participating in a theatrical spectacle you will be taking part in the conception of a film. Indeed through your reactions you will undoubtedly influence the definitive form that the film assumes in the mind of its director.3 Rehearsals for the play began at the Studio on the set of Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities in January 1963 and it was successfully performed thirty times between 6 February and 5 March 1963 with no intervention on the part of the Ministry of Information. While Bourseiller deemed it in his memoirs to have been ‘a successful curiosity’, the critical response was in fact ambivalent, at times very negative, although several commentators

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noted the strength of Karina’s performance and her potential as a stage actor (Bourseiller 2008: 232). Rivette eventually succeeded in convincing the head of the pre-censorship committee that he was intending to make a respectful, non-sensational film. After receiving the go-ahead, Suzanne Simonin, La Religieuse de Denis Diderot was finally filmed between October and December 1965 using exactly the same script as had been used in the theatre (Frappat 2001: 131). The surprise banning of the film on its completion the following year provoked a high-profile scandal and generated considerable protest, including two angry interventions by Godard in the press (Godard 1966; Godard 1966 [1985]: 285–6). The ban was lifted the following year. In terms of his practice, the La Religieuse experiment at the Studio des Champs-Elysées, combined with Godard’s involvement in the performance of Pour Lucrèce in Brittany, gave him extensive first-hand experience of the day to day reality of staging plays and performing for the theatre that would inform many of his film projects of the 1960s, most notably his evolving Pour Lucrèce venture.

Pour Lucrèce Giraudoux is a central reference in Godard’s work from the beginning. His novel La France Sentimentale (1930) features prominently in Godard’s unrealised 1956 script for a film titled Odile.4 The latter’s 1964 short Montparnasse-Levallois was inspired by an early Giraudoux short story, La Méprise (‘The Mistake’, 1910), which had already been recounted verbally in his Une femme est une femme (A Woman is a Woman, 1961), while Giraudoux’s 1922 novel Siegfried et le Limousin is a guiding reference in Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (1991) and his play Amphitryon 38 (1929) is the principal inspiration behind Hélas pour moi (Oh, Woe is Me, 1993). Further references to Giraudoux punctuate Godard’s oeuvre throughout. In relation specifically to Pour Lucrèce, Godard was already speculating as early as 1958 – in the context of a critical article on The Quiet American (Joseph Mankiewicz 1958) – about what a filmic adaptation of the play might look like (Godard 1958 [1985]: 134). Four years later, in between making Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, filmed February–March 1962) and Les Carabiniers (filmed December 1962–January 1963), he sought to mount a cinematic production of it featuring Charles Denner and Sami Frey, co-produced by Godard himself in association with Edmond Tenoudji’s Films Marceau. Pour Lucrèce offers a fresh take, set in Aix-en-Provence in 1868, on the Roman legend of the rape of Lucretia, according to which the beautiful and virtuous Lucretia killed herself after being raped by Tarquin, but only having secured an oath of vengeance from her father and husband. In Giraudoux’s audacious updating of the story, Lucretia becomes the chaste and implacable Lucile Blanchard, wife of the town’s recently appointed reforming judge

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Lionel Blanchard. Lucile is endowed with the uncanny ability of identifying ‘unvirtuous’ conduct at a glance and does not hesitate to then condemn her fellow citizens by cutting them dead in public. Her behaviour spreads intense discord among the town’s inhabitants and infuriates her nemesis, Paola, who drugs her and tricks her into believing that she has been raped while unconscious by the handsome but unscrupulous Count Marcellus. Giraudoux’s forensic study of the relations among and between the sexes, of virtue and vice, truth and deception, ends with Marcellus’s violent death and Lucile-Lucretia’s suicide. As this brief outline indicates, the play’s themes resonate closely with many of Godard’s films of the early 1960s, notably Vivre sa vie, Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) and Une femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964). It is a deeply pessimistic play of ideas in which Lucile ultimately kills herself less because she was duped into believing that she had been raped, but in despair at the wickedness, stupidity and selfishness of men in general, including her husband. The theme that attracted Godard in the play was above all the one embodied by Lucile-Lucretia: purity. In this respect, his thinking was in line with that of Jean-Louis Barrault, who summarized the play in a lengthy article written when he was preparing to stage it for the first time in 1953 as ‘the tragedy of Purity’ (Barrault 1953:  81, 90–1). Godard returned repeatedly to this idea in interviews:  And another thing that interests me about the play is that it is about purity. It is about a woman who believes that she is Lucretia, and the end of the film will consist of Giraudoux’s words: ‘Purity is not of this world, but once in ten years its light shines briefly.’ For me it will be as if I had filmed the brief glow of this light: the whole world is impure, but there will be a film which represents purity. (Milne 1962–63: 8) He wrote the phrase from the play that he cites here on the physical copy that he used as his shooting script in 1962, and the following year he indicated that he envisaged concluding his revised conceptualization of his film with it (Bergala 2006: 122).5 A few years later, he finally used it as an intertitle in Masculin féminin (1966). Pour Lucrèce had an unusually difficult passage from script to stage. Giraudoux wrote it in 1943 but died the following year before it had been performed. He often wrote successive versions of scenes for his plays, which he and his principal theatrical collaborator, the actor-director Louis Jouvet, would choose between at the last moment. In the case of Pour Lucrèce, he left behind several versions (Barrault 1953: 72–8). Giraudoux’s widow did not permit production of the play until 1953, nine years after her husband’s death, and two years after that of Jouvet, who had hoped to direct it (Norwood 1985: 354, n.3). It was first performed by Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault’s company at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris in November

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1953, with Renaud in the title role. For this production, Barrault used the version of the play that Jouvet had chosen when he had been hoping to stage it (Barrault 1953: 73). At the time that Godard first sought to mount his film, the project must have seemed an attractive commercial proposition, the play having recently enjoyed considerable domestic and international success. In March 1958, it was staged (as Duel of Angels) in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) in a production directed by Barrault, with Claire Bloom as Lucile. This production then played for a week in Glasgow before transferring to London’s West End, where it enjoyed a lengthy successful run. Two years later, in April 1960, it moved to Broadway in a version staged by Robert Helpmann, after which it toured to several other American cities. On 21 August 1962, L’Express announced that certain unspecified ‘final obstacles’ to Godard’s project had fallen and that filming would begin in Aix-en-Provence in three weeks’ time (‘Jean-Luc Godard devant Giraudoux’ 1962). At this late stage, the actor who would play the female lead had still not been decided on, although Godard indicated that he envisaged casting a novice actor, whose inexperience, he suggested, would be helpful for the role (ibid.). He tasked Jean-Paul Savignac, who had worked as his assistant director on Vivre sa vie, with interviewing and photographing possible actors for the role in the Films Marceau offices (Bergala 2006: 122). Details of the cast and crew were published shortly afterwards in L’Avant-Scène Cinéma together with an announcement that the shoot was imminent (L’AvantScène Cinéma 1962:  6). The list of personnel was as follows:  adaptation and director, Godard; cinematographer, Raoul Coutard; assistant directors, Savignac and Charles Bitsch; chief editor, Agnès Guillemot; actors, Frey, Denner, Michel Piccoli, Marie Dubois, Pascale Robert and Nicole Bellac. Of the female actors, Dubois had previously starred in Tirez sur le pianiste and played a small role in Une femme est une femme; Pascale Robert is doubtless a misspelling of the name of the established actor Pascale Roberts; and Nicole Bellac was presumably the newcomer lined up for the lead role. However, these details were followed by a last-minute addendum stating that just as the magazine was going to press, the publishers had been informed that Godard was pushing Pour Lucrèce back by a few months and beginning work on Les Carabiniers instead. As his statement above from August 1962 indicates, Godard’s original intention had been to film in the area in which Giraudoux had set his play:  Aix-en-Provence. Savignac had recently made a film with Marc Allégret in a large villa in the region built by the celebrated architect Fernand Pouillon (Bergala 2006: 121). Godard visited the villa and was apparently enthusiastic about the prospect of filming there, but it had recently been sold and reaching an agreement with the new owners proved impossible (ibid.). According to Bitsch, Godard also expressed a desire to film on the family estate of the poet and novelist Louise de Vilmorin in Verrières-le-Buisson just

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south-west of Paris, and the two of them visited her there and she granted her permission (Shafto 2008). This is the location that was eventually selected. Godard tasked the cast with learning the text of the play by heart. This came as something of a surprise to Dubois, who was familiar with the director’s more improvisatory methods on Une femme est une femme (Dubois 2002: 69). According to her, Godard knew the play well and had a clear sense of what he was seeking to achieve (ibid.). Bitsch has confirmed that Godard wanted the actors to respect the original text fully: ‘He saw it almost as a reading of the play. He wanted the actors to stick to Giraudoux’s dialogue, without making any changes’ (Shafto 2008). Godard expressed his aims slightly differently shortly before the start of the shoot. His comments suggest that he envisaged the project less as a straightforward film of the play than a cinematic interrogation of the process of theatrical performance through reference to it: It’s not a question of a cinematic adaptation. And anyway we’ll be obliged to reduce the length of the text, which in extenso would produce a film of three hours. My intention is to surprise the actors in the process of performing the play, the camera taking the place of a spectator who will be able to move around. I’ll respect the rhythm of the play and the division of the scenes. (‘Jean-Luc Godard devant Giraudoux’ 1962) Approximately two weeks were envisaged for the shoot.6 However, it came to an unforeseen and definitive halt on the first day of filming. Coutard recalled them laying a short amount of track in a gateway in the garden to allow the large Mitchell camera to be placed on a dolly and pulled back so that the actors could pass through and go and sit at a table outside the house (Coutard 2007: 280). Bitsch also recalled a track being laid, although he remembered this being for a long dolly shot with which Godard planned to open the film (Shafto 2008). Both agreed that on the first day of the shoot in September 1962 it soon started raining, so the grip put a plastic cover over the Mitchell, and everyone took shelter in the Vilmorin chateau and waited – until 11.00 am according to Coutard (2007: 281), and until 4.00 pm or 5.00 pm according to Bitsch (Bergala 2006: 122). Whatever the time, an announcement was made at some point that day to the cast and crew that they were stopping the film for good. As its co-producer, this was an extremely expensive decision for Godard. The contracts had all been signed with Films Marceau, and these stipulated that the wages had to be paid in full even if the film were not made (Bergala 2006: 122). Tenoudji therefore paid everyone off and Godard subsequently reimbursed him for his share via his production company, Anouchka Films (Shafto 2008). Accounts differ as to why Godard decided to call such an abrupt end to proceedings. Some commentators have pointed to the turbulent state of his relationship with his wife Anna Karina, who at the time was shooting the

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film Shéhérazade with Pierre Gaspard-Huit in Spain (Brody 2008: 144; de Baecque 2010: 192). Dubois ascribed the abandonment of the project to the demands on Sami Frey’s schedule (Dubois 2002:  69). Bitsch, meanwhile, was accustomed to Godard’s changes of mind and had made a rule never to ask him for his reasons (Shafto 2008). For his part, Godard was as usual during this period juggling multiple projects, and according to Savignac he travelled to Paris the very same day that he shut down Pour Lucrèce with a view to setting up another film immediately devoted to the anarchist outlaw Bonnot Gang of the 1910s under the title La Bande à Bonnot, which also eventually came to nothing (Bergala 2006: 122).7

A Rehearsal of Pour Lucrèce In a letter to the producer Pierre Braunberger, Godard indicated that he had halted work on Pour Lucrèce and bought back the rights partly because he hadn’t been happy with the actors he had chosen and partly because his approach to the project had evolved in a direction that no longer interested Tenoudji (Godard 1987:  186). He now wanted, he said, to make it more experimental and to focus on the rehearsal process (ibid.). There may be some truth in this, but his comments should be treated with a degree of caution since as we shall see this letter was in part a sales pitch designed to attract the producer, who had recently co-produced Vivre sa vie, to invest in a new version of the project. Nonetheless, the letter makes clear that he in no way saw the halting of the production in September 1962 as a definitive abandonment. This is confirmed by a number of statements that Godard made later in 1962, and indeed in subsequent years. In October 1962, in the course of an interview with Tom Milne, he made no reference whatsoever to the recently abandoned shoot, while outlining instead his new vision for the film, which he suggested was lined up for filming the following May (Milne 1962–63: 7). His comments suggest a degree of continuity in his approach, notably in his emphasis on the careful attention to the delivery of Giraudoux’s dialogue. In this respect, Godard’s thinking was entirely in line with Giraudoux’s own view of how his text should be spoken, as well as a continuation of the approach to staging Giraudoux established by the latter’s key collaborator and influential interpreter, Jouvet, which involved minimal gesture and movement together with simplicity and clarity of diction (Inskip 1958: 159). For actors new to performing Giraudoux, this often meant setting aside their customary habits and techniques in favour of an understated acting style in which they became, as the playwright Édouard Bourdet put it succinctly, ‘barely conscious docile instruments’ in the service of the language (Bourdet 1953: 15). Godard’s comments also indicate a certain development in his approach to Pour Lucrèce, which now included an exploration of the passage between

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the process of rehearsal and the diegetic world of the play, together with a reflection on the differences between theatrical and cinematic representation: I have always wanted to do a classical play – classical in the French sense, that is, as I consider Giraudoux to be. The cinema is always talked about from the point of view of the images, and at the moment I find myself more interested in the sound. I want to carry this interest to its logical conclusion and simply direct a voice on the screen, show someone more or less motionless on the screen speaking a fine text. At the beginning of the film, perhaps, there will be the camera and the actors taking up their positions with their scripts, beside a chair or in a garden, and then beginning to read. You will see them reading their lines, until gradually we will have moved inside the play and the scripts will no longer be seen. The beauty of the cinema is that, whereas in the theatre if someone dies, at the end he must get up and one does not really believe it, in the cinema one can indicate that it is only an actor, but at the same time one can believe in his death because the cinema is real, it films reality. So, starting from theatre one can move into reality. (Milne 1962–63: 8) Although Godard’s letter to Braunberger is undated, it was almost certainly – given that it includes a reference to Bardot’s involvement in Le Mépris – written at some point in 1963. He suggested that they collaborate on a revised version of Pour Lucrèce towards the end of 1963 or beginning of 1964: I find myself in the position of owing Tenoudji 11 million (eleven), which I propose that you buy. Of these 11 million, five are for the rights and six for expenses (and out of these six, two are my salary). We’ll make the film without paying anyone more than 1 million, but giving them a percentage, myself included. And we’ll make a tribute to theatre through cinema, which is something I’m passionate about, and which is what I  wanted to do with Pirandello’s Six Characters. We’ll begin with the actors, and the world of theatre, and we’ll end on the characters and this phrase: ‘Purity is not of this world, but every 10 years we get a glimmer or flash of it.’ In brief, what I’m proposing to you is to film quickly and intensely a flash of beauty. (Godard 1987: 187) Although we do not know Braunberger’s response and this new version was not realized, the letter demonstrates again that Godard continued to consider the project very much live. He went on to provide detailed information regarding its proposed format, cast and conception: it would be an experimental colour, sound 16 mm project featuring (again) Frey and Piccoli, who would be accompanied this time by Karina and Brigitte Bardot, and it would now focus explicitly on (and perhaps be titled) ‘a rehearsal

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of Pour Lucrèce’ (Godard 1987).8 Godard positioned this outline through reference to Max Ophuls’s abandoned wartime project to make a film in Switzerland with Louis Jouvet set in a theatre during a performance by the latter’s troupe of their celebrated long-running production of Molière’s L’École des femmes, and suggested that he would film what he termed the ‘the theatrical phenomenon’ in the manner of Jean Rouch or Richard Leacock (Godard 1987: 186–8). The references in the letter to the Ophuls-Jouvet project and Pirandello are both significant. As noted earlier, Godard would later turn to L’École des femmes as a key example of an abandoned film in Histoire(s) du cinéma. Moreover, according to Ophuls’s son, the documentary filmmaker Marcel, for many years Godard and the long-time director of the Cinémathèque suisse, Freddy Buache, sought unsuccessfully to track down the opening shot of L’École des femmes (Bou 2012). Ophuls senior described this shot, which he claimed was the only material he had completed filming when the project was abandoned, in some detail in a lengthy interview conducted by Truffaut and Rivette in 1957 (Rivette and Truffaut 1957).9 It had depicted, he said, a long crane movement of a camera traversing the theatre over the heads of the audience, with Jouvet sitting on it and putting on his make-up as the lights gradually dim, until it crosses the curtain and disappears, leaving Jouvet  alone on the stage in character as Arnolphe (Rivette and Truffaut 1957: 12).10 We also know from this interview that Ophuls had considered the project an experiment and that his intention had not been to make a conventional filmic adaptation of Molière’s play but rather to follow Jouvet and his troupe around with his camera during a performance of it, and to incorporate in his film the audience, the lights and the relationship between the stage and the wings: I wanted to show the actor when he leaves the stage and follow him into the wings while the play’s dialogue continued. … I  never moved away from the characters, even when they stopped acting, because that didn’t mean they had stopped living. (Rivette and Truffaut 1957: 12) It is against this background that we can appreciate Godard’s suggestion in his letter to Braunberger that what he was seeking to do in A Rehearsal of Pour Lucrèce was ‘what Max Ophuls sketched out at the beginning of the war with Jouvet and L’École des femmes’ (Godard 1987: 186). In addition, Godard’s intended focus in his revised version of Pour Lucrèce not just on the play but also on the rehearsal process and behind-the-scenes activity brings it close to the conception and concerns of Pirandello’s celebrated metatheatrical Six Characters in Search of an Author, so it is unsurprising that he should reference his abandoned Pirandello project here. Although the rights to Six Characters in Search of an Author had ultimately proved too expensive (Milne 1962–63: 5), his conceptualization of his Pour Lucrèce

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film came increasingly – in its exploration of the fluidity of the boundaries between actor and character, rehearsal and performance, life and theatre – to bear the traces of his interest in Pirandello. Godard also proposed to Braunberger that they might in the first instance consider this revised version of Pour Lucrèce as a film for television, with the possibility of a subsequent limited theatrical release. Bardot, he suggested, may well be willing to participate in the project if it were presented to her as a collective adventure based on friendship and if Le Mépris proved to be a success for her. He also went on to introduce a new element into the mix: the use of a variety of different dramatic methods. ‘You’ll see a scene that is acted successively using a Brechtian method, the Stanislavski method, and then according to the truth,’ as he put it, ‘which is the only way to make the character exist. In short, once again, I’m proposing to you a truly avantgarde film on a classical subject’ (Godard 1987: 188). In September 1963, he reiterated his intention to make a film based on Pour Lucrèce titled A Rehearsal of Pour Lucrèce, which he now presented in explicitly reflexive terms:  It will be a documentary on theatre actors, an essay on theatre through the means of cinema. And at the same time it will be an essay about cinema. You’ll see how an actor can act twice in different ways to produce a specific effect, and that will be the whole film. Previously, I would have tended to put that in the film I was working on at the time. Now I want it to be either wholly one thing or the other. I think that that will be best from every point of view, including a commercial one. (Collet 1963: 93) The following November (1964), he indicated his continuing intention to make a film of this title, perhaps the following year, that would be a ‘cinema documentary on actors in the process of performing a play’ (‘Gérard Guégan et Michel Pétris avec…Jean-Luc Godard’ 1964: 8). Once again he suggested that he saw it as a TV project and went on to clarify his rationale for this as follows: What I  don’t want to do are live television dramas. They are of no interest. I want to make films that are broadcast on television, or make them with the resources of television, because certain ‘cultural’ subjects are allowed on television but not in cinema. Staging a play by Racine is part of the prestige of television. In the cinema it would be considered non-commercial. Although he references Racine here, his main topic of discussion is Pour Lucrèce. The key point he makes regarding the openness of television to potentially difficult subjects that would be unlikely to find financial backing or an audience in the cinema is one that he rehearsed on numerous occasions

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in interviews during this period, including when he was attempting to develop a televisual adaptation of Racine’s Bérénice. It is for this reason, he argued, that ‘despite its faults, it seems to me that French television represents hope’ (‘Entretien avec Jean-Luc Godard’ 1966). Following his remarks on Pour Lucrèce in late 1964, Godard made few (if any) further public statements about the project for several years. However, his interest in theatre, and the relationship between cinema and theatre, continued. This is visible in his sustained engagement with theatre and theatricality in the films he made in the mid-1960s, especially Une femme mariée. It is also evident in a lengthy interview that he and Michel Delahaye conducted for Cahiers du cinéma in 1966 with Antoine Bourseiller and René Allio, both of whom had theatrical backgrounds and had recently made a move into filmmaking (‘Deux arts en un’ 1966: 51–78).11 A prolific film critic, Delahaye also had experience of acting for both theatre and cinema, having appeared in the play and film versions of La Religieuse. This document constitutes the most detailed record we have of Godard’s thinking about theatre in the 1960s. The conversation ranges widely over the connections and differences between cinema and theatre, including the pros and cons of using theatrically trained actors in films, the regrettable absence of significant interaction between the New Wave and the ‘young theatre’ of the 1950s and early 1960s, the different technical means and expressive syntax associated with the two artforms, and the relatively high cultural esteem in which theatre was held in France at the time compared to cinema. The following year, 1967, in an interview about La Chinoise (filmed in spring 1967), Godard again took up the topic of the relationship between cinema and theatre, and in particular those directors such as Ingmar Bergman who had moved between directing films and plays and those who had addressed the theatre in their recent films (besides Bergman, he cites Rivette, Bernardo Bertolucci and James Ivory) as a way, he suggested, of challenging themselves by moving beyond the comfort zone of their usual (cinematic) mode of artistic expression (Bontemps 1967 [1985]: 321–2). He then proceeded to give a further detailed outline of his Pour Lucrèce project in terms that had changed little since 1964. The film, which would seek to ‘teach viewers what theatre is’, would begin with the auditions, include fragments of rehearsals and finished performances featuring different actors interpreting the same role, and show the director and actors approaching the play within the framework of a series of different dramatic theories, from Aristotle to Victor Hugo, Brecht and Stanislavski (ibid.: 322). A few months later, in an interview recorded in January 1968 for a special issue of the journal Image et Son devoted to film sound, Godard rehearsed these same details, adding that he envisaged asking the actors to read the text in three different tones and including the various takes in the finished film

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(Segal 1968: 75).12 To the best of my knowledge, this was the last time he mentioned the project publicly as a live venture. After this, his explicit interest in the theatre, theatricality and the art of the actor appears to have receded for some years.13 However it re-emerged strongly in the 1980s, when he included a number of sequences based on Racine’s Andromaque (1667) and Bérénice in Soigne ta droite (Keep Your Right Up, 1987). The same year he made his idiosyncratic version of King Lear (1987) and two years later attempted to revive his long-standing Bérénice project, now subtitled in a manner reminiscent of his Pour Lucrèce venture: ‘a filmmaker’s notes about theatre based on the play by M. Jean Racine’. His plan was to develop this in collaboration with the theatre director Matthias Langhoff, who at the time was running the Théâtre VidyLausanne.14 As with Pour Lucrèce, the quality of Racine’s language was central to the project, as indeed it had been when he first sought to adapt Bérénice in the 1960s (Godard 1993 [1998]: 281). In addition to this enduring Bérénice project, in 1991 Godard explored the possibility of filming Patrice Chereau’s staging of Botho Strauss’s Le Temps et la Chambre (Time and the Room) at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe.15 He went on to draw (as noted earlier) on Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38 as the basis for Hélas pour moi and on Alfred de Musset’s On ne bandine pas avec l’amour (No Trifling with Love) in For Ever Mozart (1996). This resurgence of interest in the theatre in Godard’s work culminated in 1996–7 in the form of a project that he proposed to the theatre director Jean-Louis Martinelli, who at the time was running the Théâtre National de Strasbourg (TNS), for a film to be made in collaboration with the TNS students (Godard 1998b: 18–20). When this came to nothing, he proposed a second film, this time focused on the functioning of the TNS itself, to be titled La Formation de l’acteur en France (The Training of the Actor in France). When this again failed to take off, a disillusioned Godard expressed his disappointment in a caustic short video, Adieu au TNS (Farewell to the TNS, 1997) (ibid.).

Conclusion A study of Godard’s relationship with theatre through his handful of completed features based explicitly on or inspired partly by plays  – Les Carabiniers and King Lear in the former category, Soigne ta droite, Hélas pour moi and For Ever Mozart in the latter – would appear to point to a relatively modest degree of interest and engagement on his part with the art form. As this chapter has shown, however, such a picture would be thoroughly incomplete and indeed misleading. My focus here on his uncompleted and abandoned theatrical projects has revealed a number of things:  first, that

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the question of theatre, and the theatre-cinema relationship, has been of fundamental importance to him over several decades as a site of fascination and source of inspiration, informing and nourishing his completed works; second, that Giraudoux and Racine have been of particular significance to him over the course of his filmmaking career and of no less importance as touchstones and guides than Brecht; and third, that his relationship with theatre has ultimately been one of difficulty and recurrent failure. Indeed, the sheer volume of his failed and abandoned play-based projects suggests that there is something unfathomable, ungraspable and ultimately unresolved about theatre for him, or at least about the possibility of adequately exploring and rendering theatre through cinema. It is perhaps not unrelated in this context that the reception of both Les Carabiniers and King Lear was highly problematic: the former was widely attacked by critics on its release in 1963, while the latter was barely seen between its Cannes premiere in 1987 and its re-release in 2002.16 More broadly, the investigation in this chapter of just one category of Godard’s many abandoned projects, and the insights it has generated, has provided a concise illustration of the value of integrating the study of unfinished and abandoned film projects into the practice of cinema history in the manner that he has been advocating for many years. Within the context of his oeuvre, it also suggests that a study of other categories of his other unrealized projects – from adaptations of books to films or television programmes on topics ranging from history, politics and science to sport, music and cinema  – could be equally productive in revealing further otherwise hidden influences, connections, patterns and emphases in his work.

Notes 1. First published by Grasset in 1953, Pour Lucrèce appeared with Methuen in English as Duel of Angels, translated by Christopher Fry, in 1958. 2. For references to these projects, see, for L’Histoire du soldat, Brody (2008: 671, n.29); for Ubu Roi and Six Characters in Search of an Author, Collet (1962 [1985]: 215–36, 230); for Bérénice, see ‘Gérard Guégan et Michel Pétris avec…Jean-Luc Godard’ (1964: 1, 8–9); for Happy Days, see Bontemps et al. (1967 [1985]: 303–27, 323). 3. Flyer available in the Gruault collection in the Bibliothèque du cinéma François Truffaut, Paris. Not everyone, it should be noted, was enthusiastic about this project. In a letter to François Truffaut, dated 10 November 1961, Gruault confided that he felt that it was a ‘crazy plan’ and ‘disastrous venture’. Truffaut collection, Bibliothèque du Film, Paris. 4. I am very grateful to Nicole Brenez for making a copy of this script available to me. 5. For Godard’s comments on his intention to use this phrase to close his film, see the extract from his letter to Pierre Braunberger (Godard 1987).

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6. According to Bergala (2006: 122), the proposed shooting schedule was two weeks, while de Baecque says twelve days (2010: 191). Coutard (2007: 280) recalled that it was one week, while Bitsch suggested that it was four (Shafto 2008). 7. Godard worked on and off on La Bande à Bonnot for several years, including in collaboration with Gruault, before finally abandoning it in 1966. It was eventually made by Philippe Fourastié in 1968. 8. In his biography, de Baecque (2010: 190) gets the order of Godard’s attempts to mount a film based on Pour Lucrèce wrong, which results in a muddled account. He states erroneously that Godard first sought to set up the project with Braunberger, and then turned to Tenoudji, whereas in fact it was the other way round. He also quotes at length from Godard’s outline of the project in his letter to Braunberger, presenting it as the original plan for the film rather than the revised second version, which leads to further errors. 9. In his richly documented biography of Ophuls, Helmut G. Asper has suggested that as much as a quarter of the film was in fact shot, although the material is currently considered lost (Asper 1998: 423). 10. An article about the shoot, published in Schweizer Filmzeitung in January 1941 (reproduced in Asper 1998: 421), indicates that this shot was framed as a fantasy, which began with Jouvet leaning back in his seat in the stalls and ended with him being woken by the stage manager telling him that it was time to go home. 11. Bourseiller’s first and only film, Marie Soleil, was filmed in 1964 and released in 1966. Allio’s first feature, La Vieille dame indigne (The Shameless Old Lady), based on a short story by Brecht, appeared in 1965. 12. Godard later pursued these ideas in chapter 4A of Histoire(s) du cinéma, Le contrôle de l’univers (The Control of the Universe) (1998), where he moves between two different renditions of Paul Valéry’s poem ‘Psaume sur une voix’ (Psalm on a voice), itself a hymn to the expressive power of the human voice. 13. The exception to this was a film project in 1969–70 based on Jules Feiffer’s play Little Murders, to be produced by Elliott Gould for United Artists. Statements by Godard following the demise of the project, however, which was eventually directed by Alan Arkin, suggest that he was never seriously invested in it. See Goodwin et al. (1971: 17). 14. The treatment for this project was published in Cahiers du cinéma (special out-of-series issue: Spécial Godard: 30 ans depuis [1990: 10]). 15. For details of this project, see the Chereau collection in the Bibliothèque du Film. 16. For Godard’s response to his critics in 1963, see ‘Feu sur Les Carabiniers’ (1963 [1985]) in A. Bergala (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, vol. 1, 238–41, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Éditions de l’Étoile. For an account of the difficult production and subsequent near-invisibility of King Lear, see de Baecque (2010: 665–70).

References Asper, H. (1998), Ophüls: Eine Biographie mit zahlreichen Dokumenten, Texten und Bildern, Berlin: Bertz.

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Barrault, J. (1953), ‘À la recherche de Pour Lucrèce’, in J. Barrault and M. Renaud (eds), Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud Jean-Louis Barrault, 72–100, Paris: Julliard. Bergala, A. (2006), Godard au travail: les années 60, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma. Bontemps, J., Comolli, J., Delahaye, M., and Narboni, J. (1967 [1985]), ‘Lutter sur deux fronts’, in A. Bergala (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, vol. 1, 303–27, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Éditions de l’Étoile. Bou, S. (2012), ‘Marcel Ophuls, sa vie, son œuvre, son siècle’, episode 6: Louis Jouvet, France Inter, 9 July. Available online: https://www.franceinter.fr/ emissions/marcel-ophuls-sa-vie-son-oeuvre-son-siecle/marcel-ophuls-sa-vie-sonoeuvre-son-siecle-09-juillet-2012 (accessed 13 September 2018). Bourdet, É. (1953), ‘Le théâtre de Jean Giraudoux’, in J. Barrault and M. Renaud (eds), Cahiers de la Compagnie, 9–20, Paris: Julliard. Bourseiller, A. (2008), Sans relâche: Histoires d’une vie, Lyon: Actes Sud. Brody, R. (2008), Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, London: Faber and Faber. Collet, J. et al (1962 [1985]), ‘Jean-Luc Godard’, in A. Bergala (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, vol. 1, 215–36, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/ Éditions de l’Étoile. Collet, J. (1963), ‘Entretien avec Jean-Luc Godard’, in J. Collet (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard, 79–95, Paris: Seghers. Coutard, R. (2007), L’Impériale de Van Su: Comment je suis entré dans le cinéma en dégustant une soupe chinoise, Paris: Ramsay. de Baecque, A. (2010), Godard: Biographie, Paris: Grasset. Delorme, D. (2008), Demain, tout commence, Paris: Robert Laffont. ‘Deux arts en un: René Allio et Antoine Bourseiller répondent à Jean-Luc Godard et Michel Delahaye’ (1966), Cahiers du cinéma, 177: 51–78. Dubois M. (2002), J’ai pas menti, j’ai pas tout dit…, Paris: Plon. ‘Entretien avec Jean-Luc Godard’ (1966), Le Monde, 22 April. Frappat, H. (2001), Jacques Rivette, secret compris, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma. ‘Gérard Guégan et Michel Pétris avec…Jean-Luc Godard’ (1964), Les Lettres françaises, November, 1055: 1, 8–9. Godard, J. (1958 [1985]), ‘Un athlète complet’, in A. Bergala (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, vol. 1, 133–5, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Éditions de l’Étoile. Godard, J. (1966), ‘Le vrai visage de l’intolérance actuelle’, Le Monde, 2–3 April, 6. Godard, J. (1966 [1985]), ‘Lettre ouverte a André Malraux, “Ministre de la Kultur”’, in A. Bergala (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, vol. 1, 285–6, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Éditions de l’Étoile. Godard, J. (1987), Letter to Pierre Braunberger, in P. Braunberger (ed.), Cinémamémoire, 186–89, Paris: Centre National de la Cinématographie/Centre Georges Pompidou. Godard, J. (1993 [1998]), ‘La Loi de la gravitation’, in A. Bergala (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, tome 2: 1984-1998, 272–85, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma. Godard, J. (1998a), ‘JLG/JLG autoportrait de décembre, scénario 2’, in A. Bergala (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, tome 2: 1984-1998, 287–8, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma.

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Godard, J. (1998b) ‘Une boucle bouclée: Nouvel entretien de Jean-Luc Godard par Alain Bergala’, in A. Bergala (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, tome 2: 1984–1998, 9–41, Cahiers du cinéma. Godard, J. (2014), Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, ed. and trans. T. Barnard, Montreal: Caboose. Goodwin, M., Luddy, T., and Wise, N. (1971), ‘The Dziga Vertov Film Group in America’, Take One, 2 (1): 9–26. Inskip, D. (1958), Jean Giraudoux: The Making of a Dramatist, London: Oxford University Press. ‘Jean-Luc Godard devant Giraudoux’ (1962), L’Express, 21 August, n.p. ‘Jean-Luc Godard: une mise en scène théâtrale’ (1963), Le Figaro, 23 April, n.p. L’Avant-Scène Cinéma (1962), 15 October, (19): 6. Maillet, D., and P. Gibert (2010), ‘Conversation avec JLG’, Jean-Luc Godard – Fiction, DVD box set, Gaumont. Milne, T. (1962–63), ‘Jean-Luc Godard and Vivre sa vie’, in D. Sterritt (ed.), JeanLuc Godard: Interviews, 3–8, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Norwood, J. (1985), ‘The Director-Playwright Relationship of Louis Jouvet and Jean Giraudoux’, Modern Drama, 28 (3): 348–54. Rivette, J. and F. Truffaut (1957), ‘Entretien avec Max Ophuls’, Cahiers du cinéma, 72: 7–25. Schechter, J. (1970), ‘Brecht and Godard in Ten Scenes from the Decline and Fall of Artistotle’, Theatre, 3 (1): 25–30. Segal, A. (1968), ‘Jean-Luc Godard’, Image et Son, March, (215): 72–82. Shafto, S. (2008), ‘Interview with Charles Bitsch’, Senses of Cinema, 44. Available online: http://sensesofcinema.com/2008/the-new-wave-remembered-focus-oncharles-bitsch/charles-bitsch-interview/ (accessed 1 September 2018).

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5 Ken Russell’s unfinished projects and unmade films, 1956–68: The BBC years Matthew Melia

The career of the provocative sometimes controversial British auteur Ken Russell is littered with a bewildering number of unrealised projects. They date from his early career making pioneering arts bio-documentaries for the BBC’s arts showcase Monitor (1958–65) to the final decade of his life (Russell died in 2011) making home-made films on digital video with friends and family in the garden and garage of his New Forest cottage (his ‘garagiste’ period). These ‘shadow’ projects provide a vantage point from which to view the arc of Russell’s career:  from his transition from experimental, amateur film maker to having an innovative central role in the BBC’s postwar arts programming, through his career as the most iconoclastic (and most divisive) figure in British arts cinema from the 1970s onwards, and the return to his amateur filmmaking roots in the late 1990s. The aim of this discussion is to illuminate how these unmade ‘shadow’ projects that never saw the light of day (or at least, in some cases, not in the way Russell originally intended) fit into the wider narrative of Russell’s career. This is something that has not been explored in detail before, with no sustained study of this aspect of Russell’s career. Certain key writings on the director refer to some of these abandoned projects, but they are, more often than not, presented as incidental or anecdotal asides to the existing canonical body of work. Among these studies, Joseph Gomez’s Ken Russell: The Adaptor

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as Creator (1976) comes the closest to recognizing the critical importance of some of these unmade films. Gomez offers some valuable insight into later unmade early 1970s scripts such as The Angels, or Russell’s aborted carnivalesque adaptation of the story of ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’ by Rabelais, Gargantua. This chapter will demonstrate how an examination of Russell’s abandoned projects aids us in gaining a fuller understanding of both his existing work and his career as a whole. It will also show how these unmade projects form a parallel cinema history in the shadow of Russell’s main body of work. The chapter focuses on the period 1956–68, from Russell’s emergence as an amateur film maker, through his career at the BBC, to his position as a key auteur of British post-war arts cinema with his first major film Women In Love (1969). It aims to be the jumping-off point for a wider, more comprehensive study of Russell’s career viewed through the projects which were planned or considered but which were ultimately thwarted or abandoned. In doing so it hopes to recognize the value of such works in sustaining, supporting and developing the extant films, Russell’s career and his identity as a filmmaker. In existing critical discussions of the unmade films, those which date from Russell’s time at the BBC have had comparatively less critical coverage than others. The chapter will address a range of projects excavated from the BBC’s Written Archives Centre and consider the reasons why they failed, what the factors were that contributed to their failure (industrial? personal?), and what we can learn from them about Russell’s emergence and transition from amateur to professional film maker working within the parameters of television broadcasting.

Ken Russell and shadow cinema How do we define the term ‘shadow cinema’? Could it consist of a body of amateur films made prior to the emergence of a director as a fully fledged auteur? Could it be a body of unrealized work which lies in the shadow of a canonical, ‘official’ body of fully realized and completed work? Does it denote films which have been made, and since lost to posterity – Russell’s Monitor film, Cranks at Work (BBC 1960), for instance? This was a BBC documentary film following a day in the life of South African dancer and choreographer of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet John Cranko and his preparations for the New Cranks Revue Show.1 Is shadow cinema defined through projects which were started but then left unfinished at the development stage? Dan North observes that there are numerous criteria by which a film might be deemed to be ‘unfinished’. It might simply be a case of a screenplay that was never

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filmed, a shoot that was shut down prior to completion, even an idea for a story that was mooted and discarded at the back-of-an-envelope stage. (2008: 1) North’s study collects a variety of critical insights into the unfinished projects of several of Russell’s contemporaries – directors such as Lindsay Anderson, Derek Jarman, and Joseph Losey, but Russell himself is a surprising absence from this roster, especially given the amount of projects he undertook or proposed. North’s criteria can, nevertheless, be applied to a study of Russell’s unmade, incomplete or abandoned projects, which take on a range of different forms: projects planned in tandem with the BBC or production companies; unrealized scripts and treatments for projects he had vocalized to collaborators or loved ones, for instance, and which never came to fruition; ideas for stories that were ‘mooted and discarded at the back-ofan-envelope stage’ (the BBC’s Written Archives Centre contains numerous examples of these); or projects for which no documentation exists but which are remembered by collaborators and colleagues. In the course of the research for this discussion, an interview with actor Murray Melvin (who worked with Russell regularly across his career, from 1964’s silent-comedyinspired Diary of a Nobody: Domestic Jottings of a City Clerk (BBC), based on the George Grossmith 1892 comic novel, to Prisoner of Honor (1991), Russell’s telling of the Dreyfus affair starring Richard Dreyfuss and Oliver Reed (his last collaboration with Russell)) revealed two proposed biopics from the mid-1970s – one of the French composer Hector Berlioz and one of the nineteenth-century British erotic artist Aubrey Beardsley. However, as North suggests, ‘the British film industry can be notoriously brittle, and its productions prone to abandonment, neglect or pre-productive implosion’ (2008:  1) and these projects failed to see the light of day thanks to the collapse of the British film industry in the latter half of the 1970s.2 The Berlioz project is particularly worth noting because Russell appears to have considered a similar project in 1965, ten years earlier,3 while working for Monitor. In a letter archived at the BBC’s Written Archive Centre, Russell professes a desire to make a film about the life of the composer but admits that BBC budgetary constraints would not ‘stretch to a film with a cast of thousands’ (Russell 1965a)). Russell, who at the time had one relatively minor cinematic release under his belt, the seaside comedy French Dressing (1964), was already looking to expand the scope and ambition of his biographical film projects. In another letter dated 22 June 1965, Russell writes to comedian Spike Milligan (who he would later cast in a scene ultimately cut from The Devils [1971]) to say, If ever I do the Van Gogh story … I would love to do it with you. Next year is a long way off but colour TV will be almost with us by then and we would be able to shoot it on colour stock. (Russell 1965b)

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It seems from these two letters that the technical and financial limitations of the BBC at the time could neither support the vast amount of musicians required to perform Berlioz compositions on film (particularly the Symphonie Fantastique which Murray Melvin suggests would have featured prominently in the later film) or render sufficiently the vibrancy and colour needed for a biopic of Van Gogh. It’s also evidence that while Russell’s films for the BBC were intrinsically cinematic (see below), by 1965 his natural inclination for the spectacular, present even at this early stage, was limited by the constraints imposed upon his canvas by television and in particular the BBC. With the mooted Berlioz project, we may also note an example of Russell returning to an idea formed out of the crucible of his formative experience at the BBC and aiming to render it on a cinematic canvas. This would not be the last time, as we shall see.

Ken Russell, the ‘despised amateur’: Unrealized BBC projects, 1958–68 Prior to his appointment at the BBC in 1959 to make A Poet In London, his first professional film for Monitor, Ken Russell had already made four experimental shorts:  Peep Show (1956), a ‘Chaplin-esque comedy’ with a ‘pianolo accompaniment’ (Russell 2008:  15); the incomplete Knights on Bikes (1956); Amelia and the Angel (1957), a ‘Cocteau-esque fantasy’ (ibid.) that had ‘just won the ‘Film of the Year Award’ in the Amateur Movie Maker Magazine; and Lourdes (1958), what Russell called his ‘most ambitious effort’, featuring ‘a score by Benjamin Britten borrowed from his ballet The Prince of the Pagodas, and it was in colour’ (ibid.). These films, as Brian Hoyle (2009) observes, are the foundation for Russell’s attachment to the amateur – a style to which he would consciously return to at the end of his career. And as Hoyle remarks, ‘Russell’s fascination with and sympathy for amateurs, especially in the arts’ (2009: 40–1) is an enduring trait of his work and a characteristic of each of his films. Hoyle goes on to argue that ‘almost every film he has made involves an amateur performance of one kind or another (ibid.). Hoyle also identifies, in his essay ‘ “Start as You Mean to Go On”:  Ken Russell’s Early Amateur Films’ (2013), the foundational importance of Russell’s early and formative amateur ‘shadow’ years: While many film makers attempt to distance themselves from these early experiments, Russell clearly remains proud of the ‘small-gauge’ origins. On numerous occasions he has noted that he launched his directing career with a film he made for 400 pounds and the help of a few friends. The film in question, Amelia and the Angel (1958) essentially earned him his job at the BBC’s flagship arts programme Monitor. (Hoyle 2013: 201)

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These films are also the foundations of the developing Russell style (experimental, florid, musical, romantic, phantasmagorical, whimsical and catholic) and while it was Amelia that drew him to the attention of Sir Huw Wheldon at the BBC, it drew him first to the attention of another key industry figure: Sir Michael Balcon, head of Ealing Studios, and one of the most revered and influential figures in 1940s and 1950s British cinema. Russell had been singled out for selection by the British Film Institute (BFI), when Balcon served as chairman, for its newly launched Experimental Film Fund, which catered to, among other things, telecinema, arts documentaries and later Free Cinema.4 Michael Brooke observes, The British Film Institute first dipped a cautious toe in the murky waters of film finance with the creation of its Experimental Film Fund in 1952. Although this went on to back early work by Ken Russell, Ridley Scott and Peter Watkins, the sums involved were tiny, with the entire operation run from two grants totalling £22,500 plus the proceeds of film sales (which amounted to just £7,018 by 1960). As a result, the Fund was typically only able to put a few hundred pounds into individual films, and there was little question of it backing feature-length efforts. (Brooke 2014) In a 1958 letter, Balcon misidentifies Russell as a cine-photographer, as opposed to a still photographer and photographic documentarian, who had recently moved from photography into filmmaking. In a responding and revealing missive to Balcon in August 1958, Russell asked for help and guidance: One of your statements is, however (unfortunately for me) not entirely correct. You list a number of films and then follow it with ‘all made, incidentally, by professionals or by young men and women who have since become professionals’ … My film Amelia and The Angel is among those you mention but I, alas, am still a despised amateur. I want to make films professionally and I should like to find a place in the film industry but without contacts this seems to me at times to be an almost hopeless ambition. (Russell 1958) This self-identification as a ‘despised amateur’ is at odds with the outspoken public persona ascribed later, in the 1970s, to the ‘enfant terrible’ and ‘wild man of British cinema’ (titles foisted on him by the British media post-Dance of the Seven Veils (BBC 1970)  and which dogged him and his reputation thereafter) and demonstrates a degree of self-awareness and trepidation as he looked towards the British film establishment for guidance and recognition. The letter is indicative of a filmmaker struggling to emerge and to find their place. Russell’s films are, tellingly, also full of characters (see Altered States (1980) or Tommy (1975)) who emerge transfigured and transcendent, or

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reborn from traumatic, cocooned, contained and limiting states of being. BBC films like The Debussy Film (1965), Delius: Song of Summer (1968) and later films such as The Music Lovers (1970) or Mahler (1974) also deal with the complex relationship and power dynamics between artists and their patrons and mentors: artists who struggle for acceptance by the establishment whilst at the same time being seemingly locked in conflict with it. In the case of Delius:  Song of Summer, the relationship was that between the composer and his amanuensis, Eric Fenby. In his autobiography A British Picture (2008), Russell discusses both Amelia and the Angel and his need for BBC patronage, which would turn out to be a profitable if often conflicted relationship: It had just won the ‘Film of the Year Award’ in the Amateur Movie Maker Magazine. So far my audience had been limited to family and friends, some amateur film clubs and a convent of nuns. It was time to turn professional and for that I needed financial support and a showcase. In a word I needed Monitor. (Russell 2008: 15) Thirteen years later, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph decrying the £40,000 supplementary grant that had just then been awarded to the BFI for its Film Production Board, Russell reflected unfavourably on his early experience. Referring to the BFI Film Production Board as a ‘production board which would last 5 minutes in the real world outside their fairy castle in Dean St’, (Russell 1972), Russell critiques the Board, observing its habit of flaunting and exploiting the names of directors (including his own) whose careers it claimed to have launched, and condemning it for flushing money down the ‘dilettante drain’: I can’t speak for my colleagues but as for launching me – that’s just a bad joke. True, in my early days I did ask them for help and always had the door slammed in my face. Eventually I made a modest little film called Amelia and the Angel. The word got about that it was good: the BFI saw it at the dubbing stage, lent me £100 at enormous interest to finish it off and have been wallowing in glory ever since. (ibid.) These early years help frame Russell’s career, conferring a symmetry upon it. If, during these years, the young Ken Russell is desperately trying to emerge from the shadows, then it was to the shadows he retreated in his final decade with a deliberate return to amateur film making (we might say they are the shadow of his early amateur years) partly in response to his year of being neglected by an increasingly indifferent and often affronted British film industry. This ‘Garagiste’ period includes films like Fall of the House Of Usher (2002), Boudica Bites Back (2009) and A Kitten For Hitler (2007), a short film made for a wager with Melvyn Bragg who proposed Russell

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couldn’t make a film that even he (Russell) would be offended by. All of these films were home-made in the grounds of his Hampshire cottage on a digital camcorder, with a miniscule budget and ‘with the help of a few friends’. In interview with James Payne, Russell stated of his later ‘Garagiste work’, All you have to do is press a red button. And there’s nobody telling you what to do, it’s also nice to have control over what I’m doing now, like I had in my early films such as Amelia and the Angel. It’s free and easy and anything that comes into one’s mind is achievable. There’s a way to achieve without resorting to money (Payne n.d.). These films are notable for their deliberately amateur aesthetic, form and style, but they nevertheless remain consciously Russellian in terms of content and iconography. These final years provide a context for understanding his work as a form of shadow cinema operating outside of (or in the shadow of) dominant, contemporary trends in cinema.

The Wheels of Chance (1960) This early struggle to emerge, transfigured, from the shadows is evident from another letter. Two years prior to the major breakthrough of Elgar (1962), Russell had proposed and written a treatment for an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s short novel The Wheels of Chance (1895). Correspondence around this project dates back to 3 June 1959 with a letter from Norman Swallow (Assistant Head of Films and Television) to Miss D.  Ross (Copyright Department). In the correspondence, Swallow refers Russell to Ross as someone ‘whom you may know as someone who is doing a series of film treatments for us’ and who is ‘interested in the possibility of adapting “The Wheels of Chance” by H.G. Wells as a 30 minute television programme’ (Swallow 1959). After querying the copyright clearance on the project, he suggests that ‘if the proposed adaptation were to be accepted it might be technically advisable for it to be made entirely on film.’(ibid.). Wells’s novel is a whimsical satire set during the ‘cycling craze’ of the late nineteenth century. In Russell’s hands it may also have potentially been the middle section in a trilogy of films, sandwiched between both Knights on Bikes and Elgar,5 where the bicycle also has a strong iconographic and thematic presence (as it also does in French Dressing).6 The above letter indicates that The Wheels of Chance was, in fact, envisaged as both a film and TV programme.7 Two further letters indicate that copyright was cleared and that it was agreed with Russell that he would prepare a treatment (for a total of 30 guineas) and that on condition of a full script being produced another 60 for a 45-minute play or 90 for an hour. However, a final decisive letter dated September 1960 from Donald Wilson (then Head of Scripts at the

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BBC) brings the matter to a crashing close, pointing out the shortcomings of Russell’s treatment and further revealing Russell’s struggle to emerge from the shadow of the amateur: Although I  can see this working in a general technical sense, I  am not nearly so happy about it from the point of view of dramatization. It seems to me superficially done. … The whole thing is underscripted for this amount of story. The introduction of numbered ‘shots’ has rarely any relevance to what would eventually appear on the screen because it cannot possibly include all the necessary angles you would want to use … my feeling about your scripting is that it is unrealistic and gives little idea of shape and construction. I think that this is important, but possibly of less importance than a feeling of general disappointment of your story so far in terms of dramatic construction, and I am sorry but I cannot accept this as a satisfactory piece of writing. (Wilson 1960) If The Wheels of Chance indicates an early (if unsuccessful) attempt at experimenting with narrative film making and adaptation, it also slightly alters the accepted narrative of Russell’s career demonstrating that, prior to Russell’s biographical explorations (which would become his trademark mode of filmmaking across his career), he was already attempting to write for the BBC within the framework of fiction/adaptation. He would return to this narrative style two years later with his first foray into cinema, French Dressing (as much an homage to his European contemporaries in the emerging French Nouvelle Vague as to the current trend in British Seaside films), as well as with Diary of a Nobody: Domestic Jottings of a City Clerk (BBC 1964). Russell was perceived at this point in 1959 to be overly ambitious, not yet deemed proficient in scripted for televised drama, and unable to adapt to a cinematographers mindset, from one which was suited to experimental documentaries of Monitor – up to this point Russell had been making innovative, experimental documentary shorts for the BBC, such as A House in Bayswater (1959) – to one needed for the more (spatially) limited medium of long-form narrative television drama.

The Quest for Corvo (1966–7) Another unmade project dating from 1966, The Quest for Corvo, was a proposed adaptation of A.  J. A  Symons’s experimental, postmodern 1934 biography of the eccentric English writer Baron Corvo (real name Frederick Rolfe), titled The Quest for Corvo – An Experiment in Biography. Correspondence about the project dates from 1967, when Russell was involved with postproduction on Dante’s Inferno for the BBC – the dramatized documentary on the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti  – and

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Corvo was a film that Russell seems keen to have made in a similar style. At the time, Russell was working as a freelance filmmaker, working for the BBC, as well as completing production on his second cinematic feature, the spy thriller Billion Dollar Brain (1967). A letter from April 1967 (one month before production on Billion Dollar Brain was completed) from Sally Jenkins (BBC Music and Art Department) to Heather Dean (BBC Copyright Department) indicates that Russell was keen to come back to the BBC to make the film and ‘does not want to let the matter drop’ (Jenkins 1967). He was keen to meet with Julian Symons (the author’s brother and holder of the book’s copyright) to discuss the matter. The New York Review of Books describes Symons book as a hilarious and heart-breaking portrait of the strange Frederick Rolfe, selfappointed Baron Corvo, an artist, writer, and frustrated aspirant to the priesthood with a bottomless talent for self-destruction. But this singular work, subtitled ‘an experiment in biography,’ is also a remarkable self-portrait, a study of the obsession and sympathy that inspires the biographer’s art. (Byatt 2001) Symons writes himself into the book as he uncovers more about the mysterious Corvo after coming into possession of a copy of the 1904 novel Hadrian the Seventh (which charts its lead character’s troubled journey to the papacy). As a book that explores and experiments with the ‘biographers art’ and contains a novel-within-a-novel dealing prominently with Catholicism (and the machinations of the Church), this would seem an ideal choice of subject for Russell. During this period, he was increasingly concerned not just with biographical filmmaking but with biographers themselves (another abandoned project on the Bloomsbury writer, biographer and author of The Eminent Victorians (1918), Lytton Strachey, is detailed below). Russell selfconsciously places himself within a tradition of biographical representation and experimentation. However, The Quest for Corvo seems to have fallen through after the meeting between Russell and Symons failed to take place. A further letter from Heather Dean suggests that Russell had failed to follow up with correspondence around the project (possibly due to being involved in the production of Isadora (1966)) and that Symons had turned down the £100 fee after the arranged meeting did not take place. The letter from Dean reads, It is possible that one day Ken Russell may come back to the idea of making a television film documentary about Baron Corvo. Meanwhile I am filing your letter of July 6th last year with a note that Julian Symons had not accepted the fee of £100 for the television use of the book The Quest for Corvo … His acceptance was conditional upon a meeting with Ken Russell that never came about after he telephoned twice and wrote

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to him once. I believe that Ken Russell is now involved in film making. (Dean 1967) By 1967, Russell had made over thirty films for Monitor of varying types and styles combining both dramatic and documentary conventions, and by then he was already planning a film adaptation of a D.  H. Lawrence novel which, in a letter from 1968, he calls “Lawrence in Torrents” (Russell 1968a) – this would turn out to be Women In Love.8 The Quest for Corvo emerged (and then disappeared) at a time when Russell was moving between the mediums of film and television. Correspondence suggests that Russell simply lost interest in the project and was increasingly drawn to other projects, possibly Delius: Song of Summer (archived correspondence shows that both Russell and the BBC considered this to be the high-water mark of their work together) and latterly Women in Love.9 But the phrasing of Dean’s letter lends itself to the understanding that Russell was increasingly washing his hands of television. This was, of course, not to be the case. But by 1973, it appeared that (according to a letter from BBC Head of Plays, Christopher Morahan of April that year) The Quest for Corvo was again mooted as a possible Russell project when the English-speaking rights became available. This was made clear in an article in The Times in 1970, which discussed the controversy surrounding Russell’s film for the BBC’s Omnibus programme, Dance of the Seven Veils (his ‘Comic Strip in 7 Episodes on the Life of Richard Strauss’): Mr Russell has a ‘big list’ of subjects for future television films, headed by Gustav Mahler – ‘It would be a portrait of Vienna in 1910 with Freud in his prime, a weird and rather marvellous era’  – and Baron Corvo, originator of Hadrian Seventh. (Billington 1970)10 As with Berlioz, Corvo connects Russell’s BBC ‘era’ with the ambitious cinematic biographical projects of the 1970s, although what form it would have taken is a mystery.

The Great Twentieth Century Music Revue (1967) Throughout his career, Russell frequently returned to projects and recycled them in different forms. For instance, he was invited by Melvyn Bragg to revisit Elgar again in 2002 for ITV’s flagship arts programme The Southbank Show and its twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations with the film Elgar: Fantasy of a Composer on a Bicycle.11 He had previously returned to developing a project about the composer in 1976 with an unrealized film script, Elgar, Land of Hope and Glory, a sequel of sorts to the Monitor film. Beginning in 1936 after Elgar’s death, it uses a Wellsian flashback

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technique as we follow a mechanic called Burt and a mysterious ‘Woman’ through the locations of Elgar’s life. The concept of the composer and the ‘mysterious woman’ would later be revisited in his abandoned 1982 project The Beethoven Secret. Between the 1980s and the 2000s, Russell returned to making TV films for ITV and the South Bank Show. One of the films that Russell made during this period, Ken Russell’s ABC of British Music (ITV 1988), was anticipated by an unmade BBC Omnibus documentary film entitled The Great Twentieth Century Music Revue. A letter from Stephen Hearst (Head of Arts features) in August 1967 to the controller of BBC One locates the potential production among a flurry of projects mooted around the time of (and in the wake of) the production and broadcasting of Delius:  Song of Summer: Ken Russell, like Jonathan Miller, likes changing his programme offers between breakfast and tea so, subject to him having changed his mind again since we were together, I would like to briefly outline his proposal. When we met he thought he was likely to shoot his next film on Nijinski in March and he would therefore find it impossible to do a major film on Delius for us before then. What he could and very much wanted to do was a relatively (for Ken) inexpensive film called ‘The Great Twentieth Century Music Revue’ which would rely on compilation and take a light-hearted and sweeping look at the changing fashion of 20th Century Music. This would be about a fortnight’s original shooting and the style of the film would to some extent be based on the Prokofiev which went out in Monitor and combined original shooting with library footage. (Hearst 1967) This letter illustrates that by the 1960s the BBC had become a breeding ground for a new generation of highly talented creative minds  – like Russell’s and Miller’s – individuals that were less willing to cede creative or artistic control to the controlling and patriarchal BBC. Russell later returned to the project in 1988 for ITV, offering yet another example of him recycling older abandoned projects. For Russell, these projects were rarely fully lost and retained a level of importance for him throughout his career.

Nijinski Both Nijinski and Strachey are two further examples of major projects that were later abandoned. Nijinski was to be a biographical film dealing with the complex relationship between the male ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinski and the founder of the Ballet Russes, Sergei Diaghilev. Lee Langley, in a piece for

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The Guardian in 1967, argued that Russell’s projects were becoming less easily containable by the medium of television: Russell says he could never have done it properly on television: ‘Part of that epoch was the spectacle, the extravagance and I just couldn’t have shown it. We’d have had to find ways to suggest the spectacle, instead of using it to make a comment; … The central key to Nijinski will be the ballet ‘Petrouchka’ because episodes in the ballet closely mirror the dancer’s life and the violent relationship between Nijinski and Diaghilev. (Langley 1967) Nijinski was to have a been a major project in 1968 and correspondence surrounding it spans from December 1967 to March 1968, at which point the project was declared dead (or ‘postponed indefinitely’). A  letter from Russell to the head of programming, John Culshaw, from January 1968 explained the situation: Just to a note to reassure you about my honourable intentions towards Delius. The position is this, maybe Nijinksy will be made this year, maybe it will be made next year, that is if it is not made as a feature film. I would like to make it for the BBC as a Television film, but that’s another story. (Russell 1968b) It is evident from earlier letters to Culsaw that Nijinski was to have been the next major Russell project but was postponed and replaced by Delius, which was originally slated to go into production after Nijinski. Russell was already contracted by Saltzman to direct Nijinski, with Rudolf Nureyev in the lead. But according to Russell, the film fell through after the dancer walked off the project, leading him to direct Billion Dollar Brain for producer Harry Saltzman instead (Phillips 1970). However, in yet another example of an abandoned idea being recycled, Russell would later go on to make a biopic of the film star Rudolph Valentino, Valentino (1977), starring Nureyev. A key issue also seems to have been when to start production of Delius, which appears to have been Russell’s priority. As such, by 13 March 1968, Nijinski appeared to be permanently abandoned. When researching unrealized projects, a degree of speculation and hypothesis is required and here we might also consider that had Nijinski film gone into production, how would it have affected the production of Valentino? Would either Russell or Nureyev have agreed to it? This seems doubtful given the disintegrating relationship between the two men during the production of Valentino, a film that Russell later disowned. Or is Valentino another example of Russell recycling and rethinking (and incorporating elements of) a project long since abandoned? If Nijinski had gone into production might it have formed part of a hypothetical cycle of

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films based around male dancers (Russell had trained as a dancer in his earlier life), commencing with Cranks at Work and ending with Valentino?

Strachey To date, there has been little to no discussion of Russell’s unrealized adaptation of the life of the writer and Bloomsbury group member Lytton Strachey, based on Michael Holroyd’s 1967 biography. Correspondence relating to Strachey reveals that Russell was seemingly keen to make the proposed film for the BBC’s Omnibus. The correspondence dates from 4 July 1968, at which time Russell was busy filming Women in Love. A letter from Norman Swallow (1968a) (executive producer for Omnibus) to Holroyd declared Russell’s interest in the project and made it clear that both Russell and Holroyd had been liaising about a possible collaboration. Two further letters ensued, asking Holroyd for a film treatment (one letter from the set of Women in Love). The idea ran into trouble when the writer Frances Partridge, a surviving member of the Bloomsbury Group and wife of Ralph Partridge (the unrequited object of Lytton Strachey’s affections), and Noel Carrington, the son of the painter Dora Carrington (Strachey’s lover), voiced concerns over the dramatized form and content of the film after reading a brief article in The Sunday Telegraph (ibid.). These members of Strachey’s circle had also been made wary by a recent sensationalist serialization of Strachey’s story, which had been printed in The Observer. Swallow, in a letter to Partridge from 29 November 1968, explained, I was extremely sorry to hear from Michael Holroyd of your proposal worries and out proposed documentary film about Lytton Strachey. But let me say at once that I  sincerely sympathise with your response to a newspaper item – which I assure you did not come from us, nor even, I think, mentions the BBC. We are forever learning about ourselves from newspapers, usually inaccurately. (Swallow 1968b) Swallow goes on to state their intention to make two ‘complimentary’ films – one about Virginal Woolf (to be made by Julian Jebb) using ‘filmed statements’ from those who knew her and other bits of filmed documentary evidence, and the other on Strachey, to be filmed by Russell and which would be a ‘dramatized’ documentary (ibid.). Despite Swallow’s defence of Russell’s credentials, his admiration of the author and the BBC’s faith in Russell, Partridge rebutted the notion of a dramatized documentary, telling Swallow, None of the people chiefly concerned (Carrington’s brother Noel Carrington, Alix Strachey and myself) would in the least object to a

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documentary based on Holroyd’s book but we are deeply distressed at the idea of our sisters, husbands, relatives and friends fictionally for no actors performance however good can be other than grotesque to those who knew the originals intimately. … I want to make it plain that the question of whether Ken Russell is or is not a good film maker has no bearing on the question. Whereas we were prepared to co-operate in a literary history and did so fully and to the best of our ability, we are not ready to take the same attitude to dramatization. (Partridge 1968) There was one more chief sticking point: I am afraid I am very far from giving you approval and support. You say that Michael Holroyd is allowing you to refer to his biography. The book is of course largely made up of quotations from copyright materials in the form of letters and diaries; the copyright in nearly all of these belong either to Alix Strachey (in the case of Lytton) or myself (in the case of Carrington). I  think I  should state here in writing that neither of us is prepared to give permission to the BBC to use any of this material for dramatization. (ibid.) These letters evidence the complex copyright issues that Russell often faced in his productions, an issue that also affected the production of The Debussy Film. It’s worth noting that Russell had harboured a desire to make the Carrington / Strachey story for some time, and had even proposed it as the subject of a Wednesday Play: Couldn’t there be a floating spot in the Wednesday Play series for film like ‘Delius’ or more particularly for ‘Lytton Strachey and Carrington’ – the subject of my next? (Russell 1968a) Christopher Hampton’s film Carrington (1995), starring Emma Thompson as Carrington and Jonathan Pryce as Strachey, was finally made with Partridge’s blessing – finally convinced by Holroyd on the grounds that the events of the film were so remote and most of the people who originally objected were now dead. But it was Russell’s attempt in 1968 that was the first stage in the evolution of the final project.

Conclusion Although not a comprehensive survey, this chapter has aimed to bring to the fore some of the major unrealized Ken Russell projects from between 1959 and 1968. What emerges from a study of these projects is that Russell, a director (in)famous for his baroque, experimental, romantic,

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visually spectacular, iconoclastic and bombastic cinematic vision  – which he would come to be defined by even more throughout the 1970s with films like The Music Lovers, The Devils, The Boyfriend (1971), Savage Messiah (1972), Mahler, Tommy, Lisztomania (1975) and Valentino – was as early as the late 1950s harbouring ambitions to indulge his natural cinematic inclination, sometimes to his detriment and the detriment of productions he was working on. If this period seems littered with discarded projects however, they were not lost; abandoned, left incomplete or victims of forces outside his control (sometimes within his control), these projects were never forgotten and form the cement that connects his existing projects, frequently recycled and forming the basis of later projects. As such, they cannot be disregarded; they become essential to an understanding of both Russell and his work. The next decade would see Russell’s most celebrated period and it too would be built (at least in part) upon the foundation of a range of unrealized projects and shadow cinema.

Acknowledgements With thanks to Stewart Williams for the many engaging and illuminating discussions and insights.

Notes 1. It is broadly assumed that the project fell victim to the great cull of tapes carried out by the BBC, along with hundreds of hours of programming from the period. The BBC threw out or recorded over tapes in order to save both money and space. Until 1978, the broadcaster had no firm policy on the archiving of live broadcasts and recorded material. 2. A further interview with Ken’s wife, Elise Russell, revealed a host of projects he had planned in the final two decades of his life, indicating a desire to break back into mainstream filmmaking. A lack of funding proved to be an insurmountable obstacle though. 3. According to Murray Melvin, his brief cameo as Berlioz in Lisztomania (1975) was intended as an audition for the role of the composer in the proposed film. 4. The fund had replaced the Crown Film Unit, which had been dismantled in 1951. The Eady Levy scheme had proposed two grants (£12,500 each) for the creation of experimental films by emerging young filmmakers to make films for telecinema. Balcon had been chosen to chair the committee. Other early nominees had included John Schlesinger, Alan Clarke, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson. 5. There is evidence of Russell’s use of amateur musicians in the role of an amateur-wind band, as detailed in casting notes: ‘They are amateurs and took

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the part of an amateur band at Powick Hospital where Elgar used to conduct and teach’ (James 1962). 6. The bicycle plays a significant, iconographic role in the film’s opening sequence, an homage to early silent film comedy and cinema. 7. Russell seems to have also looked to the BBC for his unmade film The Angels (1973). A response from Christopher Morahan at the BBC reads, As I said the other day I understand that Ken Russell was to get in touch with us when he returned from his work in Italy (and H.D.G thinks he has already told Ken Russell’s agent this) that a) I don’t like it very much. It’s quite entertaining but very bewildering and b) it really is far too expensive for us. (Morahan 1973) 8. John Hill (2015) gives a detailed account and analysis of this practice and how ‘Russell’s incorporation of elements of drama into the arts documentary generated arguments, both within the BBC and beyond, about the legitimacy of mixing “fact” and “fiction” in such works. These debates focused, in particular, on the use of “dramatic reconstruction” and subjective “interpretation” and the “fairness’ of the films” treatment of the artists and composers with which they dealt’ (452). 9. This was one of two major Lawrence adaptations Russell planned, the other being the unrealized St Mawr (1972), which Russell scholar Kevin Fullerton describes as being about its central character’s obsession with the powerful stallion St Mawr, seeing it as symbolic of nature, a forgotten past, sexual liberation and the epitome of idealised manhood. St Mawr is owned by a group of upper class toffs, but always remains tethered to a mysterious groundskeeper, a brooding Welshman (and therefore an outsider) who also overtly symbolises a lost past … he reasons for its failure to be financed are largely unknown, although its sexually explicit nature and overtones of bestiality may have been too controversial for backers. (Fullerton 2017) 10. Russell’s portrait of Mahler (1974) was originally envisioned as a BBC film four years earlier, a project dealing with the composer as part of the wider milieu of artists and intellectuals at the turn of the century. 11. In the 1970s, Russell also returned to Elgar for an untitled and unrealized project. This will be the subject of a forthcoming study on Russell’s Elgar films.

References Billington, M. (1970), ‘Film Director Wanted to Shock’, The Times, 17 February. Brooke, M. (2014), ‘The BFI Production Board: The Features’, BFI Screenonline. Available online: www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1348538/index.html (accessed 8 September 2018).

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Byatt, A. S. (2001), ‘The Quest for Corvo’, The New York Review of Books. Available online: https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-quest-for-corvo (accessed 10 September 2018). Dean, H. (1967), Letter by Heather Dean, 5 April 1967, T53/99/2, BBC Written Archives. Fullerton, K. (2017), ‘Sex against the State: Sexuality as an Iconoclastic Act in the Films and Novels of Ken Russell’, conference paper, Ken Russell: Perspectives, Reception and Legacy, 14 July, Kingston University. Gomez, J. (1976), Ken Russell: The Adaptor as Creator, London: TBS The Book Service. Hearst, S. (1967), Letter by Stephen Hearst, 17 August, T62/5/1, BBC Written Archives. Hill, J. (2015) ‘ “Blurring the Lines between Fact and Fiction”: Ken Russell, the BBC and Television Biography’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 12 (4): 452–78. Hoyle, B. (2009), ‘In Defence of the Amateur’, in K. Flanagan (ed.), Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist, 40–1, Plymouth: Scarecrow Press. Hoyle, B. (2013), ‘ “Start as You Mean to Go On”: Ken Russell’s Early Amateur Films’, in R. Shand and I. Craven (eds), Small Gauge Story Telling: Discovering the Amateur Fiction Film, 201–20, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. James, A. (1962), Monitor: Elgar Story, casting form, 11 October, T32/1033/1, BBC Written Archives. Jenkins, S. (1967), Letter from Sally Jenkins to Heather Dean, 5 April 1967, T53/99/2, BBC Written Archives. Langley, L. (1967), ‘The Eisenstein File’, The Guardian, 26 October. Morahan, C. (1973), Letter from Christopher Morahan, April, T62/5/1, BBC Written Archives. North, D. (ed.) (2008), Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Cinema, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Partridge, F. (1968), Letter from Frances Partridge to Norman Swallow, November, Add MS 82004, Western Manuscripts Collection, British Library. Payne, J. (n.d.), ‘A Ban Apart’, Garage Land: Arts, Culture, Ideas. Available online: https://www.transitiongallery.co.uk/htmlpages/editions/g_land6_russell. html (accessed 28 November 2019). Phillips, G. (1970), ‘An Interview with Ken Russell’, Film Comment, 6 (3). Russell, K. (1958), Letter from Ken Russell to Sir Michael Balcon, August, Sir Michael Balcon Collection, MEB-1650, BFI Reuben Library. Russell, K. (1965a), Letter from Ken Russell to Donald East, 5 July, T32/1095/1, BBC Written Archives. Russell, K. (1965b), Letter from Ken Russell to Spike Milligan, 22 June, T32/1095/1, BBC Written Archives. Russell, K. (1968a), Letter from Ken Russell to Huw Wheldon, 18 September, T53/118/4, BBC Written Archives. Russell, K. (1968b), Letter from Ken Russell to John Culshaw, January, T53/118/3, BBC Written Archives. Russell, K. (1972), Letter to the Daily Telegraph, 12 July, Press Cuttings, BFI Archive.

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Russell, K. (2008), A British Picture, London: Southbank. Swallow, N. (1959), Letter from Norman Swallow to D. Ross, 3 June, Elgar file, T48/508/1, BBC Written Archives. Swallow, N. (1968a), Letter from Norman Swallow to Michael Holroyd, 4 July, Add MS 82004, Western Manuscripts Collection, British Library. Swallow, N. (1968b), Letter from Norman Swallow to Frances Partridge, 29 November, Add MS 82004, Western Manuscripts Collection, British Library. Wilson, D. (1960), Letter by Donald Wilson, September, Elgar file, T48/508/1, BBC Written Archives.

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6 Ghatak in the shadows: Films that struggled Sanghita Sen

Film history is abundantly speckled with unrealized, lost (and/or subsequently found) and incomplete projects. One such case in Indian film history is that of Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976), a leading Bengali filmmaker from India, who has a considerable body of unmade, lost and incomplete projects that outnumber films that came to be recognized as classics. The number of his unrealized film projects and obscured written works are almost equal to what he was able to complete in his life. His oeuvre comprises eight feature films, seven documentaries, four shorts, one advertisement film and seven screenplays for films directed by others. Among his ‘shadow’ projects are his thesis on cultural practices, a letter to a producer that outlines his vision of political cinema, about twenty-two film scripts that could not be made, four incomplete feature films and three incomplete documentaries. A study of these projects and what compelled him to abandon them can throw light on an important episode of the hidden history of the Indian independent cinema and the unrealized potential of Ghatak’s genius. A close look at his struggle with both complete and incomplete projects reveals a prolonged battle throughout his career against the establishment using art as his weapon. An understanding of his struggle offers us crucial insights into why there was such a concerted effort to obstruct Ghatak’s film career and the reluctance to promote his films despite their striking uniqueness. His rebellious attitude, prodigious talent, arrogance, alcoholism and tragic premature death have attracted varied reactions from people since

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his demise. For some, he is a promethean figure of Indian cinema; for others, a troubled artist who stands in antithesis to the methodical Satyajit Ray. However, these binaries are unhelpful in creating a constructive understanding of Ghatak’s film practice as they often neglect the complexities that the contemporary Indian Independent cinema had to endure and how these complexities directly and disproportionately impacted him. In his 1982 essay ‘The Genius that was Ritwik Ghatak’, Safdar Hashmi, a prominent Indian theatre activist, demonstrated how a lifetime of hounding and mental torture born out of uncertainties and intense privations at the hands of those who man the official bodies ostensibly promoting and patronising new cinema drove this extremely sensitive individual, poet, scholar, and artist to a kind of self-imposed exile from the art world controlled by commercial monsters … that broke him mentally and physically. (Hashmi 1989: 97) Both the acts of romanticizing and demonizing Ghatak impairs an objective evaluation of his works and the role he played in shaping Indian cinema. It is important to look into the barriers that Ghatak faced from the establishment to comprehend the structural impediments that independent and political filmmakers of his period experienced. Additionally, such an exploration may help us grasp why, despite a massive potential and the existence of popular cinephilia, an alternative film movement like the transnational new cinema could not crystallize in India. Despite an abundance of anecdotes and hearsay about Ghatak and a growing interest in him post the 1980s, both his complete as well as incomplete films and scripts are somewhat inaccessible. A  lot of location changes and moving homes, coupled with the precarities of his life, led to the loss and misplacement of many of his works. A lot of materials and his writings were also lost after his wife moved away in late 1969. Language poses another barrier. Most of his interviews and writings are in Bengali and were published in West Bengal and Bangladesh – the English translation of which is grossly inadequate. Additionally, the edited collections of his interviews and writings on cinema are locally published and often not available even for a pan-Indian market. Besides this, the quality of images and subtitles in the available DVDs of his films are far from desirable. Furthermore, the copyright issues of his films pose another level of hardship to either doing an in-depth study or curating a complete retrospective of his works. The bulk of his unrealized projects is so large that it is impossible to do justice to them within the premises of one chapter. Keeping this constraint in mind, this chapter attempts to discuss only the halted, abandoned and incomplete films along with his lost and found cinema manifestos to initiate an engaged discourse. The titles of films and scripts as well as Ghatak’s interviews and

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other published materials in Bengali used in this chapter are translated by me unless otherwise stated.

Ghatak’s background and his idea of people’s cinema The last of nine children of Indubala Debi and Rai Bahadur Suresh Chandra Ghatak, the twins, Ritwik and Pratiti Ghatak, were born on 4 November 1925 in Dhaka in undivided India (now in Bangladesh) in a prominent and socioculturally active family (Ghatak 1995:  11). Ghatak spent his early years in the part of Bengal that became East Pakistan (and later Bangladesh in 1971)  as a consequence of the Indian Partition in 1947, which made their relocation to West Bengal permanent. Growing up, Ghatak witnessed events that moulded not only the history of modern India but also him as a cultural activist. These include Gandhi’s Quit India Movement, the impact of the Second World War, the infamous Bengal Famine of 1943, the outbreak of intercommunal tension and riots just before the Indian Independence, the Partition, mass migration and a consequent social crisis in post-Independence India. The Partition and subsequent loss of what he called ‘the homeland’ created a collective trauma which haunted him till his death in 1976. Film scholar Adrian Martin remarks, ‘Compacted trauma became the basis for and the substance of his work in all media:  theatre, writing (both fiction and essays), film’ (2014: 206). Although Ghatak’s films carry moderate to extensive autobiographical traces around this trauma, his artistic calibre turned local experiences into a quintessential expression of collective trauma and aspirations, thereby conferring on his works a transnational relevance. A versatile genius, Ghatak was a cultural activist, playwright, theatre director, organizer, film theorist, writer and educator. It is crucial to investigate these multiplicities to fully recognize what compelled him to switch to filmmaking from theatre when he time and again denounced his love for the medium per se in his interviews (Ghatak 1995: 37). To Bhupati Nandi, a vocal artist and an eminent Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) activist, Ghatak shared his fascination for film as a powerful medium of artistic expressions because of its unique ability to reach millions of people at one go (Ghatak 1995: 360). In another interview, Ghatak affirmed the medial potential of cinema for its capacity of creating immediate reactions in the audience and therefore, using it to communicate his messages with a sense of immediacy and urgency (Ghatak 1967: 24). As a Marxist cultural activist, he chose cinema for this medial potential to agitate, educate and especially organize the people.

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Ghatak weaponized cinema to perform some interrelated functions: First, to create a people’s cinema as an integral part of the cultural front of the Indian Left – he considered ‘culture as the property of the people’ (Ghatak 1954: 18). Second, by weaponizing cinema, he was mounting an opposition to Indian art house cinema’s elitist pursuit of good cinema. As the film society movement accelerated between 1947 and 1980 in India, of which Ghatak was an integral part, it nested an invigorated debate over good cinema in terms of ‘an aesthetically sophisticated product’ to ‘a radical political text’ (Majumdar 2012:  731). Ghatak’s opposition was premised on the commodification of cultural practices, driven by what the Indian film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha describes as the ideology that methodically obfuscates issues of social relevance and constructs images only for their aesthetic exchange value (1982:  9). Third, Ghatak undertook a politicohistorical analysis of social oppression and struggle in his films. By doing this, Ghatak aimed at reaching out to the non-elite audiences left out from the intended viewership of Indian art house cinema. Finally, as his preferred mode of cinematic expression, he politicized the melodramatic form, potentizing it with the Indian epical and mythological materials to counter Indian art house cinema’s excessive affinity to the cinematic social realism denouncing a Eurocentric point of view in order to decolonise cinema, on the one hand, and its near-absolute dismissal of Indian mass cultural forms, on the other. Despite sharing the proclivity of the Indian art house cinema’s project of using films to critique and destabilize the culture industry’s hagiographic illustration of the nation and a developmentalist discourse of bourgeois nationalism, Ghatak created an idiom of cinema which is markedly different from it. His profound scholarship of the Indian history of multiculturalism, ancient epics, classical and Puranic literature, Marxist texts, as well as world philosophy helped him to effortlessly amalgamate insights from conflicting traditions into his cultural practice. Ghatak used these materials to potentize cinema to suitably connect with audiences and subsequently use the medium as weapon in the struggle against structural discrimination and systemic injustice. All his films and writings, right from his first abandoned project in 1948 till his very last, Jukti, Takko aar Gappo / Reason, Debate and Stories, keep this focus intact. The following section deals with the context of his unmade and delayed projects up to 1953.

The context of his stalled projects and unmade films Ghatak’s film activism started in the late 1940s by creating a trade union for the marginal workers and technicians of film studios in Kolkata. He was one of the organizers of this union and continued his lifelong active connection

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with it (cf. Sen 1976: 213–15; Sen 2002: 105–9). In 1948, Bengal was in turmoil with the ongoing peasants’ movement transforming into an armed struggle against the newly independent Indian State and the creation of the Red Zone in the Kakdwip area in southern Bengal.1 The slogan of this movement, ‘Land to the Tiller and Power to the People’, spread in several states of India like wildfire. Against this backdrop, Ghatak’s very first film project was conceived as a collective endeavour in guerrilla filmmaking with his comrades including Mrinal Sen (filmmaker), Hrishikesh Mukherjee (filmmaker), Salil Chowdhury (Indian composer), Tapas Sen (stage lights artist), Bangshi Chandragupta (art director and production designer) and Nripen Ganguly (filmmaker). This project was initiated after the police firing killed eight peasant revolutionaries in Kakdwip in November 1948. Using guerrilla techniques, Ghatak and his friends planned to make a silent film in 16  mm by shooting stealthily, smuggling the rushes to a Kolkata laboratory to edit and develop the film, and then clandestinely screening it in villages (Sen 1976: 215). Sen wrote the script of the film; Chowdhury named the film Jomir Lorai / The Struggle for Land; Ghatak collected a derelict camera for shooting. The idea of this project was undertaken at a time when filmmaking was a highly inaccessible, expensive and exclusively institutionalized exercise. What is fascinating about this project, regardless of its artistic value, is how a group of unemployed young cultural activists, without any training or access to either capital or organizational support, appropriated cinema to be as accessible as possible through their sustained irreverence for the medium. The idea of this project demonstrates that from the very outset they weaponized cinema to be collective, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and in service of the people, subverting its function of entertainment. This project never saw the light of day as the group were under police surveillance due to their close association with the Communist Party of India (CPI) (Sen 1976:  215). Nevertheless, this project not only prepared them for future filmmaking but also helped them forge a collective network with which they continued to work when they embarked on their full-fledged filmmaking careers. Ghatak received his first break in filmmaking as an assistant director to Manoj Bhattacharya’s 1950 project Tathapi / Nevertheless. In the same year, he collaborated with Nemai Ghosh on the making of Chinnamul / The Uprooted, the first Indian film that followed a neorealist aesthetics to depict the horrors of the Partition. Chinnamul was an Independent film project led by IPTA activists and Ghatak was instrumental in fusing the documentary aesthetics into the structure of the fictional film. In many ways, Chinnamul was a continuation of the IPTA’s engagement with the film medium that started in 1946 through K. A. Abbas’s Hindi film Dharti ke Laal / Children of the Earth. As Ghatak was working on Chinnamul, he was invited to direct an alreadysuspended project titled Bedeni / Snake-Charmer Woman. This ill-fated film,

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based on a Bengali short story by Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, was being shot at Rupashri Studio in Kolkata under the direction of Nirmal Dey in 1950. But due to a fire and the relocation to a different studio, the film was stalled thereafter for lack of funds. After a couple of years, Sunil Roy, the producer of the film, once again organized funds for the film by mortgaging his own residence (Dutta and Dutta 2003:  94). He approached Ghatak to complete the film. Ghatak rewrote the script and rechristened the film as Arupkatha, which loosely translates as ‘not a myth’. The film explores the customs of nomadic snake-charming community and the structural exploitations that women are subject to under a patriarchal stronghold. It follows the trials and tribulations of three generations of snake-charmer women – Bedenis – who are forbidden to fall in love or have a family and are destined to be under complete control by the tribe’s chief. One of the protagonists of the film, Chiti (played by Ketaki Dutta) rebels against this custom once she falls in love; the film revolves around the repercussions of her rebellion. Under Ghatak’s direction, the shooting for Bedeni recommenced in early 1952. The cast and crew of the film comprised mostly theatre personalities and the IPTA members. The outdoor shooting was done in Bolpur in West Bengal and Ghatshila in then Bihar over a schedule of twenty days. However, due to a fault in the camera, the entire film rush was damaged. The project was abandoned once again as the fund ran out. Ketaki Dutta was pregnant with her first child which she miscarried during the shooting. She equated her miscarriage with the project being miscarried (Dutta and Dutta 2003: 95). She reminisced, ‘A fault in the camera made the rushes turn too dark. Nothing could be seen. We couldn’t see a thing. People couldn’t watch an outstanding film. And Sunil Roy sacrificed everything he had to complete [it]’ (ibid.). A  few coloured stills taken on days of shooting, kept in personal collections, are the only surviving remnants of the film (ibid). Made between 1952 and 1953, Ghatak’s first completed independent project, Nagarik / The Citizen, continued the tradition of working with IPTA people; he built on his experience of working on Chinnamul and the ethos and spirit that drove the project thus making Nagarik a collective venture. Ghatak confirmed, ‘Nobody took any money for working on it, not even the laboratory or the studio. I even got the raw film stock for free … whatever little extra money was needed, we gave from our own pockets’ (Ghatak 1976: 293). However, the film’s release was stalled owing to some extraneous and legal issues. Interestingly, despite obstacles with the film’s release, Nagarik was nominated for the State Award by the government of India and was included in the list of 1954 films approved for public exhibition (‘Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’ 1955:  9; Ghatak 1995: 58). Since it was not released for public screening, this enlisting was proven futile.

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Thereafter, the film was left to its obscure fate due to the problems with its timely release and Ghatak leaving Kolkata in 1955. In an interview in 2017, Ramananda Sengupta, the cinematographer of Nagarik, informed me that the negatives of the film, kept in the custody of the Bengal Film Laboratory, was given away to extract silver (Sengupta 2017: personal communication). Consequently, it was thought to be lost till Ghatak’s colleague Brahma Singh, and Ramesh Joshi, the editor who collaborated with Ghatak in all his projects, found a run-down print of the film in Bangladesh (ibid). This was one of the only prints of the film made in 1953 which was sent to Bangladesh for screening (Ghatak [1966] 2015:  348). P.  K. Nair, Indian archivist and the founder-director of the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), created a dupe negative of the film from this in 1977 to produce prints of the film for release (ibid). Nagarik was released on 20 September 1977 in Kolkata’s New Empire theatre, after one year and eight months of Ghatak’s passing and twenty-five years after it was made. This film was digitally restored by Ritwik Memorial Trust in 2014, though this version hasn’t yet been released. Ghatak mentioned that Nagarik was the first objective depiction of the struggle of the middle-class in post-Second World War Bengal at a time when Bengali realist cinema was not commonly made (Ghatak 1967: 21). For many, it was a period of cultural and political optimism; it ignited the hope that the power of the anti-imperialist struggle would defeat bourgeois nationalism, paving the way for revolution. Had it been released immediately after its making – two years before Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali / Song of the Little Road in 1955  – Nagarik would have been the first film of the Indian New Wave. Ray watched the film in the Bengal Film Laboratory when editing Pather Panchali and noted that Nagarik exhibited the mark of an empathic mind throughout the film; this signalled the unique characteristics and boldness with which Ghatak enlivened Bengali cinema later in Ajantrik / Pathetic Fallacy (1958) and his subsequent films (Ray 1982: 117). While working on Bedeni and Nagarik, Ghatak still continued his theatre engagement at the IPTA. In 1952, he participated in a number of street plays as part of the campaign for the CPI candidate in the first general elections in Independent India. In the same year, he wrote and directed Dalil / The Document, a play about the Partition and the plights of the uprooted which earned him the awards for the best director and actor at the All India IPTA Conference held in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1953. The year 1953 brought both accolade and acrimony for him. A tension over ideological differences began building up between him and the IPTA leadership in 1954 (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1994: 100). In the same year, he drafted On the Cultural Front and submitted it to the CPI – a thesis explaining the necessity of weaponizing culture and cinema to strengthen the democratic struggle for people’s rights and social justice. Many knew about the document, but it was inaccessible as it was considered lost like

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many of Ghatak’s other pieces of work. However, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, a leader of the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPIM) and the then chief minister of West Bengal, discovered it while going through some old files in the party archive in Kolkata in 1993 (Ghatak 2006: 5). The document was published as part of the semicentennial volume of the IPTA in 1993, for the first time after nearly forty years since its writing. The next section deals with his argument in the document regarding his idea of culture as weapon, people’s cinema and his critique of the cultural policy of the CPI and the IPTA leadership for overlooking the political potential of culture for mass mobilization.

For communism, critiquing hegemony: Ghatak’s thesis on culture and cinema ‘An arrogantly committed and forthright man, he had alienated many people by his strong sense of conviction and feeling’ (Shahani 1976:  51), commented Kumar Shahani, noted Indian filmmaker, film theorist and Ghatak’s student at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune (Ghatak was the vice principal and a teacher there in 1965). His sense of obligation to the dispossessed and urgency to transform a structurally unjust society had its roots in the unfathomable misery that the Partition inflicted on millions, of whom he considered himself a part. The independence of India did not manifest itself to people like him as a liberating event from colonialism but appeared as an opportunity for the Indian political elites to grab power by sacrificing the interest of the many in favour of the few. He, like several of his comrades, considered the Partition as an act of betrayal by the Indian bourgeois nationalists to the Indian people. As a Marxist, Ghatak placed his utmost trust on the Indian communist movement for the social justice that the independence could not ensure. However, parochial attitudes and ineptness in party leadership disillusioned the idealistic Ghatak. His obsessive pursuit of a Marxist worldview and resultant conflict with the leadership of CPI and the IPTA is crucial since not only did it intensify the trouble he faced in his artistic career from the establishment but also because it jeopardized the development of the Indian Third Cinema movement. His unmade projects are a testimony of the toll his unwavering, controversial and non-conforming political conviction that later led to struggles with making films had taken on him. In On the Cultural Front, he criticized the party for underutilizing the potential of culture for its use of the cultural front to serve just two restricted purposes: to raise money and to gather crowds before the proceedings of meetings and conferences (Ghatak 1954:  14). He remarked, ‘The party is

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more interested in taking things from culture. It is very difficult to determine how much the party cares for culture as the property of people’ (ibid.: 18). He found this tendency as detrimental not only to the party but also to its goal of establishing the democratic front for actualizing structural transformation. He considered developing an alternative left progressive culture and cinema to effectively counter the quasi-feudal social structures, residual colonial practices that mutated into toxic forms of internal colonialism and crony capitalism that the bourgeois culture propagated. He thought that underdeveloped and unsophisticated people’s cultural forms cannot adequately compete with the highly sophisticated and technically advanced propaganda machinery of the bourgeois culture industry. To counter this cultural hegemony, he proposed to strengthen cultural practices by appropriating the established conventions and techniques of the existing bourgeois culture. As he wrote this thesis with an experience of filmmaking, it is likely that he had cinema’s medial potential in mind while referring to technically sophisticated cultural machinery for delivering political messages to the masses. The co-option of methods of bourgeois culture was to rouse and enthuse the people (ibid.:  19–21). Here, Ghatak envisioned a collective people’s art that would be egalitarian, inclusive and open to non-partisan participation as a step towards forming an alternative cultural platform of ‘a Democratic Front in Collective Arts’ (ibid.:  25; henceforth DFCA). He was acutely aware of the impediments for screening such films and staging such theatrical performances in a context in which exhibition spaces were controlled by the big capital. Therefore, he also included a proposal of creating repertories and institutes to solve the issue of exhibition and training of artistes and craftspeople. In addition to the obvious pedagogic functions, the aim of this alternative platform was to mobilize the masses towards the revolutionary actions of the party (ibid.: 29). Besides a detailed roadmap for the DFCA and people’s art, Ghatak also addressed two other important issues in the thesis:  (1) the position of professionals and cultural workers in the party, and (2)  the hierarchy of political work that positions cultural work as inferior to the act of organizing. He asserted, ‘An artiste serves his party and his people through his art; his task of physical mobilization is much less important. However much we glorify the latter, the former is a thousand times more powerful as a mobilizer … an artiste’s art-work is his Party work’ (ibid.: 39, emphasis in the original). Far from being a less serious ancillary to revolutionary politics, as a dominant section of the party believed art and culture to be, artwork for Ghatak was a weapon with which the artistes are able to ‘bring forth Collective Feeling’ (ibid.: 44, sic). Unlike his comrades and other Marxist filmmakers, Ghatak did not reject religion and people’s spiritual practices as an aberration, despite being an atheist himself. He urged the party to keep in mind the cultural and spiritual affinity of the masses to the epics, mythology

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and puranic tales, along with folk cultural forms. A thorough understanding and systematic engagement with the history, cultural practices and aesthetic traditions of India was a precondition to his idea of cultural activism for its potential to spearhead the process of cultural decolonization. Ghatak’s argument about the cultural front and lapses of the party leadership in dealing with it did not sit well as he was soon served with a 23-point charge. After writing his detailed defence to each point, Ghatak charged a cohort in the leadership ‘of factionalism within the Party and “Grouping” and “Disruption” in the frontal organisation’ while using the IPTA as the breeding ground for such practices (Ghatak 1995:  200). The CPI expelled him outright in 1955.

In search for alternatives: The brief spell in the Bombay film industry The end of his formal relationship with the party did not put an end to the animosity that the conflict started; it was only put on hold. In 1955, with the help of Bimal Roy, an Indian filmmaker Ghatak had worked with in Kolkata, he found a job in Bombay. Appointed as a scriptwriter in the Filmistan Studio, a disillusioned Ghatak left Kolkata. Although he started working for the industry and was no longer a party member, he did not forsake his people’s cinema project. Ghatak wrote two filmscripts in 1955–6, namely, Madhumati and Musafir / The Traveller; Bimal Roy bought the former and Hrishikesh Mukherjee the latter (ibid.:  55, 73). Musafir, Mukherjee’s directorial debut, and Madhumati, directed by Roy, were released in 1957 and 1958, respectively. Both films received critical acclaim and National Awards. The highest grossing film of 1958, Madhumati was one of the biggest hits of the 1950s (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1994: 200). The film earned as many as nine Filmfare awards and the National Award as the best Hindi language film of the year. In 1956, while working in the Filmistan Studio, he wrote a letter to Shashadhar Mukherjee, urging him to create provisions for experimental filmmaking. This letter could be taken as his manifesto of radical cinema, continuing from his 1954 thesis. This lesser-known letter of Ghatak to Mukherjee came in the possession of Surama Ghatak, which she included in her book of biographical documentation of Ghatak published in 1995. Considering the films being made hitherto in India as ‘progressive bluffs’, Ghatak urged Mukherjee to make a department for experimental filmmaking, appoint persons with necessary flares, put all sorts of hurdles before them  – a low budget, no stars, no good equipment, no fancy name in technicians, no massive

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sets, no legendary music director, and also no colour  – just ideas. Let them get out of the studios and shoot out of doors. … Let them see the world through the camera, let them explore possibilities of editing table, creative soundtrack, camera set-up. (Ghatak 1995: 70, emphasis mine) Here, we can see Ghatak going back to his roots from his first unrealized film project, Jomir Lorai. By proposing this experimentation, Ghatak wished to liberate filmmaking from the privileged institutional premises to democratize it with greater accessibility. However, his appeal for this radical project was disregarded by the studio for obvious reasons. This brief but very successful stint in Bombay was a period of productive artistic engagement and a fulfilling personal life for him. During this period, he was working on a number of scripts such as Saat Lahari / The Seven Layered Necklace, Raja / The King and Jader Keu Mone Rakhe na / People No One Remembers in 1956 and Notun Phashal / The New Harvest, Amritakumbher Sondhane / In Search of Ambrosia and Akal Basanta / The Untimely Spring in 1957. None of these scripts were made into films and were subsequently lost after B. N. Sircar, an influential Bengali film producer and the founder of the New Theatres film studio invited Ghatak back to Kolkata to make Notun Phashal (ibid.: 76). Ghatak saw in it an opportunity for his much-coveted filmic experimentation. He left his prospering career in the mainstream Hindi film industry and returned to Kolkata in March 1957 to chase his dream. But in June 1957, Sircar abruptly withdrew from the project citing financial uncertainty and indefinite delay in starting the work leading to the abandonment of the project (ibid). In 1958, Ghatak started working on another script, Arjan Sardar / The Chief Arjan, based on a story written by Shibsankar Mitra. This project was also abandoned for funding issues. It is during this time of despair that Pramod Lahiri, a Kolkata-based producer, unexpectedly came forward to produce Ghatak’s next projects.

Ghatak and the long 1960s: It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair Between 1958 and 1963, he completed five films, Ajantrik / Pathetic Fallacy (1958), Bari Theke Paliye / The Runaway (1959), Meghe Dhaka Tara / Cloud Capped Star (1960), Komal Gandhar / E-Flat (1961) and Subarnarekha / The Golden Line (1963), despite constant struggles with funding and lack of equipment to make films outside the studio system (O’Donnell 2004: n.p.). All of them were later recognized as classics by film scholars and cinephiles. However, other than Meghe Dhaka Tara, the rest of his films failed at the box office for reasons often not directly connected to his films.

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With reference to the reception of the four out of his five films (Subarnarekha was not released at the time of speaking), Ghatak sarcastically commented, ‘My first film was called a picaresque episodic film along the lines of the eighteenth century Spanish novel Gil Blas De Santillane; the second was called a film of documentary approach; the next was a melodrama, and the fourth, nothing at all, just no film’ (Ghatak 1963b: 31). Ghatak’s anguish was not so much because his films were not well received but because of the obstacles created by some of his former comrades and members of the film fraternity, literally endangering his filmmaking career. The fourth film in the above quote refers to Komal Gandhar, a film about the factionalism and weakening of the IPTA. The content of the film angered some people in the party and a plan was hatched, thereafter, to sabotage the film’s performance by bulk booking and disrupting the screening by confusing the audience with misguided reactions in the theatre (Ghatak 2017:  personal communication). This led to a drastic fall in attendance despite a promising start in the first week (Chatterjee 2003). However, Komol Gandhar is now considered a classic. The machinated failure of the film caused Ghatak, as the co-producer, considerable financial loss. Additionally, his credibility as a filmmaker came under relentless scrutiny, worsening an already difficult funding situation for his future projects. This debacle spearheaded a painful phase which continued till the end of Ghatak’s life, with a brief respite between 1972 and 1974 when he was able to make his last two features, namely, Titas Ekti Nadir Naan / A River Called Titas and Jukti, Takko Aar Gappo, respectively. This is a period of wasted potential as he undertook a number of projects during this time which had to be abandoned either for funding difficulties or ill health. A look at the interest and reception of his films in India and abroad, mostly posthumously, will help one understand the extent of loss that these nine years caused. Watching Ajantrik made George Sadoul spellbound, even though he watched the film without English subtitles at the Venice Film Festival (Bali 2005: n.p.). Such was his impression that he added an entry on Ghatak and the films listed above, except Komal Gandhar, in his Dictionary of Filmmakers, describing him as the ‘remarkable Bengalese filmmaker’ (Sadoul 1965: 99). Henry Langlois, hearing about the film, possibly from Sadoul, wanted to have a print for the French National Film Archive (Ghatak 2017: personal communication). However, Sadoul’s encounter with Ghatak was just a fortunate coincidence. He was literally unknown in most of the world till the 1980s when retrospectives of his films started being curated and attracted transnational attention. Meghe Dhaka Tara is the only film which was commercially successful in his lifetime and is considered a masterpiece in world cinema. Undertaking a detailed textual analysis of the film in ‘The Film We Accompany,’ noted film scholar Raymond Bellour quotes Serge Daney, a French film critic, who drew his attention to the

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film describing it as ‘one of the five or six greatest melodramas in cinema history’ (Bellour 1992:  n.p.). Considering Subarnarekha as a masterpiece of ‘the project of revolutionary modernism’, Adrian Martin comments that the film poses ‘a challenge to film analysis and cinema studies’ (Martin 2014:  205–6). Subarnarekha presented a promise of success immediately after its release as screenings were held at full houses. However, Rajshree Pictures bought the rights of the film for ₹65,000 only (about £710) and took charge of the distribution without Ghatak’s knowledge to evade taxes on the huge revenue from Satyen Bose’s Hindi melodrama Dosti / Friendship in 1964 and subsequently withdrew the film from Kolkata theatres without any explanation (Chatterjee 2018). This was the most challenging among Ghatak’s Partition trilogy both in terms of form and content, yet the film was not even allowed a fair run in the box office before being taken off. The fact that Subarnarekha, a film considered a masterpiece by a foremost film scholar, had to ‘lay in cold storage for three years before it could be released’ is a testimony to how the subdual of Ghatak’s projects disrupted the ‘course of development of Indian cinema’ as Hashmi pointed out (1989: 96). His estrangement with the IPTA and the party, unemployment and consequent decline into stark poverty not only affected him but also drove his family to precarity and misery. This gradually pushed his mental health to the brink and he resorted to alcoholism from early 1960s (Ghatak 2017:  personal communication). Following the Komol Gandhar fiasco, it was impossible for him to start working on his next film. As his mental health deteriorated, he returned home after resigning from his job at the FTII in 1965 and had to be institutionalized thereafter (Ghatak 2017: personal communication). Since that time, Ghatak underwent constant psychiatric treatment and was intermittently institutionalized till his death (ibid). A  combination of deteriorating mental and physical health hastened his premature demise. Ghatak, an upright and outspoken cultural worker, refused to sugarcoat his scepticism and disdain for the unscrupulous funders and would-be producers. His declared identity as a Marxist and a vocal criticism of mainstream industrial cinema, combined with his unbending view of filmmaking, created issues in procuring funds for his projects. This difficulty was further compounded by the serial failure of his films at the box office. Acutely aware of the practical implications of these failures, he commented, It is impossible to explain … how intolerably difficult it has become to make experimental films in Bengal. The situation is more critical now, with the cost of filmmaking almost doubled. How can one expect a producer who has invested [300,000 or 400,000 rupees] in these days to go on supporting experimental films, if as a businessman, he cannot recover even his investment? (Ghatak [1966] 2015: 78)

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Though the unsurmountable struggle for funding and support was created, to some extent, by him, the smear campaign against him that painted an adverse picture of Ghatak among potential producers also played a major role (cf. Ghatak 1995). This period has the largest number of unmade films, including Kato Ajanare / All That I Unknown in 1959, a documentary on the musical maestro Ustad Allauddin Khan in 1963; Bagalar Bangadarshan / Bagalar Discovery of Bengal in 1964; Ranger Golam /The Knave of the Trump in 1968, two documentaries on the then prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, in 1972 and the sculptor Ramkinkar Baij in 1975. Kato Ajanare, produced by Mihir Laha, was based on a Bengali novel written by Mani Shankar Mukherjee with the same title. The project was abandoned after shooting eighteen synchronized reels on a twenty-day schedule (Ghatak 1995: 221). In a 2017 interview, Surama Ghatak informed me that only one scene was left to be shot when the film was discontinued for financial problems (Ghatak 2017: personal communication). A total of seven reels of edited material was initially available (Ghatak 1975:  350). However, due to maintenance issues, most of the footage was damaged or lost (Ghatak 2017:  personal communication). Ritoban Ghatak, Ghatak’s son and a trustee of the Ritwik Memorial Trust, reconstructed three or four silent sequences of the film (Ghatak 1995: 221). Surama Ghatak laments, ‘Without any text available, there is no way to conceive the structure of the film or even the episodes chosen from the massive rambling novel’ (ibid). The documentary on Ustad Alauddin Khan was produced by eminent Indian documentarian Harisadhan Dasgupta. Immediately after shooting finished, Dasgupta informed Ghatak that he was withdrawing from the project. Dasgupta released the documentary in 1963 without Ghatak’s name as the director. Bagalar Banga Darshan was Ghatak’s next unmade project. This was an adaptation of the Italian filmmaker Alexander Blassetti’s 1942 comedy-drama, Quattro Passi fra le Nuvole / Four Steps in the Clouds. The film was set in context of Bengal, capturing the nuances of urban and rural life. It was shot in black and white 35 mm film. The shooting went on only for a week, from which only four reels survive. An aesthetically beautiful film, it showcases Ghatak’s captivating camera work as well as a pleasantly surprising levity and humour. The plot of the film utilized the issue of mistaken identity of The Comedy of Errors. Had it been completed, Bagalar Bangadarshan would have been Ghatak’s experimentation with seriocomic genre and could have freed him from the restrictive image as a filmmaker of the Partition. An adaptation of a novel written by the Bengali writer Narayan Sanyal, the shooting for Ranger Golam started in 1968. Ghatak was the scriptwriter, director and producer of the film. With his long-time collaborator, Anil Chatterjee, playing the lead, he shot nearly one-fourth of the film in seven days in an outdoor location in Bolpur. Yet again, funding shortage, along with his exacerbated alcoholism and ill health, led to the film being left

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unfinished. Soon after the suspension of shooting of Ranger Golam, Ghatak had to be readmitted to a mental hospital in Kolkata in 1969. Only about three reels of footage of the film without sound and a synopsis of the script done by Ghatak survive. Another unmade and lost project from 1972 is a documentary on Indira Gandhi. One segment of the film was shot in Hyderabad; another part with Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first prime minister of Bangladesh, was shot in Kolkata. However, the project was abandoned for similar reasons. In 1975, he started working on a documentary on the famous sculptor, entitled Ramkinkar Baij: A Personality Study. The film was shot in 16 mm colour. The shooting of most part of the film and preliminary editing was completed. However, Ghatak passed away just before the background sound designing was about to start. His son completed the film, but it was never released.

Conclusion Ghatak is perhaps the only Indian filmmaker whose first and last films were released together, posthumously. The French author Hubert Niogret wrote in the note for a programme on Ghatak’s films at the Austrian Film Museum in 2015, ‘For those who were lucky enough to see one of his films, Ghatak is one of those rare artists who by their way of showing things can change our own perception of the world’ (‘Films by Ritwik Ghatak’ 2015). Ghatak’s works remained unsuccessful at the box office during his lifetime and he was largely overlooked in the international context as well. Although both Ray and Sen, Ghatak’s contemporaries, were familiar names of Indian cinema in the global context, Ghatak remained an obscure figure for a long time. Over the years, Ghatak has been transformed into an urban myth in India, defined by stark binaries– such as a genius but an erratic, undisciplined and alcoholic artist; unique but also the enfant terrible of Indian cinema (and cultural practice), as film scholar Marie Seton once called him (Dasgupta and Bhattacharya 2003:  139). In the process of mythologizing Ghatak, a noticeable tendency emerges to romanticize him as the quintessential rebel up in arms against the leadership of the Indian Communist Party. However, what is often suppressed in this effusive discourse is the fact that Ghatak had the characteristic critical insights of a Marxist and his critique of certain policies of the Indian Left and the leadership was an essential part of the dialectical process of Marxist political praxis. Moreover, such overt emphasis on Ghatak’s conflicts with the party, identifying it as the sole barrier in his artistic career and finally to his undoing, takes away the focus from the massive antipathy that he suffered from the bourgeois establishment. This includes the influential people who regulated the film industry, exhibition and distribution circuits and the official bodies of the government in control

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of censorship, funding, granting awards and promotion of Indian cinema in national and international festivals. Ghatak was in opposition to both the national bourgeoisie and political elites for their uncaring attitude towards the masses, and the culture industry that works as the propaganda machinery for this group and crony capitalists. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that these formidable forces invested a considerable amount of their clout to quash an uncompromising voice of dissent. It is important to remember the damage that was caused by these external forces gathered against him, the cumulative effect of which resulted in the great number of unfinished and lost works. As mentioned earlier, copyright of several of Ghatak’s films has been a complex issue. After the Left Front government came to power in West Bengal in 1977, they took initiative to buy the rights from different people (Hashmi 1982:  96). Also noteworthy is the incredible archival and restoration work that has been carried out by Ghatak’s wife, Surama Ghatak, and their children, Samhita and Ritoban Ghatak, at the Ritwik Memorial Trust. They have worked tirelessly to track Ghatak’s ‘lost’ works and incomplete projects and have amassed them over several years. Thanks to the Trust, the NFAI now holds the entire collection of Ghatak’s films in one place.

Note 1. In 1948, Kakdwip became the eye of the storm after the renewal of the Tebhaga Movement – a peasants’ movement, led by the peasant front of the CPI, that sparked off in 1946 in India aiming to end the aggressively exploitative feudal landlord system. The peasants, here, denied returning the land they took over to the landlords despite intervention of communist leadership. They created a Red Zone under proletarian control. Several women peasant revolutionaries were murdered by the State in the police firing including their feisty leader Ahalya who was pregnant (cf. Custers 1986).

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Chatterjee, P. (2003), ‘The Relentless Tragedy of Ritwik’, Himāl: South Asian. Available online: https://www.himalmag.com/the-relentless-tragedy-of-ritwik/ (accessed on 23 June 2020). Chatterjee, P. (2018), ‘Memories and Vagaries – Ritwik Ghatak’, Stage Buzz. Available online: http://stagebuzz.org/2018/12/12/memories-and-vagariesritwik-ghatak-by-partha-chatterjee/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). ‘Cinema as weapon: Ritwik Ghatak’s unknown masterworks’ (1996), Programme note, New York Film Festival. Custers, P. (1986), ‘Women’s Role in Tebhaga Movement’, Economic and Political Weekly, 25 October, 21 (43): WS97–WS104. Dutta, K. and Dutta, M. (2003), ‘Bedeni O Nagarik/ Bedeni and Nagarik’, in Ritwik Memorial Trust (eds), Nagarik: Panchash Bochor/ Nagarik: Fifty Years, 94-96, Kolkata: Ritwik Memorial Trust. ‘Films by Ritwik Ghatak’ (2015), Programme Note, Austrian Film Museum. Available online: https://www.filmmuseum.at/jart/prj3/filmmuseum/main.jart?j-jurl=/en/film_program/scope&schienen_id=1417110855494&ss1=y (accessed 13 October 2019). Ghatak, R. ([1954] 2006), On the Cultural Front, thesis submitted to the Communist Party of India, Kolkata: Ritwik Memorial Trust. Ghatak, R. ([1963a] 2015), ‘Music in Indian Cinema and the Epic Approach’, in Cinema and I, 62–4, Kolkata: Dhyanbindu & Ritwik Memorial Trust. Ghatak, R. ([1963b] 2015), ‘Film and I’, in Cinema and I, 26–32, Kolkata: Dhyanbindu & Ritwik Memorial Trust. Ghatak, R. ([1966] 2015), ‘My Films’, in Cinema and I, trans. S. Bandyopadhyay, 77–80, Kolkata: Dhyanbindu & Ritwik Memorial Trust. Ghatak, R. ([1967] 2000), ‘As an Artist, I Believe in Involvement’, in S. Dasgupta and S. Acharya (eds), Ritwik, Face to Face, 20–25, Kolkata: Deepayan. Ghatak, R. ([1973] 2000), ‘I Haven’t Fallen in Love with Cinema’, in S. Dasgupta and S. Acharya (eds), Ritwik, Face to Face, 57–71, Kolkata: Deepayan. Ghatak, R. ([1975] 2013), Cinema Man and Something More: A Collection of Essays, Kolkata: Deys. Ghatak, R. ([1976] 2015), ‘On Nagarik’, in Cinema and I, 293–4, Kolkata: Dhyanbindu & Ritwik Memorial Trust. Ghatak, S. (1995), Ritwik, Kolkata: Anushtup. Ghatak, S. ([1995] 2010), Ritwik: From Padma to Titas, 2nd edn, Kolkata: Anushtup. Hashmi, S. (1989), The Right to Perform: Selected Writings of Safdar Hashmi, Delhi: Sahmat. Martin, A. (2014), Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ‘Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’ (1955), State Award of Films 1955, New Delhi: Government of India. Majumdar, R. (2012), ‘Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film: Society Movement in India’, Modern Asian Studies, 46 (3): 731–67. O’Donnell, E. (2004), ‘ “Woman” and “Homeland” in Ritwik Ghatak’s Films: Constructing Post-Independence Bengali Cultural Identity’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. Available online: https://www.ejumpcut.org/ archive/jc47.2005/ghatak/ (accessed on 12 September 2019).

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Rajadhyaksha, A. (1982), Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic, Bombay: Screen Unit. Rajadhyaksha, A. and A. Gangar (eds) (1987), Ghatak: Arguments and Stories, Bombay: Screen Unit. Rajadhyaksha, A., and Willemen, P. (1994), Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, London: British Film Institute. Ray, S. ([1982] 2003), ‘On Nagarik’, in Fifty Years of Nagarik, 117, Kolkata: Ritwik Memorial Trust. Sen, M. ([1976] 2015), ‘Ritwik and Us’, in Me and My Films, 213–15, Kolkata: Banishilpa. Sen, M. (2002), Montage: Life. Politics. Cinema, Calcutta: Seagull Books. Sengupta, A. (2004), ‘The Face of the Mother: Woman as Image and Bearer of the Look in Ritwik Ghatak’s Films’, Journal of Moving Image. Available online: https://jmionline.org/article/the_face_of_the_mother_woman_as_image_ and_bearer_of_the_look_in_ritwik_ghataks (accessed on 30 June 2019). Sadoul, G. (1965), Dictionary of Filmmakers, trans. P. Morris, Berkeley: University of California Press. Shahani, K. ([1975] 2015), ‘Violence and Responsibility’, in A. Rajadhyaksha (ed.), Kumar Shahani: The Shock of Desire and Other Essays, 159–62, New Delhi: Tulika Books. Shahani, K. ([1976] 1987), ‘Nature, in the End, Is Grandly Indifferent’, in A. Rajadhyaksha and A. Gangar (eds), Ghatak: Arguments and Stories, 51–3, Bombay: Screen Unit.

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PART THREE

Questioning the unmade

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7 Herding Cats; or, the possibilities of unproduction studies Peter C. Kunze

Prefatory remarks When I  completed this chapter a few years ago (this reprinted chapter was originally published in issue 80 of The Velvet Light Trap, 2017), early rumours of a new adaption of Cats were emerging. The plan succeeded this time, and the film was released in December 2019. Perhaps on some level, this chapter fails in that the case study of failure it offers ultimately was made. But the 2019 version is neither cel-animated (though it does feature a good deal of digital animation) nor is it based on Tom Stoppard’s scripts. A more accurate reading of ‘Herding Cats’ in light of Tom Hooper’s film would be that we need to have a broad and inclusive understanding of unproduced media if we are to study it. This area of inquiry not only should include projects that never made it to fruition, but unsuccessful attempts at successfully produced projects, such as Truman Capote’s rejected script for The Great Gatsby (Clayton 1974)  or Bob Fosse’s initial development work on Burnt Offerings (Curtis 1976) before leaving the project to direct Cabaret (1972) instead. Indeed, ‘unproduction studies’ (as I  called it) or studies of shadow cinema can expand to include false starts or efforts by contributors who left or were fired from the production, drawing attention to labour that was significant for the artist and perhaps the film as well, yet

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goes unacknowledged in the film credits and film history. Such studies reveal the logistical complexity of filmmaking during all stages of production as well as the logic – or illogic – of the media industries. Our understanding of a shadow cinema will always be contingent upon the time and place from which we study a given project, and for this intriguing area of investigation to thrive, it must be liberal in its understanding of ‘failure’ and sceptical of any perceived sharp distinction between unproduced and produced. * On 26 June 1990, Universal Pictures announced an epic pairing:  director Steven Spielberg and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber would collaborate on an animated adaptation of the latter’s hit musical, Cats. Each had achieved unprecedented success, having earned greater box-office grosses than nearly any predecessor in their respective fields of film and theatre. Spielberg, along with occasional collaborator George Lucas, had directed or produced several of the most financially successful films to that point, including Jaws (1975), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and E. T. the ExtraTerrestrial (1982). In addition to his hit musicals Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968), Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) and Evita (1978) with lyricist Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber had also composed the music for Cats (1981) and Phantom of the Opera (1986), which were each experiencing wildly successful runs both in the West End and on Broadway. Both Spielberg and Lloyd Webber had popularized once again the high-concept entertainment in their respective cultural realms and, by some accounts, saved and revitalized their arts.1 With clear, straightforward storylines and high production values, these shows and films simultaneously delighted mass audiences and irritated conservative critics. In reviewing Cats for Variety, Richard Hummler conceded, ‘It’s certainly possible to cavil that too much has been made of Eliot’s low-key book of light poetry, that Cats is closer to arena spectacle than a legit musical. The public won’t think so, however, and will relish its size, scope, and vitality’ (Hummler 1982). Mark Steyn, critic for The Independent in London, told The New  York Times, ‘Just as Spielberg’s movies confront and play upon primitive fears and ideas we have had since childhood, so do Lloyd Webber’s musicals hark back to the nursery, special effects and all’ (quoted in Watson 1990). Setting aside accusations of infantilizing musicals, Lloyd Webber admitted, ‘I can see that in some ways what we are both doing is comparable. I would love to work with him’ (ibid.). Two months later, with the announcement of Cats, Tom Pollock, chairman of Universal Pictures, gushed to the press that the pairing of Spielberg and Lloyd Webber was ‘literally a match made in heaven’ (quoted in Dutka 1990). Surely, with this pedigree of talent and amount of publicity, the film would prove a box office smash. Quite the contrary: the film was never made, and the project remains but a footnote in the careers of both men.

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This seemingly impossible failure raises a curious question: What might be learned from studying unproduced media? In fact, must media be produced to be studied? In ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Walter Benjamin observes that ‘if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize’, then their ‘answer is inevitable:  with the victor’ (Benjamin 1969:  256). By extension, history tends to focus on successes, especially when the story of such success casts favour unto the victor. To this end, what histories are suppressed when we celebrate success, and who is silenced in the process? Furthermore, how might a focus on failed media reveal the realities of media production, where success proves to be exceptional rather than normal? This chapter furthers the call for media studies scholars to counter this historiographic preference and market logic towards media successes by closely examining the possibilities that exist within a serious study of media failures. In so doing, I build upon scholarship in the Fall 2009 issue of The Velvet Light Trap, which featured a dossier of short essays examining the emergence of ‘failure studies’. Contributions by Michael Z.  Newman, Lisa Dombrowski and Heather Osborne-Thompson consider critical and commercial failures in film and television, while Jonathan Sterne, John Belton, Leo Enticknap and Lisa Nakamura re-examine failed technologies. While he understands the generative possibilities for failure studies, Charles Wolfe observes, ‘To describe a historical event, metaphorically as a “false start” or a “dead end” is to presume that history follows a certain direction and consists of motivated acts’ (Wolfe 2009:  98–9). This admonition against a ‘whigish’ notion of history encourages historians to challenge understandings of ‘success’, but we might also think about what we mean – or potentially could mean – by failure.2 Furthermore, by studying failure, do we not make it a ‘success’ of sorts? To be fair, Charles Ramírez Berg asserts in his provocative take on failure studies that we already study failure. He outlines a range of failures regularly under scholarly consideration –failures of execution, critical failures, boxoffice failures, failures of imagination – before posing, ‘And I wonder, What media failures are we failing to recognize?’ (Berg 2009:  102). This essay offers one answer: unproduced media. It seems axiomatic that to be studied, a work of media culture must first be made. But one could easily argue, in a contrarian spirit, that any produced media is, to a degree, already a success:  it made it out of ‘development hell’ where many efforts languish and into production.3 Granted, some films were never released (The Day the Clown Cried, Lewis 1972), were deliberately withdrawn from circulation (Song of the South, Foster and Jackson 1946), or simply are no longer manufactured and sold – but they exist.4 Unproduced media projects often receive brief mentions as asides or footnotes but traditionally warrant no further discussion. Disrupting this accepted convention, however, may yet yield new insights, theories and methods for the future of media studies – and media historiography, in particular.

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The reality is that the media industries abounds with failures. Jason Mittell, for example, argues failure remains ‘the default norm’ (Mittell 2009: 76–7), thereby ‘help[ing] us [to] understand the limits of the system’ (ibid.:  77). Since failure represents the rule rather than the exception, it warrants more careful consideration in our growing study of media production. In addition to commercial or critical failures, we need to study projects that never emerged from ‘development hell’ because attention to such failures may offer us more representative samples of industrial behaviour and logics than a focus on successful media productions. Furthermore, while some scholars have suggested that the recent turn to media industry studies may, in fact, develop an approach that is ‘in a more palatable form for cultural analysts, policy wonks, and the media industry itself’ (Wasko and Meehan 2013:  156), failure studies privileges the marginalized and suppressed histories to better understand the everyday realities of industrial logics, patterns, and decision making. While the possibility always exists that this approach will follow an engineering model of failure analysis that serves to improve future practices, it also provides the opportunity to understand the mindset that governs industrial practices in the first place. In turn, this work can revise and reorient received industrial histories while also countering, even subverting, received accounts from the industry itself. The motivated scholar may apply a range of methods to studying unproduced media. Most obviously, unproduced media often serve as filler in the archives of producers, filmmakers, screenwriters and studios. A brief glance through the holdings of the Harry Ransom Center, for instance, reveals scores of unproduced screenplays and related materials in the collections of prominent writers like Ernest Lehman, Diane Johnson, Paul Schrader, William Faulkner, Doris Lessing, Tennessee Williams, David Mamet, Terrence McNally, Gabriel García Márquez and Ian McEwan, among others. What possibilities lie within these materials  – seeming excess compared to the creators’ produced works – has yet to be determined. While the screenplays themselves are ripe for textual analysis, especially interpretation and textual variation, the paratexts related to the production  – memos, studio notes, meeting minutes – provide rich opportunities for discursive analysis into the day-to-day operations of screenwriters, production companies or studios. In this way, studies of unproduced media may be particularly fruitful for the developing field of media industry studies, especially the study of individual practitioners working within and against the media industries. Seemingly, media industry studies would easily render traditional understandings of media authorship problematic, since the notion of singular creative agency is untenable and counterproductive in a fundamentally collaborative medium. In his introduction to media industry studies for Cinema Journal, Paul McDonald historicizes the increasing interest in industry and its ramification for extant methods. Traditional studies of authorship privileged singular genius over ‘attention to the broader

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industrial, institutional, and market contexts in which film exists’, and subsequent discussions of discourses and ideology that usurped authorship’s centrality still avoided discussions of industry (McDonald 2013: 146). Yet studies of authorship do not need to ignore or oppose considerations of industry, nor do industrial studies need to avoid questions of authorship and creative agency. Synthesizing political economy and cultural studies approaches, Thomas Schatz advocates attention to modes of production, authorship and film style in writing industrial histories of film (Schatz 2009: 45–56). In a subsequent article, he argues that critical study of the media industries ‘demands that we ask what constitutes authorship in the context of cultural production, and what creative and administrative work roles really matter in the production process’ (Schatz 2014: 40). Similarly, Michele Hilmes contends, Industry study is the translation of authorship into a dispersed site marked by multiple, intersecting agendas and interests, where individual authorship in the traditional sense still most certainly takes place, but within a framework that robs it, to a greater or lesser degree, of its putative autonomy  – a deeply disturbing displacement for many, and productive of much of the dystopian rhetoric that the concept of ‘mass media’ has inspired over the course of two centuries. (Hilmes 2009: 22) For Hilmes, foregrounding industry destabilizes our attention to authorship in radical, but productive, ways. Studying unproduced media, therefore, can situate authorship at the centre of an analysis so as to explore industrial logic and practices of its moment. Studying failure also encourages us to re-evaluate our unacknowledged commitment to conceptions of success, broadly defined. Must our histories privilege the victors? How might histories of failure allow us to give voice to the silenced, the marginalized, the uncredited? In The Queer Art of Failure, Judith Halberstam contends our investment in success is also an investment in seriousness. Serious scholarship must examine serious art, the unspoken premise dictates. ‘Being taken seriously,’ Halberstam playfully writes, ‘means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant’ (Halberstam 2011:  6). Consequently, we follow the same paths of knowledge production and meaning-making that came before us and generally produce similar work as a result. Halberstam reminds us to find value in the unexplored and the unexpected: ‘Like many others before me, I propose that instead the goal is to lose one’s way, and indeed to be prepared to lose more than one’s way’ (ibid.). A  scholarly allegiance to success, much like an investment in ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (Arnold 2009: 5), legitimates a dominant narrative that simultaneously narrows our attention and excludes the outliers. Studies of unproduced media remind us, once more, of the value of interrogating the

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politics and potential ramifications of our research commitments. It also encourages us to pursue unexplored avenues to revise extant accounts, reveal forgotten narratives, and produce new histories. An ‘unproduction studies’ approach would employ these directives within the production studies framework, originally articulated by John Thornton Caldwell in his 2008 monograph, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television.5 While political economy dominated early media industry studies work and continues today in the research of scholars Robert McChesney, Janet Wasko and Jennifer Holt, its top-down approach focuses attention on corporations, institutions, government agencies, industry leaders and public and corporate policy. In the spirit of cultural studies, production studies inverts the model, bringing questions of hegemony, power, agency and resistance from cultural studies into media industry studies. Scholars invested in Caldwell’s approach examine below-the-line workers, for example, to ‘look at ways that culture both constitutes and reflects the relationships of power’ (Mayer et  al. 2009: 2). This reorientation challenges both industrially produced accounts as well as traditional scholarly practice, focusing on the quotidian over the extraordinary and the ignored over the celebrated. With this imperative in mind, my discussion of unproduction studies employs a case study – Tom Stoppard’s unproduced screenplay for an animated adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats – to examine how authorship provides a fruitful avenue for discussing power, agency, and authority in the media industries. Admittedly, Stoppard, Lloyd Webber, stage director Trevor Nunn and Steven Spielberg are hardly below-the-line industry workers but a hierarchy of artistic and executive power nevertheless emerges. In particular, my analysis hopes to illuminate the creative tension that arises during efforts at collaboration between two cultural industries – in this instance, film, based in Los Angeles, and the London-based theatre. Employing what Caldwell calls ‘an integrated cultural-industrial analysis (2008: 4), I examine archival materials housed in the Tom Stoppard Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, which includes drafts of the screenplay, correspondence between Stoppard and various figures involved in the production, and memos between his employees and himself. I synthesize this information with a textual analysis of the musical Cats (and its source material, T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats), discursive analysis of trade and popular press coverage about the planned production and industrial analysis of Hollywood between 1990 and 1994. What develops is a historical narrative of relative failure that foregrounds not only the complexity and value of authorship in contemporary Hollywood, but also insight into the motivations, behaviours and practices of film production at Amblin in the early 1990s. By studying unproduced media, we have another avenue for understanding the complex power dynamics behind media production and the logic that informs industrial praxis.

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Staging Cats All scripted films are essentially adaptations of their respective screenplays, but as a creative property adapted from a book of poems, Cats offers a particularly complex case of authorship across various media and, therefore, production cultures. Before Cats could be animated, it had to overcome one major difficulty: its plot – or lack thereof.6 The musical was originally devised in 1977, when Lloyd Webber, who was quarrelling with his regular lyricist, Tim Rice, was seeking a project that would afford him some creative autonomy. Years earlier, Lloyd Webber had found a copy of The Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a book of children’s verse by T.  S. Eliot that he had enjoyed as a child, in a bookshop and saw the potential for setting the light-hearted poems to music. Originally published in 1939, Eliot had intended the verses for his godchildren. In a 1931 letter to his godson, Tom Faber, he wrote, ‘I am glad you have a cat, but I  do not believe it is so remarkable a cat as My cat,’ followed by a poem that would become the first of many to follow in subsequent letters (Cats: The Book of the Musical 1983: 7). The light and whimsical poems represent a playful departure from his more well-known work, such as ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land (1922), both canonical fixtures within Anglo-American Modernist poetry. Indeed, as Lloyd Webber noted in reading ‘Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat’ (Riedel 2015: 281), the poems of Practical Cats have a musical quality that betrays Eliot’s love of popular music and music hall entertainment.7 Indeed, for a poet who famously extolled the virtue of impersonality in art (Eliot 1975: 37–44), these poems demonstrate a more intimate and more accessible side to readers while still echoing the themes that he had explored earlier in his career (Bay-Cheng 2014:  229). Furthermore, Eliot was long deceased, essentially offering Lloyd Webber a silent partner and a relative degree of independence in this production compared to his earlier work with Rice. Of course, such an easy working relationship was not immediately guaranteed: when Eliot died in 1965, the rights to his work had fallen to his young widow, Valerie Eliot. First secretary, then wife and finally faithful editor and executrix of his estate, she remained protective over her husband’s literary legacy. Years earlier, Walt Disney had approached T. S. Eliot about adapting Practical Cats into an animated film, but Eliot declined because he did not want his mischievous cats ‘to be pussycats or turned into cartoon cats’ (‘What’s a Jellicle Cat?:  The Making of Cats:  The Video’ 2000). (Walt Disney Studios released a vaguely similar project, The Aristocats (Reitherman 1970); it was the last animated feature that Disney himself had approved before his 1966 death.) Seeking her blessing and the rights to the book, Lloyd Webber prepared some melodies and invited Mrs Eliot and his friends to his estate in Sydmonton to hear a preview of his work-inprogress. She approved of his efforts, even providing him with poems not

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included in the original collection (Riedel 2015: 281). The most important of these uncollected poems chronicles Grizabella, the dejected ‘Glamour Cat’ whom the other cats scorn. Eliot allegedly found the poem too depressing for a children’s book (ibid.), but Grizabella becomes the emotional core of Cats through her show-stopping performance of ‘Memory’.8 Lloyd Webber assured Mrs Eliot that he would avoid a Disney treatment of the book, insisting he had Hot Gossip, a popular (and provocative) British dance troupe of the time, in mind. To Lloyd Webber’s amusement, she was delighted:  ‘Yes, yes, I  think Tom would’ve liked that!’ (quoted in ‘What’s a Jellicle Cat?:  The Making of Cats:  The Video’ 2000). With Mrs Eliot’s blessing and no (living) collaborator to answer to, Lloyd Webber could proceed with relative autonomy in writing Cats. In the history of Cats, Valerie Eliot may be the unsung hero, as her contributions have largely been rendered invisible, save a few interviews with Andrew Lloyd Webber. In addition to locating the source materials for Grizabella, she provided Lloyd Webber with T.  S. Eliot’s own plans for a theatrical adaptation of Practical Cats. Lloyd Webber recounts, ‘He proposed that eventually the cats were to go “Up up up past the Russell Hotel, up up up to the Heaviside Layer” ’ (Cats: The Book of the Musical 1983:  9). Using this verse, Lloyd Webber was able to transition from Grizabella’s nostalgic ‘Memory’ to the finale song, ‘The Ad-Dressing in the Cats’, in which the doyen of the cats, Old Deuteronomy, selects Grizabella for rebirth and reacceptance among the cats. She and Old Deuteronomy ascend above the stage on a giant tire, where she eventually scales a staircase to the Heaviside Layer  – and redemption. Even with Valerie Eliot’s help, however, the Estate did make one inhibitive demand: Eliot’s poems were to serve as the book for the show – that is, the non-musical part of a musical, including the narrative structure and spoken dialogue – rather than as mere inspiration. Cats has no spoken dialogue; instead, it takes viewers into the world of the cats (the songs ‘Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats’ and ‘The Naming of the Cats’), introduces a variety of quirky cats with each character getting his or her own song and ends with Grizabella’s ascension to the Heaviside Layer. Several incidents are pantomimed, but not sung about, since Eliot himself had not detailed them in the poems: the Cats hold their annual ball (essentially, an extended dance sequence), Macavity the Mystery Cat briefly kidnaps Old Deuteronomy, Mr Mistoffelees saves Old Deuteronomy, Old Deuteronomy select Grizabella for rebirth. In short, Cats has no discernible plot but rather follows a concert-like format, featuring a range of song (music hall, jazz, operetta) and dance (tap, jazz, ballet) numbers. While the Eliot estate did not meddle in the creation of Cats, its restriction undeniably had a shaping effect on the final product in that Cats is more accurately a music hall revue than a traditional integrated musical. The American Theatre Wing acknowledged this authorial presence when it nominated the late T. S.

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Eliot for the 1983 Tony for Best Book of a Musical, which he subsequently won (with Valerie Eliot accepting). Despite the accolades from Tony voters, Broadway critics and denizens were less thrilled with the final result. Purists saw it as a ‘dumbing down’ of the stage, departing from the intellectual stimulation that they see as the traditional charge of ‘serious’ drama. More recently, scholar Sarah BayCheng has argued the musical misses Eliot’s theme of the ‘commonality’ between cats and humans as ‘the spectator of Webber’s Cats becomes immersed and overwhelmed in the fantasy of an all-out theatrical assault’ (Bay-Cheng 2014:  237). Lloyd Webber’s peers have been no less critical. Stephen Sondheim, often credited by theatre critics and scholars as reviving and intellectualizing the American stage musical, candidly observed, ‘Where there’s no substance, it gets boring … I  remember going to Cats and wondering why they just didn’t stack five million dollars on the stage’ (Citron 2001: 277). Sondheim’s derision refers to the show’s $4.5 million budget, far exceeding anything Broadway had seen up to that point in 1982. But Cats exemplified a new theatrical experience—the high-concept musical. Indeed, even as a stage show, Cats works perfectly into Justin Wyatt’s definition of high concept as ‘a striking, easily reducible narrative which also offers a high degree of marketability’ (Wyatt 1994:  13). Plot was all but irrelevant; Cats was an experience to be cherished, as indicated by its ‘Now and Forever’ ad campaign, featuring nothing more than two yellow eyes with dancers as pupils. Indeed, few theatregoers knew what they would see when they went to Cats, in part because, at the time, the concept of anthropomorphic cats was curious, if not downright ludicrous. While Broadway musicals had always included dance numbers, the foregrounding of dance here was integral, and the musical’s appeal laid in both the variety of dance styles as well as the amount of dancing the musical showcased. The music featured Lloyd Webber’s trademark melodies, catchy tunes that would follow theatregoers out the door and have been described by conductor Lorin Maazel as Lloyd Webber’s ‘great talent  – I  would say genius’ (Rockwell 1987). Story was secondary not just to the style, but by legal necessity, but audiences obviously did not seem to mind. The scaledback plot and heightened spectacle, matched by blockbuster success on Broadway, makes the failure to adapt the show all the more puzzling. Two populations have predominantly comprised Broadway audiences:  locals, such as the Broadway community and residents of the New  York City area, who traditionally view the theatre as an esteemed cultural tradition; and tourists, who include seeing a Broadway show on their to-do lists while in town. Steven Adler reports that from 1980 to 2000, the percentage of Broadway audiences composed of residents within and around New York City dropped from around 60 per cent to 44 per cent (Adler 2004: 12). Cats appealed to this surging demographic of tourist-attendees,

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and indeed, there was good money to be found there; in fact, Cats’ ticket prices were the highest on Broadway and its presale was the most successful in Broadway history to date. (Lloyd Webber’s next major spectacle, The Phantom of the Opera, eclipsed it in 1988 and, unsurprisingly, Disney’s first theatrical effort, Beauty and the Beast, in 1994 surpassed even Phantom). Writing for The New York Times, drama critic Frank Rich wrote, ‘Whatever the failings and excesses, even banalities, of Cats, it believes in purely theatrical magic, and on that faith it unquestionably delivers’ (Rich 1982). While Rich agreed the show charmed audiences, he lamented ‘that this ambitious show [didn’t] lift the audience – or, for that matter, the modern musical – up to the sublime heaviside layer’ (ibid.). Rich’s aesthetic concerns ultimately lost out to the audience’s desire for family-friendly spectacle. The 1980s were an age of crowd-pleasing blockbusters on the screen, and Cats brought that spirit – and market logic – to the Broadway stage. Though Lloyd Webber faced harsh dismissals from American critics, in part because he defiantly triumphed in the musical that many saw as a distinctly American art form, audiences flocked to his spectacular shows (Siropoulos 2010:  274). Unsurprisingly, when Lloyd Webber turned his attention to Hollywood, he brought Cats with him and sought a relationship with the master of blockbuster entertainment, Steven Spielberg.

Adapting Cats To make Cats work on the big screen as a major release from Hollywood, however, it would obviously need a plot and an experienced producer who could assemble the creative team to give it one. Alan Sutton, speaking on behalf of Universal Pictures at the formal announcement, stated, ‘This will be an adaptation of Cats, with a script and a beginning, middle, and end’ (quoted in Anderson 1990). Curiously, tentative plans called for an animated version, seemingly defying T. S. Eliot’s earlier concerns with Walt Disney and Valerie Eliot’s guardianship of those intentions. An animation studio had not been designated at the time, though Amblimation, the animation arm of Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment, would eventually emerge as the chosen producer. Spielberg had entered the animation end of filmmaking five years earlier, when he served as executive producer for An American Tail (Bluth 1986). One of the co-producers, and the film’s director, was Don Bluth, who had famously defected from Walt Disney Animation in the 1979, taking several animators with him and temporarily crippling Disney’s animation division. By that time, Disney found itself struggling under the stifling limitations of its family-friendly brand, and animation, in particular, was floundering, despite the relative successes of The Rescuers (Reitherman, Lounsbery, Stevens 1977) and The Fox and the Hound (Rich,

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Berman, Stevens 1981). Disney considered closing its animation division altogether when Michael Eisner and Frank Wells assumed control in 1984. Corporate lore alleges that Roy Disney, Walt Disney’s nephew and a prominent board member, prevented such a bold move (see the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty (Hahn 2009)). Yet it was the Spielberg-backed An American Tail – not a Disney film – that initiated Hollywood’s renewed faith in feature animation in the 1980s. With stunning animation reminiscent of early Disney, a hit pop song and an inspirational immigrant story that evoked populist American ideals (and Spielberg’s own family history), An American Tail compelled Spielberg to produce The Land Before Time (Bluth 1988), another hit film, and eventually start Amblimation after Don Bluth ended their creative partnership. By this time, the proven viability of the home video market and the box-office success of The Little Mermaid (Clements and Musker 1989) launched a full-fledged animation renaissance, effectively returning Disney to the forefront of feature animation and family entertainment. Spielberg planned to reap the benefits of the resurgence he had helped trigger, and with its emphasis on spectacle, Cats seemed the perfect pre-sold vehicle for such box-office success as an animated feature. Yet the production stalled. Despite the recent success of the Disney animated films, which were ostensibly musicals, the musical as a film genre was an unstable venture for risk-averse studios. An anonymous studio executive told Variety in 1991, ‘The classic American musical is an artifice that is very expensive and very hard to maintain. … They always cost too much’ (Fleming 1991). Few Broadway musicals had made it to the screen in the 1980s, and when they did, their production costs often crippled their ability to yield profits; the noticeable exception was The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (Higgins 1982), a star vehicle for Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds. Animation remained the best bet for circumventing the danger of filming musicals, in part because the convention of spontaneously bursting into song more seamlessly integrated into a fantastical animated environment. By 1992, little progress had been made on the Cats film: Lloyd Webber disliked the initial script, and the London-based animation unit were consequently released from their contracts (Fleming 1992). In order to breathe new life into Cats, Lloyd Webber and Spielberg needed a strong script. Nunn, director of the original stage production in the West End, had written a 49-page treatment, including the reconfiguration of the kidnap plot. Spielberg approached a seemingly unlikely choice: Tom Stoppard, whose plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and The Real Thing had made him one of England’s premier dramatists. But the men had worked together before: Stoppard had scripted Empire of the Sun (1987), the second film in Spielberg’s foray into serious drama, following the critical and commercial success of The Color Purple (1985). Two years later, Stoppard had served as a script doctor on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), which earned the playwright $120,000 initially and a

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$1,000,000  ‘thank-you bonus’ from Spielberg after the film’s remarkable success at the box office (Dubner 2000: 229). That same year, in a profile of Stoppard for Vanity Fair, Spielberg lauded the playwright’s formidable work ethic: ‘For somebody who really is an artist, his work habits are really noseto-the-grindstone. … Tom is a real problem solver. He works until he reaches a solution’ (Schiff 1994: 220, 222). Though he had contractual obligations to Universal, where Amblin Entertainment had its offices, Stoppard was reticent to become involved in the project. Admittedly ‘not a tremendous enthusiast of musicals’ (Gussow 1995: 88), he had a vague familiarity with Lloyd Webber’s work. It was not until Nunn appealed to Stoppard that he relented, in large part because he, like Lloyd Webber, enjoyed Practical Cats’ verses. Cats, described by Stoppard as a ‘concert with dance’ (ibid.), may not have had the plot or levity of serious drama, but T. S. Eliot certainly imbued it with a respectable imprimatur. Stoppard began work on Cats in February 1994, and his first hurdle was, beyond the lack of a discernible plot, the sheer length of the show. The running time for Cats exceeded two hours; an animated film, as a costly, hand-drawn endeavour targeted toward a family audience, would have been ninety minutes long, ideally shorter. The loose arrangement of the songs in the original show necessitated moving them around while editing some songs down or removing them altogether. To Stoppard’s relief, Lloyd Webber remained cordial and understanding about the constraints Stoppard faced as both a dramatist building a story and an independent contractor charged with delivering a viable script to Universal. This responsibility reveals Stoppard’s indispensable value to the project, for, as Caldwell notes, ‘because film and television are so capital intensive, a script also functions as a financial prospectus, a detailed investment opportunity, and a corporate proposal’ (Caldwell 2008: 232). Without a strong one, Cats would quickly exhaust its nine lives. Stoppard’s contract with Universal, however, posed a different problem. It obligated him to deliver a script where he would take screen credit, but with a stage musical as the source material and a 49-page treatment by Nunn, he worried whether or not his efforts would warrant such credit. Subsequent meetings between Stoppard, Lloyd Webber and Nunn revealed there was plenty to be done – and disagree over. Time and space, in particular, proved difficulties for Stoppard. For the original stage show, John Napier had designed an elaborate junkyard set, with shadows and pools of light to simulate night-time and fuel the mystical, magical spirit of Cats. Stoppard wanted to include a sequence in the daytime to allow for events to unfold more naturally, but Nunn feared such a temporal move would mean humans would or could enter the narrative, ‘bring[ing] with them problems of scale and style’ (Nunn 1994a). Furthermore, the poems place action in Kings Cross and at the Thames River, which, in reality, are roughly two miles apart – an unreasonable distance to expect these cats to inhabit throughout the span of

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the film. The overture offered additional complications, as it is out-of-place in a film. Consequently, Stoppard had to imagine a title sequence, wherein the overture could be adapted and the cats introduced to the audience. He suggested they could appear twice:  as humans perceive them and as cats do (Stoppard 1994a). This doubling revealed an interpretative crux that goes back to Eliot’s book itself: Are the cats human-like (dressed in clothes, for example), or are their natural features motivating those perceptions? Stoppard was unsure but argued, ‘The charm and cleverness of the papers consists in Eliot’s bringing off – constantly – a “human interpretation” of ordinary cat-behaviour’ (Stoppard n.d.). To illustrate this effect, Stoppard explains that Bustopher Jones, whom Eliot describes as ‘this Brummell of Cats’ in reference to his dapper and haughty appearance (Eliot 1967:  49), ‘doesn’t actually wear trousers and spats:  that’s his colouring’ (Stoppard n.d.). Nunn errs toward a comic ‘double take’ effect, wherein the cats are alternately cats and human-like (Nunn 1994b). Part of the justification for this reason lies in normal cat behaviour being ‘much less fun for the animators’ (ibid.). Here one sees the adaptation process in action: In anticipation of the animation of these characters, the authors occasionally defer to the animation process as a way of negotiating narrative dilemma. If it will ease this stage of production or make it more enjoyable for the animators, let that guide the decision. They differed on the extent of characterization for Rum Tug Tugger, a swaggering tomcat with a Mick Jagger-like persona, and Mr Mistoffelees, a playful young cat with magical powers. In the stage show, both have striking, prominent roles  – as well as their own introductory songs  – but Nunn contends developing them further ‘would make the whole project a different show – which then invites negative questions about why it was attempted’ (ibid.). The stage show had no major characters, save perhaps Grizabella, but the conventions of Hollywood storytelling required a goal-oriented protagonist (or protagonists) to orient the narrative trajectory. Which cat would emerge from the ensemble as said protagonist became a source of contention among the creative team. In moments like these, creative agents renegotiate creative power time and again, as one of the original architects of the stage show contends with the film’s ostensible author over character use. While Stoppard brings dramatic credentials, Nunn’s directorial experience and continuing investment in the show create an amicable, but noticeable, tension within the production. By March 1994, Stoppard had produced a rough draft for Lloyd Webber and Nunn but insisted it not circulate beyond the three of them (Stoppard 1994b). Arguably, as a stage show, the lead characters are Old Deuteronomy and Grizabella, but the screenplay elevates Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer to a central role. They almost drown in the opening scene, only to be saved by Demeter, who introduces them into the world of the Jellicle cats. Stoppard casts Grizabella as a Jellicle cat who was rejected by the other Jellicles

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because she loved Macavity; when he rejects her, she has no one and wonders around pathetically. Macavity kidnaps Old Deuteronomy, and the Jellicles respond by forming a search party. The original plans called for Macavity to be electrocuted on the live rail of the train tracks during a confrontation with Mr Mistoffelees, but Stoppard instead has Macavity swept away by rushing water during a showdown on the bridge with Mungojerrie. From here, the film would return to the stage version: Old Deuteronomy would return to the Jellicles and select Grizabella to ascend to the Heaviside Layer. While the screenplay remains faithful to much of Nunn’s treatment, the true challenge for Stoppard appears to be in condensation, both in moving the action along and jettisoning unnecessary songs or shortening those songs that will remain in the film. Working with Lloyd Webber and Nunn necessitated a change to Stoppard’s usual writing protocol. Normally, as a playwright, he would not have shared a manuscript with anyone during drafting because he would not have to, but the demands of financing and producing a film as well as adapting an existing property written by someone else necessitated compromising his preferred creative approach. It is interesting to note that Spielberg and, more importantly, Universal are left out of the discussion at this stage. Nevertheless, Stoppard found himself fighting Universal on his contract for Cats. He insists animating Cats, rather than filming live-action version, ‘was our decision (Andrew’s/Trevor’s and mine)’ (Stoppard 1994c), though that particular choice clearly preceded Stoppard’s attachment to the project by several years. By virtue of what Stoppard deems a ‘historical anomaly’, Universal planned to issue the home video as ‘authorless’, thereby cutting him out of any bonus contingent upon those sales (ibid.). By this point, Stoppard was preparing the first draft, despite having no signed agreement between Universal and himself. As he assured his attorney, Anthony Jones, ‘I need hardly point out that in working thus far without a contract I am accommodating a schedule and an urgency which are not mine’ (ibid.). Stoppard deferred to the conventions of the Writers Guild of America, and his concerns gesture not only toward how industrial entities define authorship, but how such definitions are often bargained out rather than firmly established. Stoppard continued to work on the script, relaying messages to Lloyd Webber and Nunn via fax and occasionally meeting in Lloyd Webber’s flat to work out the intricacies of the developing plotline. Yet by early April, Stoppard still had no contract. He informed his lawyer he would no longer meet with Lloyd Webber and Nunn until an agreement was made: ‘Enough is enough’ (Stoppard 1994d). Stoppard’s contractual woes were presumably assuaged by May, when a meeting was held to discuss the state of the script. Suggestions included a more developed backstory for Grizabella, further emphasis on the threat posed by Macavity the Mystery Cat (who will kidnap Old Deuteronomy, in the central storyline) and positioning Demeter as the central female love

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interest. Again, the authors consider the animators’ interests, suggesting an expansion of Mr Mistoffelees, who an unspecified participant describes as ‘an animator’s dream come true with his magical powers and dazzling display of tricks’ (‘Notes Summarizing Discussion’ 1994). The film does have one considerable rut: its timing surpasses 100 minutes, 15 minutes more than the ideal length. To accommodate this problem, the authors decide both to scale back the musical numbers and remove some characters entirely (ibid.). By summer, Steven Spielberg re-entered the picture, literally and figuratively. He had somewhat withdrawn from the production prior to Stoppard’s arrival, but as the project neared a viable draft, he reassumed his role as executive producer and Stoppard began to share drafts with him. In July, Stoppard wrote to Spielberg to lament the burden of his professional obligations to his stage work and the script. He had been in Australia to prepare a production of his new play, Arcadia, and then to Tahiti to revise Cats. Expanding Macavity’s antagonistic role in the text – as the kidnapper of Old Deuteronomy – had exacerbated extant narrative difficulties, while the running time continued to prove cumbersome. Nevertheless, with Spielberg now taking a more active role in production, Stoppard planned to deliver the next draft of the script by early August. The next draft proved no less problematic for Stoppard, as efforts to scale back on ‘Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats’, the opening number, resulted in a mere loss of two seconds. Notes from Amblin in September revealed a mixed reception by the executives, despite claims that this version represents ‘a joyous leap forward [with] a greater sense of clarity to the story, but not at the expense of its mystery and elusiveness’ (‘Outline for Revisions from Amblin to Tom Stoppard’ 1994). Finally, the running time comes under 90 minutes, but the studio reminds Stoppard the agreed upon length is 80–85 minutes. They wrote, ‘we need to find further cuts and trims’ (ibid.), and despite this collegial sense of shared responsibility, the onus clearly rests on Stoppard’s shoulders. Steven Spielberg’s extensive notes on the third draft in October 1994 generated even more headaches for Stoppard. The plot still remained unclear to the representatives at Amblin, and the film’s animators ‘unanimously raised the question of what this movie is supposed to be about at its core’ (‘Outline for Revisions from Steven Spielberg to Tom Stoppard’ 1994). While the nameless Universal executives had requested more emphasis on Demeter’s characterization, Spielberg wanted refocused attention on Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, the playful pair of cat burglars whom Eliot describes as ‘knockabout clowns, quick-change comedians, tight-rope walkers and acrobats’ (Eliot 1967: 27). For Spielberg, at least, they were clearly the lead characters whose storyline ‘embod[ies] the movie’s theme and microcosm’ (‘Outline for Revisions from Steven Spielberg to Tom Stoppard’ 1994). This reading of Cats curiously countered efforts by Lloyd Webber and Nunn, neither of whom saw the two as protagonists, though they did discuss plans

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to have Mungojerrie long for Demeter. Spielberg, too, had issues with cat versus human aspect of the cats’ behaviour, deeming the issue one worthy of continued attention. In his extensive feedback to Stoppard, Spielberg was sparse on praise: Macavity’s introduction is misplaced, Rum Tum Tugger’s song ‘literally stops the show’, Grizabella’s presence is sporadic and ‘not very satisfying’, Old Deuteronomy needs to be warmer, perhaps even charmingly senile. ‘If you look at the pages,’ Spielberg noted, ‘you’ll see you did this a bit, but never committed to telling the story’ (ibid.). Spielberg’s approach and tone were markedly different than his British counterparts: he’s assertive, rather than suggestive, preferring imperatives over proposals for reconsideration. Of course, as producer and head of Amblin, he approaches the project as a film executive, rather than in the paternal way one finds evidence of in Lloyd Webber’s and Nunn’s correspondence. His manner – occasionally curt, often authoritative – exposes the expectations and mores of the industrial culture behind American filmmaking in contrast to the expectations within the British theatre. The failure of Cats partially results from the inability to negotiate the storytelling conventions and industrial cultures of Hollywood and the West End. Concurrently, Spielberg was developing plans for DreamWorks, his studio with David Geffen (coincidentally, one of the original producers of the Broadway production of Cats) and Jeffrey Katzenberg, formerly Eisner’s right-hand man at Disney and the executive overseeing feature animation at Disney. This endeavour would eventually lead to the end of Spielberg’s partnership with Universal as well as the closing of Amblin and Amblimation, effectively stalling Cats. At this point, DreamWorks preoccupied Spielberg’s time, forcing his attention to Cats to be intermittent and perhaps explaining his occasionally curt commentary on its progress. What Spielberg ultimately lobbied for was the emotionally-oriented family fare that had become indicative of his personal brand: ‘what’s important is to develop and write really warm character and story moments so that the scenes between the songs don’t just feel like connective tissue’ (ibid.). In doing so, we see an increasingly complex notion of authorship at work in Hollywood set in relief against the more traditional model often found in the theatre prior to this era. The rising costs of theatrical productions of British megamusicals in the 1980s and 1990s revived the flailing Broadway theatre but also led corporate-produced shows that moved away from the helm of visionary producers like David Merrick and Harold Prince towards large creative teams of executives who had a strong hand in funding, developing, and producing the show (Adler 2004: 5, 32). While Stoppard presumably will be credited with writing the film, different artistic visions and interests converge through the various production discourses. Caldwell has observed that within animation (specifically television, but I  would broaden it to feature films, too), ‘new forms of organization and divisions of labour allow [films] to look authorless. This process underscored and cultivated a sense of

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the production company’s brand rather than an awareness of an individual director’s or writer’s identity’ (2008: 241). As a result, any notion of singular authorship, at least in this context, remains wholly fraught and untenable. That December, Stoppard sat down with Mel Gussow, drama critic for the New York Times, for another interview in a series that would later comprise Gussow’s Conversations with Stoppard. Probed about his involvement with the adaptation of Cats, Stoppard amiably replied, It’s one of the few collaborations I’ve enjoyed. I like working with myself usually. But because of the songs and the music, I couldn’t work by myself. I had to sell Andrew and Trevor on the advisability of changing the order of the songs. It all ended up quite happily, and artists are drawing away. (Quoted in Gussow 1995: 89) In March 1995, Gussow sent Stoppard the transcripts for review in preparation for publication. Stoppard revised the final line of the above quotation accordingly: ‘It all ended up quite happily, and artists are drawing away, but that doesn’t mean it’s my screenplay they are drawing’ ‘Chapter 6 and 7 Typescript’ (n.d.). In the margins, Stoppard noted that he had heard from Spielberg that another writer had assumed work on the project.

Conclusion In early 1995, Stoppard left the Cats project under unclear circumstances. Following a November meeting with Spielberg in New York, he had revised and delivered the next draft of the screenplay. In a note to Kathleen Kennedy, co-founder and president of Amblin Entertainment, Stoppard wrote with resignation, ‘I (and Trevor) think the best script (honouring Eliot/Lloyd Webber/Nunn equally) was my 2nd draft. I have heard nothing from Steven or from anyone. I expect it’s going to be lionized’ (‘Bound Typescript with Holograph Corrections’ 1995). Though other screenwriters tackled the project, the ultimate fate of the animated Cats remained unclear. With the beginning of DreamWorks Animation, Amblimation folded and with it seemingly went Cats. In 1998, Lloyd Webber’s production company, Really Useful Group Films, produced a live action version on a closed stage in London. The resulting video received a limited theatrical release before airing on PBS and being distributed on home video by Universal. Two years later, Cats closed on Broadway as the longest-running show in American theatre history; a few years after, however, another megamusical, Les Misérables, eclipsed Cats, before it was itself surpassed by Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, which is still running as of February 2020. In 2006, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Steven Spielberg sat next to each other at the Kennedy

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Center Honors, where both were recognized for their lifetime achievements and lasting contributions to the arts. Each represents unparalleled success, but here in this discussion of their under-discussed ‘failure’, we see how such success is attempted and how failure can occur. The history of the failed animated adaptation of Cats is not their story – or failure – alone. It reveals the creative process of Tom Stoppard, whose own achievements in the theatre not only testify to his considerable talent but also to the cultural capital he brings to a project whose artistic merits may be deemed suspect by the cultural elite. To an extent, Tom Stoppard not only brought Cats a plot; he also brought it respectability. In failing to write the script that passed Spielberg’s standards, Stoppard ironically succeeded in maintaining his authorial agency.9 Though he ultimately left the project, studying this failure reveals any sense of his authorship that we might have assumed, even if he had completed his work on it, would have been much richer and more intricate than popular and trade discourses around filmmaking would have led us to believe. What goes unproduced, at least in this case, underscores the varying interests, values and objectives within commercial filmmaking – or any media production, for that matter. While the contents of numerous film archives can attest to the complexity of authorship, special attention to unproduced scripts may reveal conflicting interests, developing and divergent artistic visions, and the battle of egos that can occur as brands, personalities, world views, aesthetics and powers collide behind the scenes and are unable to compromise. Because these tensions could not be rectified, they unintentionally provide keen insights into systemic failures that laid the groundwork for future innovation or nurtured an ongoing rift between individuals, industries, or both. Media studies scholarship understandably explores how the media industries work, but foregrounding unproduced media might help to map out how and to what extent they temporarily, periodically, or ultimately failed to operate with their usual efficiency. Development and pre-production have been a major focus of research by production cultures scholars Julie D’Acci, Elana Levine and Denise Mann, among others.10 Their studies, however, very often privileged successful texts, such as Cagney & Lacey, General Hospital or Lost. What histories are lost when the show goes unproduced, unaired, unarchived? How might we recuperate those histories, and what might they tell us? Production studies of unproduced media provides a potentially generative inroad for historiography and industrial analysis as one explores the labour, power dynamics and everyday realities of media production. Rather than focusing on what went wrong so as to prevent future failure, unproduction studies may uncover creative and industrial tensions that, in fact, reveal themselves to be alternative models of success, as in when a writer refuses to compromise her artistic vision or a production team actively works to revise narrative conventions only to be stymied by corporate intervention.

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Future studies might offer a more intensive study of the pre-production stage, including tracing the network of practitioners who contribute (or even hinder) to the development process. Similarly, one might examine interpersonal, interprofessional or interindustrial tensions that arise in development and on the set itself that can serve to delay, derail or destroy a production altogether. While this case study focused on a study of a relatively small number of industrial actors, future studies may further complicate the study of authorship, adaptation, and industrial convergence by exploring in greater detail the complex networks of stakeholders that develop within the pre-production, including but not limited to screenwriters, producers, directors, actors, agents, managers, assistants, script doctors, industrial representatives and executives. Production studies has traditionally focused on below-the-line labour, but in this instance, the project did not make it much further than early animation efforts. Nevertheless, a hierarchy clearly emerges between Lloyd Webber, Stoppard and Nunn as theatre talent and Spielberg as the movie talent. Though the former had all experience considerable success on the stage, leading some to even compare Lloyd Webber to Spielberg, in the context of the film industry, Spielberg takes precedent. What emerges is not only an interesting reorganization of power but also a case study in the cultures that arise within art forms and the accompanying industries and what transpires at the creative level during moments of industrial convergence. Furthermore, failure studies suits production studies – and cultural studies in general – particularly well because of its investment in the neglected and the invisible, allowing us to interrogate structures of power within the media industry. Unproduction studies could follow in that vein, resisting industrial logic, values and ambitions. We might return to Walter Benjamin, who advises that ‘empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers’ (1969:  256). Similarly, Judith Halberstam contends, ‘Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism. A market economy must have winners and losers, gamblers and risk takers, conmen and dupes’ (2011: 88). While Halberstam’s project aims to recuperate failure as an artistic and intellectual future for queer studies, we might broaden this endeavour to resist extant hegemonies with media studies praxis. Forsaking the winners in favour of the ‘losers’, broadly defined, we can also engage in a cultural studies praxis that resists capitalist ideals and ‘refus[es] to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline and as a form of critique’ (ibid.). If cultural studies of media industry studies truly hopes to stand in opposition – rather than in service – to the industry, it must resist giving sole attention to the ‘winners’, the heard and the visible. In that way, we can engage in a truly radical critical praxis that seeks to understand and to unsettle, to examine and to expose, to analyse and to mobilize. In failure, we can find an alternative (to) success – one that resists convention and control, empowers the disenfranchised, inspires innovative approaches for media history.

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Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Blake Atwood, Tom Schatz and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. Additional thanks to the staff of the Harry Ransom Center for their research assistance. This chapter was originally published in the journal The Velvet Light Trap, no. 80, Fall 2017: 18–31. It has been updated for this collection with the kind permission of the author, Peter Kunze.

Notes 1. Writing in The New York Times in 1987, John Rockwell observes, ‘We live, we are told, in the age of the musical in decline and the opera in crisis. By his very success, Lloyd Webber has proven that there is an eager, enthusiastic public that will support ambitiously conceived, large-scale works of musical theater’ (30). 2. For more on ‘whigish’ history, consult Robert Sklar. 3. Similarly, we might also argue that projects are cancelled to prevent failure. To a certain extent, these projects remain failures, even if the producers, production company, or studio feels that they have avoided commercial failure by cancelling the project during pre-production. 4. Scholarship also exist on these failures. E.g. consult Jean-Michel Frodon (2013) and Jason Sperb (2012). 5. It should be mentioned that cultural studies of production predate Caldwell’s book, especially work in feminist media studies by scholars Julie D’Acci (1994) and Elana Levine (2001). 6. In fact, John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation (1990) and the subsequent film version (Schepisi 1993) features a running gag about how the pretentious Manhattanites at the centre of the film alternately find Cats to be banal (‘an all-time low in a lifetime of theatregoing’), yet they leap at the chance to be included in the Sidney Poitier-directed adaptation allegedly in the works. (Thank you to the anonymous reviewer who brought this plot point to my attention.) Clearly, Guare uses Cats as emblematic of the New York elite’s rejection of the increasing populism and spectacle of Broadway, though they are enamoured with the idea of being featured in a film directed by Sidney Poitier, no less. The latter point connects to Guare’s larger lambasting of his protagonists’ white liberal racism. 7. For further discussion of Eliot’s fondness for music halls, and Modernism’s engagement with popular culture more broadly, consult Faulk (2001: 603–21). 8. Ironically, ‘Memory’ is the most popular song in the show but is not based on a poem in Practical Cats. The lyrics were largely written by Cats director Trevor Nunn, though he found his inspiration in Eliot’s poem, ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (1911).

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9. The Don Bluth Collection at the Savannah College of Art and Design includes a script for Cats by Phil Nibbelink and Dick Zondag, dated 15 March 1996, which suggests that not only did the project persist for at least another two years, but Spielberg sought a new animation team as well. 10. Consult D’Acci (1994), Levine (2001) and Mann (2009).

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Sperb, J. (2012), Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Stoppard, T. (n.d.), Stoppard to Trevor Nunn, Box 56, Folder 4, TSP. Stoppard, T. (1994a), Stoppard to Trevor Nunn and Andrew Lloyd Webber, 8 February, Box 56, Folder 4, TSP. Stoppard, T. (1994b), Stoppard to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn, 24 March, Box 56, Number 5, TSP. Stoppard, T. (1994c), Stoppard to Anthony Jones, 24 March, Box 56, Folder 7, TSP. Stoppard, T. (1994d), Stoppard to Anthony Jones, 6 April, Box 56, Folder 7, TSP. Wasko, J., and Meehan, E.R. (2013), ‘Critical Crossroads or Parallel Routes? Political Economy and New Approaches to Study Media Industries and Cultural Products’, Cinema Journal, 52 (3): 150–7. Watson, P. (199), ‘Lloyd Webber: Composer as Industry’, New York Times, 1 April. ‘What’s a Jellicle Cat?: The Making of Cats: The Video’ (2000), Cats [Mallet 1998], Universal, DVD. Wolfe, C. (2009), ‘From Failure: On Prepositions and History’, The Velvet Light Trap, 64: 98–9. Wyatt, J. (1994), High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood, Austin: University of Texas Press.

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8 Assembling Frankenstein Kieran Foster

In 1957, the British production company Hammer Films released The Curse of Frankenstein into cinemas. Directed by Terence Fisher and starring Peter Cushing, the film (the first ever British colour gothic horror) proved a commercial triumph for the company, and Hammer would go on to capitalize on its success, producing an adaptation of Dracula in 1958 (also directed by Fisher) and subsequently cementing its reputation as an expert in the gothic horror genre. The year 1958 also saw the release of a sequel to The Curse of Frankenstein entitled The Revenge of Frankenstein (Fisher 1958). A slew of sequels eventually followed (six Hammer films featuring Frankenstein were produced between 1958 and 1974, and eight Dracula films followed Hammer’s original, made between 1958 and 1974)  with Hammer’s varied production slate often buoyed by a new gothic horror offering. The groundbreaking success of The Curse of Frankenstein and its subsequent impact on Hammer have been written on extensively (see Pirie 1973, Hutchings 1993, Rigby 2002, Kinsey 2002, Hearn and Barnes 2007, Meikle 2009, Hearn 2011), and Hammer itself has been the subject of extensive academic study. However, this chapter will argue that in order to provide a full and extensive history of the company, Hammer’s unmade projects must also be considered. James Caterer, in his chapter for the edited collection Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films, notes that ‘the film industry works by not making far more films than it ever actually makes … to limit investigations to those films which completed the journey from script to screen is to miss out on a potential wealth of information’ (Caterer 2008: 190). Yet despite this, unmade projects receive proportionally little attention in most film

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production histories. This chapter will detail two unmade Hammer projects developed in the late 1950s to demonstrate how, even for a company as well documented as Hammer, contextualizing unmade films into the wider canon of film history can present a number of new methodological questions about the nature of the film industry as well as illuminate new historical and production contexts within existing works. The first project that will be examined is American producer Milton Subotsky’s Frankenstein screenplay, written for Hammer in 1956. Whilst Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein was eventually written by Jimmy Sangster, Subotsky (through producer Eliot Hyman) was the first to approach Hammer with a project relating to Frankenstein. As a precursor to Hammer’s most important project, Subotsky’s Frankenstein was vital to The Curse of Frankenstein’s eventual production, and this chapter will analyse its development primarily using Subotsky’s screenplay, which is held in the Warner Bros. Archive at the University of Southern California (USC), as well as through correspondence between Hammer and Eliot Hyman held in the British Film Institute’s (BFI) Special Collections. Second, the chapter will examine Hammer’s first attempt at a television series  – The Tales of Frankenstein, developed primarily in 1957/8, in the wake of The Curse of Frankenstein’s success. The series was intended to be an American co-production with Screen Gems (the television subsidiary of Columbia) but ultimately failed to make it into production as a series, with only the pilot being produced (but never released). The series is important not only as Hammer’s first attempted television venture but as an attempt to consolidate its recent success in the gothic horror genre as well. The show was a rare misstep for Hammer at the time and shows the company having to quickly come to terms with increased American interest. In order to discuss The Tales of Frankenstein in detail, archival material held at the BFI Special Collections will be used. Specifically, internal correspondence between Michael Carreras and Sangster, a document dated 28 February 1958 titled ‘General information for Writers’ for The Tales of Frankenstein and five synopses for potential episodes, each with producer’s notes also attached. The produced pilot will also be discussed, and the analysis will be supplemented with materials from trade magazines written at the time of the show’s production. These projects are not only key to understanding Hammer’s early success but also foreground the complexity of defining an unmade film. Subotsky’s Frankenstein may not have made it to the screen, but Hammer did produce a Frankenstein film shortly after its development. The Tales of Frankenstein was never produced as a series, but a pilot was developed. Traces of these projects therefore exist outside of the archive, yet it is only there that the extent of both projects can be fully realized. As such, this focus on archival materials also draws attention to how researchers study unmade projects. With no completed text to analyse, the researcher must

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use primary materials such as correspondence, screenplays, treatments and financial documentation to understand as much as possible about these failed productions. This, like all archival research, ultimately leads to a more pragmatic methodology, with no final fixed text meaning that one must rely on the material available to draw their conclusions. With the researcher being at the mercy of the available material, it is prudent to utilize a mixed method approach, where these archival materials are supplemented by secondary sources such as trade magazines, academic works and fan magazines. This chapter will therefore not only look to examine this crucial juncture in Hammer’s history through unmade films but also reflect on the methodologies utilized in the chapter and their applications for the study of unmade works more broadly.

Enter Frankenstein: Subotsky and Hammer Films Though the 1950 Eady Levy is often cited as a crucial moment in the resurgence of Anglo-American industrial relations, Hammer Films was, by the time of the Levy’s introduction, already two years into a fruitful transatlantic partnership. In the late 1940s, Hammer were making finance and distribution deals on a film by film basis, and Hammer’s managing director James Carreras looked to ‘muster more reliable financial support’ (Harper and Porter 2003:  141). This led to a deal between Hammer and the American production company Robert Lippert Productions in 1948, to produce B-pictures for the American market. Lippert partnered with Hammer as the British company ‘could supply at reasonable cost the kind of modest B-picture that was fast dying out in Hollywood due to rising costs and a shrinking market’ (Eyles et al. 1994: 29). The relative success of the arrangement saw Lippert and Hammer sign a new five-year deal in 1950 (Harper and Porter 2003: 141). Through this deal, Hammer and Lippert utilized the Eady Levy, producing ‘unremarkable second-feature fillers made by Hammer/Exclusive featur[ing] fading American stars such as Richard Carlson, Zachary Scott, Cesar Romero, Dan Duryea, Dane Clark, Richard Conte and John Ireland’ (Springhall 2009: 15). The Lippert deal also meant that Hammer distributed twelve films to the American cinemas a year but perhaps more crucially ensured that Lippert ‘would give substantial help in fine-tuning them for that market’ (Harper and Porter 2003:  141). The actual benefits of this ‘fine-tuning’ is incalculable, but this early guidance in how best to break through into the lucrative American market was undoubtedly advantageous for Hammer and was arguably a fundamental foundation in Hammer’s later transatlantic success.

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As the 1950s progressed, the company had been bolstered by the reception of its first X-rated film The Quatermass Xperiment (Guest 1955), an adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s seminal BBC television series The Quatermass Experiment (Kneale 1953). Released in black and white, the film broke new ground for Hammer not just with its X-certificate but as arguably its first foray into the horror genre. This is put forward by Denis Meikle, who notes that with the release of The Quatermass Xperiment, ‘Hammer Horror also arrived on the scene’ (2009:  20). The year following The Quatermass Xperiment, 1956, proved to be one of the most important year in Hammer’s history. It saw the conclusion of a brief cycle of films initiated by The Quatermass Xperiment, with Quatermass 2 beginning shooting on the 21 May (Kinsey 2002: 49) heralding the end of Hammer’s short-lived black and white, X-rated science-fiction cycle (which also included X the Unknown (Norman 1956)). It also saw the end of Hammer’s longstanding deal with Robert Lippert Productions. Although the expiration of Hammer’s transatlantic partnership in 1956 could be seen as potential crisis point for Hammer, its end actually proved to be remarkably fortuitous to the company’s later success. With the Lippert deal ending, James Carreras began looking for new partners. The most effective way Carreras achieved this was through the charitable organizations of The Variety Club of Great Britain and its international branch The Variety Club, which gave Carreras access to a huge number of society’s most wealthy patrons. Carreras held a number of prominent positions in both branches, eventually serving for two terms as president of the Variety Club International from 1961 (Meikle 2009: 14). Carreras utilized his connection to the Variety Club to secure Hammer’s next partnership. Through their mutual association of the Variety Club (Kinsey 2002: 50; Pirie 2008: 57), Carreras struck a deal with Eliot Hyman and Associated Artists Pictures. This deal benefitted Hammer almost immediately when Hyman was approached by Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, two American producers fresh off their first feature film (Rock, Rock, Rock! (Price 1956)) looking to produce a version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Hyman knew exactly which company to call. James Carreras agreed to enter into a partnership with Hyman on Frankenstein, and by March 1956, ‘James and Michael Carreras had begun negotiations based on a working draft of the screenplay’ (Meikle 2009: 31). The Warner Bros. Archive at the USC holds a copy of Subotsky’s script dated 1956. The Hammer Script Archive also holds a copy of an undated and untitled scanned copy of a script which, when cross-referenced with the one held at the Warner Archive, is confirmed to be a duplicate of Subotsky’s script. Though the script did not necessarily have a direct textual influence on Sangster’s screenplay for The Curse of Frankenstein, it was the genesis of the Frankenstein project at Hammer, and as such was fundamental to Hammer’s later success within the gothic horror genre.

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Subotsky’s screenplay differs almost entirely from Sangster’s eventually produced script, being a more faithful adaptation of Shelley’s original novel. It is also keenly influenced by Universal’s earlier adaptations directed by James Whale, Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). It starts with a prologue startlingly similar to that of The Bride of Frankenstein. Opening ‘in the summer of 1818’ (Subotsky 1956: 1), it begins on the night that Mary Shelley conceives the novel Frankenstein. No dialogue is spoken, but the narrator notes how this night birthed ‘the greatest horror story of all time’ (Subotsky 1956: 3). Unlike Sangster’s The Curse of Frankenstein, which, despite a brief flashback of Victor as a young child, focuses entirely on Frankenstein as an adult, Subotsky’s script is mainly focused on a young Frankenstein beginning his experiments at university. Like Whale’s adaptations before it, Subotsky’s script emphasizes the creature over his creator, an important distinction to make when regarding Sangster’s later adaptation, which focuses far more on Peter Cushing’s Baron. Both Whale and Subotsky have several sequences that see the Creature having escaped Frankenstein’s laboratory and exploring the world on his own. For example, in a sequence roughly halfway through the screenplay, the Creature comes upon a child who has fallen in the lake and rescues her. However, her father and a group of villagers arrive to see the Creature standing over her and attack it, forcing it to flee. This leads directly into another loosely adapted sequence from the novel and The Bride of Frankenstein, as the Creature is taken in by a blind man who takes pity on him and offers him food and shelter. However, when the blind man’s family return, it is revealed to be the family of the girl who attacked the Creature. Theses sequences, despite having precedent in the novel, are strongly reminiscent of Whale’s previous films, a factor that would go on to be a concern for Hammer later in its production. Subotsky’s script also features a clear reference to Jack Pierce’s iconic design of the Creature in Whale’s Frankenstein films. Although giving no actual description of the Creature, Subotsky specifies the ‘electrodes on the Creature’s head’ (Subotsky 1956: 34). Removed from context, these homages to Whale’s earlier films would not be particularly notable. Adaptations of the same novel are bound to have similarities, and Subotsky’s nod to Whale’s films could be interpreted as a deferential acknowledgment of Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein’s permeation of popular culture. However, these sequences and homages became one of the fundamental reasons Subotsky’s script was eventually deemed unsuitable at Hammer. The ubiquity of Universal’s Frankenstein series (1931–48) meant that Universal did not take Hammer’s decision to produce their own version lightly. With a sense of ownership over the property, Universal looked to curtail Hammer at every turn, raising ‘the prospect of a lawsuit against the company should their picture contain any elements, textual or otherwise, unique to their movies’ (Hearn and Barnes 2007: 22). On 23 August 1956, James Carreras

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wrote to Hyman, breaking down into five points Hammer’s strategy to deal with Universal’s attempts to stop the production. The first three deal with the fact that Mary Shelley’s novel was in fact in the public domain, and therefore, in the words of James Carreras, ‘if our screenplay is based on the book “FRANKENSTEIN” nobody on earth can do anything about it’ (Carreras 1956a). Carreras had been informed of this on the same day that he wrote to Hyman, as a letter contained in the BFI Archive and dated 24 August from an unknown source reads, With reference to our conversation over the telephone yesterday, I have made investigations and find that the work entitled ‘FRANKENSTEIN’… is in the public domain and you are entitled to make a film based thereon together with such alterations and additions thereto as you may desire (‘Letter to J. Carreras’ 1956). Although this seemed to present a clear justification for Hammer to adapt the novel itself, Carreras also highlighted a key issue this gave the production: ‘If we use any ideas in the Universal International pictures on “FRANKENSTEIN”, then we are headed for trouble’ (Carreras 1956a). Universal’s attempts to hinder Hammer’s adaptation of Frankenstein plagued the production and continued throughout its development, even after Subtosky’s script had been discarded and the project began filming. Two days into the filming of the picture, on 21 November 1956, Carreras sent a memo to Hyman noting that ‘Universal International have objected to the registration of the title “THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN” ’ and urged his American partner to ‘fight this with everything you’ve got, because we are advised here that being in the public domain anybody can call a film “Frankenstein” ’ (Carreras 1956b). This extreme pressure by Universal put Subotsky and Hammer in an extraordinarily difficult position. It immediately scuppered Hammer’s first plan for the production, which was to potentially produce the picture in black and white and enlist Boris Karloff to star (Rigby 2002: 43; Hearn and Barnes 2007: 23). Universal’s copyright concerns also immediately ruled out the prologue to Subotsky’s script and the brief note he gave on the Creature’s design. These two examples are particularly overt, but the vagueness of the wording in Universal’s threat to Hammer – ‘textual or otherwise’ – made it difficult for the company to discern what material would keep them on the right side of Universal’s lawyers. Even Subotsky’s adaptation of some of Shelley’s scenes could potentially cause issue. One of the most striking sequences in Whale’s Frankenstein sees an inversion of Shelley’s scene at the lake, where the Creature, in a tragic misunderstanding, drowns a child he had briefly befriended. This also could be said for the Creature’s visit to the blind man, which appears in the book, but is also a key sequence in Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein. These sequences, despite initially featuring in

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some form in Shelley’s novel, have elements that at least echo Universal’s own films. Despite Subotsky’s script referencing Shelley’s novel far more than Whale’s earlier films, even producers at Hammer saw the script as merely a lesser version of Universal’s adaptations. Tony Hinds, who was brought onto the project as a producer later in development, noted that one of the key reasons he eventually brought in Sangster was that Subotsky’s script ‘was a complete steal’ (cited in Meikle 2009: 35). Hammer realized that the script would fall foul of Universal. In a detailed letter to Subotsky from Michael Carreras, one of Carreras’s main concerns was the script’s similarities to Universal’s Frankenstein. He wrote, [it] must very carefully be checked that there is no parallel to the original film (Universal 1931). It is not sufficient to take the book and write an original from it; if this is done you will find that at least 80% of the good ideas were used in the original. (cited in Kinsey 2002: 50) Despite the script not being particularly well received by Carreras (and later Hinds), Hammer was clearly still considering using the script. The company sent it to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) to get its advice on what potential rating the film would receive. The script was sent back on 22 June with some minor cuts noted but relatively little resistance from the censor (Fields 1956). By this time, Hinds had come on board as a producer and was less enthusiastic about the script than Michael Carreras. With this in mind, Hinds noted to James Carreras that, due to the novel being in the public domain, Hammer was not necessarily beholden to Subotsky’s script and could develop its own (Rigby 2002: 43; Meikle 2009: 36). Sangster, who had been a production manager at Hammer since 1954 and had recently written his first feature film, X the Unknown, was offered The Curse of Frankenstein by Hinds himself. In his memoir Inside Hammer (2001), Sangster recounts that Hinds ‘asked me to start from scratch and write my version based on the original book’ (2001: 27). Sangster also notes that ‘I had no idea at the time that there was a script already in existence, and to this day I’ve never read it’ (ibid.). Given Sangster’s position as a production manager at the company, one would think that Sangster was at least aware of the ongoing pre-production of Frankenstein. However, there is no contradictory evidence to Sangster’s claim of having never seen Subotsky’s script, though it does share one overt similarity to his own. Both begin with Baron Frankenstein in prison, with a visit causing him to recount his misadventures. The flashbacks then form the main crux of the film. This does not occur in the book and is either a coincidental use of a framing device, or Sangster utilizing a small element of Subotsky’s former script. Sangster avoids the pitfalls of Subotsky’s script by producing an extremely loose adaptation of Shelley’s novel. Furthermore, Sangster puts some

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distance between his screenplay and Universal’s films not only by altering key parts of the narrative but also by drastically altering the characterisation of Frankenstein himself. Sangster notes that ‘the first major change I made was to make Baron Frankenstein the villain, as opposed to the monster’ (ibid.: 28). Colin Clive’s portrayal of the monster’s creator in Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein was of a driven and often obsessive man compelled to push the boundaries of science for the greater good of mankind. However, he was by no means the primary focus of the films, which ‘centred on the Monster rather than Frankenstein himself’ (Hutchings 1993: 101). In contrast, Sangster’s Baron is an arrogant, unsympathetic and murderous figure. With both narrative and characterization dramatically altered in his draft, Sangster’s script put crucial distance between Universal’s films series and Hammer’s upcoming gothic horror. Not only did these changes shift Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein away from Universal’s earlier films, but just by merely hiring Sangster, the perception of the project markedly changed. Subotsky and Rosenberg’s involvement with the project, instigated by Eliot Hyman, highlighted the transatlantic partnership between Hammer and Hyman. However, despite Hyman still being a critical part of the project’s financing (Barnett 2014: 233– 7), Sangster’s hiring meant that the project’s cast, director, producers and writer were all British. Therefore Hammer, by bringing in Sangster instead of Subotsky, created another degree of separation by crafting what is essentially an entirely British production. The film’s release and subsequent international success laid the groundwork for Hammer’s later gothic horrors. However, this examination of Subotsky’s script and the production context of The Curse of Frankenstein more broadly demonstrates how some of the key components of Hammer’s gothic horror formula were dictated by circumstance rather than long-term strategizing. Subotsky’s script would have undoubtedly presented a more conventional take on the material, but despite clear misgivings from Hammer producers such as Hinds, Hammer did initially seem content enough to send the script for approval to the BBFC, with the intent to seemingly produce the picture in black and white. It was Universal’s insistence that the production differ entirely from their own which caused Hammer to seriously reconsider the project again. Subotsky’s script featured many key sequences and characters from Shelley’s novel, and as such featured enough similar material to Universal’s films to worry Hammer. Hinds’s decision to hire Sangster to produce his own Frankenstein script was prudent not only due to Sangster’s desire to radically alter the characters and events of the novel, but also due to his status as a former production manager. In an interview with Wayne Kinsey, Sangster notes that one of the first questions he asked Hinds on being offered the assignment was ‘how much are we going to spend on the picture?’ (in Kinsey 2010:  97). Sangster’s experience in managing a

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production, and his knowledge of Hammer’s frugal budgets, made him a more than adept replacement for Subotsky. Sangster’s ideas would ignite Hinds’s enthusiasm for the project, leading to its eventual shooting in colour. Almost every memorable component of what would become Hammer’s gothic horror formula would be visible in The Curse of Frankenstein, yet as the above clearly demonstrates, many of its most enduring facets, such as its focus on an antagonistic Baron Frankenstein over the creature and startlingly original creature design, came about through the lessons learned in the troubled production process of Subotsky’s Frankenstein.

Hammer in America: Tales of Frankenstein Hammer soon capitalized on the monumental success of The Curse of Frankenstein. In October 1957, Hammer submitted Sangster’s screenplay for Dracula to the BBFC, and in November that same year, the sequel to The Curse of Frankenstein – The Revenge of Frankenstein – was also submitted to the BBFC. Hammer was quick to respond to audiences’ desire for more gothic horror films but also looked to bring this success to television as well. Two crucial deals in the months of June and September 1957 facilitated what was to be Hammer’s first foray into television. The first was between Universal and Screen Gems, Columbia’s television production subsidiary, with Billboard noting ‘the acquisition of 550 Universal features’ (Strong 1957:  18). This deal saw Screen Gems acquire a substantial portion of Universal’s pre-1948 horror product, which was packaged as Shock! or Shock Theater. This was the first package of horror films on the television market, and within little more than a week, nine television stations had ‘shelled out some $2,500,000 for Screen Gem’s new “Shock” package of 52 chillers’ (‘Stations Loves Those Chillers, SG’s $2,500,000 Sales on U Pix’ 1957:  28, 40). Horror on television was clearly immensely profitable for Screen Gems and Columbia and laid the groundwork for a more ambitious venture further down the line. The second deal came in September 1957 and was between Hammer and Columbia. Despite The Curse of Frankenstein proving to be a huge success for Hammer and Eliot Hyman, the financial partnership had been extremely testing. This is notable in correspondence from James Carreras to Hyman, sent on 1 October 1957. Carreras began his letter clearly referencing an accusation levelled at him by Hyman: ‘Hysterical you suggest. After looking through our correspondence it’s a wonder I’m not biting lumps out of the carpet’ (Carreras 1957a). Carreras also underlined the key issue between Hammer and Hyman:  ‘No pre-production cash from you and your share twelve days after the shooting starts  – What sort of 50/50 partnership is that’? (Carreras 1957a).

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Eager to move on from this after the success of The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer secured a three-picture deal with Columbia in September 1957. The 11 September 1957 issue of Variety notes that the three films produced under the deal were to be The Snorkel (Green 1958), The Camp on Blood Island (Guest 1958) and The Blood of Frankenstein, which was the sequel to The Curse of Frankenstein that would later be renamed The Revenge of Frankenstein. The deal secured Hammer worldwide distribution for all three pictures and 50 per cent financing for The Snorkel and The Camp on Blood Island (with Hammer fully financing The Revenge of Frankenstein) (Myers 1957: 7, 12). Crucially, this deal also gave Hammer access to Columbia’s Screen Gems, and less than two weeks later, Screen Gems announced its own television show Tales of Frankenstein. Interestingly, Hammer is not mentioned in the article, and the series was touted as having Boris Karloff set to ‘host and occasionally star’ (‘SG’s “Frankenstein” ’ 1957:  31). By late October, however, Hammer’s involvement as co-producers on the show was made clear and the nature of the deal was further explained. In the 23 October issue of Variety, the trade noted that ABC (the American Broadcasting Company), had agreed to co-produce the venture (‘ABC, Screen Gems Set ‘Frankenstein’ 1957:  50). The same article outlined that ‘production on the show will be split between Hollywood and England, with Bryan Foy producing shows on the Coast and James Carreras … in England’ (‘ABC, Screen Gems Set ‘Frankenstein’ 1957: 50). The article also went on to note that the Tales of Frankenstein will be an anthology series and that Boris Karloff ‘is now out of the picture’ (ibid.). The BFI Archive holds materials that detail internal correspondence at Hammer and which demonstrate that Hammer was taking the opportunity of American syndication very seriously. The earliest letter is from Sangster and was undated, accompanied by what is clearly Michael Carreras’s reply, dated 15 October 1957. Sangster’s original letter (presumably written a week or less before this), detailed eight potential avenues in which he would take the Frankenstein character. These various escapades include (but are not limited to) the Baron dabbling in ‘voodoo’ and ‘black magic’, having a ‘set to with Zombies’ and trying to comprehend ‘how much pain can a human being stand’ (Sangster n.d.). Carreras writes back to Sangster asking if he ‘would be available to write six thirty-minute stories for this series’ (Carreras 1957). Tony Hinds was designated to oversee production for Hammer in America (Hearn and Barnes 2007:  36), which makes it clear that Hammer was looking to closely replicate the success of The Curse of Frankenstein by utilizing the same creative team. An article in Broadcasting notes that the series was to have thirty-nine episodes, with twenty produced in the United States under producer Bryan Foy, whilst James Carreras would produce nineteen in the United Kingdom (‘ABC-TV, SG Agree on “Frankenstein” ’ 1957: 90). The article also notes that the series was looking to be shown in the 1958/9 season on American television. The pilot for Tales

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of Frankenstein (Siodmak) was produced in January 1958, with German actor Anton Diffring in the title role. This immediately shows an increase in Hammer’s relationship with American studios, with this project not only relying on American financiers and distributors but actually planning on filming half of the episodes in America as well, handing over control of these episode to Foy. However, before examining the pilot (ultimately the only produced episode of the series), it is worth examining Hammer’s long-term plan for the series, which was set out in a document dated 28 February 1958 and titled ‘General information for Writers’. This detailed document was to act as a bible for writers drafted in to work on the show, covering the length of each episode, recurring sets and characters (and character profiles), and notes to producers on how to select and engage writers for the series. The document noted that the series will be twenty-six episodes (down from the originally mooted thirty-nine), with thirteen made in the United Kingdom. Surprisingly, the document also revealed that only eight of these ‘will actually include the character of Baron Frankenstein’ (‘General Information for Writers’ 1958). The BFI Archive holds five treatments for potential episodes dated between March and April 1958 (Bryan 1958, Dryhurst 1958, Kersh 1958, Rawlinson 1958, Woodhouse 1958, ).  These synopses are by five separate writers and do not seem to be based on any of Sangster’s brief story outlines in his correspondence. Some of the writers drafted in for the project however were extremely experienced. For example, A. R. Rawlinson (writer of The Man Who Knew Too Much (Hitchcock 1934)) had been a prolific writer for nearly four decades when he was drafted in to write the first synopsis. This first synopsis is of note not just because of the pedigree of the writer, but for the many story elements that are incorporated within later Hammer Frankenstein films. The story outline sees a man named Peter visiting Frankenstein’s home village and falling for a woman called Lisa, whom he meets outside Frankenstein’s castle. They talk, but Peter notices a peculiar relationship between the Baron and Lisa. After Peter demands that the Baron let her leave the castle with him, the Baron says he will if Peter can persuade Lisa to leave. As Peter declares his love for her, Lisa stabs him in the shoulder. The Baron and Peter eventually try to subdue Lisa, but she falls from the stairs and is killed. The Baron reveals to Peter that Lisa was one of his creations, born with no heart or soul, and due to this, had slowly become evil. At the end of the episode, Peter leaves the castle as the Baron goes back to his laboratory. Producer Tony Hinds wrote of the synopsis: ‘I feel that the story is acceptable up to paragraph 24. From there on, it should be improved. It might be an idea to keep the girl alive and to use her in say, story number 2’ (Hinds 1958a). Despite a relatively lukewarm response to the synopsis from Hinds, elements of Rawlinson’s story can be identified in Frankenstein Created Woman (Fisher 1967), which sees the doomed

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romance of two villagers result in the creation of a female monster by Frankenstein. Produced nearly a decade later, Frankenstein Created Woman has parallels with Rawlinson’s plot synopsis and, interestingly, is written by Hinds under his pseudonym John Elder. Another treatment held at the BFI also seemingly influences a later film. The fifth treatment was written by Peter Bryan and begins with Frankenstein approaching a successful hypnotist named Khotan for help waking his new creature. Frankenstein has successfully transferred a brain into a new host, but the Creature is effectively brain-dead. Frankenstein hopes that Khotan (who is in fact a disgraced Austrian doctor) will be able to use hypnosis to finally awaken it. The hypnosis is successful, but the Creature immediately kills Khotan (and the Creature itself is also killed in the struggle). Khotan awakens but finds his mind has been transferred into the body of the Creature, and Frankenstein strongly implies that this had been his plan all along. Khotan hypnotizes Frankenstein and attempts to put his own mind into a less monstrous body but fails. In his last act, he hypnotizes his daughter into killing him, making her instantly forget the moment she does it. This synopsis is notable as, like Rawlinson’s, it has a number of key similarities with an eventually produced Frankenstein film, in this case, The Evil of Frankenstein (Francis 1964). The film is again written by Hinds (under the pseudonym John Elder) and sees the Baron seek the services of the hypnotist Zoltan in waking his Creature. Zoltan plays a more antagonistic role than Khotan, hypnotizing the Creature for his own malevolent purposes. Despite this small alteration, the similarities are startling, particularly as it was Hinds who initially commented on Bryan’s synopsis, noting, ‘I like this. There may be too much plot, but this can be remedied in the screenplay’ (Hinds 1958b). Although neither Rawlinson nor Bryan was credited in later productions (although not stated in the document, it is likely Hammer owned the rights to the synopses once submitted), Bryan did go on to work for Hammer in the 1960s, writing the screenplays for The Hound of the Baskervilles (Fisher 1959), The Brides of Dracula (Fisher 1960)  and The Plague of the Zombies (Gilling 1966). Despite these intriguing synopses (which also included adventures such as the Baron cloning himself), the project ultimately came undone after only a pilot was shot. Initially, Hinds was sent to oversee the production of the pilot but soon returned to England frustrated with the project (Hearn and Barnes 2007:  36). Michael Carreras reportedly flew out to Hollywood in mid-November (‘Carreras Makes Vidpic Pilot on “Frankenstein” ’ 1957: 16), and star Diffring followed in early December (‘Diffring Coast-Bound for “Frankenstein” ’ 1957:  52). According to the ‘General Information for Writers’ document, the production commenced in January 1958. Carreras would later note that the experience in America overseeing the pilot was ‘one of the unhappiest experiences of my screen career’ (Hearn and Barnes 2007:  36), and it is clear that there was a significant tension between

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Columbia/Screen Gems and Hammer over the portrayal of the Baron and his creation, and the tone of the Frankenstein television series. As noted, Hammer initially turning to Sangster and Hinds to write and produce the project indicates they were looking to replicate the success of The Curse of Frankenstein. Sangster himself, in his brief plot synopses sent to Michael Carreras, suggested that this will be the same antagonistic and ruthless Baron he wrote in The Curse of Frankenstein, noting that in one story Frankenstein ‘becomes interested in Black Magic and the power of the Devil … he considers the Devil and he have a certain affinity’ (Sangster n.d.). However, the pilot is far from Hammer’s depiction of the Baron, and the overall tone of the pilot (widely available since falling out of copyright) is more aligned with Universal’s 1930s/40s cycle. Notably, the director of the pilot and executive producer on the project was Curt Siodmak, who had been a crucial figure in much of Universal’s 1940s horror output. Siodmak had written the screenplay for The Invisible Man Returns (May 1940), The Wolf Man (Waggner 1941)  and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Neill 1943), as well as directing Son of Dracula in 1943. Compounding this notion, Screen Gems’ acquisition of Universal’s horror output for television also gave the company the right to utilize elements of Universal’s Frankenstein on the small screen. This is clear in the design of Frankenstein’s Monster in the pilot. Quite clearly a direct homage to Jack Pierce’s makeup, this move away from Hammer and towards Universal’s original design proved to be a point of contention for Michael Carreras. On 9 December 1957, Carreras sent producer Irving Birking a memo regarding the Creature’s appearance. Attaching Hammer’s own planned designs, Carreras noted that the current design of the Creature does not go far enough and that Columbia ‘should seriously consider marking the face itself with further scar tissue and signs of burns’ (Carreras 1957b). These suggestions clearly went unheeded, with Columbia preferring to utilize Pierce’s original design. This obvious shift away from Hammer’s own iteration of Frankenstein is also clear in their depiction of the titular character. Whilst Diffring’s Baron is scheming and emotionless, he is far from Sangster and Cushing’s murderous antagonist in The Curse of Frankenstein. The difference is perhaps most striking in a sequence in the pilot where husband and wife Paul and Christine seek out the Baron in order to save Paul’s life. Paul is dying from an unspecified illness and the Baron, whose Monster needs a brain, refuses to help. When Paul succumbs to his illness shortly afterwards, the Baron digs up his body and transplants Paul’s brain into the Monster. This is in marked contrast to the strategy laid out by Cushing’s Frankenstein when he is searching for a brain for his Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein. Cushing’s Baron invites the distinguished Professor Bernstein to his castle and after he arrives, invites him to examine a painting at the top of the stairs. The Baron then throws Bernstein from the top, killing the Professor and thus securing an intelligent brain for his

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Creature. In the television pilot, the Baron’s crime (for which he is arrested at the end) is grave robbing. Whereas Hammer’s Frankenstein leaves a multitude of bodies in his wake on the quest to create life, Diffring’s more neutral Baron, Siodmak’s direction and the clear homage to Pierce’s makeup result in an episode which lacks any of Hammer’s identity. As seen in the examination of The Curse of Frankenstein, this is clearly due to the fact that nearly every production decision made on The Curse of Frankenstein was in direct opposition to Universal’s film cycle. Tales of Frankenstein offered Hammer what would have been at the time their greatest opportunity to permeate the American market. This was not just a co-financing or distribution opportunity, but the chance to have creative control over what could have potentially been a long-running series on American television. However, the show was ultimately undone by Screen Gems relying more on the legacy of Universal than the recent Hammer iteration of Frankenstein. The recruitment of Sangster and Hinds, two of Hammer’s key architects on The Curse of Frankenstein, demonstrates that Hammer was clearly hoping that Tales of Frankenstein would offer a means to bring their unique interpretation of the character to the small screen. However, Screen Gems had recently acquired Universal’s library of horror films for distribution on television, and after having great success airing them, was seemingly reluctant to move away from a tried and tested formula. This left Hammer in an impossible position. Although it is highly unlikely that Screen Gems would have entered a co-production deal with Hammer without the previous success of Shock, trying to merge the traditions of Universal’s gothics with Hammer’s new approach proved untenable, and the television show was never picked up.

Conclusion The importance of these two projects for Hammer, at a crucial period in the company’s history, has been outlined throughout the chapter. However, in a broader context, these case studies demonstrate how unmade projects can disrupt and challenge pre-existing notions in established film histories. This is clear in the examination of the production process of Milton Subotsky’s Frankenstein. Subotsky’s script and its development were crucial to The Curse of Frankenstein’s production, however, Subotsky’s importance to The Curse of Frankenstein is often minimized in other studies of Hammer, with some instead looking to the company’s previous filmography to explain their move to gothic horror. This is apparent in A History of Horrors (2009), where Meikle looks to draw a direct parallel between The Quatermass Xperiment and The Curse of Frankenstein. Meikle quotes an interview with Michael Carreras regarding a meeting at Hammer on the special effects used

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to create the final monster in The Quatermass Xperiment, and the decision to give the decidedly unhuman looking creature a human eye. Carreras recounts, The idea of putting an eye into it came up … and the semblance of the last human cry … and the whole thing changed. And I remember at the meeting only a few sentences later, I heard somebody say: ‘You mean like the monster in Frankenstein…’? I’d never heard the name Frankenstein mentioned before then, but there was certainly a spark at that meeting. (Carreras, cited in Meikle 2009: 24) Meikle goes on to note that ‘it was a spark that would ignite into a flame’ (Meikle 2009: 24), and he is not alone in encouraging this direct connection between The Quatermass Xperiment and Frankenstein. This is perhaps most blatantly demonstrated in Picart’s The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein (2002), where the author gives credit for the conception of Hammer’s gothic horror cycle solely to chairman James Carreras, suggesting that ‘he conceived of the idea of remaking the “classic” horror films of the thirties and forties, but this time in vivid and graphic color’ (Picart 2002: 99). This suggestion that it was James Carreras who envisaged Frankenstein as the next property for Hammer to adapt, or that it was through the production of The Quatermass Xperiment, discounts the fact that the eventual Frankenstein project did not even originate at the company but with the American producer Eliot Hyman and can lead to erroneous conceptions of Hammer’s own production methods. However, the foregrounding of unmade projects can offer crucial and original insights into existing areas of enquiry. For example, whilst only examining Hammer’s produced slate of films within the period of 1956–8, one could see a frictionless transition to a production and distribution model that relied heavily on American finance and distribution. However, the unmade The Tales of Frankenstein television show demonstrates that this fledging relationship was tenuous and not without difficulties. The project saw Hammer struggling to adapt to Screen Gems’ own methods of production, a fact made all the more difficult due to Screen Gems trying to incorporate elements of the Universal cycle as well. This project may not have made it to the screen, but I would argue it is crucial to any examination of Hammer’s emergence in the horror genre as it shows another potential path the company could have taken, with a focus on television over theatrical production. These unmade projects therefore do not only illuminate crucial details in Hammer’s own development but reflect the importance and necessity in contextualizing unmade case studies into wider industrial and production studies within film histories.

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References ‘ABC, Screen Gems Set ‘Frankenstein’ (1957) Variety, 208 (8): 50. ‘ABC-TV, SG Agree on “Frankenstein” ’ (1957), Broadcasting, 53 (22): 90. Barnett, V. (2014), ‘Hammering Out a Deal: The Contractual and Commercial Contexts of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 34 (2): 231–52. Bryan, P. (1958), ‘Tales of Frankenstein: Synopsis Five’, 8 May, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 19e, BFI National Archive. Carreras, J. (1956a), Correspondence with E. Hyman, 23 August, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 1b, BFI National Archive. Carreras, J. (1956b), Correspondence with E. Hyman, 21 November, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 1b, BFI National Archive. Carreras, J. (1957a), Correspondence with E. Hyman, 1 October, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 1b, BFI National Archive. Carreras, J. (1957b), Correspondence with I. Birking, 9 December, Hammer Film Productions Collection. Item 18, BFI National Archive. Carreras, M. (1957) Correspondence with J. Sangster, 15 October, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 19a, BFI National Archive. ‘Carreras Makes Vidpic Pilot on “Frankenstein” ’ (1957), Variety, 208 (13): 16. Caterer, J. (2008), ’The Mysterious Case of the House-Breaker, the Thief-Taker General, and the National Lottery’, in D. North (ed.), Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films, 189–205, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. ‘Diffring Coast-Bound for “Frankenstein” ’ (1957), Variety, 209 (2): 52. Dryhurst, E. (1958), ‘Tales of Frankenstein: Synopsis Four’, 10 April, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 19e, BFI National Archive. Eyles, A., Adkinson, R., and N. Fry (1994), House of Horror: The Complete Hammer Films Story, London: Creation Books. Fields, A. (1956), ‘Examiner’s Report’, 10 October, The Curse of Frankenstein File, British Board of Film Classification Archive, London. ‘General Information for Writers’ (1958), 28 February, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 19c, BFI National Archive. Harper, S., and Porter, V. (2003), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hearn, M., and Barnes, A. (2007), The Hammer Story: The Authorised History of Hammer Films, 2nd edn, London: Titan Books. Hearn, M. (2011), The Hammer Vault: Treasures from the Archive of Hammer Films, London: Titan Books. Hinds, A. (1958a), Correspondence with A. R. Rawlinson re. ‘Tales of Frankenstein: Synopsis One’, 26 March, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 19e, BFI National Archive. Hinds, A. (1958b), Correspondence with P. Bryan re. ‘Tales of Frankenstein: Synopsis Five’, 8 May, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 19e, BFI National Archive. Hutchings, P. (1993), Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Kersh, C. (1958), ‘Tales of Frankenstein: Synopsis Three’, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 19e, BFI National Archive. Kinsey, W. (2002), Hammer Films: The Bray Studios Years, Surrey: Reynolds & Hearn. Kinsey, W. (2010), Hammer Films: The Unsung Heroes, Sheffield: Tomahawk Press. ‘Letter to J. Carreras’ (1956), Correspondence from anonymous sender, 24 August, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 1b, BFI National Archive. Meikle, D. (2009), A History of Horrors: The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer, 2nd edn, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. Myers (1957), ‘Col ‘58 Brit. Pix Seen Getting 50% of its UK Gross’, Variety, 208 (2): 7, 12. Picart, C. (2002), The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein: Universal, Hammer, and Beyond, Westport: Praeger. Pirie, D. (1973), Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, 1946–1972, London: Gordon Fraser. Pirie, D. (2008), A New Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris. Rawlinson, A. R. (1958), ‘Tales of Frankenstein: Synopsis One’, 26 March, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 19e, BFI National Archive. Rigby, J. (2002), English Gothic, 2nd edn, Richmond: Reynolds & Hearn. Sangster, J. (n.d.), Correspondence with M. Carreras, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 19a, BFI National Archive. Sangster, J. (2001), Inside Hammer, Richmond: Reynolds & Hearn. ‘SG’s “Frankenstein” ’ (1957), Variety, 208 (4): 31. Springhall, J. (2009), ‘Hammer, House of Horror: The making of a British film company, 1934 to 1979’, Historian, winter (104): 14–19. ‘Stations Loves Those Chillers, SG’s $2,500,000 Sales on U Pix’ (1957), Variety, 207 (12): 28, 40. Strong, E. (1957), ‘SG to ‘Program’ Universal’s 550’, The Billboard, 69 (2): 18. Subotsky, M. (n.d.), Frankenstein, unpublished screenplay, c.1956, Warner Bros. Archives, University of Southern California. Woodhouse, H. (1958), ‘Tales of Frankenstein: Synopsis Two’, 1 April, Hammer Film Productions Collection, Item 19e, BFI National Archive.

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9 Burning bright: Samuel Fuller’s Tigrero and accidental ethnography Andrew Howe

In 1954, 20th Century Fox studio executive Darryl Zanuck commissioned Samuel Fuller to journey to the Amazon basin of Brazil and shoot footage of the Karajá tribe, around which the writer/director would then construct a screenplay based upon the life of Sasha Siemel. Born in Riga, Latvia, Siemel immigrated first to the United States and then Buenos Aires, finally settling in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil in 1914. He became a renowned big game hunter, successfully killing over three hundred jaguars, nearly all while armed with nothing more than a spear. Zanuck had optioned Siemel’s autobiography, Tigrero (1953), and hired Fuller to give it the Hollywood treatment. Although John Wayne, Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner were all soon attached to the project, insurance companies would not cover a shoot in such a dangerous location. The project was set aside, although Fuller did use some of the footage he shot for a dream sequence in a film he released a decade later. Nearly forty years after his visit to Brazil, Fuller returned to the Karajá in 1993, accompanied by fellow director Jim Jarmusch as an interviewer. Out of this experience came a documentary, Tigrero:  A Film That Was Never Made (1994), by Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki. The result is equal parts documentary and ethnography, serving as a time capsule for the Karajá – many of whom recognized long-deceased relatives in the footage shown to them – revealing just how much their culture had changed

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in four decades. The documentary also chronicles the case of a film left on the cutting room floor, demonstrating how such non-films have their own, captivating production history. This chapter examines how a failed project yielded fascinating insights into the inner workings of Hollywood production, as well as an accidental ethnographic study of the Karajá and their change over time.

Methodology and sources In his introduction to Scenes Unseen (1991), a study of unfinished films, Henry Waldman notes that ‘little-known stories behind the lost films and documentaries by cinema’s greatest names illustrate what fiction writers have known all along: People’s failures often contain stories more compelling than their successes’ (1–2). Waldman denotes fear as the agent that has sunk many such projects (2–3), although in this case the fear did not involve censorship of material considered threatening in some fashion but instead a fear that the actors might not be safe. Tigrero does not warrant even a mention by Waldman in his study, and to a large extent Fuller’s failed film is overlooked even in his own biographies. Along with Kaurismäki’s documentary, Fuller’s posthumously published autobiography, A Third Face, represents the bulk of focus upon this episode of his career. These aren’t the only sources that one can turn to, however, in gaining an understanding of the scope of the project, Fuller’s vision for what he hoped it would become, or the value that can be discovered in a cinematic failure that, eventually, bore fruit. The film’s failure can be contextualized within a greater context of unseen cinema, namely, in that with the passage of time and in the face of new cultural values, the Karajá were transformed from a savage race into a bellwether for the impact of globalism on indigenous culture. Aside from the documentary and autobiography, other sources help to shed light on Tigrero as a fascinating entry into the shadow cinema canon:  interviews that Fuller gave throughout his life, with journalists, biographers and other filmmakers; Siemel’s source material, Tigrero!; portions of the script that Fuller wrote before the project was nixed; photos he took during his time among the Karajá; and, the video footage he shot while visiting the tribe. These various sources, when taken in conjunction with one another, facilitate a triangulation that begins to paint a picture of how an abandoned project can, years later, gain unexpected life and morph into something similar to, but distinct from, the original project. None of this would have been possible without the creation of the documentary, however, as it is one thing to read Fuller’s wild and often seemingly exaggerated tales of the Karajá – which became more and more romantic as he progressed through life – and still another to see the photos and videos he took during

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the 1950s. This example of shadow cinema is unique in that a rough cut of the film was never made, and the sources for interpreting his vision were not available to the public in an archive or other repository. Indeed, although Fuller spoke often and freely about the Karajá and his experiences in the Mato Grosso, except for in a few rare cases he kept back the visual documentation of his trip until, along with Kaurismäki and Jarmusch, he was ready to journey back to Brazil and allow his footage to inform the birth of a new piece of art.

Sasha Siemel Following the abandonment of the project, Fuller went on to enjoy a long, and controversial, career in and out of Hollywood. Siemel’s book, however, was never made into a film following Fuller’s aborted attempt. That’s not to say that Siemel did not enjoy fame and fortune, however. Previously, he had gained notoriety for his hunting prowess following the publication of Julian Duguid’s Green Hell (1931), a non-fiction account of an expedition into the Pantanal led by Siemel, and Tiger Man (1932), Duguid’s follow-up biography of the hunter. The fact that the former was reprinted as late as 2006 and the latter 2015 indicates something about the enduring interest in Siemel’s life. The exposure these two books gave the hunter resulted in international speaking engagements, advertising campaigns and even acting gigs, including the 1946 film Jungle Terror. During the 1930s and 1940s, Siemel was something of a global celebrity, a throwback to the African big game hunters of the nineteenth century. Certainly, Siemel did much to cultivate his own celebrity, his biography containing numerous episodes of bravery and heroism, some of which test the limits of credulity. His biographers certainly helped to construct a romantic hero, isolated not only in the jungles of rural Brazil but also at the limits of human endurance. As Peter Hathaway Capstick, who dedicates a chapter to Siemel in Death in the Silent Places (1981), notes, ‘[Siemel’s] personal story is a dark reflection of the wild land and the ferocious individuality of a frontier people’ (118). Siemel himself was no stranger to over-the-top rhetoric, such as in his description, quoted in Capstick, of what it is like to fight a jaguar: A spear fight is a hard thing to describe. Rarely does it last more than a minute or two, but these moments are filled with such action, excitement, and danger that they defy words. The tigre does not come from one direction. He is everywhere at once, on this side and that, in front and trying to get behind the spearmen, circling, leaping, flashing in, and dodging back. All is a blur. (298)

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Hyperbole aside, it is well documented that Siemel used a spear to hunt jaguar, the product of an early episode where he accidentally shot himself during an attack (Siemel 1953: 288; Capstick 1981: 139). Siemel’s story is one of those that benefits from the telling, although his experiences were quite amazing even prior to their embellishment. Siemel’s biggest claim to fame, covered widely at the time, was when he killed Assassino, a jaguar who was known not only for killing cattle but also multiple men who had previously hunted him. The exploits of the cat were so notorious that those living in the Mato Grosso region had come to believe that Assassino was imbued with a supernatural spirit, much as did those who lived through the Tsavo Man-Eaters’ reign of terror in Kenya at the end of the nineteenth century (The Ghost and the Darkness, Hopkins 1996). As Capstick notes, what made the cat so deadly was the fact that it acted more like hunter than hunted: ‘Assassino had a killing technique that was born from a bullet he had once taken while treed; never treed again, but would wait until the dogs strung out in their pursuit then double back, ambushing them one by one until all were dead’ (1981:  136). Although the fact that Siemel hunted and killed this notorious cat is not in question, one has to wonder about the detailed, eight-page account Siemel gives of his climactic battle, which recounts in great detail every single feint, stab and thrust with his spear, as well as each intricate dodge and strike of the jaguar (1953: 264–72). Capstick’s account, however, takes things to an even greater level with his purple prose: The huge cattle-killing jaguar that came to be called Assassino by the backwoodsmen of the Mato Grosso had long ravaged the pantanal before Sasha ever hunted him. A feline Jack-the Ripper if ever one prowled the lonely morass of marsh, Assassino could certainly be considered a truly murderous maniac, a gigantic male that stalked and killed any animal that crossed his path for sheer fun, leaving the torn and disembowelled bodies where they lay, unless he chanced to be hungry at the moment. (1981: 135–6) One can see why Fuller, a director known for over-the-top genre fare, and for stories that often explored the human condition from the perspective of a lonely outsider, would be interested in making a film based on Siemel’s life.

Hollywood eccentric Samuel Fuller was an oddball in Hollywood even among a canon full of unconventional filmmakers. Instead of yelling ‘Action!’ to initiate a scene, he was known to fire blanks from a pistol he kept on his hip. He routinely placed a ‘W’ in the margin of a script to denote that the scene was ‘weird’,

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either by dint of its content or the manner in which he envisaged its filming (Dombrowski 2008:  22). Interpersonally, he was known for his colourful demeanour, often seen with a cigar in one hand and a drink in the other, employing colourful language to get his point across. Throughout his career, Fuller courted controversy, pushing the envelope when it came to his cinematic subject matter. He depicted death by friendly fire in Merrill’s Marauders (1962), abuse in a mental hospital and the divisiveness of racism in Shock Corridor (1963), and the underbelly of small-town Americana through prostitution and paedophilia in The Naked Kiss (1964). These latter two films were so provocative that Fuller would not direct a film in Hollywood for the next sixteen years. Soon after his return, he directed one of the most controversial films of the 1980s, White Dog (1982), a film about a black trainer tasked with re-programming a dog conditioned to attack black people on sight. Due to pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other organizations, the film was pulled after only a week, although it is now considered a classic (transferred to DVD by the Criterion collection), noted for its nuanced study of racism. Back in 1954, however, Fuller was viewed in Hollywood as an up-andcoming director due to several successful post-Second World War films, including the Korean War drama The Steel Helmet (1951) and Fixed Bayonets! (1951), the latter of which featured James Dean in his first cinematic role. Although 42 at the time of his visit to the Karajá, Fuller was still relatively new to directing. Before the Second World War, he had been a pulp detective fiction writer who had adapted several of his novels into screenplays. The first footage Fuller ever shot was during the war itself, when an officer instructed him to film the residents of Falkenau as they were forced to tour a nearby concentration camp and help prepare the piles of dead Jewish prisoners for burial, a scene that the director later employed in the semi-autobiographical film The Big Red One (1980) (Fuller 2002: 215– 16). After the success of his early directorial efforts, Fuller had signed a highly unusual contract at 20th Century Fox: The seven-year option contract, signed in April 1951, stated that Fuller would render his services to Fox for twenty-six weeks as a writer and director on an initial film and, at the pleasure of the studio, also act as a producer for the film. Subsequent contract extensions also bound Fuller to Fox for half a year, leaving the director free to pursue one outside motion picture or television show the remaining twenty-six weeks. (Dombrowski 2008: 55) Darryl Zanuck, the last of the old Hollywood tycoons, recognized that what Fuller required to thrive was partial freedom, resulting in this rare contract. It was Zanuck who optioned Siemel’s Tigrero, dispatching the director to

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Brazil on a location shoot. Fuller was not difficult to convince, citing one of his earlier films as a motivation for embracing this new project:  ‘My appetite for making movies in faraway places had already been whetted by House of Bamboo’ (Fuller 2002: 325). The die for another successful film had been cast.

A tale that grows in the telling From the beginning, it was conceded that the film would need to largely be shot on site in Brazil, although there were concerns regarding safety in such a project. As Fuller notes, his initial plans were somewhat grandiose: There would have been four units. The first, mine, was to shoot between Rio and Bahia, and the others in the wilder regions of Brazil. I went in the end and returned alive with about 8000 feet of 16mm colour scope about the Indians, the Jivaros, the head-hunters of the Mato Grosso. I told them that since I’d come back alive, that proved that there was no danger involved for the actors. (Fuller 1969: 107) It is not surprising that Fuller demanded to be the one to head into the interior, although not without the creature comforts of a plane stocked with cigars and vodka (Fuller 2002: 325). Fuller chose the Karajá, at that time only reachable first by plane, then horse and finally boat. This tribe is located in central Brazil, mostly on islands in the middle of the Araguaia River, one of the largest in the Amazon basin. The modern era has not been kind to the Karajá, which saw its population drop from approximately forty thousand at the beginning of the twentieth century to just over three thousand today (‘Karajá’). The attrition is due to the twin impacts of modernization and globalization, with many leaving the Araguaia region for employment in cities, gold mines, oil fields and other locations, integrating into the Brazilian melting pot and never returning (Buckley 1999). Despite being largely unvisited by tourists as late as the 1950s, Fuller was welcomed with open arms. Although he was there primarily to scout locations for a fictional film based upon the life of a European expat, the footage Fuller captured provides a fascinating insight into an indigenous culture largely untouched, at that point, by the modern world. Much as with Siemel’s autobiography, Fuller’s writings about his past must be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism. The interviews he gave over the years and his posthumously published autobiography are packed with anecdotes that, in their totality, seem a bit unlikely to have been squeezed into a single lifetime. Fuller was a storyteller extraordinaire, and it is important to filter his tales about the aborted Tigrero project. Over the

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years, his accounts of the Karajá grew more and more romantic, perhaps impacted by the forty years he lived after that trip, with a loss of innocence about the social and cultural inequities that were supposed to be addressed by the Second World War and its aftermath. Certainly, different aspects of his descriptions of the Karajá become harder to reconcile when placed in conjunction with one another. For instance, he discourses in both his autobiography and in the Tigrero documentary about how peaceful the tribe was, a point that comes up over and over: ‘What I discovered in that remote corner of Mato Grosso was a society far more peaceful and caring than ours. Little by little, I began to feel like the savage and see the Karajá as the civilized ones’ (Fuller 2002: 326). He also notes that of the three tribal chieftains, the warrior held lesser status than the hunter or priest because there was so little need for fighting. Fuller continues by noting other aspects of the utopia, finding the Karajá to be ‘joyful, hospitable, generous human beings. They didn’t have laws, judges, or police, nor did they need any. There was no crime, jealousy, or greed’ (Fuller 2002:  327). No society is perfect, Fuller’s statements clearly unrealistic and based upon a very brief period of observation in a single village. Furthermore, his account veers into incongruity several pages later when he describes a scene where the Karajá decapitate a tribal enemy (justified in that this individual tried to take one of the village children), hang it above a fire and feed the fire with special wood and herbs. Three days and three nights later this process results in a shrunken head, a trophy for the tribe to cherish (Fuller 2002:  330–1)! As Fuller noted in one of his many interviews, ‘I asked them through an interpreter as a special favour, when they shrink the head, to stop the ceremony at night because I can’t photograph at night’ (Server 1994: 144). In his schizophrenic focus upon this tribe for both its noble and savage attributes, Fuller fell into a representational trap that developed out of the Enlightenment period, his fascination with the Karajá reducing them to a highly bifurcated abstraction. Although his writings on the subject may be suspect due to his competing projects of romanticism and sensationalism, the footage he recorded can unimpeachably be considered ethnography and forms the basis for our understanding of the original film project. Perhaps due to the fact that he was unable to communicate with the tribe members, the footage he shot is quite detached, simply taking in tribal life and rituals. Fuller was largely an observer, with very little evidence of interference other than perhaps convincing the tribal elders to shrink their trophy head during daylight hours. The most well-known scene involves a ceremonial ascension to manhood where young boys subject their skin to scraping by a device made out of piranha teeth. The ritual bloodletting that results is presented matterof-factly. Fuller also filmed a related ceremony that involved the piercing of the penis with a wooden needle, footage that for obvious reasons was never shown and does not appear in the documentary (Fuller 2002: 328). He may

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have embraced a project of sensationalism in his writings about the Karajá, but his camera is one of passive observation; at least, as passive as turning a technological and Western gaze upon naked indigenous bodies can be. This remove is all the more impressive due to the genuine connection he felt with the villagers, at one point mentioning that his favourite part of the trip involved sitting around the fire laughing with the tribe members even though he had no idea what they were laughing about (Fuller 2002: 330). Amidst the bluster and hyperbole that typifies his autobiography, it is quite clear that Fuller viewed his short time with the Karajá as something special: ‘It was damned hard to leave a place where I’d experienced so much peace and happiness’ (Fuller 2002: 329). He may have found it difficult to leave, but he would have an even harder time getting the tribe, and project, out of his system. Upon Fuller’s return to the United States, he was informed by Zanuck that the project was dead.

Gone but not forgotten Although John Wayne and Ava Gardner were signed onto the project, when it came time to move things along toward production, 20th Century Fox decided that they could not risk exposing such valuable stars to the wilds of the Mato Grosso. The project was put on hold, with some footage of the Karajá and about one-third of the script all that would ever be completed (Fuller 1969: 107). Per his contract, Fuller moved on to another project, and the next year he and the studio agreed to part ways (Dombrowski 2008: 91). Tigrero never got off the ground, a fate that is not that uncommon in Hollywood. Indeed, Fuller was involved in nearly a dozen other unfinished projects, although few were carried quite as far forward as this one. Aside from Tigrero, Fuller was attached to a screenplay titled ‘Uncle Sam’, which exposed the follies of the Department of Immigration and Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nevada), co-author of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Himself a son of parents originally from Ireland, McCarran was pathological in his antipathy towards immigrants. It is no surprise that this screenplay, coming during the early Cold War where anything deemed ‘Un-American’ was suppressed, was never made into a film. Fuller was also attached to ‘The Rifle’, a take on Vietnam from multiple perspectives centered on an old, Second World War-era rifle that finds its way into the hands of various people (similar to The Red Violin). He was also at various times attached to a biopic of Balzac, another of Rimbaud, a tale chronicling Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill, a docudrama chronicling twenty-four hours in the life of a Soviet soldier, and finally another Vietnam War film, this one from perspectives on both sides of the conflict, including through the eyes of a 12-year-old Viet Cong operative (Server 1994: 144–5;

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Fuller 2002:  47, 61, 97–8). As is a common occurrence with directors in Hollywood, Fuller experienced a lot of false starts. However, none of the rest of these films involved shooting actual footage, and none got under his skin in quite the same way. Over the years, Fuller has been nothing if not consistent in his focus on Tigrero  – it comes up in most of his career reflective interviews  – but maddeningly inconsistent in the specifics he offers, his framing of the project having migrated over the years. In an interview he conducted in the late 1960s, he poetically compares the film to the islands in the middle of the Amazon that are slowly consumed during the wet season, admitting that he considered buying the script back from Fox (Fuller 1969: 107). His late-inlife musings, both in the documentary and in his autobiography, generally support this view, although he did note, ‘The best thing about [the film] was the title’ (Fuller 2002:  325). A  new strain began to emerge in these later texts, however, one involving what the failed film did for him personally: ‘I was terribly disappointed about the fate of Tigrero. Yet I came to see that the time I’d spent with the Karajá had given me a new vision of life, renewing my faith in the entire human race’ (Fuller 2002: 330). One interpretation of this quote suggests a storyteller in the sunset of his career buying into his own project of romanticism. However, Fuller’s love for the Karajá is too consistent to be anything other than genuine. Great films can transform the lives of audience members, something that failed projects are unable to do. The latter, however, can transform the lives of those who work on them, as Tigrero clearly did for Fuller. The footage was used, not in the manner in which he initially envisaged, but first employed in a surreal dream sequence involving the piranha ritual in his own film Shock Corridor (1963) and then in Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made, released just three years before his death. It is in the latter in which all the streams of this story converge: an unfinished aesthetic product, a largely unseen ethnography and a personal journey of a storyteller nearing the end of his life.

Remembering the project The documentary is not only the primary showcase for Fuller’s 1954 footage but also a platform for a director to revisit a failed project with decades worth of subsequent life experiences. The result is a sort of Heart of Darkness type journey where Fuller leads Jarmusch and the audience into a distant past, uncovering a culture that the modern world has largely obliterated, in that regard a sort of inverse of Conrad’s dark vision. The ethnographic study that results from this time capsule approach is no less potent due to its accidental nature. Numerous strands of memory are woven together by the director in his conversation with Jarmusch, including his plans for the film, which

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featured a symbolic and possibly unfilmable opening. Fuller shot footage of a Wood Stork, a large wading bird, captured by an alligator. This nature video gave him the idea that the opening should symbolize the full cycle of life and death. An egret would be taken by an alligator, which would in turn fight with a second alligator over its meal. Both alligators would in turn be rapidly skeletonized by a group of piranhas, one of which would be plucked from the water by an egret. As he tells Jarmusch, Fuller planned to shoot this opening scene in one fluid take. He had a similar montage planned for the film’s finale, one that would also indicate the cyclic nature of life and death in the most brutal of environments. Aside from reading Siemel’s book, Fuller had also viewed footage of a Tigrero named Manuel killing a jaguar with a spear, something that was so memorable that forty years later he re-enacted the scene for Jarmusch. Zanuck had essentially issued Fuller a blank check, dispatching the director to the Mato Grosso to shoot whatever footage he deemed important, and to incorporate into a screenplay what he found there. Armed not only with a 16 mm camera and plenty of film but also with two guns, several cases of Polish Vodka and seventy-five boxes of cigars (presumably not all for himself!), Fuller ventured into the interior, shooting footage of the jungle and river, as well as its wildlife, from a plane, as well as from boats and on horseback. It was with the Karajá, however, that he shot the majority of his footage. Before he left on the scouting trip, John Wayne had been engaged to play the Tigrero, and Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power as a fugitive couple, Mary and Graham, who employ Wayne’s character to take them safely through the Mato Grosso. The trio face many perils, as the giant island they traverse in the middle of the river shrinks during the wet season and nature begins to assert itself as a fourth, and adversarial, character. One such trial claims Graham’s life after he abandons Mary to try and save himself. As Tigrero tells Mary, ‘Don’t blame him too much. Men do crazy things under the spell of fear and panic. The jungle brings out the best and the worst in people. It was self-preservation. His mind snapped. He loved you, all right – it’s just that he loved himself a little more.’ At the end of the film, when Mary’s life hangs in the balance, Tigrero lets her die, having the same philosophy and not willing to risk his life to save hers. As Lee Server notes, such a tale would have fit well into Fuller’s oeuvre of genre-bending films that explore some of the darker dimensions of the human condition:  ‘The story touches on Fuller’s thematic interest in the nature of heroism and cowardice, with a typically provocative upending of romantic cliché’ (1994: 143). It’s hard to believe, however, that Zanuck let  alone Wayne would have sponsored such a stark vision, although it should be noted that just two years later Wayne gave one of his darkest, and most critically acclaimed, performances as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956). As Fuller notes in the documentary, such a dark turn was not a problem for Tyrone Power, who was sick of playing the hero and desired a

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more complex character. Regardless, the project was halted, undone by the inability of getting it insured. There is also the possibility that other aspects of production would have posed a problem. By the mid-1950s, Fuller was beginning to hone an independent streak that would eventually see him run out of Hollywood, and he does mention to Jarmusch that he would have quit the project had the studio forced him to add a romantic element between Tigrero and Mary. And then there are the set pieces that Fuller had envisioned to open and close the film, quite grandiose and probably beyond his capabilities during that time.

Accidental ethnography Fuller’s description of Tigrero, a film that was never made, soon takes a back seat in the documentary to the accidental ethnography that comes about from two visits to the exact same village forty years apart. The changes that Fuller notes are numerous, obvious and far-reaching. As Fuller states during an interview, ‘Their village was so much more developed than the primitive place I’d visited in the fifties. The brush and trees had been cleared away, and there were telephone poles everywhere. Instead of going naked with body paint, now the Karajá wore T-shirts’ (Fuller 2002: 552). The T-shirts are clearly from elsewhere, as many feature messages and slogans, some in Portuguese but even more in English. One person wears a New  York Yankees baseball cap; another sports a digital watch. It is clear from the documentary that, although the younger Karajá still have facial tattoos, they are much less extensive than those worn by their elders. The Karajá have also acquired electricity since Fuller’s initial visit and now have television. Fuller is told that whereas the villagers did not use money in 1954, they do now. The tribe is also abandoning its language, and in one scene Fuller and Jarmusch watch as a teacher reads to her charges from a Portuguese reading book geared towards normalizing mechanized life for the Karajá: ‘I’m seeing an airplane. It’s coming down from the sky.’ As the documentary establishes, there were several primary reasons for the rapid obliteration of traditional Karajá culture. In the mid-1960s, the Brazilian military dictatorship put in a nearby airstrip to support the twenty thousand soldiers they moved to the region to suppress a group consisting of less than sixty leftist guerillas. A hotel and casino were also constructed near the village to turn the region into a tourist destination, with the Karajá advertised as a draw. The sad irony is that the monies earned from such tourism were often lost at the casino. A small measure of karma was exacted when, in an attempt to smoke out a beehive from the hotel, the Karajá hired for this operation accidentally burned the building to the ground! As Fuller notes, however, some things have not changed, as the river continues to be

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a resolute influence on the Karajá:  ‘The only thing they couldn’t change is the river. They can’t change the women there beating the hell out of the clothes and washing, they can’t change the families around there singing and having fun. That’s what they haven’t changed.’ This is the creeping, and unbeatable, threat facing the Karajá:  allowing enough of the outside world in to appeal to new generations with new expectations, so that their children will not leave, while simultaneously attempting to preserve some semblance of traditional culture, language and ritual. In the midst of this focus upon widespread culture destruction, one of the village elders, a sculptor, reminds Fuller that there is a very personal dimension to such loss: ‘In this village, a lot of things have changed since your last visit. But for me the saddest thing is that I’ve lost my husband. I feel very lonely.’ It is easy to forget that Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made actually features three directors, as Fuller is such an overwhelming presence that we tend to focus on both him and Jarmusch, who fills the role of the one who sees with fresh eyes. Kaurismäki’s erasure from the text is extreme, even by documentary filmmaker standards, although it is in moments such as the inclusion of the sculptor where his genius is evident. True, much of the footage this director chose to include in the documentary involves the broad strokes of cultural loss on a tribal level as seen through the eyes of a western observer, as well as footage filmed forty years apart. With the brief inclusion of this statement from the sculptor, however, the audience is reminded that the loss we decry as National Geographic-loving, armchair-sitting voyeurs is nowhere near as acute as the specific loss felt by the Karajá themselves. This truth is nowhere more amply demonstrated than in one of the culminating episodes of the documentary, where Fuller screens his 1954 footage to the gathered village. Fuller and Jarmusch project the film onto a sheet tied between two trees. At first, despite their rapt attention the Karajá are visibly confused, although quickly begin to note familiar locations and individuals. The villagers in the 1954 footage wear less clothes and more paint but largely look the same. As Fuller later notes, unlike the village elders, for whom the experience was sobering, the youth of the village were amused by the experience: ‘It was exactly how our kids would react to seeing their grandparents dancing, say, the fox trot’ (Fuller 2002: 563). Jarmusch agrees: ‘The screening was a success. The Karajá were really surprised to see their relatives and friends alive once again.’ The sobering elements of the footage are evident, however. Fuller finds out that two of the boys featured in the footage  – Kuberene and Iora – who would be no more than 50 in 1994, have long since died. By dint of his background, Fuller is able to revisit a place forty years later, a number probably not that far off from the average Karajá life expectancy. One of the viewers, the son of one of the boys featured in the footage, is very touched by the experience. It is later revealed that his father was killed by a crocodile. Finally, although the documentary does not connect the dots

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for the viewer, there is the subtle implication that the personal dimension of showing footage of ancestors is the only aspect of novelty. Although presented almost as if an avatar type experience, with strange men arriving to project images onto a sheet tied between two trees, the documentary had previously established that many Karajá worked in the hotel and casino during the twenty-year period those two establishment were in operation, and that most of the hovels in the village now have television. Even in the midst of a special episode such as this one, where villagers are treated to images of loved ones before the incorporation of such technology into their lives, Kaurismäki reminds us that the damage has already been done, and that the images that the Karajá witness are not only a celebration of their kin but also a memento mori for a traditional existence.

Second life Samuel Fuller journeyed to the Mato Grosso region of Brazil to make Tigrero, which – featuring John Wayne, Ava Garner and Tyrone Power, all at the height of their stardom – would have been one of the biggest films of his career. What he found there was not the film he was looking for but instead an indigenous tribe whose lifestyle would fascinate the director for the rest of his life. Fuller was lucky enough to get to return to the Karajá several generations later, in so doing – with the help of Jarmusch and Kaurismäki – able to document the loss of traditional culture in the face of modernization and globalism. True, from his initial visit in 1954 through his 1994 return, and in all of the interviews he gave in between, Fuller fell into the trap of romanticizing the Karajá. However, it must be conceded that he was little different in this than pretty much everyone else during this time period, such liberal portrayals of massive indigenous cultural loss the groundwork for later, more nuanced, anthropological visions. Tigrero may have been a failed, unfinished film, but it was also the lynchpin for a lifelong journey undertaken by one of Hollywood’s most eccentric of storytellers. In the documentary’s final frame, a lesser known, but no less potent, storyteller reinforces one last time the schizophrenic nature of Fuller and his fascination with the Karajá, which in many ways stands in for a general Western fascination with the loss of indigenous culture. When Jarmusch notes that the studio wasted the pairing of Wayne with Gardner and Power, Fuller reminds him that he should add the Karajá to the list. This statement is insightful, but the last image Kaurismäki leaves us with indicates that, despite a career full of cinematic plaudits and even an accidental ethnography, at the end of the day Fuller was little better than a tourist. Before being whisked away on a speedboat to the ‘uncivilized world’, the venerable director tosses of a cryptic bon mot to the Karajá chief seeing him off: ‘See you at MGM!’

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References Buckley, S. (1999), ‘Old Tribe, New Tribe: Brazilian Indians Seek Own Way of Modern Life’, Washington Post, 19 December, A01. Available online: https:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-12/19/003r-121999-idx.html (accessed 23 June 2020). Capstick, P. H. (1981), Death in the Silent Places, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Dombrowski, L. (2008), The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill You!, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Duguid, J. (2006), Green Hell, Claremont: Pomona Press. Duguid, J. (2015), Tiger Man, Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar. Fuller, S. (2002), A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Fuller, S. (1969), ‘Interview’, in D. Will and P. Wollen (eds), Samuel Fuller, 91–124, Brentwood: Edinburgh Film Festival. Fuller, S. (2012), Samuel Fuller: Interviews, G. Peary (ed.), Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. ‘Karajá’ (2020), Projeto de Documentação de Línguas Indígenas. Available online: http://prodoclin.museudoindio.gov.br/index.php/etnias/karaja/povo (accessed 23 June 2020). Siemal, S. (1953), Tigrero!, Long Beach, CA: Safari Press. Server, L. (1994), Samuel Fuller: Film is a Battleground, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Waldman, H. (1991), Scenes Unseen: Unreleased and Uncompleted Films from the World’s Master Filmmakers, 1912–1990, Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

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10 Clouzot’s L’Enfer Lucy Mazdon

In 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot, the acclaimed director of critical and commercial hits such as Le Salaire de la Peur / The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955) began shooting L’Enfer. Set in the beautiful lakeside location of Garabit in the Auvergne region, the film, based on a script Clouzot wrote with Jean Ferry and José-André Lacour, was to depict the increasingly extreme jealousy of Marcel (Serge Reggiani), a hotelier, towards his wife Odette (the 26-year-old star Romy Schneider). The film was intended to create a new form of cinema, drawing on the experimental music and sounds currently being developed by composer Pierre Boulez and the then fashionable images of op and kinetic art. As several of his collaborators on the film note in Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea Annonier’s documentary L’Enfer d’Henri Georges Clouzot (2009), this new type of cinema was intended to rejuvenate Clouzot’s filmmaking style and counteract the accusations of ‘cinéma de papa’ levied at his work by the young Turks of the nouvelle vague (Truffaut 1954). Despite, or perhaps because of, an unlimited budget from Columbia Pictures, the shoot was beset by problems. Clouzot’s extreme attention to detail as he experimented with colour and other visual innovations in many ways seemed to echo the obsessions of his lead character. Three weeks into filming, he suffered a heart attack and the film was abandoned. In 2009, Bromberg and Medrea Annonier directed the full-length documentary L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot. Following a fortuitous meeting with Clouzot’s widow, Inès Clouzot, Bromberg had retrieved thirteen cans of footage from the original shoot. His documentary combines this footage, newly filmed and contemporary interviews with cast and crew, and

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extracts from the script read by actors Bérénice Bejo and Jacques Gamblin. The film sets out to determine why L’Enfer, described by the filmmakers as a film maudit, a cursed film, was never completed. In terms of the analysis of unmade films undertaken in this collection, Clouzot’s L’Enfer presents a particularly interesting case. Clouzot’s film did indeed remain unmade, and vast quantities of footage were left to languish in 185 cans. Yet Bromberg’s chance encounter with Inès Clouzot saved those cans from oblivion, making a film which both is and is not Clouzot’s L’Enfer. In 1994, another version of the film was made. Also titled L’Enfer, this film directed by Claude Chabrol (somewhat ironically, himself a leading figure in the French New Wave) was based upon Clouzot / Ferry / Lacour’s original script and starred the then hugely successful Emmanuelle Béart and François Cluzet. Both films thus remove Clouzot’s unfinished work from the shadows, bringing it to life through different processes of transformation and reconstruction. In this chapter, I  will situate the unfinished L’Enfer within Clouzot’s wider body of work, examining his innovations in this unfinished film and the various ways in which it emerges from and echoes its predecessors. I will examine Bromberg and Medrea Annonier’s documentary and the narrative of obsession and madness it constructs in its account of the doomed shoot. I  will also consider Chabrol’s L’Enfer of 1994. Based on Clouzot’s original script, it is a very different film to that intended by Clouzot and as such sheds some light on both the originality of Clouzot’s experimentation and the reasons for its ultimate failure. Henri-Georges Clouzot made a number of highly successful films in France during the 1940s and 1950s. He began his career working as a screenwriter for Continental in Germany and then went on to work for the Nazi-owned Continental in occupied France. His first two films for Continental, Le Dernier des six / The Last of Six (1940) and L’Assassin habite au 21 / The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (1942) were commercial and critical hits. However, his next venture, Le Corbeau / The Raven (1943), was to prove much more controversial. The film tells of a small provincial French town divided by the poisonous pen letters of an anonymous writer. While it attracted respectable audiences during its initial release, it was condemned by the left-wing Resistance press, the Catholic Church and the pro-Nazi Vichy regime for its morbidity and immorality and its depiction of France as small-minded and self-loathing. Clouzot was fired by Continental and following the Liberation of France was tried for collaborating with the Germans and given an industry ban. This was rescinded in 1947 and he went on to have a highly successful career, making a series of critically and commercially acclaimed films, including Quai des Orfèvres (1947), Le Salaire de la Peur (1953), Les Diaboliques (1955) and La Vérité (1960). Clouzot was a notoriously meticulous filmmaker; nothing in his films was left to chance. Each of his films was storyboarded in enormous detail leaving no space at all for improvisation from his cast. It was precisely this

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attention to detail and pre-planning which prompted criticism from some of the directors of the Nouvelle vague who saw in it the stuffiness and lack of artistic freedom which they were exploring with their handheld cameras, location shooting and semi-improvised scripts. Yet to condemn Clouzot for this attention to detail is to do him and his films a disservice. Clouzot’s films are far more than the straightforward genre cinema their plots and themes may at first suggest. They are marked by often dark and eerie poetic imagery which recalls both the Expressionist cinema which influenced Clouzot during his early years at Continental and the French Poetic Realist cinema of the 1930s. They are often pessimistic, exploring themes of misanthropy, paranoia, revenge and loneliness. And yet they also reveal rich character studies and flashes of humanity which often serve to make their bleakness even more sharp. Clouzot’s work brilliantly combines edge-of-the-seat suspense with sharp social critique and political satire along with a rich and often innovative visual style. For these reasons, his films of the 1950s and 1960s garnered critical acclaim while making huge profits at the box office. It is worth noting that Clouzot’s Le Salaire de la peur / Wages of Fear was the first French film in the UK to break through to full circuit release in the UK (Mazdon and Wheatley 2013). The British Academy of Film had judged it film of the year in 1954 and it is not perhaps surprising that this film should be the ‘break-through’ movie for this was indeed a film which combined admirably the ‘local’ specificities and the ‘international’ (read Hollywood) appeal highlighted by Sarah Street as essential for successful export (Street 2002). Clouzot’s film was a co-production and very much part of the French and wider European industry’s concerted effort during that period to create an exportable product. It featured a multinational cast (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli and Peter Van Eyck). Its dialogue was limited, making translation rather less intrusive, and what dialogue there is incorporates Italian, English, German and Spanish as well as the dominant French. Writing in The Financial Times, critic Derek Granger noted, Filmgoers should be aware, then, that they will be submitting themselves to a fairly gruelling ordeal and that they will also be seeing a film containing elements of toughness and violence which we have come more to associate with the American thriller (the kind of thing which Mr. John Huston might do in his fierce ‘Sierra Madre’ mood) than with the closequartered intimacy of the best French films. (Granger 1954) Granger goes on to refer to the film’s ‘disquieting undercurrent of feeling … that bleak and pessimistic quality which has dominated the intellectual temper of post-war France’. The film is thus ‘different’ to the majority of French production  – a violent, suspenseful action film  – and yet in some ways still part of that identity – bleak, philosophical and intellectual. It was

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this very ability to combine popular appeal with intelligent and innovative filmmaking which ensured Clouzot’s success. Interviewed in L’Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot, filmmaker Costa-Gavras, who had worked as a production assistant on L’Enfer, discusses the New Wave directors and their criticism of Clouzot’s meticulous preparation, ‘He was criticised by the nouvelle vague for planning out everything in the script. The big word of the epoch was “improvise”. He had a nice line about that: “I improvise on paper”.’ Clouzot has often been described as the ‘French Hitchcock’, an analogy which of course speaks volumes about the hegemony of Hollywood. Nevertheless, there are obvious similarities in the work of the two directors and they both expressed mutual admiration. Interestingly, they drew on shared French sources for two of their arguably most important films, an inspiration which reminds us of the inherent fluidity of ‘national’ cinemas and problematizes that aforementioned American hegemony. French crime writers Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud, writing as Thomas Narcejac, collaborated on a series of hugely popular crime novels published under the name of Boileau-Narcejac. A  number of their publications were adapted for cinema, including Celle qui n’était plus as Les Diaboliques (1955), directed by Clouzot, and D’entre les morts as Vertigo (1958), directed by Hitchcock. This shared interest in dark narratives of crime and suspense alongside a rigorous attention to the detail of performance, characterization and mise en scène certainly reveals affinities between the two filmmakers. In many of Clouzot and Hitchcock’s films, it is often in a sense of impending and unavoidable doom and the absence of actual horror or shock that the real tension lies; the infamous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is an obvious example. In marked contrast, both directors were renowned for inflicting very real cruelty on their stars, in particular their female stars, in their search for exceptional and convincing performance. Hitchcock’s depiction of women and his treatment of his female stars have been well documented. Tippi Hedren’s account of the shooting of The Birds (1963) during which she was repeatedly pecked at by live starlings rather than the mechanical birds Hitchcock had promised, provides a chilling confirmation of the sadism of the director’s technique. Clouzot treated his female stars in similar fashion. Brigitte Bardot, who starred in La Vérité / Truth (1960) said of the director that he is ‘a negative being, forever at odds with himself and the world around him’ (Lloyd 2007: 6). Certainly this would seem to echo the pessimistic, indeed misanthropic, view of the world we see depicted in his films. However, Bardot’s remarks were surely also influenced by her experiences during the filming of La Vérité. Wanting her to fall asleep and drool, the director gave her a number of sleeping pills claiming that they were painkillers. The shoot was a great success but Bardot found herself in hospital having her stomach pumped.

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So how did L’Enfer fit within Clouzot’s career and previous oeuvre? Clouzot had not made a film since La Vérité in 1960 as the death of his first wife Vera in December of that year had plunged him into a deep depression. As several of his collaborator’s note in the Bromberg–Medrea Annonier documentary, L’Enfer was to be Clouzot’s attempt at a new kind of cinema, a cinema which would challenge the criticisms of the New Wave directors and position him at the forefront of cinematic innovation. It was a hugely ambitious project. Clouzot combined the black and white realist mise en scène of his earlier films with daring, experimental colour footage which would be used to represent the hallucinations of the jealous husband. As Ginette Vincendeau notes, This includes play with light and patterns, some of which was filmed at an exhibition of kinetic art held that year at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Special effects include faces merging into one another, geometric visual play and the lake turning blood red. The rest, especially around Schneider, might be called erotic experimentation. Wearing blue lipstick, her skin oily and glittering with sequins or her body wrapped in cellophane, the actress blows smoke, smiles alluringly at the camera or plays suggestively with a metallic toy as she reclines in skimpy underwear. (Vincendeau 2018: 7) Buoyed by his earlier critical and commercial success, Clouzot showed some early rushes of the film to American studio Columbia who rather surprisingly gave him an unlimited budget. Arguably it was this very lack of budgetary constraint which would lead to Clouzot’s failure to complete the film as it permitted him complete and unfettered creative freedom. He hired three technical crews who would work simultaneously on different parts of the production, each led by leading contemporary directors of photography, Claude Renoir, Armand Thirard and Andreas Winding. As discussed in the documentary, he ‘over-indulged in lengthy preparation and multiple retakes on a scale qualified as “Hollywoodian” by his collaborators’ (Vincendeau 2018: 10). Thousands of metres of test footage were shot both on location and in a studio. The combination of innovation, boundless experimentation and Clouzot’s perfectionism were always going to make the shoot challenging. However, the difficulties were compounded as the Garabit reservoir which was both visually and spatially central to the film was due to be drained by the French Electricity Board precisely twenty days after the beginning of the shoot. As cast and crew worked against the clock, tensions mounted and ten days into the shoot lead actor Serge Reggiani walked off set, claiming Maltese fever but later calling Clouzot a ‘schizophrenic maniac’. Certainly, Clouzot had pushed Reggiani extremely hard, asking him to run behind a camera car for ten miles a day on steep mountain roads. Attempts to replace Reggiani with Jean-Louis Trintignant were to prove short-lived when the

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actor left the set after a few days without shooting. Clouzot, a self-confessed insomniac, worked through the night, rewriting scenes. The production increasingly spiralled out of control until finally, while shooting a scene in which Romy Schneider and her female co-star Dany Carrel kiss in a boat, Clouzot suffered a heart attack and the shoot was finally brought to a close. Bromberg and Medrea Annonier’s documentary is on the surface, an attempt to preserve Clouzot’s unfinished film, a film that was intended to be the director’s masterpiece. Bromberg is the founder of French company Lobster Films. As the company web site states, Created in 1985, Lobster Films is a team whose goal is to restore films and share their discovery and their passion for cinema – from the early days until today. A unique cinematheque, a rare films catalogue (from Georges Méliès to the RKO collection, from Jacques Prévert to Nelly Kaplan), a restoration laboratory, a recording studio, a producer, a DVD editor and organizer of concert films … At Lobster, we encourage all participations in the sharing and the recognition of the unknown wonders of cinema. (‘Welcome to Lobster’ n.d.) Alongside his work sourcing and restoring earlier film, Bromberg began in 1992 the ‘Retour de flamme’ events during which he would accompany early film with piano and commentary in front of a live audience. This dedication to the preservation of film is to some extent what underpins L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot. Having discovered the cans of footage following his chance encounter with Clouzot’s widow, Bromberg’s experience in and passion for filmic preservation, which he terms ‘treasure hunting’ (Bastin 2016), uses the documentary format to bring this ‘lost’ film to new life and new audiences. Bromberg does nevertheless make a distinction between L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot and his work on cinematic restoration. Discussing the film in an interview with Sarah Bastin, he remarks, Well, actually, it is not at all restoring; we found elements that were in very good shape because they had never been used. What we did is basically produce a film based on that unused footage, about a film that was never completed. Now, it’s more an experience in film directing and documentary directing  – although it’s not really a documentary  – than film restoration as it is. We’ve created a lot of elements, including music, some dialogue … we had very little to work from. We hired new actors, including Bérénice Bejo, who was the actress in The Artist, and other people  – that was before The Artist  – and basically we tried to reconstruct this unique moment of a film that was never to be. So, it is not ‘restoration’ in any event, but it’s treasure hunting and treasure finding at its best. (Bastin 2016)

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Bromberg is clear that the film is neither straightforwardly a restoration of an earlier film nor is it straightforwardly a documentary about the making of an earlier film. Nevertheless, it does to some extent make a claim for the neutrality and authority of documentary. The film begins with a voice-over narrative from Bromberg revealing his chance encounter in the lift with Inès Clouzot and his discovery of the ‘lost’ footage. However, this apparently factual narrative is immediately problematized as Bromberg refers to his own claustrophobia, a psychological disorder which mirrors the insomnia of Clouzot which, seconds later, we learn led to the inception of L’Enfer. An image of Clouzot cuts to shots of the boxes of film and the voice-over tells us, ‘These boxes tell us the story of L’Enfer, L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot.’ We then see some of the original film footage, shots of Schneider and Reggiani accompanied by a tense, dramatic musical score strikingly reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Hitchcock’s work. The film then cuts to a television interview with Clouzot, shot during the production of L’Enfer, and we hear Clouzot explain that the film began with his insomnia and was a means of expressing the anxiety he felt when unable to sleep. He goes on to allude to his depression and then falls silent, smoking his pipe, and the image lingers for a moment on his face. The film then cuts once more to footage of Reggiani and we hear his words, words presumably taken from the script for L’Enfer, spoken by Jacques Gamblin. Then once more we hear Bromberg’s ‘authorial’ voice-over stating, ‘L’Enfer is the story of a man, Marcel Prieur, and his wife Odette.’ Writing in his 1991 book, Representing Reality, Bill Nichols defines documentary in terms of the relationship between image and reality: The elevation provided by metaphor, the sense of remove, is drained away as special properties of photographic film and magnetic tape hold the documentary image to the exact shapes and contours, patterns and practices, of the historical world. We expect to apply a distinct form of literalism (or realism) to documentary. We are less engaged by fictional characters and their destiny than by social actors and destiny itself (or social praxis). We prepare ourselves not to comprehend a story but to grasp an argument. We do so in relation to sounds and images that retain a distinct bond to the world we all share. (1991: 5) Documentary according to Nichols is precisely distinctive from fiction film in its responsibility to accurate representation. Therefore, documentaries that use reconstruction, special effects, subjective voice or performance techniques may be considered less valuable or questionable in terms of their status and intent (see Vaughan 2019). Nichols went on to refine and nuance this position in his later work. In Blurred Boundaries, he posits a performative documentary mode ‘that does not draw our attention to the formal qualities

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or political context of the film directly so much as deflect our attention from the referential quality of documentary altogether’ (Nichols 1994: 93). Writing in New Documentary in 2006, Stella Bruzzi goes further, arguing that the search for ‘pure’ documentary, free from subjective representation, is ultimately fruitless: The pact between documentary, reality and the documentary spectator is far more straightforward than many theorists have made out: that a documentary will never be reality nor will it erase or invalidate that reality by being representational. Furthermore, the spectator is not in need of signposts and inverted commas to understand that a documentary is a negotiation between reality on the one hand and image, interpretation and bias on the other. (Bruzzi 2006: 6) In her work, Bruzzi analyses the use and effect of performance techniques in twentieth century documentary. She argues that these techniques of reconstruction and performance enable a critical and reflexive engagement on the part of the spectator with the documentary form itself. She concludes that if a documentary is considered entirely subjective in its representations this does not negate its status as documentary. Instead, it provides a valuable questioning of earlier accounts of the documentary form and their construction of a clear division between ‘objective fact’ and ‘subjective fiction’. It seems to me that it is precisely within this performative documentary space that we should locate L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot. As the opening sequence described above demonstrates, the film combines objective fact (the encounter which led to the retrieval of the footage), subjectivity (Bromberg’s claustrophobia, Clouzot’s insomnia) and performativity (Gamblin’s reading of Marcel’s words, the musical score). The film does not simply present us with an objective account of the making of L’Enfer and the reasons for its failure. Instead, it combines that narrative, recounted in talking head interviews with Clouzot’s collaborators on the film, with original footage and contemporary performance of the script. As it moves back and forth between these different elements, so it blurs boundaries between fact and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity, performance and reality. The film is simultaneously documentary, fiction, reconstruction and homage. This is not something Bromberg attempts to conceal. His opening reference to his claustrophobia in the lift which cuts quickly to Clouzot’s own discussion of his insomnia suggests a connection between the two directors which is furthered by the physical resemblance they share. This mise en abyme structure is furthered as Bromberg’s claustrophobia and Clouzot’s insomnia are mirrored in the jealous madness of Marcel, played by Serge Reggiani, whose dark, brooding looks also recall Clouzot and Bromberg. This movement between the found footage (sometimes accompanied by a diegetic

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soundtrack the film reveals not to be ‘authentic’), talking head interviews and contemporary performance precisely places the spectator in a position of uncertainty and reflexivity. What is it we are watching? Clouzot’s film? Or Bromberg and Medrea Annonier’s film about Clouzot’s film? Or both at the same time? Any claim for documentary objectivity or neutrality is further problematized by the meta-narrative Bromberg and Medrea Annonier construct for the film. L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot, as its title suggests, simultaneously places Clouzot at the heart of the film as both auteur and main protagonist. The film’s opening remarks tell us that the boxes of film retrieved by Bromberg will reveal the story of ‘L’Enfer d’Henri Georges Clouzot’, thus immediately positioning Clouzot as auteur and the doomed film and its fate as his work, the expression of his artistic creativity. Interestingly, this construction is extended even in the talking head interviews with Clouzot’s collaborators on the film. Each of them recounts their experiences of working with him, their recollections of his behaviour and their understanding of the film as being very much Clouzot’s project despite the huge numbers of personnel involved. Throughout, the film stresses Clouzot’s excess (the unlimited budget, the endless shooting, the three crews), his overarching ambition for the film (the visual and auditory experimentation) and the ultimately doomed nature of his ambition. Thus, Bromberg represents Clouzot as a Promethean figure, the creative genius whose overarching ambition could ultimately only lead to failure. However, the film does not only position Clouzot as auteur. The director’s obsession and excess, emphasized so heavily in the film, mirrors the obsession and madness of Marcel, Clouzot’s central protagonist in L’Enfer. Clouzot to some extent becomes Marcel, the story of L’Enfer recounted in L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot is the same story Clouzot tells us in L’Enfer. As such, Clouzot himself becomes the protagonist of this narrative which both is and is not L’Enfer, the mise en abyme structure furthered as the dominant themes of obsession and failure echo the narratives and characters of many of Clouzot’s earlier films. Consider once more Le Salaire de la peur, for example, and the doomed journeys of the four central protagonists in their bid for money which would enable escape from exile in the nameless South American country in which they have found themselves. And of course, this narrative of obsession is mirrored in Bromberg’s own avowed obsession, his quest to seek the lost footage of this ‘mythic’ film. Here again, the boundaries between fiction and documentary are blurred forcing us, as spectators, to engage in precisely the critical and reflexive engagement posited by Bruzzi. The narrative of obsession, both in the found footage and the documentary ‘remake, is further played out in the presence and representation of the film’s leading female star, Romy Schneider. Schneider was a popular European star of the 1950s thanks to her lead role in the Sissi trilogy directed by Ernst Marischka in 1955, 1956 and 1957. By 1964,

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she had begun to move from such popular fare to rather more challenging art films, working with the likes of Luchino Visconti, Alain Cavalier and Orson Welles. She was in other words malleable, ready to experiment, and as Bromberg / Medrea Annonier’s film reveals, in Clouzot she found a director who would push that experimentation to sometimes disturbing levels. The found footage reveals extensive footage of Schneider in a bikini while other scenes depict her kissing and touching Marcel’s ‘rival’ Martineau (Jean-Claude Bercq) and Marylou (Dany Carrel) as Marcel’s jealousy takes hold. More disturbing still are scenes of Schneider wrapped in cellophane, with light shining into her eyes, almost blinding her, and her naked body prone on a railway track as a train (physical embodiment of Marcel’s jealousy) approaches from behind. As Ginette Vincendeau states, Presented as Marcel’s deranged fantasies, the images are also, in a wider sense, a misogynist projection of male erotic obsession on to the body of a woman, ‘blaming’ her for generating a morbid male desire that can only be controlled by violence. In this respect, the overlapping of the kinetic art experiments with Schneider’s sexualised image  – William Lubtchansky labels some of the pure geometric visual play ‘optical coitus’ – speaks of an amalgam in Clouzot’s mind between dysfunctional modernity and the spread of sexual ‘freedom’ in the early 1960s. (Vincendeau 2018: 14–15). Vincendeau goes on to remark that Bromberg’s film makes some attempt to rectify this highly reductive reification by giving Odette a voice in the form of Béjo’s narrative voice-over. However, this gesture, she suggests, is of little force as they ‘begin their film with an image of liquid boiling on a hot plate … an obvious allusion to Schneider’s ‘sizzling’ sexuality and … end it on four minutes of Schneider’s highly sexualised poses, accompanied by languid music’ (Vincendeau 2018:  15). This representation of Romy Schneider in both L’Enfer and L’Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot thus extends the narratives of obsession, madness and indeed cruelty previously discussed. As Schneider’s face and body are revealed, transformed and tortured by Clouzot’s experiments, so they become victim of and bear witness to the obsessions of his ‘creative genius’. As they are revealed once more in Bromberg and Medrea Annonier’s documentary, this exploitation and cruelty is even more marked as our knowledge of Schneider’s tragic later years and early death make her vulnerability even more apparent. The doubling or mise en abyme created by L’Enfer d’Henri Georges Clouzot is further extended by Claude Chabrol’s L’Enfer made in 1994. Chabrol was part of the group of filmmakers whose early work would become what we now identify as the French Nouvelle vague. Along with Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette, Chabrol began his career as a film

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critic at Les Cahiers du cinema. Like many of his cinematic contemporaries, Chabrol was a great admirer of the work of Hitchcock and in 1957 he co-authored with Eric Rohmer the volume Hitchcock, a study of the director’s films through an analysis of The Wrong Man (1956). Chabrol’s first film, Le Beau Serge (1958) was hugely indebted to Hitchcock’s thriller, Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and this admiration for and emulation of Hitchcock’s work of course recalls the similarities between the work of Clouzot and Hitchcock previously discussed. It is also worth noting that Chabrol, sometimes characterized rather dismissively as the most ‘mainstream’ of the New Wave directors, was, also like Clouzot, an extremely meticulous filmmaker. James Monaco described him as ‘the craftsman par excellence of the New Wave, and his variations upon a theme give us an understanding of the explicitness and precision of the language of the film that we don’t get from the more varied experiments in genre of Truffaut or Godard’ (Monaco 1976: 253). In another echo of Clouzot, the psychological thriller became a mainstay for Chabrol, and some of his most celebrated films – Les Biches (1968), La Femme Infidèle (1968) and Que la bête meure (1969) – fall squarely within this genre. Given these connections and similarities, it is perhaps not surprising that Chabrol should decide to make a version of L’Enfer based on Clouzot’s original screenplay. The narrative of obsession, madness and violence scripted by Clouzot, Ferry and Lacour predates and predicts the themes which structure so many of Chabrol’s other works. Just as Clouzot’s scenes suggest a descent into a pathological and disturbing jealousy, so Chabrol’s film is deeply disturbing. Who is in control, who is mad? Is it Paul (François Cluzet) with his obsessive mistrust of his beautiful wife Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart)? Or is it Nelly herself who provokes and controls Paul with her lipstick and provocative clothes, prompting the inevitable and irrevocable disintegration of his psyche? The film provides no answers, no resolution. It ends with the words ‘sans fin’ (without end). The madness, it seems must continue, in an inexorable spiral towards destruction and death. However, while it is possible to read Chabrol’s L’Enfer as a filmed version of Clouzot’s work at the level of narrative, its direction and structure suggest a quite different type of work. The footage revealed in Bromberg / Medrea Annonier’s documentary suggests a film in which the extravagant experimentation of the mise en scène would have mirrored the narrative of obsessive madness; Clouzot’s film about losing control, they suggest, would itself have lost control. In marked contrast, Chabrol’s taut direction and controlled mise en scène contains the madness at its heart while in no way diminishing its disturbing force. Chabrol’s L’Enfer, like Bromberg / Medrea Annonier’s film, both ‘remakes’ and provides a meta-narrative on Clouzot’s doomed film. L’Enfer d’Henri Georges Clouzot constructs Clouzot’s intended masterpiece as a film maudit, a doomed film, brought down by the overarching ambition

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and creative obsession of its writer and director, an ambition enabled by the limitless budget provided by Columbia Pictures. Chabrol’s L’Enfer constructs Clouzot’s intended masterpiece as a supremely well-crafted thriller. Gone are the visual innovation, the experiments with sound. Yet there remains nevertheless a deeply unsettling study of the psychology or indeed psychosis of jealousy. It is possible to read this as a parable for the virtues of a French film industry in which budgets are not unlimited and the merits of tight mise en scène and authorial selection ensure precisely the type of cinema which typified both Clouzot’s previous career and many of the films of Chabrol. In a gesture not entirely dissimilar to the Hollywood remake of French cinema, so often claimed to take its French source and spend vast budgets only to create an artistically inferior other, here the ‘Hollywoodien’ financial input unleashed Clouzot’s creative ambition which, left entirely unfettered, only led to failure and an aborted film. It seems certain that the material freedom afforded by Columbia’s investment was a central factor in Clouzot’s failure to complete his film; with less money Clouzot would have been forced to a smaller crew, more discipline, less footage. Nevertheless, there were other disruptive factors, not least the tensions between Clouzot and Reggiani and the Eléctricité de France’s (EDF) draining of the Garabit reservoir which imposed an artificial but immovable deadline on the shoot. However, as both Bromberg’s documentary and Chabrol’s thriller reveal in rather different ways, the failure to complete the film was ultimately due to Clouzot, to his obsessive drive to create a new kind of cinema, a masterpiece which would rival the creative innovation he so admired in contemporaries such as Fellini. L’Enfer d’Henri George Clouzot reveals a filmmaker who would never be satisfied, whose experimentation would never be exhausted. Given this, it is rather fitting that he should have chosen to shoot his film around the Garabit Viaduct. Between 1880 and 1884, before the construction of the Eiffel Tower, Gustave Eiffel worked with engineer Léon Boyer to create a highly ambitious metal structure over the Truyère gorges, in Cantal. The completed Garabit Viaduct was considered at the time to be not just one of the world’s most beautiful structures but also a technical and architectural feat, spanning 565 metres and, with its height and red colouring, an astonishing and iconoclastic presence in the rural landscape. Like Eiffel’s groundbreaking construction, Clouzot’s film was intended to push artistic boundaries, to make audiences gasp at its creative daring. Sadly, it was not to be. And yet thanks to L’Enfer d’Henri Georges Clouzot and to Chabrol’s L’Enfer, life has been breathed into this ‘shadow’ film. Bromberg and Medrea Annonnier have shown us the film Clouzot could have made while Chabrol perhaps shows us the film he should have made. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, they have made two films which are not Clouzot’s film but films of significant artistic merit in their own right.

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References Bastin, S. (2016), ‘Exclusive Interview: Treasure Hunting: Lobster Films’ Serge Bromberg on “Amazing Film Discoveries” ’, Flicker Alley. Available online: https://www.flickeralley.com/exclusive-interviewtreasure-hunting-lobsterfilms-serge-bromberg-on-amazing-film-discoveries/ (accessed 30 June 2020). Bruzzi, S. (2006), New Documentary: Second Edition, London: Routledge. Chabrol, C., and Rohmer, E. (1957), Hitchcock, Paris: Editions Universitaires. Granger, D. (1954), Financial Times, 15 February. Hayward, S. (2005), Les Diaboliques, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Lloyd, C. (2007), Henri-Georges Clouzot, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mayne, J. (2007), Le Corbeau: French film guides series, London: I.B. Tauris. Mazdon, L., and Wheatley, C. (2013), French Film in Britain; Sex, Art and Cinephilia, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Monaco, J. (1976), The New Wave, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nichols, B. (1991), Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Nichols, B. (1994), Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Street, S. (2002), Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA, London: Continuum. Truffaut, F. (1954), ‘Une Certaine tendence du cinema français’, Les Cahiers du cinema, 6 (31): 15. Vaughan, A. (2019), Performing Identity in Contemporary Biographical Documentary, PhD thesis, Southampton: University of Southampton. Vincendeau, G. (2018), ‘Welcome to Hell’, notes to accompany the Arrow DVD release of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno. ‘Welcome to Lobster’ (n.d.). Available online: https://www.lobsterfilms.com/en/ histoire (accessed 30 June 2020).

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11 Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and its shadow: Rescue and resistance Sue Vice

Claude Lanzmann shot around 220 hours of interview footage between 1978 and 1979 as part of a commission to make a film about the Holocaust. His interviewees were eyewitnesses to the wartime genocide, including both survivors and perpetrators, as well as members of Allied government institutions in the United States, philosophers and historians. The organizing principle of what was to become Shoah (1985) emerged during the editing, undertaken by Lanzmann and others including Ziva Postec, in a process that lasted over five years. It was during this time that the final version’s centring on the subject of the mass murder of the Jews in extermination camps between 1941 and 1945 took shape. The fact that the remainder of the footage was excluded but not discarded, as if held in waiting to be turned into an artistic artefact, is made clear by the separate releases of edited material from the outtakes that have appeared since 1985. These individual films focus on a variety of different topics that include a camp uprising (Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4  p.m., Lanzmann 2001), the failure of outside agencies to provide assistance (A Visitor from the Living, Lanzmann 1999) and, most recently, the experience of four female eyewitnesses (The Four Sisters, Lanzmann 2018). The archive of the remaining outtake footage is held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, and available to watch

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online, in its original form of eleven-minute film reels. In most cases, the interviews on the USHMM website, which last for up to ten hours each, are accompanied by a transcript and, when necessary, a translation since there are no subtitles. The very plethora of accompaniments of this kind, as well as the presence in all the outtake footage of ‘ruined’ shots, clapperboards, off-screen sounds, occasional absence of either image or audio, and sections filmed seemingly in order to be thoroughly edited, such as the long stretches in that with Abba Kovner which show nothing but Lanzmann listening, means that these interviews, however fascinating and valuable they may be, are not immediately accessible or easy to watch. In their unedited state, they are poised on the boundary between testimony and art. The outtakes’ status, one full of potential for a release that is as yet unrealized, is clear in those instances where other filmmakers have borrowed sections of Lanzmann’s footage for their own purposes. Their decisions give a sense of the variety of possible editing strategies that could be followed. For instance, in his documentary Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust (2019) about Peter Bergson’s wartime efforts to save the European Jews, Pierre Sauvage uses some of Lanzmann’s interview with the would-be rescuer from which the figure of the director, along with his voicing of questions and responses, has been entirely cut out. Instead, Sauvage uses a montage of clips from Lanzmann’s colour film that consists only of Bergson speaking, intercut with black-and-white footage from an interview for Laurence Jarvik’s 1982 documentary Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? Such a repurposing of Lanzmann’s footage in this case transforms it into centring on the individual as a historical agent, by means of a crosscutting between Bergson’s utterances from different sources. Such a format gives priority to his judgement and intentions. However, watching Lanzmann’s interview in the context of the other outtake footage suggests that his plan for the Bergson material would rather have been to continue the focus on broader existential concerns, such as those with international indifference and incomprehension, which characterize all his encounters of this kind. And although Lanzmann might have reduced the amount of screen time he occupies as interlocutor, it is unlikely that he would have removed himself entirely from any released version of this footage, as Sauvage has done. Rather, it is a matter of documentary principle on Lanzmann’s part that the figure of the interviewer should remain both audible and visible. As the case of Sauvage’s act of borrowing suggests, Lanzmann’s outtakes as they stand reveal a consistent concern on his part with rescue and resistance, although this topic barely features in the released version of Shoah. This interest is evidenced in the interviews I  will discuss here, as well as such others as that with Tadeusz Pankiewicz, who sheltered Jews in the Kraków Ghetto, Hersh Smolar, a former partisan in the Minsk Ghetto, and several individuals who campaigned on the Jews’ behalf in the United States, including the War Refugee Board director John Pehle, as well

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as Bergson. Although such a subject might seem entirely the opposite to that of the process of death by gassing, with which Shoah concerns itself, Lanzmann’s excluded interviews of this kind reveal the near-impossibility of accomplishing either rescue or resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, and the painful ethical conflicts to which this realization gave rise. In this way, it is possible to imagine these encounters contributing to what Rémy Besson calls the tragic tenor of the released film (2017: 85). Even as it is clear why such material would not suit Shoah, with its focus on the processes of killing, the potential of the outtakes to constitute a filmic meditation on a different aspect of the wartime genocide is equally evident. My examples here are the interviews with Abba Kovner, the poet and former partisan from Vilna, and Hansi Brand, who had been a member of the clandestine Hungarian Aid and Rescue Committee in wartime Budapest. In each instance, Lanzmann organizes the encounter around a significant phrase which sums up a particular view of Holocaust victims and survivors from the standpoint of the late 1970s. In the case of Abba Kovner, Lanzmann’s aim is to centre the discussion on the phrase ‘like sheep to the slaughter’. Although this wording was used by Kovner in a declaration urging the Jews of Vilna to revolt, it has also been deployed to condemn those who did not do so. In the interview with Brand, Lanzmann attempts to address the verdict put forward at the post-war trial involving Rezső Kasztner, her fellow Committee member, which implied that negotiating as he did with such Nazi officials as Adolf Eichmann, even for the purpose of attempting rescue, constituted ‘selling one’s soul to the devil’. This notion of a Faustian pact has continued to characterize debate about the wartime actions of Jewish leaders in occupied Europe. In both interviews, what could be seen as a mishap or a technical flaw in the process of filming arising from the contested phrases takes on such significance that it could become the centre of a discrete filmic release. In the encounter with Kovner, this takes the form of Lanzmann’s reading aloud the wrong version of a call to revolt, one that the former partisan did not write, while in Brand’s case, the language of the interview has to change from Hebrew to German for her to be able to reflect expansively on the past. Nonetheless, in both cases, we see footage that could either have contributed to a version of Shoah that was never made or constituted a new release with a different emphasis. The topics of rescue and resistance are themselves a ghostly presence in our conception of a genocide that proceeded barely hindered for four years, since we already know that their success was only minimal.

Abba Kovner: ‘Like sheep to the slaughter’ Lanzmann’s almost five hours spent interviewing Kovner in late September 1979 took place at the latter’s home of Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh in Israel. It

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centres on Lanzmann’s efforts to investigate the utterance ‘like sheep to the slaughter’, in relation to that phrase’s apparently characterizing the Jews with a culpable passivity. The interview’s clearly hot and sunny outdoor setting, with its mise en scène of Mediterranean plants and tree-lined paths, contrasts sharply with Kovner’s words, as he recalls occupied Vilna, the cramped and unheated ghetto living spaces during winter, and the mass shootings in the nearby forest of Ponari, which had been a pre-war holiday destination. As with many of his survivor interviewees, Lanzmann’s determination to meet Kovner arose from the testimony the latter gave at the 1961 Eichmann Trial. While delivering his witness statement, Kovner read in court the wartime ‘appeal’ to resist, which is prefaced by the lines: ‘Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter, Jewish youth! Do not believe those who are deceiving you.’ Its concluding section repeats the phrase that had caught Lanzmann’s attention: Hitler aimed at destroying the Jews of Europe. It turned out to be the fate of the Jews of Lithuania to be the first. Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter. It is true that we are weak, lacking protection, but the only reply to a murderer is resistance. Brothers, it is better to die as free fighters than to live at the mercy of killers. Resist, resist, to our last breath. (State of Israel 1992: 460). The appeal was written by Kovner in late December 1941, as a direct consequence of his realization that all the Jews in Europe were to be killed, and issued by the FPO (Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye, or United Partisan Organization) in the Vilna Ghetto on 1 January 1942. It was read out at an FPO meeting, which was disguised as a new year’s party, by Kovner in Yiddish and by Tusia Altman, a colleague from Warsaw, in Hebrew (Porat 2009:  68–9). Both the historical instances of Kovner’s reading the appeal aloud, in the Vilna Ghetto and at the Eichmann Trial, suggest that Lanzmann’s filmic aim might have been to persuade his interviewee to re-enact such a reading in the present. Yet this never takes place, and the only person to utter the words of a wartime appeal is the director himself. Kovner’s biographer Dina Porat describes Kovner’s appeal as representing a ‘turning-point in the consciousness of the Jews in conquered Europe as a people’, in its explicit recognition of genocide at a time when the planned murder of all Europe’s Jews was widely considered, even by those affected, to be ‘unthinkable, a wild exaggeration’ (2009:  73, 68). Centring the interview on the appeal in this way is fitting for Lanzmann’s filmic project, in its returning to the very moment when the knowledge of genocide was being arrived at, and the revolution in understanding that it occasioned. But we learn that the director’s view of the phrase, at least in the first half of the interview, draws not on Kovner’s use of a communal first-person

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plural and proscriptive form, ‘Let us not go …’, but takes it instead to be a critique of individuals who had already gone to their deaths ‘like sheep to the slaughter’. Despite being prompted to interview Kovner by his having recited the distinctively worded ‘appeal’ of January 1942 at the Eichmann Trial, Lanzmann makes a remarkable error two hours into the encounter. Kovner responds with bewilderment to Lanzmann’s claim that ‘the text of the appeal is … very violent, and it is a condemnation of the Jews’. In answer to his interviewee’s questioning this description, Lanzmann reads aloud and has presumably had in mind until this moment the wrong version of a wartime appeal to resist. The text Lanzmann recites is not Kovner’s from January 1942. Rather, it is a much longer document of uncertain authorship, whose location in the archive at the Ghetto Fighters’ House in Israel alongside Kovner’s appeal seems to have generated this confusion (Arad 1980: 232). Most strikingly, the later version’s tone throughout is indeed aptly characterized as a ‘violent condemnation’, by contrast to Kovner’s one of urgent persuasion. Lanzmann is no stranger to the cinematic device of reading aloud documents of varied provenance when these are crucial to his filmic vision, so that in Shoah, he reads a letter from Willy Just to Walter Rauff on the subject of modifying the gas vans at the camp of Chełmno. In the present case, Lanzmann’s decision to read out the appeal becomes one of action as well as ventriloquism, since it constitutes the moment in which his error comes to light. Like Kovner’s, the manifesto recited by Lanzmann begins, ‘Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughter.’ However, its tone quickly alters thereafter into that of a harangue. Lanzmann voices the claim in this appeal that the present ‘terrible misfortune’ is even greater because of ‘the disgraceful conduct of Jews today’, uncannily placing himself in the position of that version’s author: LANZMANN: Never in its long martyrdom did the Jewish people not give proof of such abasement, of such lack of human dignity, of national pride, and unity, of so much generalized inertia and submission to the assassins. The heart hurts more when one thinks about the conduct of the Jewish youth educated during twenty years in the ideals of pioneering and defence, and today apathetic, lost, not up to the demands of today’s tragic struggle. Kovner’s repudiation of wording of this kind is clear in his startled flinching as Lanzmann starts to read the appeal in French, followed by his definitive denial of having written the document after the translator begins to present it in Hebrew. Lanzmann does not reach the end of this other manifesto in his reading aloud during the interview, since Kovner interrupts: ‘No need to continue, I never wrote anything like that.’

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Lanzmann is taken aback by the mistake of reading aloud the wrong appeal and can be heard out of shot explaining that ‘Irène’ (his research assistant, Irène Steinfeldt-Levi) had located the text. Kovner is more sanguine, urging the director not to ‘get upset’ over ‘unimportant things’. In the second half of the encounter, Kovner holds a printed copy of his own manifesto, which he has clearly sought out during a break in the filming. This is a visual reminder of the scenario in 1942 as he describes it, in which eventually ‘the whole Jewish population of Vilna had this appeal in their hands’. One of the ironies of Lanzmann’s reading the wrong version is that Kovner’s original, in an interview which was occasioned by, and revolves around, this very text, is itself never recited. It remains unvoiced on this occasion, present only in the form of a visual trace. As Kovner’s case shows, ‘the negation’ of the ‘sheep to the slaughter’ phrase, in urging the Jews of Vilna not to act in a certain way, is just as important as its judgemental usage (Feldman 2013: 148). In his survey of the historiography of Holocaust resistance, Robert Rozett uses the aphorism to sum up the now outmoded opinion held by some in the first decades after the war about those who did not take up arms, or at least flee from the Nazi onslaught: ‘they were bunched together under the rubric of having gone to their deaths “like sheep to the slaughter” ’ (2004: 341). Indeed, Lanzmann’s mistake in reading out the wrong appeal makes for cinematic drama, partly in laying bare his preconceptions and reliance on a historiography of Holocaust resistance which was influenced, at that time, by Raul Hilberg. In his 1961 history, The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg quotes the phrase with a revealingly different emphasis: ‘Jewish resistance organizations attempting to reverse the mass inertia spoke the words: “Do not be led like sheep to the slaughter” ’ (2003: 1111). Hilberg uses the form of a prohibition here, ‘Do not’, rather than the imperative request of ‘Let us’, as Kovner does, and compounds the notion of acquiescence in his adding the passive construction, ‘Do not be led’, in the place of ‘Let us not go’. Kovner is equally always mindful that the call to arms had a meaning it was hard to accept, as he adds: while ‘it is better to fall as fighters’, it is the case that ‘even in a fight there is no chance of success’. The address of his appeal to ‘Jewish youth’ is itself an acknowledgement of the difficulty for those with families even to consider such a summons. In this way, Lanzmann’s error of attribution dramatizes, by means of Kovner’s interruption and the director’s consternation at his mistake, the divergence between the opposing senses in which the ‘sheep to the slaughter’ utterance is used. Its status as a ‘twofold phrase’, either lamenting passivity or heralding martyrdom, is made visible as well as audible (Feldman 2013:  151, 143). Kovner’s new twist to the phrase is to use it to urge defiance on his fellow Jews, but without any ‘vestige of accusation’, as he put it at the Eichmann Trial (State of Israel 1992: 464).

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Lanzmann and Kovner remain at a conceptual and visual distance from each other throughout the encounter, giving filmic expression to the vexed questions of wording, translation and attribution that are central to the interview. They seldom appear together in a shot, the camera focusing for the most part only on Kovner. There are also some stretches where the figure of a listening Lanzmann is present in which, although we hear Kovner speaking, he remains invisibly off-screen. This footage could be edited to give the impression of an exchange, but in its present state it offers a correlate to what seems to be a lack of sympathetic connection between the two men. As he sometimes does in Shoah when an interviewee uses a language he cannot respond to directly, Lanzmann refers to Kovner throughout in the third person, addressing his remarks in this way to the translator, Francine Kaufmann, and compounding the sense of distance between them. For the most part, Kovner avoids eye contact with his interviewer and equally does not look into the camera, although occasionally he fixes Lanzmann with an intently attentive expression of widened eyes with his hand covering his mouth. Such an effect of distance alternating with wary or sceptical connection is visible alongside Kovner’s more frequently turning away from Lanzmann, holding his head in his hands or even closing his eyes. It cannot be doubted that, in part for the very reason of his intense reserve, Kovner possesses the ‘star’ quality that Lanzmann sought in his interviewees. Indeed, unlike most of the witnesses in Shoah, Kovner was already well known by the time of the interview in 1979 in his roles as a partisan, avenger, trial witness, independence fighter and Israeli poet. The portrait of Kovner as it appears in Lanzmann’s interview is that of an older version of the well-known visual images encapsulating these roles, particularly that of him carrying a rifle in the newly liberated Vilna of 1945. The familiarity of Kovner’s lean-faced and unsmiling expression, his wideeyed stare, and his hair, the appearance of which he was very particular about as a young man (Porat 2009: 23), all make his filmed presence itself a historicized one. Most notably, Lanzmann’s interview with Kovner takes the form of a confrontation between different versions of the ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ phrase, at a moment in which the historiography of Holocaust resistance itself was changing. It does so not by means of dialogue or debate but through the error of attribution that Lanzmann makes. Lanzmann’s mistake, and his ‘flabbergasted’ response (‘ça me sidère’, as he says in French to Kovner), symbolizes the change from one tradition in rhetorical and historiographical use to another. It does so by enacting and making visual a moment in which such condemnation is shown to be the wrong response. Including such a moment in any filmic release would have required the director’s willingness to portray his own fallibility for the sake of cinematic drama.

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Hansi Brand: Selling one’s soul to the devil In Lanzmann’s 1.7-hour interview with Brand, a different but similarly denunciatory utterance hangs over the exchange. In this case, it is a phrase that emerged from the 1954–5 trial in Israel of the Hungarian-born amateur journalist Malchiel Grünwald. Grünwald was charged with libelling Brand’s colleague Rezső Kasztner, whom he accused of collaborating with the Nazis in occupied Budapest during the last years of the war. However, Grünwald’s defence by the Israeli lawyer Shmuel Tamir turned the trial into an attack instead on Kasztner, and the verdict was found in Grünwald’s favour. In his summing up, the judge at trial, Benjamin Halevi, described Kasztner, and by extension those who had worked with him in the underground Hungarian Aid and Rescue Committee, as having ‘sold his soul to the devil’ (Orr 1994: 91). The debate centred in particular on the so-called Kasztner train, by means of which 1,684 Jews were taken from Hungary to safety in Switzerland. It was alleged at the trial that Kasztner had deliberately failed to warn others about their impending fate in order to ensure the safety of this train filled with his family and associates. More recently, it has been argued that Brand, and not Kasztner, was involved in choosing the passengers. Lanzmann’s interest lies precisely in Brand’s behind-the-scenes yet ‘crucial’ role, rather than seeing her simply as a substitute for the nowdead Kasztner. Although the trial verdict was overturned in 1958, Kasztner did not live to see his name cleared, having been assassinated a year earlier by Ze’ev Eckstein, ‘a right-wing zealot’ (Shaked 2015: 3). It is to explore this fraught Holocaust-era history, one of ‘at least trying to influence the course of events’ (Sanders 2016: 12), that Lanzmann interviews Brand. If the encounter with Kovner attempted to address the post-war image of Jews going to their deaths as passively as ‘sheep’, then that with Brand centres on the debate from the same period of post-Holocaust thinking about ‘guilty victims’, whose very survival was attributed to acquiescence or collaboration (Yablonka 2003: 10). Like Kovner, Brand had testified at the Eichmann Trial, at which Halevi was once more in the position of judge. However, the sympathetic reception of witness testimony in Jerusalem in 1961 registered an alteration in attitude from that of the Kasztner Trial just six years earlier. In the present encounter, Brand has reluctantly agreed to be interviewed and is reticent and defensive, until a change in the language of the exchange from Hebrew to German prompts her more freely to address the events of the past. Lanzmann interviewed Brand in September 1979 at her home in Tel Aviv. She recounts how the Committee’s wartime efforts, which had been directed towards assisting refugees from other Nazi-occupied countries, turned to trying to save the lives of their fellow Jews in Hungary following the Nazi invasion in March 1944, after which, as Brand puts it here, the conditions

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of life in Hungary changed ‘utterly and completely’. These efforts included Kasztner and Brand’s husband Joel entering into discussions with Eichmann, at the latter’s instigation. The deal as proposed by Eichmann would have involved supplying goods to support the German war effort in exchange for Jewish lives, relying on the Allies to provide the materiel. A wartime article in The Times describes the ‘loathsome’ nature of such a proposal, as part of a story which began ‘with a process of deliberate extirpation and ends, to date, with attempted blackmail’ (reproduced in Fuchs 1984: 193). While it is Kasztner with whom the negotiations are usually associated, it was Brand who introduced her colleague to Eichmann and she was present at many of the meetings between them. As Brand puts it to Lanzmann, by the time of the occupation of Hungary, ‘we knew that the Germans were losing the war and it was only a matter of time before they would lose completely’. However, that did not prevent the Nazis from sending hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in 1944. As Andrea Pető describes the period between May and July 1944, ‘the deportation of 430,000 Jews from Hungary was the quickest in the history of the Holocaust … with the active participation of Hungarian civil servants’, including the police and government employees (Pető 2019: 471). As the interview opens, we see Brand seated in a small brocade armchair in front of a cluttered bookcase in her Tel Aviv apartment. Lanzmann is not visible, and indeed, apart from the occasional intrusion of his gesturing hand into the frame, he remains unseen throughout. There is thus no footage of the director to intercut with that of his interviewee, to give even the impression of an exchange. Brand’s expression is one of a wary and controlled discomfort. A gradual close-up on her face shows her blinking rapidly, appearing apprehensive to the extent that tears seem only just to be restrained. Brand holds herself very still, although her anxiety is betrayed by her visibly agitated breathing, and she sits at first with her arms crossed in a defensive posture. Almost all extant photographs, apart from one pre-war image of her as a smiling young woman, show Brand with the same expression of a grim reserve. She seems relaxed only in an interview conducted towards the end of her life for Czech television, in Martin Smok and Petr Bok’s three-part series Among Blind Fools (1999):  not only is the documentary itself more straightforwardly positive about attempted rescue, but Brand is also able to speak in her native Hungarian. It is possible to discern in a withdrawn self-presentation of the kind apparent in the encounter with Lanzmann the effects of the ordeal of the occupation, followed by the accusation of collaboration in 1954 and the murder of her colleague and friend Kasztner three years later. In the interview with Lanzmann, Brand acknowledges the importance of performance in relation to ‘the role of a negotiating partner’ in the meetings with Eichmann, where, despite the ‘abject inequality’ of the two sides (Yablonka 2003: 12), she had to appear business-like, using a ‘normal,

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sociable, let’s say ordinary manner, so that no one would know that we were afraid of them [the Germans]’. This performance of self-control in the present seems to be Brand’s way of coping with the difficulty she describes in talking about the past at all. Indeed, the encounter with Lanzmann both begins and ends with her declaration of its problematic and even inadvisable nature. ‘If I begin once again to discuss this, I will have to relive the tragedies of our people and of my life,’ she says at the very outset, and she concludes by invoking the likelihood of ‘historical distortions’ following whatever she might say: ‘And … that’s why I really didn’t want to do this interview.’ The present encounter thus forms an interview despite itself. Brand’s demeanour and affect throughout the encounter testify to the personal cost of estimates of the Committee’s activities being divided between the extremes of acclaim and condemnation (Sanders 2016:  11), as well as the painful nature of the accusations themselves. Her responses are enacted in bodily and linguistic form as we hear her rebuff any suggestion of questionable behaviour on Kasztner’s part and on her own. For instance, at the opening of film reel eight, Lanzmann launches straight into a confrontational dialogue, asking Brand about Kasztner’s rescue of individuals from his hometown of Koloszvár, which the director calls by its German name of Klausenburg: LANZMANN: But surely you know, it is also said that Kasztner saved his own people in Klausenburg, for example, Dr Fischer, his father-in-law, and Zionists from Klausenburg and … what do you think about that? BRAND: I ask you, if you were in the same situation, wouldn’t you be thinking about your own family? … [Otherwise] he wouldn’t have been a ‘Mensch’. Lanzmann’s response to Brand’s argument here, ‘That’s a very good answer’, is hard to take at face value, since it functions as much as a facilitation of the interview as an expression of his own opinion. In his interview in the outtakes with the defending lawyer Tamir from the Kasztner Trial, Lanzmann appears to go along in a similar manner with a diametrically opposite view. Yet such moments in the director’s construction of an interviewer-persona have the effect here of allowing for a future use of this footage, as if the possibility of editing together divergent views from different interviews on the questions surrounding rescue and resistance is already being prepared for in the dialogue. However, Brand’s demeanour and attitude do alter over the course of the interview within the constraints of her watchful reserve, in a way that arises from a change in language. The question of national language and translation is invariably more than a simply technical matter in Lanzmann’s interviews, in both Shoah itself and in the outtakes, forming instead an

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integral part of the meaning (Kaufmann 2016:  174). In the present case, language plays a significant role in the way Brand presents herself. The interview begins with her speaking Hebrew, then translated into English in answer to Lanzmann’s questions, which he poses in English and which are in turn translated into Hebrew so that Brand can respond to them. Although it therefore conforms to what Lanzmann calls the ‘four-part structure’ of the translation in Shoah between Polish and French (Kaufmann 2016: 165), the situation at the outset of Brand’s interview is unusual. Neither director nor interviewee is speaking in their native tongue, nor do they use a shared foreign language. This is likely to be the result of the unseen translator, who is not one of the consistently present figures from Shoah, each of whom is associated with a particular language, being unable to translate Hebrew to French. It seems that in the present case Lanzmann, who can be heard commanding ‘Coupez!’ (‘Cut!’) on several occasions before the reel’s eleven minutes of filming time is up, is dissatisfied with the interview’s conduct. It proceeds at a slow tempo, with long pauses between utterances. Between reels four and five a change takes place, so that, for the remainder of the interview, Brand and Lanzmann speak directly to one another in German without the translator’s intervention. The change in language makes a striking visual, as well as auditory, difference. Speaking German allows Lanzmann to question Brand in an unmediated mode that seems to thaw her stillness. She uncrosses her arms, for instance to gesture at parts of her body in support of her account of interrogation by the Hungarian secret police, as she describes, ‘I was beaten on the head and the soles of the feet.’ It also speeds up the exchanges between interviewer and interviewee so that they speak over and interrupt each other, giving an impression of high emotion. The change from Hebrew to German takes place after Brand has described Joel’s initial meeting with Eichmann. As she adds, ‘The offer that Eichmann made was that for every truck we gave him, he would set 10,000 Jews free’, a proposition with the result that ‘Joel was so shocked by the words that he couldn’t find an answer, and asked for time to think … and that he must consult the others’. The last words to be translated into English from Hebrew, before the direct exchanges in German begin, are about the Committee’s reaction to Eichmann’s proposition, in the form of a cliff-hanger at the end of a film reel: ‘since there was no choice, we began to discuss the prospects.’ In a congruence of form and subject, the very moment the language in which the interview is conducted turns to German is also that in which it moves on to questions about the wartime wish to rescue and the post-war slur of collaboration. This change marks a return to the language of the past, reminding the viewer that all the negotiations with Eichmann also took place in such a tongue. Indeed, while she is still using Hebrew, Brand quotes that SS officer’s words in initiating what she calls his ‘macabre’ proposal: ‘But I have an idea: we can make a deal’, then

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comments on her turning to the language of the transaction: ‘(and I must say this in German): Blut für Waren und Waren für Blut’ [blood for goods and goods for blood]. It is used here as a language reserved for the world of the past. Eichmann’s phrase, ‘blood for goods’, which is, like the notion of selling one’s ‘soul to the devil’, an element of the ‘linguistic legacy’ of the Committee’s negotiations (Yablonka 2003:  15), is defamiliarized in the present through its rendition by a Hungarian-born woman quoted within her Hebrew-language narrative. Brand’s returning the phrase to its original German restores the criminal responsibility to its rightful place. As Hanna Yablonka puts it of more recent views of the Committee’s activities, ‘the “devil” alone remained guilty of all charges’ (Yablonka 2003: 14). The encounter with Lanzmann might seem uncomfortably to replicate the structure of Brand’s post-war trial appearances, in which she ran the risk of turning from witness to defendant. Yet it is not to either of the trials but to the meetings with Eichmann that Brand contrasts the encounter with Lanzmann, in responding to the director’s request that she describe the ‘situation’ on those occasions, ‘because it’s so hard to imagine’. Brand answers by claiming, ‘It wasn’t the way we are now, sitting across from one another and having a nice conversation on a sofa, and you ask and I answer.’ Even if there is both historical bathos here, and some irony in Brand’s characterizing the interview with Lanzmann as a ‘nice conversation’, her reply deflects what we can only imagine to be one of the director’s goals, to draw her back into the world of the past. The change to speaking German rather than Hebrew might have begun such a process, and allowed the interview to become an opportunity, like the Eichmann Trial, to ‘tell the Committee’s story and once more prove the late Kasztner’s innocence’ (Geva 2014: 106). Indeed, we hear Lanzmann, during the course of the interview, remind Brand of the large audience to be expected of their discussion, as he puts it of the situation in Hungary in mid-1944: ‘I want to understand and to see [the situation], and not just for myself, but for the people who will see this film.’ However, Brand’s practised resistance and her unwillingness to ‘relive the tragedies’ of either a personal or public kind evades Lanzmann’s wish to provoke a reincarnation of the past. As well as excluding the interview with Brand from Shoah, in which the fate of the Hungarian Jews does not feature directly, Lanzmann chose not to use any footage from it in his final film, The Four Sisters (2018), where his interviews with women from a divergent range of backgrounds are placed side by side. One of these interviewees is Hanna Marton, whose life and that of her husband were saved by their inclusion on the Kasztner train. This reveals that, in filmic terms at least, Marton’s view of the Holocaust in Hungary, as a passenger on the train, superseded that of Brand’s, one of those who organized its journey, in the director’s eyes.

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Conclusion Despite their sharing a visual congruence between subject and form, the interviews with Kovner and Brand seem to be at odds on the question of rescue and resistance in the Holocaust years. For Kovner, acknowledging the totality of death faced by the Jews entailed the painful corollary that, since individual rescue would not help the majority, choosing the manner of one’s own death was the only option. The goal of this kind of ‘resistance’ was not that of self-preservation, as he puts it: ‘It was not a question of saving myself, to save you, to save a neighbour. It was to fight the Germans.’ Indeed, Kovner relates to Lanzmann an instance in which a group of Lithuanian partisans offered to ‘prepare a hide-out outside Vilna, for 20 to 25 individuals’ whom the FPO might have ‘wanted to save – writers, artists, thinkers, politicians, individuals who would have a place in history’. However, Kovner explains that ‘we refused to give them such a list’. His efforts during the war to combat incomprehension on the Lithuanians’ part when their offer was refused are repeated in the present, for Lanzmann and, by implication, for the spectator: ‘They were asking us to make a selection, of course positive … but we told them: is it for this that we are rebelling? To make this selection, to decide who had the right to life or death?’ Yet in Vilna, a mass uprising never took place, as it did in the Warsaw Ghetto, and it would in any case have been a symbolic resistance that could not hope to challenge an insuperable foe. In Brand’s case, it looks as if just the kind of selective rescue rejected in Vilna was enacted in Budapest. However, this is only so since what the Committee believed would be a mass rescue turned out in the event to be a partial one. The Kasztner train was considered at the time to be only the first in a series of such transports. Brand’s aggrieved defence of Kasztner is one of herself too: ‘I don’t know if there are a lot of people living in Israel who, let’s say, saved 1,600 Jews’. Yet the nature of the impasses that were shared in the very distinct situations of Vilna in 1941 and Budapest in 1944, concerning the difficulty of converting information about mass murder into understanding and action, suggests that these perspectives on how to respond in situations of catastrophe and emergency could be juxtaposed in the form of a separate release, as a supplement to or shadow of Shoah. The disruptive moments on screen serve as an alternative kinetic way of embodying the quandaries of the past, since the reserved and defensive demeanour on the part of both Kovner and Brand militates against the possibility of the reincarnation which could have offered a way out of ‘teleological retrospection’. This is a mode that characterizes not just the post-war knowledge of the mass killing of the Jews, but is also ‘used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come’ (Bernstein 1998: 626). The

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harsh utterances on which the interviews centre  – the biblically inflected ambiguity of ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ and the metaphysical evil implied by ‘selling one’s soul to the devil’ – could helpfully be replaced by a more everyday acknowledgement of the ‘trap situation’ in which decisions were made and actions taken. The experience of watching Lanzmann’s outtakes may feel destabilisingly unmediated, since none of the cutting, interpolation of landscape footage or adjustment of the soundtrack has taken place, as it has in Shoah and the other releases. This is in addition to what is the uncomfortable nature of the subjects of these excluded interviews, in their constituting unedited eyewitness accounts of irresolvable quandaries in the face of organized mass killing. Yet the viewer is rewarded in an unexpected way for their efforts, by being able to consider what the shape of their own virtual editing of this material might take. In this sense, each spectator’s interpretation has the status of a shadow of Shoah. Thus, rather than removing the error of attribution that Lanzmann makes in reading aloud someone else’s appeal in his interview with Kovner, or using only the German-language part of Brand’s, these ruptures could form the conceptual heart of each encounter in the imagined cinema of the viewer’s mind. In this way, watching the outtake interviews at all is a means of evading what David MacDougall calls the director’s ‘centering of meaning’ as this takes place by the very process of cutting, tidying and shortening documentary footage. Instead, the viewer is free to impose or divine their own meaning (MacDougall 1999: 297–8). Note: The outtakes were created by Claude Lanzmann during the filming of Shoah and are used and cited by permission of the USHMM and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem.

References Arad, Y. (1980), Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust, Jerusalem: KTAV. Bernstein, M.A. (1998), ‘Victims-in-Waiting: Backshadowing and the Representation of European Jewry’, New Literary History, 29 (4): 625–51. Besson, R. (2017), Shoah: Une Double Réference? Des faits au film, du film aux faits, Paris: Éditions MkF. Feldman, Y. (2013), ‘ “Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter?” On Trauma, Selective Memory, and Historical Consciousness’, Jewish Social Studies, 19 (3): 139–69. Fuchs, A. (1984), The Unheeded Cry, New York: Mesorah. Geva, S. (2014), ‘Wife, Lover, Woman: The Image of Hansi Brand in Israeli Public Discourse’, Nashim, 27: 97–119.

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Hilberg, R. ([1961] 2003), The Destruction of the European Jews, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kaufmann, F. (2016), ‘The Ambiguous Task of the Interpreter in Claude Lanzmann’s Films Shoah and Sobibor: Between the Director and the Survivors of the Camps and Ghettos’, in M. Wolf (ed.), Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps, 161–80, London: Bloomsbury. MacDougall, D. (1999), ‘When Less is Less: The Long Take in Documentary’, in B. Henderson, and A. Martin (eds), Film Quarterly: Forty Years – A Selection, 291–305, Berkeley: University of California Press. Orr, A. (1994), Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crises, London: Pluto. Pető, A. (2019), ‘ “Non-Remembering” the Holocaust in Hungary and Poland’, POLIN 31, 471–80. Porat, D. (2009), The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Yuval, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rozett, R. (2004), ‘Jewish Resistance’, in D. Stone (ed.), Historiography of the Holocaust, 341–61, London: Palgrave. Sanders, P. (2016), ‘The ‘Strange Mr Kastner’: Leadership Ethics in Holocaustera Hungary, in the Light of Grey Zones and Dirty Hands’, Leadership, 12 (1): 4–33. Shaked, M. (2015), ‘The Unknown Eichmann Trial: The Story of the Judge’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 29 (1): 1–38. State of Israel (1992), The trial of Adolf Eichmann: record of proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem, Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial, in co-operation with the Israel State Archives and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem. Yablonka, H. (2003), ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel: The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kasztner and Eichmann Trials’, Israel Studies, 8 (3): 1–24.

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Reconstructing the unmade

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12 The never Alice: Marilyn Manson, gothic girlhoods and Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

When internationally renowned goth rocker Marilyn Manson first announced his intention to direct and star in his feature film debut in both roles – an Alice in Wonderland (Carroll 1865)-inspired feature called Phantasmagoria:  The Visions of Lewis Carroll  – Manson’s trademark passion to shock and awe a perceived conservative mainstream seemed assured.1 With his gender-blurring, pro-Satan public persona already making him an icon for gloomy teens and thus necessarily the enemy of good taste (or so his commercial brand has now for decades suggested), this seeming desecration of Lewis Carroll’s beloved Victorian children’s classic seemed like a perfect match. A short synopsis released at the time of the film’s trailer release in 2010 read as follows: Victorian England. A  haunted writer in an isolated castle is tormented by sleepless nights and visions of a girl named Alice. He finds himself becoming a symptom of his own invention. Now all his nightmares know his name. He is Lewis Carroll and he is terrified of what waits for him each night. (Miska 2010)

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Intending to create a dark horror film in the style of the works of Roman Polanski and Ingmar Bergman, Manson was as fascinated with the story of Carroll himself as with the author’s stories of Alice and described his project as relating to biographical details which remained unspecified: ‘It’s about the period in his life where there was a real split … It’s a very Jekylland-Hyde sort of story. It’s based on his diaries, and it’s all very factual’ (‘Marilyn Manson’s “Alice in Wonderland” Film Shut Down Due To Trailer Backlash?’ 2010). Given that controversial accusations of mental instability, paedophilia and sexual deviancy have come to surface in biographies and literary scholarship concerning Carroll, Manson appeared to be intending to generate ‘shock value’ by using such material to cut against the traditionally ‘wholesome’ family-friendly image of Alice in Wonderland (as perpetuated in the 1951 Disney animation). Yet, beyond a few public statements made when Manson was being interviewed about other projects, however, a ninety-second trailer produced in 2006 and released online in 2010 is the only concrete evidence of his own ‘vision’ that we can rely on to analyse the potential shocking qualities of the film that failed to materialize. In fact, the media specifically promoted the idea that the project faced obstacles and was eventually shelved because of a strong public ‘backlash’ against the supposedly scandalous nature of this specific trailer. However, as I shall argue through analysis of that trailer and consideration of the transgressive qualities already associated with Alice in Wonderland and Carroll himself, there are perhaps more persuasive explanations that can be discerned, suggesting something far less in keeping with Manson’s star persona as a bad boy provocateur. In tackling an unmade film which exists only in the form of a teasertrailer (originally produced to attract investors) and in the equally teasing statements made about it during Manson’s media appearances, this chapter also looks to raise broader questions about the researching of shadow cinema. There is always something ephemeral that hovers enigmatically around the notion of unmade or unfinished films. This grants them a quality that can perhaps be best described as loosely akin to the Japanese aesthetic concept of mono no aware, defined by Yoji Yamakuse as ‘the sense of pathos the Japanese feel when contemplating the fleetingness of life. Cherry blossom viewing is an example of this sense of pathos in action. The blossoms give pleasure but also arouse feelings of pathos because their beauty will only last a few days’ (2012: 72). More poetically, perhaps, James Crowley and Sandra Crowley simply describe mono no aware as the ‘ “ah-ness” of things’ (2001: n.p.). While making concrete cross-cultural parallels is problematic, in a general way there is something about this simultaneous experience of the pleasures beauty can bring and its simultaneous loss that the unmade film can often provide, resulting in this response of ‘ah-ness’. As intangible as it may be, this sense of ‘ah-ness’ is particularly useful when seeking to theoretically situate the significance of the unmade

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Phantasmagoria project. Unlike older unmade film projects, the mysteries and enigmas of ‘what could have been’ in this instance are not buried in a formal material archive but are far more contemporary. We have more information about this project from informal information repositories like Reddit and YouTube than we do more orthodox moving-image museums or libraries. In terms of the questions of reconstruction then (can this film be reimagined from the material we have available to us?), Phantasmagoria offers a fascinating instance of a film whose status is still realistically in flux, and quite logically will be until Manson himself passes away. Although he has in recent years stated that project is over and he has no interest in returning to it, we simply just do not know if this film will ever be completed or not. Consequently, the ‘ah-ness’ that recalls a similar essence to mono no aware that so often permeates shadow cinema in this instance is importantly complicated by what undeniably must remain a flicker of hope. In a production sense, nothing has been ‘lost’ in this project except for the desire to make it. Consequently, while this chapter therefore frames Phantasmagoria ultimately in the past tense  – thus aligning it with the ‘unmadeness’ of other films presented in this collection – it is a significant case study because its very status of ‘unmade’ is essentially volatile and unstable, just as the production history of the film itself will now be demonstrated to be.

The making (and breaking) of Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll Manson’s affinity with the Alice stories and the life of their author had long been in evidence. Born in 1969 and growing up in a small town in Ohio, Brian Hugh Warner would transform into Marilyn Manson, a flamboyant international goth rock star linked to drugs, sexual excess, madness and depression (Galloway 2011: n.p.). As a teen, ‘down the rabbit hole’ was a vernacular expression used by Manson and his friends ‘to describe the effects of hallucinogenic drugs’ (ibid.), an aspect of Alice’s psychedelic heritage that has played a significant role in the countercultural endurance of Carroll’s book as a revered text (Ellinger 2018). The extent of Manson’s own reverence for the material can be oddly discerned from a former band member’s legal suit against Manson in 2007, which included the unusual charge that the singer had ‘misused funds by – among other things – employing roadies to carry his rare Lewis Carroll books’, prompting biographer Gavin Baddley to note it must surely be ‘an extensive collection if it requires its own road crew’ (2008:  n. p). The same year, his album Eat Me Drink Me (2007) demonstrated well how Alice was informing Manson’s own works in this period, including songs like ‘Are You the Rabbit’, as well as the title track,

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which included many lyrical references such as:  ‘In the wasteland on the way to the Red Queen / It’s no wonder our stage clothes have dreams to be famous / The trees in the courtyard are painted in blood, so I’ve heard / She hangs the headless upside down to drain.’ This unification of Alice with horror imagery had earlier been voiced by Manson when discussing his planned feature film debut. In 2004, the first rumblings of Manson wishing to tackle Alice and Carroll in the specific context of cinema began to appear. In October that year, Jennifer Vineyard at MTV reported that he was to play the Queen of Hearts in an Alice adaptation called Living in Neon Dreams (Vineyard 2004). Rumoured to tell the story of a girl who enters a fantastic alternate reality when falling into a coma after a car accident, this film also did not come to fruition but was to supposed to have co-starred Alan Cumming, Daryl Hannah, Tim Roth and Jonathan Pryce, with Jeremy Tarr attached as director (Vineyard 2004).2 Manson justified his departure from this project because of delays: ‘The schedule kept being delayed to the point where it’s been two years now, and I  had to pass on it because I  just didn’t feel like it was going to happen and I feel like I want other things to happen’ (Harris 2005). Yet while Living in Neon Dreams appeared to vanish with little trace, Manson’s reputation as a screen actor (having first appeared in David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997)) was soon to escalate with a key performance in Asia Argento’s film adaptation of J.  T. LeRoy’s controversial novel The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004). This also led to appearances in US television series such as Salem (broadcast on WGN America from 2014 to 2017), Sons of Anarchy (broadcast on FX from 2008 to 2014)  (Petridis 2017) and  – most recently  – the television series The New Pope (HBO, 2020), and saw his name attached to number of uncompleted projects by Chilean surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorwosky (Lack 2011; Zakarin 2014). Within this context of ventures into film and television, Phantasmogoria was intended not only to further Manson’s acting ambitions but also to be his directorial debut. Indeed, the first details of the Phantasmogaria project started to emerge when Manson discussed the collapse of Living Neon Dreams with MTV in November 2005. Elaborating a little on the ‘other things’ he wanted to happen, he explained his idea for a film about Lewis Carroll and how he became a persona much more bizarre and elaborate than Marilyn Manson … Charles Dodson was his real name, and he was a person who had a tortured inability to find love and to find happiness in his life, and his story is one of great depression. It’s one of a split personality – a person who was deaf in his right ear and left-handed. He was a mathematician and an artist, a deacon in a church who believed in evolution. I relate to him. (Harris 2005)

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The then-18-year-old English model Lily Cole was also mentioned as his potential co-star for the first time. Manson also made explicit his broader ambitions as a major player in the film industry, discussing what in retrospect is another incomplete film project with him as a central actor: a three-film series about Edgar Allan Poe, directed by filmmakers including Gaspar Noé and Chan-wook Park (Harris 2005). By 2006, the Phantasmagoria press machine was in full swing with Manson appearing at the Berlin International Film Festival in early February to promote his pet project. Again, a continuing theme in Manson’s sound bites for the press concerned how much of himself he saw in Carroll:  ‘I felt like there were a lot of things about his personality that were like mine … His creativity thrived mostly at night. He was a very odd person. In the past year, just putting together the script, I think I’ve adopted a lot of his personality, whether for better or for worse’ (Harris 2005). Increasingly framing the film as a surreal horror movie, for Manson, the more I  looked into it, the more [I realized] this was a ghost story, really. He was haunted by his own demons and had a split personality in a lot of ways. He couldn’t find happiness; he couldn’t find a family. He didn’t sleep. I think that he was seeing things. You start seeing things differently, stuff that normal people don’t see – stuff that I have seen now and again. I think I was able to relate to that and to want to put it on the screen. (Harris 2005) Elsewhere it was reported that Manson’s presence at Berlin was specifically to attend the European Film Market to seek funding for the film. Indeed, his producer suggested a degree of impatience on Manson’s part to get the project moving ahead: ‘He didn’t want to wait for Cannes to do this, he’s ready now’ (‘Manson “Will Play Lewis Carroll” ’ 2006). By mid-2008, it had appeared that this determination had paid off. Conceptual photographs had been released. Funding of $4.2  million had been announced. And prestigious German film distribution and international sales group Wild Bunch was attached to the project (‘Marilyn Manson’s Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll’ 2008). Wild Bunch had already distributed highprofile cult and horror films including Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2007) and Park Chan-wook’s Old Boy (2004), suggesting that they saw Phantasmogoria as potentially possessing similar qualities. Rumours also came and went about casting with both Angelina Jolie and Tilda Swinton supposedly attached at different times (‘Phantasmagoria:  The Visions of Lewis Carroll’ 2016). By March 2010, however, the novelty had begun to wear thin as film journalists began asking, ‘Whatever happened to Marilyn Manson’s Alice in Wonderland Movie?’ (Turner 2010). Just a month later, the film ‘trailer’ seemed finally to answer that question was finally released (Miska 2010).

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The Phantasmagoria trailer The most concrete indication of what a completed version of Phantasmagoria might have looked like is the brief teaser trailer itself. It is, in practical terms, the most solid textual material available for analysis when examining the formal qualities and content of the intended movie. The core aesthetic of the trailer features light-coloured images appearing in a world of what is largely literally and symbolically depicted as darkness. The first image of Manson’s own blurred, white, ghoulish visage appearing on a flat black background echoes gothic cinema from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Wiene 1921) to Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise (1978–2018), but it also consciously replicates the cover of his fifth studio album The Golden Age of the Grotesque (2003). While recognizably iconic to horror fans in general, fans of Manson in particular would have immediately recognized the reference to that album, thereby forming a bridge between Manson’s enduring gothic brand and sensibility and specific horror film iconography. Actor and model Lily Cole’s youthfulness is also emphasized in the next shot. A fast cut is made to a woman’s naked legs. Then, in a gloomy and still deliberately out-of-focus vignette, Manson-as-Carroll is dressed in Victorian attire, leaning over the sleeping Cole resting on a red sofa. Wearing a white frilly dress, denoting both her virginity and girlish youth, Cole appears to be under threat; and the imagery is suggestive of sexualized childhood. Manson thereby places himself in the role of the transgressive paedophile, suggesting strongly that Phantasgmoria would draw on the long-held suspicions surrounding Lewis Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell, to whom he had originally told the Alice stories when she was 10 years old. In discussions of the project Manson had expressly mentioned the ‘narrow perception’ of Carroll as a man ‘obsessed with photographing young girls’ (‘Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll’ 2016). This is directly invoked later in the trailer by the appearance of an old-fashioned freestanding box camera, pointing at Cole as she sits upright posing on the couch. This image seems self-reflexive of the inherent sexual voyeurism of the trailer as a whole. Over discordant music, a voice – which we can presume to be Manson’s – croaks enigmatically ‘the sleep of reason produces monsters’. The reference recalls Francisco Goya’s 1797 painting of the same name, an etching often cited in critical discussions on the literary gothic due to its explicit association between a susceptibility to talk of the supernatural and lax intellectual rigour (Cavallaro 2002: 1; Hurh 2015: 4–6). Random flashes continue throughout the brief trailer at increasing speed, edited fast and faster with flashes of Cole’s face and Manson-as-Carroll submerged in water. As they come close for a lipstick-smeared kiss, the red stain on his face again recalls the cover of The Golden Age of the Grotesque and evokes Manson’s broader signature

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brand for elasticity when it comes to the gender specificity of clothing and make-up and his penchant for cross-dressing and drag performance. A dramatic crash of drums and a black screen marks the part of the trailer, approximately twenty seconds in, where strange creatures begin to appear. We have here an escalation of the trailer’s horror and gothic qualities in both sound and vision – marking it very much as an exercise in experimental genre filmmaking. Manson-as-Carroll sits on the same red lounge with his hand on the inside leg of a young woman’s body, continuing to emphasize the theme of sexual transgression and paedophilia. Yet now, physical horror is evident in the absence of Cole’s torso. She has been quite literally reduced to legs and crotch, typifying again a heavily fetishized approach to women’s sexuality that marks the trailer. Cole’s voice over says, ‘You have a strange affinity to the beautiful and the dreadful, Charles,’ over a typically Mansonian industrial-ambient soundscape, making the character’s aesthetics both explicit and central. As Manson-as-Carroll’s luminous, white face continues to blur in and out of the black foreground, marked by extreme high contrast, what becomes inescapable here is a fact that has permeated the entire trailer: this is as much about Marilyn Manson and his star image as it is Carroll himself. With the same black background and ominous music, a white rabbit is shown trapped in a cage – a reference of course to Carroll’s clock-anxious character who guides Alice through his Wonderland. Further flashing images appear of the girl cuddling the rabbit, then cut back to the caged animal as it is menaced by gloved hands holding either a knife or scissors. Similar menace is evident in a shot of Cole’s open mouth, penetrated by large metal tweezers as if threatening to pull out her tongue. The suggestion of human and animal vivisection contributes to a trope of medical examination that culminates in one startling, blink-and-you-miss-it image of a hairless vagina being probed or opened by surgical tools. The shadowy appearance of a figure in a beak-like mask also furthers this medical horror imagery, envisioning the presence of a plague doctor. The perverse, visceral intersection of sex, violence and transgression is the thematic drumbeat that speeds up with the trailer’s editing. In shots so fast as to be almost subliminal, we see blood pooling between a girl’s legs, headless bodies, disembodied breasts, masked faces, blood-soaked bandages and hands caressing the naked chest of another faceless young woman. The editing seems to slow slightly to emphasize the eroticism of flesh being stroked or embraced. Underwater imagery is also in repeated evidence, sometimes involving both Manson and Cole, sometimes just Cole alone as if tied to a bed frame or a chair. These underwater shots can be seen as a reference, perhaps, to the pool of tears in Carroll’s first Alice book, or maybe to the river on which Carroll famously first told his stories to Alice Liddell and her sisters.

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Manson’s version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee also usefully demonstrates his approach to reimagining Carroll’s work. In the original book, Carroll borrowed their names from eighteenth-century poet John Byrom’s critique of how similar composers Giovanni Battista Bonocini and George Frederick Handel were, despite the vocal rivalry between them. The literary reference indicates here two people that are strikingly similar, despite their insistence on squabbling over minor matters.3 Their appearance in the trailer sees them brandishing short swords, presumably engaged in something akin to the ‘battle’ presented comically in Carroll’s writing (where they have only one sword and an umbrella ‘which is just as sharp’). In Manson’s hands, however, the sexual fetishization of female twins replaces the original meaning and tone. Played by actresses referred to as ‘The Porcelain Twins’, the figures are presented here with face masks that style them like grotesque mannequins, but again with their naked chests exposed. In discussing their role in the film, Manson clearly sought to ramp up the shock value, by stating that ‘the girls playing Tweedledee and Tweedledum are twins who get to have real genuine sex with each other. I like to make dreams come true’ (‘Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll’ 2016). The trailer teases this deviant ‘dream’ through further fastcut images of the now-unmasked twins stroking each other’s breasts. The notion of transgressive sexuality that straddles young women and violence is then also rendered visible in a brief but highly significant symbolic image of a blood-spattered white sock in a Mary Jane-styled shoe – a symbol of girlhood corrupted and violated, and perhaps the ultimate takeaway image with which to interpret the atmosphere the trailer attempted to create. Then the title of the film appears and the music, and the trailer itself, ends as silently and as dramatically as it began.

Grotesque Alice and the aesthetics of outrage By all accounts, this was the trailer first presented to a limited audience of sixty journalists at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2006, supposedly to a ‘positive reception’ (‘Phantasmagoria:  The Visions of Lewis Carroll’ 2016). Four years later, however, it was held up to be the cause of the project’s demise when – despite Manson’s assertion that it was ‘not intended for the public eye’ – it was leaked on to the internet on 7 April 2010. Several online news outlets quoted the British newspaper The Mail on Sunday as reporting that ‘a significant negative outcry’ against the trailer had ‘caused such a backlash that a decision was made to close down the project’ and that Wild Bunch had placed it on ‘hiatus’ (see, for instance, McMahon 2010). Manson publicly railed against the leak as ‘criminal’ (‘Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll’ 2016). In truth, however, there is little supporting evidence

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to demonstrate any genuine ‘outcry’ against the project. The oft-cited report from the Mail strangely does not appear anywhere in that newspaper’s own online archive, raising suspicions about the authenticity of the original statement issued by an anonymous source involved in Phantasmagoria’s production. Might this statement have been issued from within Manson’s camp as a kind of bluff to justify or mask abandoning the project for other reasons? Analysing the representation of the Alice stories in popular culture certainly suggests that any sense of outrage about Manson’s proposed project was likely to have been exaggerated, if not completely fabricated. While the impression of Alice in Wonderland as a sanitized and even sacred classic of children’s literature certainly exists, Carroll’s book has long had a close critical association with the gothic and the grotesque – which is clearly what attracted Manson to it in the first place. Frankie Morris committed an entire chapter of his Artist of Wonderland The Life, Political Cartoons, and Illustrations of Tenniel (2005) to the notion of ‘The Grotesque Alice’, which begins by describing Tenniel’s drawings for Carroll’s book as presenting ‘an atmosphere of prodigious strangeness – an environment filled with the things and entertainments, the modes and preferences, of another age’ (Morris 2005: 182). This, for Morris, ‘both repels and attracts. This is because they are in the presence of the grotesque’ (ibid.): The word ‘grotesque’ is employed here to mean, not merely the fantastic (a synonym suggested in most dictionaries), but the definition given by its mid-twentieth-century theorists: an ‘unresolved clash of incompatibles,’ or any abnormality that imparts the disturbing sense that the real world may have ceased to be reliable. We can identify many of the grotesque’s components in the Alice texts and pictures: objects brought to life and human beings deprived of lifelike attributes, the merging of beings and things, deformities of and violence to the human body (which the subject often experiences with cool indifference), a proclivity to deal with the ordinary things of this world while exhibiting such phenomena-all of these occurring within a structured framework that appears to have its own inner logic. (Morris 2005: 182) While contemporary illustrators have demonstrated a tendency to ‘adapt the books to current sensibilities’, Morris notes the enduring fascination with the original Tenniel illustrations and argues that this is largely due to ‘their insidious grotesqueries … and [that] it is perhaps in their very mystery that the fascination lies’ (ibid.: 183–4). Likewise, Anna Kérchy has also argued that while the origins of children’s literature in the eighteenth century were at least initially a didactic response to the supposed immorality of the adult literary genre of Gothic fiction,

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland could be seen almost mocking the didactic and educational forms that preceded its publication: Although Carroll’s Alice tales did not become Gothic texts per se, they recycled a fair amount of Gothic generic features, most prominently the destabilization of the boundaries between waking life and nightmarish fantasy tormenting the dreamer with the fear of losing one’s way, mind, and self-identity. (Kérchy 2016: 94) As this suggests, Manson’s vision of Lewis Carroll and the Alice stories was less of a radical revisioning than a return to the novel’s roots. Moreover, presenting Alice in a deviant or transgressive manner was itself nothing new. Productions from Alice in Acidland (Donne 1969)  and Alice in Wonderland:  A X-Rated Musical Comedy (Townsend 1976)  to Claude Chabrol’s Alice ou la Derniere Fugue (1977) (which starred Sylvia Kristel of softcore Emmaneulle fame) all evidence a cultural history of ‘corrupting’ Alice for humour and sexual sensationalism. International adaptations from The Silent Cry (Dwoskin 1977) and Jan Svankmajer’s Něco z Alenky (1988) to Alice in the Underworld:  The Dark Märchen Show!! (Mari 2009) and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) also demonstrate that tonally and thematically dark and explicitly gothic variations of the tale have existed for decades, positioning Manson’s idea in a tradition of Aliceinspired representations rather than as a truly transgressive work. Even Rogue Entertainment’s blockbuster horror videogame American McGee’s Alice (2000) proved that a horror reimagining of Carroll’s famous worlds, configured through the dark sensibility of contemporary gothic subcultures, was a tested formula for success. Might Manson’s project have been too predictable in this context, rather than too outrageous? What the promotional trailer suggests most, perhaps, is how Manson intended to repurpose the pop cultural clout of Carroll and Alice to align with his own personal brand image as sexually transgressive. Since that had already been exploited by previous reimaginings of Alice in Wonderland itself, Manson instead sought to draw from the ‘deviancy’ associated with Carroll himself, or rather Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, for whom Lewis Carroll was a non-de-plume. As if determined to up the ante on his project’s transgressivism, Manson’s evidently sought to capitalize on the accusations of paedophilia now linked with Dodgson. Manson’s reference to Carroll’s diaries when discussing his concept was a telling one. The period across which Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) was one of great personal tumult, as Manson knew well. Carroll had first told the stories to Alice Liddell and her sisters on a boat ride in 1862 (when Alice was 10 years old), before presenting her with a written manuscript in 1864 (which was then published in 1865). Yet in the year

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between first writing the stories and presenting them to Alice, he had a notorious six-month falling out with the Liddell family. The reasons for this remain the subject of great speculation, in large part because seven pages are suspiciously missing from his diaries, dating from June 1863, which is when the tensions with the Liddell’s began. An air of scandal surrounds this, which dates back at least to the publication in 1945 of Victoria through the Looking Glass, wherein Florence Becker Lennon first conjectured that the rift may have been precipitated by Dodgson proposing marriage to the 11-year-old Alice, for whom he had an ‘unhealthy’ attraction (Lennon 1947: 192). While no evidence exists to support this popular explanation for the missing diary entries (presumed to have been destroyed by one of his descendants), Dodgson’s own work as a visual artist, primarily as a photographer of young girls, has furthered this questioning about the nature of his relationship with the Liddell sisters. In 2008, Anne Higonnet wrote insightfully on this aspect of Dodgson’s photographic practice. Beginning his work in the art form in approximately 1855, he was dedicated to photography for a quarter of a century well beyond what Higonnet said could be described as ‘recreational’ (2008: 5). Of his approximately 3,000 photographs, 2,500 negatives have survived, allowing historians ample material to study his work as a visual artist as well as an author (ibid.). While celebrating his prolific output as a photographer, however, Higonnet is unavoidably forced to address the representation of young girls and sexuality in his photos: over half are of children, thirty of whom are depicted nude or semi-nude. As Higgonnet discusses, The issue of Carroll’s motives inevitably confronts us with the scandal surrounding his photographs. The discovery of four photographs of nude girls made by Carroll in the Rosenbach Library collection in Philadelphia has increased suspicion of his motives. Many people suggest there is evidence of paedophilia in Carroll’s photographs. Some argue his sexual desire for little girls was conscious, others concede it might have been unconscious. Either way, the photographs, particularly those of Alice Liddell have been used to explain the erotic energy that some scholars believe is evident in the Alice books. (Higonnet 2008: 8) More recently, a particularly controversial photograph of Alice’s sister, Lorina Liddell, photographed in the nude in full-frontal pose, has led writers such as Will Self to conclude that Carroll was a ‘heavily repressed pedophile’ (Munoz-Alonso 2015). And as the nudity of young women and the shot of the Victorian box camera in particular make clear, there can be little doubt from the ninety seconds of trailer footage that exists of Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll that Manson was consciously focused on developing and exploiting such ‘erotic energy’ as potentially the most transgressive

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element of Carrollian mythology. To maintain his own brand image as a sexually deviant provocateur, Manson clearly felt compelled to capitalize on Carroll’s own alleged deviancy, if Phantasmagoria was to outdo all earlier transgressive cultural representations of Alice.

Have we not seen all this before? Here is perhaps where the project really failed. While it is difficult to determine precisely why Phantasmagoria:  The Visions of Lewis Carroll never made it past a decade of hype and a ninety-second trailer, the evidence at hand gives grounds to suspect that what the film promised in terms of shock factor simply misread both where Alice had been taken before and how predictable Manson’s shock factor had become. In February 2006, Manson explicitly promised that the film would be ‘something people haven’t seen before’ (Harris 2005), but this in practical terms at least contradicted what his producer Alain de la Mata was quoted as saying a month earlier:  ‘What people expect from Manson, they’re going to get here’ (‘Manson “Will Play Lewis Carroll” ’ 2006). It would have likely been a vanity project in the truest sense, using the image of Carroll as a paedophile (regardless of whether that claim is grounded in reality or not) to underscore and highlight Manson’s own personal brand as sexually transgressive. But Manson had built his brand as a musician on shock and awe, of having the reputation as a cutting-edge provocateur; the amplifying of other overtly taboo subjects such as incest implies that the rumours surrounding Carroll’s alleged paedophilia was not going to be enough to live up to his cutting-edge brand. Manson needed more. In short, what may have been in vogue and considered daring or demonstrative of a transgressive vanguard in the mid-2000s was – by the mid-2010s – something a little less radical and subversive. More recently, the very boundary pushing considered Manson’s trademark has at times been represented in the press as something in the past tense; for instance, a highly publicized interview with Alex Petridis in The Guardian in September 2017 suggested that Manson was a bored drunk trapped in an image he had no way of escaping (Petridis 2017). Thus, while stories about the project’s cessation speculated that it was due to ‘a negative response to the film’s violent trailer’ (McMahon 2010), there is another possibility: that taking a film about an empowered young woman negotiating a confusing world and converting it into a pompous softcore tale of tortured masculinity with highbrow pretensions was in fact simply just a bit tacky and – in terms of Manson’s broader public personae, as de la Mata noted above – precisely what one would expect it to be. An examination of online comments from even Manson’s most ardent fans, in response to the leaked trailer, demonstrates that this was indeed apparent to

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many of them. Though many thought the trailer ‘amazing’ (‘It looks fucked up and awesome!’), others felt ‘slightly disappointed at how predictable some of the shots were’. ‘It screams “shock value” which is never a good thing,’ wrote one fan: ‘I mean, it’s great to be shocking, but you can never be seen “trying.” ’ ‘I’ve seen porn like that maybe five, six years, ago?’ wrote another, being particularly critical of ‘that retarded idea of “real twins having sex” ’: There’s nothing I find intriguing about this trailer, save for an initial ‘Oh will you look at that.’ All I  can see is a mismatched and poorly shot compilation of porn and abstract images, which I can only imagine are for the purpose of shocking people. Have we not seen all this before?4 As one woman, who identified as someone who had been ‘a fan of Manson’s in my early teens’, wrote in response to the lewiscarroll.org announcement of Phantasmagoria’s cancellation: ‘In-your-face genitalia is hardly creative or interesting. In an age where we are bombarded with sexual themes, I  thought he would be “above” that and give us something to ignite our imaginations more’ (Welsch 2010). Described once as ‘preposterously self-mythologizing’ (Petridis 2017), there was something almost desperate in how the trailer seeks to align Manson’s vision of his own commercial brand with that of Carroll. Was it this that rendered the film almost redundant– that there was so little work for the audience to do? As even his own fans were acknowledging, it was hard to be shocked and outraged when supposed transgressions are so familiar, not only been preconceived but also pre-constituted and pre-digested. Audiences around the world already knew Manson was a bad boy  – that has been precisely his brand since his 1994 debut album Portrait of an American Family. One fan responded dismissively to the trailer, noting simply that it repeated ‘the whole “vaginas-and-girls-covered-in-blood” thing that he’s managed to turn into a cliché for himself’. There may be an equally simple reason why the trailer marked the end of the project: an awkward indicator of the kind of press Manson would receive eight years later, when Kyle Harris at Westworld reviewed his January 2018 concert with the opening line: ‘Marilyn Manson Just Isn’t Scary Anymore’ (Harris 2018). Part vanity project, part brand-fuelling PR machine, it is hard to make any kind of final judgement call on whether the film truly had any real potential of being completed. After the ‘hiatus’ announced in 2010, Manson surprised fans by tweeting on 7 February 2014, ‘Happy that my PHANTASMAGORIA screenplay, with me portraying Lewis Carroll, is in production. His diaries inspired the best horror film ever.’ Yet this flipped back again a year later on Reddit AMA, when Manson announced that ‘I’ve since decided, because while writing it, it was so … damaging to my psyche, I’ve decided I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I’ve decided to work on other movie projects.’ Which, to his credit, he has done with enormous

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success if his impressive performance in The Two Popes is anything to go by. Yet, as definitive as that statement seemed to be, the digital traces of the Phantasmagoria project offer us a profoundly contemporary instance of shadow cinema, which speaks directly to the contemporary film industry, the speculative power of online discourse and the volatility of celebrity and fandom.

Notes 1. While a wholly original piece of writing, this chapter is an expansion of initial ideas first published in ‘Abandoned Alice: Marilyn Manson’s Unmade Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll’ (Heller-Nicholas 2018) and republished in Wonderland (McRae and Heller-Nicholas 2018). 2. Little information on this project is available; however, the director’s name was cited in ‘Living in Neon Dreams’ (2012). 3. For further reading, see Karen Dillon’s chapter ‘The Sexual Fantasy of Twins: Twincest and Triangulated Desire’ (2018: 50–67). 4. Quoted from the forum thread ‘Trailer for Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll’ (2010), Provider Module Forum, available at: www.providermodule.com/forum/showthread.php/2616-Trailer-ForPhantasmagoria-The-Visions-of-Lewis-Carroll. Accessed 29 February 2020.

References ‘ “Author: The JT Leroy Story” Review: How to Stage a Literary Hoax’ (2016), Rolling Stone, 9 September. Available online: https://www.rollingstone.com/ movies/movie-reviews/author-the-jt-leroy-story-review-how-to-stage-a-literaryhoax-247210/ (accessed 6 March 2019). Baddeley, G. (2008), Dissecting Marilyn Manson, London: Plexus. Becker, F. B. (1947), Lewis Carroll, London: Cassell. Brooker, W. (2005), Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, London: Continuum. Cavallaro, D. (2002), Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear, London: Continuum. Cohen, M. (1996), Lewis Carroll: A Biography, New York: Vintage Books. Crowley, J., and Crowley, S. (2001), Wabi Sabi Style, Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs Smith. Dillon, K. (2018), The Spectacle of Twins in American Literature and Popular Culture, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Ellinger, K. (2018), ‘The Curious Tale of Psychedelic Alice: Alice in Acidland (1969) and Curious Alice (1971)’, Senses of Cinema, no. 86. Available online: sensesofcinema.com/2018/alice-in-wonderland/the-curious-tale-ofpsychedelic-alice-alice-in-acidland-1969-and-curious-alice-1971/ (accessed 20 August 2018).

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Fine, E. J. (2013), ‘The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome’, in S. Dinger, F. Boller and A. Stiles (eds), Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders, 143–54, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Foxhall, K (2019), Migraine: A History, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Galloway, D. (2011), ‘Gothic Revival: The Painterly Vision of Marilyn Manson’, David Lynch Marilyn Manson: Genealogies of Pain, exhibition guide, Vienna: Kunsthalle wien. Harris, C. (2005), ‘Marilyn Manson Won’t Let Scary Michael Chiklis Stop His Scary Films’, MTV, 4 November. Available online: www.mtv.com/ news/1513046/marilyn-manson-wont-let-scary-michael-chiklis-stop-his-scaryfilms (accessed 20 August 2018). Harris, K. (2018), ‘Marilyn Manson Just Isn’t Scary Anymore’, Westworld, 23 January. Available online: https://www.westword.com/music/marilyn-mansonisnt-shocking-anymore-9908257 (accessed 20 August 2018). Heller-Nicholas, A. (2018), ‘Abandoned Alice: Marilyn Manson’s Unmade Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll’, Senses of Cinema, no. 86. Available online: sensesofcinema.com/2018/alice-in-wonderland/abandonedalice-marilyn-manson/ (accessed 29 February 2020). Higonnet, A. (2008), Lewis Carroll, London: Phaidon. Honeyman, S. (2017), Child Pain, Migraine, and Invisible Disability, London: Routledge. Woolf, J. (2010), The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hurh, P. (2015), American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kérchy, A. (2016), Alice in Transmedia Wonderland: Curiouser and Curiouser New Forms of a Children’s Classic, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Lack, H. (2011), ‘20 Q&As: Alejandro Jodorowsky’, Dazed, 30 September. Available online: www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/11302/1/20-qasalejandro-jodorowsky (accessed 20 August 2018). Lennon, F. B. (1947), Lewis Carroll, London: Cassell. Linder, B. (2000), ‘Wes Craven to Dark Wonderland’, IGN Movies, 7 December. Available online: http://www.ign.com/articles/2000/12/07/wes-craven-to-darkwonderland (accessed 20 August 2018). ‘Living in Neon Dreams’ (2012), The New York Times, 21 October. Available online: https://web.archive.org/web/20121021094254/http://movies. nytimes.com/movie/442738/Living-in-Neon-Dreams/overview (accessed 20 August 2018). ‘Manson “Will Play Lewis Carroll” ’ (2006), BBC News, 31 January. Available online: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4665064.stm (accessed 6 March 2019). ‘Marilyn Manson’s “Alice in Wonderland” Film Shut Down Due To Trailer Backlash?’ (2010), Blabbermouth, 15 September. Available at: www. blabbermouth.net/news/marilyn-manson-s-alice-in-wonderland-film-shut-downdue-to-trailer-backlash/ (accessed 20 August 2018). ‘Marilyn Manson’s Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll’ (2008), Quiet Earth, 11 July. Available online: https://www.quietearth.us/articles/2008/07/11/ Marilyn-Mansons-Phantasmagoria-The-Visions-of-Lewis-Carroll (accessed 6 March 2019).

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McMahon, J. (2010), ‘Marilyn Manson’s “Alice in Wonderland” Film Shut Down Due to Trailer Backlash?’, NME, 14 September. Available online: https://www. nme.com/news/marilyn-manson-s-alice-in-wonderland-film-shut-dow-879992 (accessed 6 March 2019). McRae, E. and Heller-Nicholas, A. (eds) (2018), Wonderland, Melbourne: Thames & Hudson. Miska, B. (2010), ‘Watch the Promo Trailer for Marilyn Manson’s “Phantasmagoria” ’, Bloody Disgusting, 23 April. Available online: https:// bloody-disgusting.com/news/19948/watch-the-promo-trailer-for-marilynmansons-phantasmagoria/ (accessed 20 August 2018). Morris, F. (2005), Artist of Wonderland: The Life, Political Cartoons, and Illustrations of Tenniel, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Munoz-Alonso, L. (2015), ‘Was Lewis Carroll a Pedophile? His Photographs Suggest So’, Artnet News, 30 January. Available online: news.artnet.com/ art-world/was-lewis-carroll-a-pedophile-his-photographs-suggest-so-237222 (accessed 23 February 2020). Petridis, A. (2017), ‘ “Columbine Destroyed My Entire Career”: Marilyn Manson on the Perils of Being the Lord of Darkness’, The Guardian, 21 September. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/21/columbinedestroyed-my-entire-career-marilyn-manson-on-the-perils-of-being-the-lord-ofdarkness (accessed 20 August 2018). ‘Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll’ (2016), Manson Wiki: The Marilyn Manson Encyclopedia. Available online: https://www.mansonwiki.com/wiki/ Phantasmagoria:_The_Visions_of_Lewis_Carroll (accessed 20 August 2018). Rosenfeld, E. (2011), ‘Top 10 Controversial Music Videos’, Time Magazine, 6 June. Available online: entertainment.time.com/2011/06/07/top-10-controversialmusic-videos/slide/marilyn-manson-saint/ (accessed 20 August 2018). Spooner, C. (2013), ‘Costuming the Outsider in Tim Burton’s Cinema, or, Why a Corset Is like a Codfish’, in J. A. Weinstock (ed.), The Works of Tim Burton: Margins to Mainstream, 47–64, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Strauss, M. (2018), ‘Marilyn Manson Sexual Assault Case Declined by D.A.’, Pitchfork, 10 August. Available online: https://pitchfork.com/news/marilynmanson-sexual-assault-case-declined-by-da/ (accessed 20 August 2018). ‘Forum Thread: Trailer For Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll’ (2010), Provider Module: Marilyn Manson News. Available online: www. providermodule.com/forum/showthread.php/2616-Trailer-For-PhantasmagoriaThe-Visions-of-Lewis-Carroll (accessed 23 February 2020). Turner, G. (2010), ‘Whatever Happened to Marilyn Manson’s Alice in Wonderland Movie?’, LA Weekly, 5 March. Available online: https://www.laweekly. com/music/whatever-happened-to-marilyn-mansons-alice-in-wonderlandmovie-2401786 (accessed 20 August 2018). Vineyard, J. (2004), ‘Marilyn Manson to Play Queen of Hearts In “Alice” Adaptation “Living in Neon Dreams” Due Sometime Next Year’, MTV, 11 October. Available online: https://web.archive.org/web/20100313175456/www. mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1492127/story.jhtml (accessed 20 August 2018). Wakeling, E. (1993), Lewis Carroll’s Diaries: The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Luton: Lewis Carroll Society.

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Welsch, J. (2010), ‘Marilyn Manson’s Phantasmagoria Disappears Like a Little Ghost’, The Lewis Carroll Society of North America Website, 13 September. Available online: https://www.lewiscarroll.org/2010/09/13/marilyn-mansonsphantasmagoria-disappears-like-a-little-ghost/ (accessed 23 February 2020). Yamakuse, Y. (2012), The Soul of Japan, Tokyo, IBC. Zakarin, J. (2014), ‘Alejandro Jodorowsky to Make “Son of El Topo”, “King Shot” Into Comic Books’, The Wrap, 13 March. Available online: https://www. thewrap.com/alejandro-jodorowsky-make-son-el-topo-king-shot-comic-booksexclusive/ (accessed 20 August 2018).

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13 The movie producer, the feminists and the serial killer: UK feminist activism, misogynist 70s film culture and the (non) filming of the Yorkshire Ripper murders Hannah Hamad

In her path-breaking work in The Streetcleaner, which was the first booklength work of feminist scholarship to interrogate the UK case of the Yorkshire Ripper murders and the trial of the perpetrator Peter Sutcliffe, Nicole Ward Jouve asserts that ‘a social phenomenon such as the “Yorkshire Ripper” case could only be fully understood through a historical analysis that would give it its full context’ (1986: 145). In many ways, Ward Jouve’s assertion is the conceptual starting point for this chapter, which aims to contribute to the four-decades-long attempt by myriad feminist scholars and commentators to fully contextualize this darkly iconic chapter in UK social and cultural history of the 1970s and 1980s. And it does so with a particular view to highlighting some of the gendered stakes in how and why we do this. Moreover, in line with the overarching remit of Shadow Cinema, it does so by shining a light on a little remembered aspect of the

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cultural history of this case. Specifically, the failed attempts by Hollywood film producers of the time to harness its topicality and resonance by adapting the events of the case into a feature film. Records show that two attempts were made at the time to undertake such an endeavour. The first was made by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) in 1980, who attempted to put a film entitled The Yorkshire Ripper into production at a time when the as yet unidentified Sutcliffe was still active and at large, having murdered thirteen women over the previous five and a half years. The second instance came the following year, in 1981. This was the year in which Sutcliffe was apprehended, charged, convicted and imprisoned for these murders, along with a further seven attempted murders. This new film, reportedly entitled Hail Mary, was said to have been the property of United Artists. However, as detailed hereafter, despite its production and casting having being widely reported in the world’s media and the American film industry’s trade press, and despite interventional action against its production having being taken in the form of an organized boycott against the film by women’s groups, Hail Mary transpired to be nothing more than a hoax, perpetrated by an attention-seeking opportunist, and not a genuine film production at all. In her influential essay ‘There’s Only One Yorkshire Ripper’, feminist writer and commentator Joan Smith points to the ‘thriving’ cultural industry which has emerged as a significant part of the legacy of the Victorian-era serial killer of women that we colloquially refer to as ‘Jack the Ripper’ ([1989] 1996: 163). Among other things, she highlights the plethora of films produced about the infamous 1888 killings that have played their part in keeping Ripper business booming: films like Jack the Ripper (1959), A Study in Terror (1965), Hands of the Ripper (1971) and Time After Time (1979). One of the points she makes in doing so is that narratives like some of these, which mythologize the murderer, are highly marketable and saleable, and often find a ready audience. But beyond the realm of tabloid newspapers, the same has not been true of the Yorkshire Ripper, in relation to whom there continues to exist much more of a representational taboo when it comes to the adaptation and fictionalization of his crimes into forms of more explicitly entertainment-oriented media. To this day there exists no mainstream film or television biopic or otherwise dramatic treatment of Peter Sutcliffe. The only noteworthy title in this regard is the little-known 2011 straight-to-DVD British film Peter (on this, see Boyle and Reburn 2015), in which Sutcliffe is played by unknown screen actor Walt Kissack. The next closest candidate is the 2000 ITV miniseries This Is Personal, a depiction of the manhunt for Sutcliffe, as led by the assistant chief constable in charge of the Ripper enquiry George Oldfield (played in the series by Alun Armstrong), and in which Sutcliffe as a character commensurately barely features. Furthermore, while the opportunity to play notorious UK serial killers in film and television dramatizations of their lives and actions has attracted some very high-profile actors to the roles of murderers like Harold Shipman (played by

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James Bolam in Harold Shipman: Doctor Death in 2002), Fred West (played by Dominic West in Appropriate Adult in 2011), John Reginald Christie (played by Tim Roth in Rillington Place in 2016 and Richard Attenborough in 10 Rillington Place in 1971) and Myra Hindley (played by Maxine Peake in See No Evil:  The Moors Murders in 2006 and Samantha Morton in Longford also in 2006), no such glitterati have played Sutcliffe in a major screen role (character actor Joseph Mawle who played him in a minor role in the Channel 4 adaptation of author David Peace’s Red Riding novels in 2009 is the most noteworthy), nor have they had the opportunity. Arguably one of the foundational reasons for this, as this chapter demonstrates, stems from important consciousness-raising work done by feminists in 1980 to resist and ward off mythologizing narratives in the pipeline at that time that promised, by virtue of their assumed marketability, to elevate Sutcliffe to the status of folk hero/devil. This, according to the feminist logic informing protests against these kinds of films, would have served to further dismiss and erase the lives and identities of the murdered and maimed women, and to further mark out Sutcliffe in terms of his exceptionality, rather than to enable his actions and their consequences to be viewed in context at the far end point of the extant spectrum of quotidian violent misogyny, of which he was symptomatic in the extreme. As Vicky Seddon stated, writing in the aftermath of the conclusion to the case, ‘Sutcliffe’s actions and attitudes were not unlike those of many men’; it was only that he ‘took them beyond the bounds of socially acceptable limits’ of the time (1981: 18). Similarly, reporting for the feminist magazine Spare Rib from the front lines of a 1980 feminist protest march, one Yorkshire women’s collective wrote that while ‘the Yorkshire Ripper is very much in the minds of Sheffield women … male violence goes way beyond his individual actions’ (‘Sheffield Women’s Liberation’ 1980: 19). This chapter thus offers an archive researched history of some of the social, cultural and industrial conditions that led to the germination, but subsequent abandonment, of Hollywood’s plans to capitalize on the murders of thirteen women in the north of England from 1975 through 1981 and on the notoriety of serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, known colloquially both before his identification and since as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’. It does so with a view to arguing that second-wave feminism in the form of the UK women’s liberation movement (as it was known and referred to at the time) is a crucial context in relation to which the non-production of the planned or purported films about the Yorkshire Ripper must be understood. Specifically, with regard to the concerns of this chapter, and as indicated above, there was a wave of feminist activism in 1980 that targeted the misogyny of mainstream film culture and its exploitation of sexual violence against women – in particular the so-called women-in-danger cycle of horror films and thrillers that was doing robust business in cinemas at the time, and of which Dressed to Kill (1980) and The Shining (1980) were the highest

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profile. Women’s groups organized in protest of these films, and others that they viewed as cognate, at cinemas, first in Leeds, which was the hub of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, but then in cinemas all over the country. These protests were responsive to the murders, and to the cultures of misogyny that enabled them, and they are highly important and pertinent context for understanding reactions in the UK in 1980 and 1981 to the prospect of a Hollywood film about the Yorkshire Ripper. As Seddon demonstrates, contextualizing and historicizing the issue of male violence against women in 1980s Britain, in the late autumn of 1980, developments in the Yorkshire Ripper case and women’s reactions to these developments ‘made violence against women a national issue’ (1981:  14). There was a series of events both social and cultural that caused an escalation of feminist activism, a spike in international media interest in the Ripper case, and for popular cinema to become the particular target of women’s anger. The first event was the release in UK cinemas, on 9 November 1980, of Brian De Palma’s serial killer thriller Dressed to Kill – a film that carried notoriety with it from its earlier US release, having already been the target of protest there due to misogyny viewed by feminists as inherent to its gender discourse and its explicit depiction of murderous sexual violence against women. This was to become a lightning rod for feminist activism in the UK also, but in the more particularized context of the ongoing Ripper killings, this unfolded both differently from and independently of the earlier activism by feminists in the United States. The next event was the murder of the 20-yearold University of Leeds student Jacqueline Hill on 17 November 1980. Her murder was not considered remarkable enough to warrant much in the way of column inches in the news media, until police confirmed two days later that she was the thirteenth (and as it turned out, final) woman to be murdered by the so-called Ripper. After Hill’s death, international media interest in the case skyrocketed, and feminist outrage at the cultures of violent masculinity and male violence against women that resulted in these murders escalated. Correspondingly, the next event of significance was a two-day conference called ‘Sexual Violence Against Women’ that took place in Leeds on 22 and 23 November 1980, spearheaded by the Leeds chapter of the group Women Against Violence Against Women, and organized by Leeds Reclaim the Night founder Sandra McNeill (2018). McNeill and her colleagues had been planning this for months, but then ‘a week before the conference was due [to take place], Peter Sutcliffe killed Jacqueline Hill’, and the number of delegates planning to attend rapidly increased. It became, as she described it, ‘a very large conference, with a lot of very angry women at it … [and] A lot of [the] women [there] were very, very angry about the Yorkshire Ripper … and [they] wanted to take direct action’ (2018). The first thing that the delegates did with that anger, at the end of the second day, was to gather for a Reclaim the Night march through the city centre of Leeds.

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At the point at which the march passed the Leeds Odeon Cinema, which at that time was screening Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, they stormed the auditorium and red paint was thrown at the screen, to symbolize the blood of women murdered by violent misogynists and in protest against what they viewed as popular cinema’s complicity in perpetuating this violent misogyny. The protest against Dressed to Kill at the Leeds Odeon received much press attention (Gaskell 1980), and the next two weeks saw a whole wave of protests at cinemas around the UK that were screening a range of films that featured explicit depiction of violence against women, or that were seen to be trading on the violent sexual objectification of women (Stead 1980). In this midst of all this feminist direct action and anti-misogynist counterhegemony, plans were afoot in Hollywood for American men to monetize British women’s fear of the Yorkshire Ripper by repackaging it and selling it in the form of commercial cinematic entertainment.

MGM’s The Yorkshire Ripper On 15 December 1980, MGM issued a statement, for immediate release to the press, that bore the heading ‘MGM TO PRODUCE “THE YORKSHIRE RIPPER” ’. Issued by MGM’s then vice president of publicity Al Newman, the press release was prepared swiftly, following an announcement made earlier that day by David Chasman. Chasman was executive vice president in charge of worldwide theatrical production for MGM’s Motion Picture Division, and he announced The Yorkshire Ripper to be the working title for a forthcoming film he described as ‘a contemporary mystery-thriller’ (Newman 1980a), which, his statement revealed, had been put into preproduction. According to Chasman, the film would be made for MGM by executive producer Larry Wilcox and his company Wilcox Productions Inc. Elaborating on some details of the production, the statement also said that The Yorkshire Ripper was to be based on a story idea by a serving London Metropolitan Police Force officer who was also an established crime author: Police Sergeant Donald Rumbelow, who the press release described as ‘the world’s foremost authority on Jack the Ripper and related criminals’ (ibid.). It further stated that Rumbelow had been hired in order to ‘serve as the film’s technical advisor’ (ibid.). This was an extraordinary turn of events in light of the fact that Jacqueline Hill, the Ripper’s thirteenth known murder victim, had been found dead in Leeds less than a month prior to the decisions having being taken by MGM first: to proceed with the production of this film, second: to publicize this fact to the world’s media, and third:  to do so at a time when the as yet unidentified killer remained still to be apprehended by police. The press

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release itself leaves no room for doubt that the producers of The Yorkshire Ripper were well aware of all of these things at the point at which they decided to go ahead and begin work on the film. In fact, their foreknowledge of these factors is stated candidly and unselfconsciously in this document that had been prepared specifically for dissemination to the press and, by extension, to the public. According to the statement, The Yorkshire Ripper ‘was inspired by the modern-day murderer in Yorkshire, England who recently claimed his 13th victim, and is still at large in Northern England’ (ibid.). Furthermore, it was later reported that MGM was then considering dispatching film crews to a number of the different scenes of crime locations across West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester, and that when asked about it, the studio declined to rule out this course of action (Pithers 1980: 24). A little over a week after this announcement was made, published reports about the imminent production of The Yorkshire Ripper began to surface, with some very brief mentions of it in Hollywood industry trade papers like Variety (‘Pictures: Larry Wilcox’ 1980: 30), but also more substantial coverage of it in the mainstream news media, especially and unsurprisingly in the first instance, in the UK. Correspondingly, one of the first reporters to pick it up in the UK national press was Malcolm Pithers, writing for The Guardian, whose entry point into the story was the fact that the City of London Police had begun an official enquiry into reports of the involvement of one of their officers with the plans of an American film company to make a commercial feature film about the unsolved and ongoing Yorkshire Ripper murders (1980:  24). Pithers, along with reporters in other national and regional dailies, identified the individual in question as the aforementioned Donald Rumbelow, a 40-year-old police sergeant at the City of London’s Snow Hill police station, from Catford in south London (Dovkants 1980: 5; Pithers 1980: 24). The police enquiry into Rumbelow’s involvement was also the angle taken to the reportage of the story in London newspaper The New Standard, which specified that the enquiry had been ordered by Assistant Police Commissioner Ernest Bright, and that the reason for it was that ‘as a serving police officer he [Rumbelow] needs permission from senior officers before he can undertake outside work’ (Dovkants 1980:  5). The launch of this enquiry thus prohibited Rumbelow from commenting publicly on the story of his involvement with the production of The Yorkshire Ripper. Indeed, in my interview with him, Rumbelow himself told me that he had been instructed by his superiors in the police force ‘to keep my head down and say nothing’ (Rumbelow 2019). This explains why there is no directly quoted material from Rumbelow in the press coverage of the story that resolves the discrepancy about his knowledge of the film’s subject matter, as outlined below. As had been indicated in the MGM press release, Rumbelow was also a published crime writer who had made a name for himself among so-called Ripperologists as the author of The Complete Jack the Ripper (1975). Later

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editions of this book in fact included a lengthy section on the Yorkshire Ripper, as part of a chapter called ‘Beyond the Grave’, which deals with the cultural legacy of the Victorian-era Ripper, who famously perpetrated the notorious unsolved 1888 murders of (at least) five women in Whitechapel in East London (1988: 247–90). According to Pithers, Rumbelow had confirmed both his involvement with the production and also that the film was to be a dramatization of realworld events in the form of a ‘modern mystery story’, rather than in the form of a documentary (1980: 24), with the implication by Pithers seemingly being that this would have been a more palatable and less controversial way to narrativize the killings. However, in this and subsequent reports, Rumbelow denied knowing that the ostensible subject matter of the film was to be the Yorkshire Ripper murders. Pithers, for one, reported that Rumbelow had been ‘surprised to learn that the film was to be based on the Yorkshire Ripper’ (ibid.: 24), while a subsequent report detailed that Rumbelow had been quoted insisting that he ‘had offered an outline for a film on Jack the Ripper’ but ‘had no knowledge of plans to do it as the Yorkshire Ripper’ (‘MGM Drops “Yorkshire Ripper” ’ 1980:  4, 24). However, Rumbelow’s version of events in this regard runs contrary to that of MGM. Hollywood trade paper Variety reported that ‘informed sources close to the studio claim he [Rumbelow] was the one who provided the treatment for the film, and that the typewritten title page was “The Yorkshire Ripper” ’ (ibid.: 4, 24). The production file held on The Yorkshire Ripper at the Margaret Herrick Library contains only press clippings and publicity materials, with no sign or mention of Rumbelow’s treatment in evidence. Beyond having reportedly already written this treatment, Rumbelow was also said to have been hired to script the forthcoming film and, as aforementioned, to do it as a fictionalized drama (Dovkants 1980:  5), but this ran contrary to what was said in wire service reports to the effect that a writer ‘had not yet been assigned for the screenplay’ (‘United Press International Dispatch’ 1980). Furthermore, when I asked him about his memories of his involvement in the pre-production of this film, Rumbelow told me that after having ‘been approached by the film company re the making of a Jack the Ripper film’, and with ‘no contract with MGM’, he ‘began drafting a fictional Jack the Ripper story set in Victorian times’ (Rumbelow 2019). However, he continued, ‘before I could submit the outline to MGM [thus explaining its absence from the film’s production file] there came this bombshell of my involvement and that the story was being moved north and that the film would be called The Yorkshire Ripper’ (ibid.). Rumbelow has thus remained constant in denying knowledge of the studio’s actual intentions, suggesting that the decision to relocate the time and place of the proposed film’s setting from Victorian London to present-day Yorkshire is one that was taken by MGM without his consultation or knowledge. This supposition is further borne out by the fact that, according to Rumbelow, on 24 December 1980

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when he ‘was called in to see the Assistant Commissioner’, he ‘was told that there would be no disciplinary proceedings’ taken against him (ibid.). Rumbelow had submitted his draft script for inspection by his employers, and given that he was ‘a serving police officer’ at the time, and that ‘the [Yorkshire Ripper] investigation was still ongoing’, the fact that no action was taken seems to bear out his version of events (ibid.). Given the charged context into which the announcement was made concerning the forthcoming production of The Yorkshire Ripper, it is surprising neither that the story was deemed newsworthy by UK national newspapers like The Guardian (Pithers 1980), The Daily Mail (‘MGM Plans Ripper Film’ 1980; ‘PC in Row over Film on Ripper’ 1980) and The Times (‘Ripper Victim’s Family Protests’ 1980), nor that it was met with such great and immediate outcry across the UK. The voice of Doreen Hill, who was the mother of the recently murdered woman, rose to particular prominence in the media’s reportage of this outcry, as well as those of a number of feminist and women’s rights organizations (some of them Leeds-based), such as Women Against Rape, Women Against Violence Against Women and Leeds Revolutionary Feminists. As one story reported, the news ‘prompted a fierce reaction from women’s groups’, with Women Against Rape, for example, forcefully cautioning against the likelihood that a biopic of this kind might ‘glorify the terrible things this man has done’ (Dovkants 1980: 5) and thus risk exacerbating the extent to which he was being turned into a folk hero for and by misogynists. This was a view that was shared by police (somewhat ironically given the extent to which they were subsequently understood to have been complicit, however unwittingly, in diminishing the value of the lives of the murdered women via discourse that was circulated in relation to them), with one detective noting ‘the danger of making this killer into some kind of cult figure’ (‘Associated Press Dispatch’ 1980). Covering the story for The Morning Star, Frankie Rickford aptly highlighted some of the stakes of the news media’s mythologization of the Ripper, describing him as ‘the cult figure of our time, the record-busting lightning-striking, Master Mind of male violence who grabbed the headlines with all the razzamatazz of a superhero’ (1980). Doreen Hill meanwhile had issued a statement to the press via her solicitor Anelay Hart, likewise cautioning against the possibility that inadvertently socially catastrophic knock-ons could ensue from the film’s production, and asked imploringly:  ‘Do the film-makers have no thought for the victims’ families or that they may provoke further murders of innocent young girls?’ (Pithers 1980: 1). It was also reported that the Hill family had gone directly to MGM to register their protest against their plans to produce the film and that their complaint had been ‘noted’ (‘Associated Press Dispatch’ 1980; ‘Ripper Victim’s Family Protests’ 1980). Other noteworthy authority figures who added their voices of protest to that of the bereaved Mrs Hill at this time included the Labour member of parliament for Leeds, Stanley Cohen: ‘I

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would appeal to the company to consider the effects this film could have and to drop their plans at once’ (‘Associated Press Dispatch’ 1980), and Police Superintendent Frank Morritt, who was the media relations officer for the West Yorkshire police’s dedicated ‘Ripper Squad’: ‘I can see no good moral reason for making any feature film about this subject’ (ibid.). Alongside this vociferous backlash in the UK against the announcement of the film’s production, the story was also picked up by wire services such as Associated Press (ibid.) and United Press International (‘United Press International Dispatch’ 1980), syndicated and reported in regional newspapers all over the United States. In consideration of this backlash, MGM began almost immediately to backpedal from their announced intention to produce the film. An unnamed spokesperson from the studio was quoted in London regional The New Standard responding to the outcry as follows: ‘It is one of a number of projects under consideration. As yet there has been no casting. Naturally we will be looking at it now in the light of the reaction’ (Dovkants 1980: 5). The same nameless MGM spokesperson is quoted in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner saying ‘we have made no decision whether or not to go ahead with the film’ and ‘it is too early to say yet whether it will be made’ (‘Britons Assail MGM Plans for “Ripper” movie’ 1980). Associated Press reported that MGM ‘said they would reconsider the plan’ (‘Associated Press Dispatch’ 1980), while The Times (of London) relayed that ‘MGM said it would decide whether to go ahead with the film within 24 hours’ (‘Ripper Victim’s Family Protests’ 1980). Just eight days after the initial press release had announced MGM’s plans to make The Yorkshire Ripper, and with the story of this film’s imminent production having been reported across the breadth of the Anglophone world, on 23 December 1980, Newman issued a new statement via another press release. This time it was brief and to the point, to the effect that the project was being dropped: ‘In consideration of publication reaction in the United Kingdom, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Film Co. and Executive Producer Larry Wilcox announced today that they have abandoned plans to develop a screenplay on the subject of The Yorkshire Ripper’ (Newman 1980b). They thus specified that the reason for this U-turn was the negative response to news of their plans in Britain (ibid.). News of the announcement spread quickly and widely. In Hollywood, trade paper Variety was quick to attribute the cause of the project’s abandonment to the actions of the UK’s news media, writing that ‘Britain’s press, led by The Sun and The Evening Standard, orchestrated a wave of public outrage in which MGM was accused of unconscionable breach of taste in contemplating a film on the Yorkshire Ripper’s reign of terror’ (‘MGM Drops “Yorkshire Ripper” ’ 1980: 4). They continued to the effect that the studio had decided that ‘it was politic to abandon the property rather than continue to excite the nerve touched in the British consciousness

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by going forward with it … MGM felt it was pointless, in the end, to make a film the British public did not want to see’ (ibid.: 24). What is (or perhaps should be) quite surprising, given the quick decision to abandon the project in the aftermath of the outcry, is the major extent to which MGM had misjudged the cultural mood in Britain. This is considering both that the perpetrator of the murders was still an active killer at the time that the announcement about the forthcoming film production was made, and also the demonstrated strength of feeling against cultures of violent misogyny which had prompted the feminist picketing of cinemas, alongside the non-violent direct action that had been taking place at film screenings during that time. This was a clear failure to understand or to engage with the sociocultural conditions in the UK at that time – conditions that would cause this attempt to capitalize on the Yorkshire Ripper murders and to elongate the ‘women-in-danger’ (Siskel and Ebert 1980)/’women-injeopardy’ (Merck and Clayton 1981) exploitation film cycle to be met with such opprobrium both by feminist activists and commentators at one end of the spectrum, and by the news reading public on the other. The fact of the ongoing Yorkshire murders is therefore a crucial context in relation to which the outcry against the production of this film must be understood. Just days later, after five and a half years’ worth of intermittent murders and attacks on women by this individual, Peter Sutcliffe was finally apprehended and arrested by police on 2 January 1981.

The Hail Mary Hoax Later that year, in the aftermath of the media frenzy surrounding Sutcliffe’s trial and conviction, discourse began circulating in the news media to the effect that another attempt to produce a film based on these murders, and focusing upon the individual who perpetrated them, was being made. So the story went, the film was again being made out of Hollywood, but this time the studio behind it was said to be United Artists. As indicated earlier, the reality of the matter was, despite the fact that this grew into a much bigger news story than the story of MGM’s genuine production plans for The Yorkshire Ripper, that there was actually no such film being planned, and the flurry of media reportage about it from June to September 1981 was the result of a hoax perpetrated by man named Michael ‘Rocky’ Ryan (Davies 1981; McNeill 2018), who, it transpired, was a serial hoaxer responsible for planting a number of other false stories in a range of UK newspapers, including one in The Daily Express that concerned a purported sighting of Lord Lucan in South Africa, and another in The Sun concerning a purported assassination attempt on the Shah of Iran (Hutchings 1991; Ryan 1991). On this occasion, Ryan convinced a range of UK tabloid newspapers to report various aspects of a story concerning the ostensible production of a film

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called Hail Mary (this is a false reference to the prayer that Sutcliffe was supposed to have said over the body of one of his victims) about the life and crimes of the Yorkshire Ripper (‘Rocky and the Ripper Film…’ 1981). Rumblings in the press about the ostensible production of this film emerged as early as June of that year (Davies 1981), with reportage peaking in August and September after the story had been picked up by wire services and widely internationally reported across the Anglophone world (‘Mother of Ripper Victim Protests Film’ 1981; ‘Yorkshire Ripper Film Planned’ 1981). Writing for The Daily Mirror on 24 June, Murray Davies reported that Sutcliffe himself was to be involved in talks with ‘a Hollywood film syndicate made up of three independent producers’ and that the talks were to be mediated by Ryan, described as an ‘ex-SAS bodyguard’ and later exposed as the architect of the hoax, from the prison cell at Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight where he was then serving his life sentence (Davies 1981). According to Ryan, Sutcliffe was ‘extremely interested’ in the prospect of being made the subject of a Hollywood film and that the supposed financial backers were considering ‘paying a consulting fee’ to his wife Sonia (Davies 1981). In reality, Sonia Sutcliffe never accepted money from the news media in exchange for anything whatsoever to do with her husband’s crimes. On 12 August, journalist Fred Willis wrote that ‘an American company … has already started work on a film about [Sutcliffe’s] 13 killings’, continuing to make the erroneous claim that ‘some of the preliminary filming has taken place in the Bradford and Manchester areas’ and also in Clayton – the residence of Sonia Sutcliffe’s parents (Willis 1981). Willis and others, including Michael Goldfarb of The Washington Post, also reported that Sonia Sutcliffe had been hired by this unnamed American film company to act in the capacity of technical adviser on its production (Goldfarb 1981); but Willis went on to specify that the source of his information about the supposed production of this film had been, of course, serial hoaxer Michael ‘Rocky’ Ryan. Ryan’s lies in defence of the non-existent film and elaborating on details of its production continued to appear in print over the ensuing weeks. These included lies to the effect that Hollywood star Robert De Niro was on board to play Sutcliffe and that veteran Hollywood actor Jack Palance was to play Sutcliffe’s father John, which prompted an angry rebuttal from De Niro’s agent Harry Ufland, who told the Daily Mail’s Hollywood correspondent Douglas Thompson that ‘we have not been approached’, that ‘if we were we would hang up the phone’ and that he’d ‘like to sue somebody over this’ (Thompson 1981: 4). They also included lies that were directly responsive to reports of distress experienced by the loved ones of some of the murdered women (Davies 1981; ‘Ripper Film Pledge’ 1981), and none more so than Doreen Hill, who, upon hearing news of another planned film about Sutcliffe and his crimes, voiced her distressed protest once again (‘Mother of Ripper Victim Protests Film’ 1981)  – even going so far as to pen a handwritten

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letter to the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, entreating him to step in and intervene (Hill 1981). She received no reply (Hill 1981). Refusing to name the American production company with whom he claimed to be working, and on whose behalf he claimed to speak, Ryan attempted to assure readers of the Yorkshire Evening Post that ‘the film company has not the slightest intention of sensationalising the story or of glamourizing Peter Sutcliffe’ and that ‘we do not want to cause Mrs Hill any distress nor upset anyone connected with the other victims [the family of 16-year-old Jayne McDonald, the youngest of the thirteen women known to have been murdered by Sutcliffe had already attacked the project as “heartless” in a Daily Mirror report (Davies 1981)]’ (‘Ripper Film Pledge’ 1981). Indicative, however, of Ryan’s self-serving disregard for Hill’s maternal grief, is his disingenuous promise to allow her to read the nonexistent film script which he offered up confidently and spuriously as a means by which the grieving mother’s ‘fears will be allayed’ (‘Ripper Film Pledge’ 1981). Ryan’s lies thus became more and more outlandish and audacious as the story of the film’s production gained momentum in the UK news media and beyond, and his confidence in offering up titbits of information about how the film was supposedly shaping up increased. Ultimately of course, the story went nowhere, because, much like the infamous tape recording of the Ripper’s voice that famously redirected the focus of the police manhunt for the perpetrator, with tragic consequences for the subsequently murdered and maimed women and their loved ones, the whole thing was a fraud perpetrated by a single individual with deliberate intent to deceive and mislead.

The boycott At the height of the media reportage of the production of Hail Mary though, its impact was such that it mobilized a number of women’s groups to take interventional action to try to shut down the film’s production. In August 1981, writing on behalf of the Leeds chapter of Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), locally based feminist activist Sandra McNeill wrote letters to a number of women’s media groups, including the activist pressure group Women in Media, and the Sexism in the Media branch of the Women’s Monitoring Network, concerning her group’s plans to arrange a coordinated national boycott of the film (McNeill 1981; Millar 1981a,b; Mary 1981). In her letter of 26 August, in which she wrote to Women in Media to seek their help and support in organizing this opposition, McNeill explained that one of WAVAW’s intended outcomes in staging this protest was to have women members of pertinent and potentially sympathetic

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unions such as the actors’ union Equity, the National Union of Journalists and the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTTS) campaign ‘to pass resolutions to make it union policy not to co-operate in making, distributing or advertising this film’ (McNeill 1981). WAVAW’s press release outlining their objections made very clear some of the things they believed were at stake in ensuring that the film was not shown or seen, and preferably not even made (‘Oppose Film to be Made about Sucliffe [sic]’ 1981). Making pointed reference to both the psychological and material impact of the attacks on women in the Leeds locality in particular, it stated, ‘Having lived for five years with the possibility of being his [Sutcliffe’s] next target, we are now faced with profit-mongers who intent [sic] to make millions of pounds by re-enacting these crimes to titillate men and terrify women’ (ibid.). In this way, they point to corporate capitalization upon real-world violence against women as a major factor in what was at stake in the production of the film. Further, in so doing, they presciently anticipated what Joan Smith later described as ‘the marketing of female fear as a commodity’ (Smith [1989] 1996:  31), in reference to the easy saleability of De Palma’s Dressed to Kill during the weeks leading up to Sutcliffe’s apprehension and the period of time thereafter. Moreover, Dressed to Kill is directly invoked as a point of comparison with the proposed Sutcliffe film, precisely in order to demonstrate the extent to which its marketability and popularity was symptomatic of what WAVAW viewed as a ‘women hating culture in which men are encouraged to see themselves as attackers or protectors of women, and women are portrayed as victims, deserving or innocent, prostitute or virgin depending on our relationship to men’ (‘Oppose Film to be Made about Sucliffe [sic]’ 1981). Explaining the appositeness of understanding the film in this way, and referring back to the cinema protests of 1980 that accompanied the UK release of De Palma’s film, they continued, ‘This proposed film must be compared to “Dressed to Kill” a film which has angered women and met with their opposition and angry protests in many places where it has been screened. Women of Leeds believed [sic] such opposition to be mild compared to what can be expected if the Sutcliff [sic] film reaches the cinemas’ (ibid.). Summing up WAVAW’s position, the flyer states candidly that ‘on the grounds that the proposed film is insensitive, exploitative and encourages a rape-culture mentality we believe it should not be made, and we are seeking the support of groups and organisations in stopping its production’ (ibid.). The explicit use of the term ‘rape-culture’ is significant here, given its centrality to second-wave feminist debates about violence against women, and to some of the most important interventions made by second-wave feminist writings and activism towards changing attitudes and understandings about gendered cultures of violence, and male sexual violence against women (Brownmiller 1975).

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As feminist scholar Kaitlynn Mendes explains, ‘For several decades, feminists and academics have increasingly talked about the development of a “rape culture,” or a socio-cultural context in which male dominance is eroticized … As a result, rape culture … fosters the belief that men are entitled to women’s bodies’ (Mendes 2015: 5). Going on to further explicate the meaning of the term, Mendes explains that ‘rape culture supports the policing of women’s behaviour (they shouldn’t be out at night), and justifies male violence if a woman is (perceived) to be out of line. In this way, rape culture serves as a reminder to women to remain in their “proper” place, and demonstrates that if they fail to do so, they will be (threatened with) rape, battery or murder’ (Mendes 2015: 6). She continues, ‘This line of thought is also responsible for the views that some women cannot be raped – such as sex workers, “sluts”, or women of colour, who are always thought to be “up for it” ’ (Mendes 2015: 6). It was this misogynist rationale (which supposes that women who have sexual agency are themselves responsible for opening themselves up to the matter-of-fact reality of male violence) which informed the assumption made by investigators at the time that the perpetrator of the Yorkshire Ripper murders was motivated by a hatred of prostitutes. The logic followed therefore that the victims must either have been sex workers, been mistaken for sex workers or demonstrated some lack of normatively and chastely feminine propriety in their comportment or in the way they chose to inhabit their bodies as women. It further informed the logic behind the strand of Sutcliffe’s defence that argued against the idea that his crimes were sexually motivated (Hollway 1981; Bland 1984; Ward Jouve 1986; Cameron and Frazer 1987; Smith [1989] 1996; Wattis 2018). This makes clear just some of what was seen to be at stake for feminists that these films about Sutcliffe were ostensibly being planned, and these stakes come into vivid view when such films are understood as manifestations of ‘rape-culture’. As this chapter has therefore demonstrated, 1970s and 1980s cultures of misogyny and violent masculinity, alongside the waves of UK women’s liberation movement feminist activism that took place during the Yorkshire Ripper years and after, are key contexts in relation to which the non-filming of The Yorkshire Ripper and Hail Mary have to be understood. Further, and as the thwarted production of the MGM film in particular makes clear, there can be clear and present ideological ground at stake for feminism in how and whether an ostensibly marketable commercial feature film gets made.

References ‘Associated Press Dispatch’ (1980), International News, London, Tuesday AM Cycle, 23 December. Bland, L. (1984), ‘The Case of the Yorkshire Ripper: Mad, Bad, Beast or Male?’, in P. Scraton and P. Gordon (eds), Causes for Concern: British Criminal Justice on Trial?, 184–209, London and New York: Penguin.

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Boyle, K., and Reburn, J. (2015), ‘Portrait of a Serial Killer’, Feminist Media Studies, 15 (2): 192–207. ‘Britons Assail MGM Plans for “Ripper” movie’ (1980), Los Angeles HeraldExaminer, 24 December. Brownmiller, S. (1975), Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, New York: Simon and Schuster. Cameron, D., and Frazer, E. (1987), The Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder, Cambridge: Polity. Davies, M. (1981), ‘Ripper in Cell Talk over Film’, The Daily Mirror, 24 June. Dovkants, K. (1980), ‘Police Probe into MGM Ripper Film’, The New Standard, 23 December, 5. Gaskell, J. (1980), ‘Dateline: Leeds’, The Daily Mail, 27 November, 13. Goldfarb, M. (1981), ‘United Artists Is Reportedly Planning a Film on the Life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper…’, The Washington Post, 15 August, C3. Hill, D. (1981) Letter to Sandra McNeill, 10 September, Box 1, Folder 8, The Sandra McNeill Collection, Women Against Violence Against Women. ‘Press Cuttings “About a Ripper Film” ’ (n.d.), Feminist Archive North, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Hollway, W. (1981), ‘ “I Just Wanted to Kill a Woman.” Why? The Ripper and Male Sexuality’, Feminist Review 9: 33–40. Hutchings, V. (1991), ‘Ryan’s Lore’, The New Statesman, 22 March, 12–13. Mary (1981), Letter to Sandra McNeill on behalf of Sexism in the Media, Women’s Monitoring Network, 3 October, The Sandra McNeill Collection, Feminist Archive North, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. McNeill, S. (1981), Letter to Women in Media, 26 August, Records of Women in Media, Administration, General Enquiries, 6WIM/A/03, The Women’s Library, LSE, London. McNeill, S. (2018), Interview with author, 5 April, Feminist Archive North, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Mendes, K. (2015), Slutwalk: Feminism, Activism and Media, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Merck, M. and Clayton, S. (1981), ‘Obvious Nastiness? An Opinion’, Spare Rib 106, 26–7. ‘MGM Drops “Yorkshire Ripper” ’ (1980), Variety, 31 December, 4, 24. ‘MGM Plans Ripper Film’ (1980), The Daily Mail, 23 December, 2. Millar, E. (1981a), Letter to Sandra McNeill on behalf of Women in Media, 10 September, The Sandra McNeill Collection, Feminist Archive North, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Millar, E. (1981b), Letter to Sandra McNeill on behalf of Women in Media, 21 October, The Sandra McNeill Collection, Feminist Archive North, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. ‘Mother of Ripper Victim Protests Film’ (1981), United Press International Dispatch, International News, Friday PM Cycle, 14 August. Newman, A. (1980a), ‘MGM TO PRODUCE “THE YORKSHIRE RIPPER” ’, News from MGM, 15 December, THE YORKSHIRE RIPPER Production Files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles. Newman, A. (1980b), ‘FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE’, News from MGM, 23 December, THE YORKSHIRE RIPPER Production Files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.

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‘ “Oppose Film to be Made about Sucliffe [sic]” ’ (1981), Women Against Violence Against Women, August, 6WIM/A/03, The Women’s Library, LSE, London. ‘PC in Row over Film on Ripper’ (1980), The Daily Mail, 24 December, 11. ‘Pictures: Larry Wilcox’ (1980), Variety, 24 December, 30. Pithers, M. (1980), ‘Police Check Ripper Film Link’, The Guardian, 24 December, 24. Rickford, F. (1980), ‘Sexual Terrorism Must End’, The Morning Star, 22 November, The Sandra McNeill Collection, Feminist Archive North, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. ‘Ripper Film Pledge’ (1981), Yorkshire Evening Post, 15 August. ‘Ripper Victim’s Family Protests’ (1980), The Times, 24 December, 2. ‘Rocky and the Ripper Film…’ (1981), The Daily Mail, 2 September, 15. Rumbelow, D. (1975), The Complete Jack the Ripper, London: WH Allen. Rumbelow, D. (1988), The Complete Jack The Ripper, Revised Edition, London: Penguin. Rumbelow, D. (2019), Interview with author, 19 August. Ryan, R. (1991), ‘Not quite right’, The New Statesman, 19 April, 38. Seddon, V. (1981), ‘Violence against Women: Male Power in Action’, Marxism Today, August, 14–18. ‘Sheffield Women’s Liberation’ (1980), Spare Rib, 91 (February): 19. Siskel, G., and Ebert, R. (1980), ‘Women in Danger’, Sneak Previews, Season 4, Episode 4, 18 September. Smith, J. ([1989] 1996), Misogynies, London: Vintage. Stead, J. (1980), ‘Now is the Time to Stand Up and Fight’, The Guardian, 5 December, 10. Thompson, D. (1981), ‘Douglas Thompson’s Hollywood’, The Daily Mail, 15 August, 4. ‘United Press International Dispatch’ (1980), Domestic News, London, Tuesday AM Cycle, 23 December. Ward Jouve, N. (1986), The Streetcleaner: The Yorkshire Ripper Case on Trial, London: Marion Boyars. Wattis, L. (2018), Revisiting the Yorkshire Ripper Murders: Histories of Gender, Violence and Victimhood, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Willis, F. (1981), ‘Sonia Sutcliffe Helps with Ripper Film’, 12 August, The Sandra McNeill Collection, Box 1, Folder 8, Feminist Archive North, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. ‘Yorkshire Ripper Film Planned’ (1981), Associated Press Dispatch, International News, Wednesday PM Cycle, 2 September.

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14 The unmade undead: A post-mortem of the post-9/11 zombie cycle Todd K. Platts

A good deal of cinematic output occurs in cycles, which is to say that groups of similar films are produced and released within a limited span of time before falling back to typical production queues or disappearing altogether (see Klein 2011: 5–20; Nowell 2011: 41–54; Grindon 2012: 44–5; Stanfield 2013:  215–25). Despite a recent increase in academic scrutiny of this phenomenon, scholars have yet to explain the conditions supervising the emergence and development of cycles, including how and why they end (Platts 2017:  192). A  notable lacuna within film cycles studies are the analytic lessons that can be learned from the films that were never made during a cycle. A focus on unmade films within particular cycles is warranted because film production in general, and cyclical production specifically, is characterized more by failures than successes; indeed, relatively few developmental projects ever reach the silver screen (Wasko 2008: 54; Kunze 2017; Fritz 2018: 30). Accordingly, shifting attention to the conditions that prevented films in a cycle from being made affords a more robust perspective on the industrial behaviours and logics that undergird cinematic decision making. With this observation in mind, the purpose of the chapter is to add to film cycle scholarship through a focus on the factors that led to a set of greenlit films to never be completed. An ideal data set for this endeavour is the post-9/11 zombie cycle. Not only was this cycle highly publicized and

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academically scrutinized, but it also left a veritable graveyard of abandoned projects at the height of its popularity such as I Walked with a Zombie, Army of the Dead, Deadworld, The Gatekeeper, Breathers:  A Zombie’s Lament and Chopper Zombie. Through a close reading industry and trade presses, the chapter utilizes a comparative assessment of the factors that led to the completion and distribution of films at the beginning of a cycle to the factors that led to the greenlighting but not completion of films at the end of a cycle, the chapter walks through four factors seen as significant to the development film cycles: commercial success, sociopolitical events and broader social currents, supporting cultural phenomena and ephemera, and industrial compatibility. When comparing the conditions at the beginning of the cycle to those that led to its demise, the changing influence of each factor through the cycle’s development is illuminated. In other words, the significance of each factor altered as the cycle unfolded. Accordingly, the assessment demonstrates how the generative mechanisms of film cycles also lead to a welter of unrealized films while also leaving space for new cycles. That is, it shows that the conditions that initiate the widespread production of certain films tend to lead to their demise (and replacement). The chapter proceeds by mapping out the post-9/11 zombie cycle, which is followed by an explication of the factors driving film cycles. The analytic sections of the chapter consider how each factor enabled the first wave of the cycle and stifled the second wave of the cycle.

The post-9/11 zombie cycle: Beginning to end The first wave of the post-9/11 zombie cycle unfolded between 2002 and 2005. The cycle was inaugurated by the profitability of Resident Evil (2002) and 28 Days Later (2002). Nearly one year after Resident Evil’s release and days before 28 Days Later would debut on American screens, Variety’s Jonathan Bing wrote, ‘The town is suddenly crawling with zombie movies, and there’s no relief in sight’ (2003:  5). Bing’s article noted the following zombie films had been greenlit or were in production:  Dawn of the Dead (2004), Shaun of the Dead (2004), Resident Evil 2 (later renamed Resident Evil:  Apocalypse (2004)) and House of the Dead (2003). All of these films were eventually completed and theatrically released. Then in November 2004 it was announced that George A.  Romero would be making a return to zombie cinema with Land of the Dead (Beale 2004: E1, E4). The performance and significance of these films as they relate to the group of unmade zombie films is given deeper consideration later in the chapter. The second wave of the zombie cycle lasted from 2006 to 2013 and was headlined mostly by sequels to the Resident Evil series.1 Within the

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timeframe 2007–9, near the height of the zombie cycle, no less than six zombie films received publicized greenlights. On 26 March 2007, Daily Variety reported that Zack Snyder – hot off the heels of Dawn of the Dead – was beginning work on Army of the Dead (McClintock 2007: 1, 8). On 8 June 2008, the New York Times profiled famed reality television producer Thom Beers, ending the profile with the announcement of Chopper Zombie (Carter 2008:  MT2), which seemed to be on the production fast track when it was scheduled to go into production in ‘early spring 2009’ (‘Thom Beers Fast Tracks Graphic Novel into First Feature’ 2008). A few months later, Hollywood Reporter announced that Jeffrey Erb, under the banner of Framelight, was set to produce an adaption of the long-running zombie comic book Deadworld (Goldstein 2008). In February 2009, author S. G. Browne posted on his website that his novel, Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament, was acquired by Fox Searchlight and that Mason Novick and Diablo Cody were set to produce (Brown 2009; Siegel 2009: 4), a script was even completed by early September 2010 (Quigley 2010). One month later, Daily Variety reported that I Walked with a Zombie was set for a remake with Adam Marcus tabbed to direct (Fleming 2009: 3). That July, Daily Variety broke that The Gatekeeper, a Shaun-of-the-Dead-comes-to-America zombie film, was in development (McNary 2009: 7). Despite the buzz of all things zombie, none of these would-be zombie films was ever brought to cinematic life. By 2013, following the successful releases of World War Z (2013) and Warm Bodies (2013), the post-9/11 zombie cycle had seemingly run its course, a sentiment captured by New York Times reporter Michael Cieply who wrote before the release of World War Z that the film was ‘chasing a wave it anticipated almost a decade ago’ (2013: C1). Since 2013, only one zombie film not related to the Resident Evil franchise  – Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016), a box-office bomb – has received a mainstream theatrical release. The films comprising the post-9/11 zombie cycle, including domestic and international box office, can be seen in Table 14.1. As detailed below, a confluence of factors derailed the post-9/11 zombie cycle. In short, box-office performance started lagging behind other horror subtypes while DVD sales, an important revenue stream, dipped; the zeitgeist, which shifted from post-9/11 anxiety to post-economic crisis anxiety, was better captured by haunted house films despite changes in zombie narratives; the story best told in zombie narratives, human drama, found better expression in television while key decision makers cut back on horror productions due to perceptions of market glut and issues over exportability; and Hollywood’s business model began decreasing the number of midbudget horror films released as the creative personnel attached to the set of six unmade zombie films pursued other projects. The analysis suggests that reference to only one factor offers an incomplete picture of cyclical demise. It shows that when the factors are considered in concert, we can not only

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Title

Release Date

Domestic Box Office

International Box Office

Box Office Rank

Estimated Budget

2002

Resident Evil

15 March

$40.1

$62.9

64th

$33

2003

28 Days Later

27 June

$45

$37.7

66th

$8

2003

House of the Dead

10 October

$10

$3.5

60th

$12

2004

Dawn of the Dead

19 March

$59

$43.3

51st

$26

2004

Resident Evil Apocalypse

10 September

$51.2

$78.1

64th

$45

2004

Shaun of the Dead

24 September

$13.5

$16.5

129th

$6

2005

Land of the Dead

24 June

$20.7

$26

112th

$15

2007

Resident Evil: Extinction

21 September

$50.6

$97.8

51st

$45

2007

28 Weeks Later

11 May

$28.6

$35.6

87th

$15

2009

Zombieland

2 October

$75.6

$26.8

42nd

$23.6

2010

Resident Evil: Afterlife

10 September

$60.1

$240.1

55th

$60

2012

Resident Evil: Retribution

14 September

$42.3

$197.7

79th

$65

2013

World War Z

21 June

$202.4

$337.6

13th

$190

2013

Warm Bodies

1 February

$66.4

$50.6

53rd

$35

2016

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

5 February

$10.9

$5.5

133rd

$28

2017

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

27 January

$26.8

$285.4

90th

$40

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Year

254

Table 14.1 Post 9/11 Zombie Films, 2002–17. Data based on information from Box Office Mojo. Box office figures and budget expressed in millions.

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gain a better understanding of how cycles conclude but also gain perspective on how cycles are replaced.

The factors driving film cycles Within existing literature, four factors work together to generate the rise and fall of film cycles:  commercial success; sociopolitical events and broader social currents; supporting cultural phenomenon and ephemera; and industrial compatibility (Platts 2017:  195–7). Though each factor is mutually distinct, they also exhibit significant overlap with each other, which is evidenced in the discussion and analysis below. Space constraints dictate a necessarily summary elaboration of each factor. Since films are business ventures intended to turn profit, commercial success is a fundamental ingredient to film cycle development. Within the entertainment industry, success often begets imitation. Consequently, the birth of all film cycles can be traced back to an originary hit (Klein 2011:  4; Grindon 2012:  44, 53; Platts 2017:  195). Not all hits initiate a cycle, however (e.g. Forest Gump (1994)) (Klein 2011: 11). This is because, as Richard Nowell suggests, cycles require a reinforcing hit, or a film that reiterates the saleability of certain cinematic content (Nowell 2011: 51, 108). Once established, cycles must be sustained with a track record of reliable hits. However, profitable cycles can be jettisoned if other trends become more lucrative (Romao 2003: 47), or they become embroiled in controversy (Kapsis 1991: 77–9). Within sociopolitical events and broader social currents, film cycles become popular, more or less, for their ability to provide prescient social commentary of current realities (Ryan and Kellner 1988:  1–16; Kellner 2010:  1–40). The cycles that can effectively dramatize contemporaneous events such as war, political turmoil, tragedies and economic recessions find prominence at those junctures in time. Seen in this light, the advent and denouement of specific film cycles can be seen as offering a historical record of how social and cultural changes were responded to and grappled with en masse (Platts 2017:  195–6). Cycles can be abandoned when the concerns they animate are displaced or another group of films proves more capable of expressing them (Grindon 2012: 42). Cultural phenomena like evolving audience demographics and shifting cultural attitudes towards controversial issues (e.g. sex and violence) help to underwrite the mobilization of themes in individual films and cycles (Platts 2017:  197). Cycles can also be bolstered or initiated by the presence of related cultural ephemera such as popular culture fads (e.g. calypso music (Stanfield 2015:  90–111)), fashions (hairstyles (ibid.:  162–87)), leisure pursuits (e.g. skateboarding (Nowell 2013:  78–81)) and popular locales (e.g. beaches (Nowell 2011: 124–5)). Hollywood cinema draws from such

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related phenomena because of its presumed built-in audience. Not all fads and fashions are exploited on screen. Instead, the popularity of certain ephemera renders it a possibility for dramatization (Nowell 2013: 79). As well, the personal judgements of industry personnel to greenlight, produce and release certain films can play a significant role in cyclical development (Kapsis 1991:  70). On occasion, as discussed below, related cultural phenomena in one medium can undermine the same phenomena in another platform. The factor industrial compatibility suggests that the process of film production impacts the type and volume of films produced in a given period of time (Kapsis 1991: 69–70; Nowell 2012: 8–9). As I have argued elsewhere, the industrial facets of film production include the interorganizational personnel governing the production, financing, and distribution of films; censorship standards governing acceptable levels of violence, sex, and other potentially offensive themes; conventions conscribing storytelling poetics; budgetary constraints inherent in individual film projects; and the technological limitations of filmmaking’s creative tools (e.g., cameras, editing equipment, special effects). (Platts 2015: 149) A focus on industrial compatibility highlights the business and industrial logics behind the greenlighting, production, exhibition and promotion of film cycle development.

A post-mortem of the post-9/11 zombie cycle The analysis below begins with the two most cited factors behind the zombie’s sudden renaissance: commercial success and sociopolitical events and broader social currents. While reference to both factors can help make sense of the post-9/11 zombie cycle’s beginnings, scholars have yet to consider how both factors may have also played a role in the demise of the zombie cycle, including the six uncompleted zombie films. The fact that the most profitable zombie films occurred at the end of its cycle (e.g. Zombieland, Warm Bodies and World War Z) and that zombie narratives could be tweaked to highlight other concerns suggests that factors other than handsome returns on investment and sociocultural resonance sustain a cycle. To paint a fuller picture of what led to the death of the post-9/11 zombie cycle, the last two analytic sections explore how supporting cultural phenomena and ephemera and industrial compatibility played crucial roles in sending six would-be zombie films back to the graveyard.

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Commercial success Hits are important to the genesis of any cycle. A single hit, however, is not always enough to justify the greenlighting of similar films. Resident Evil’s profitability, for instance, may have ensured the production of at least one sequel, but not a cycle of zombie films. Without the follow-up success of 28 Days Later, it would have been easy to chalk Resident Evil’s ticket sales to factors other than zombies:  its fast-paced action, star Milla Jovovich, its link to videogames or even luck. The collective box office of both films contributed to industry confidence in big-budget zombie films. The subsequent profitability of Dawn of the Dead and Resident Evil: Apocalypse helped to underwrite industry confidence in bankrolling Land of the Dead – George Romero’s first and only Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)-member studio-distributed zombie film (Abbott 2016: 67). Despite early hype, however, Land of the Dead only earned $20.7  million at the domestic box office against its $15 million budget. While the zombie seemed to be a box-office titan between 2002 and 2005, closer inspection reveals the monster’s box-office drawing power was (and has been) mediocre at best. In their box-office analysis of horror films covering the years 1998–2007, Blair Davis and Simone Natale reported that zombie films performed almost identically to killer/mutant hillbilly films, extrasensory perception (ESP) horror films, slashers and religiousthemed horror films while being outpaced by historical horror, Japanese horror (J-horror) and torture porn (Davis and Natale 2010: 47–9). Zombie cinema’s comparative profitability only became more suspect after 2007. In an analysis from 2006 to 2016, Todd Platts and Mathias Clasen showed that, after removing World War Z from their data set (a statistical outlier), the typical zombie film cost more and returned slightly less money than other types of horror films (Platts and Clasen 2017). Importantly, this box-office uncertainty occurred just as the group of six unmade films were receiving greenlights. After the cycle’s first wave, it became apparent that interest in zombie films was not enough to justify multiple theatrical releases per year. With that being said, such numbers would not necessarily bring the zombie cycle to a halt as box-office performance is only one revenue stream. Early in the post-9/11 zombie cycle, modest ticket sales could be easily offset by the booming DVD market. House of the Dead, for instance, lost money at the box office but did well enough on DVD to be mentioned as one of Lions Gate’s ‘principal revenue drivers during fiscal 2004’ by Business Wire (‘Lions Gate Entertainment Reports Fiscal 2004 Revenues of $384.9 Million’ 2004). The DVD market did more than boost the prospects of zombie films; it uplifted the horror genre. Between the years 2004 and 2007, horror films ‘turned in combined ticket and DVD sales of an impressive $1.5 billion’ (Egan 2007:  94). After peaking in 2007, the DVD market began faltering in 2008. Between 2004 and 2016, home entertainment

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revenue nearly halved, from $22 billion to $12 billion with big-budget films experiencing the smallest drop (Fritz 2018:  21–2). Declining DVD sales hit lower-budget genre productions hard and resulted in a scaling-back of studio-backed horror films (Graser and Stewart 2010: 11), thereby further steepening the odds against the six unmade zombie films. Confidence in adding more films to the post-9/11 zombie cycle was further undermined with the arrival of Paranormal Activity (2009) and the post-recessionary haunted house film. Films in this cycle, which include, in addition to the Paranormal Activity series (2009–15), The Conjuring series (2013–16) and the Insidious series (2010–18), were able to return incredible box-office returns on exceptionally modest budgets (Platts and Clasen 2017). Even though later entries in the zombie cycle such as Warm Bodies and World War Z did well in theatres and the Resident Evil series did exceptionally well overseas, they still possessed relatively large budgets and were, therefore, easily overshadowed by the return on investment from haunted house films. Collectively, all the above factors did not bode well for the prospects of I Walked with a Zombie, Army of the Dead, Deadworld, The Gatekeeper, Breathers:  A Zombie’s Lament and Chopper Zombie. The next section documents how the rug was further pulled from under these films when the fears associated with the aftermath of 11 September 2001 were overwritten by the financial concerns brought on by the 2007–8 recession.

Social political events and broader social currents Whether intended or not, the hopes, fears and aspirations of a particular time imprint themselves in popular culture. Horror, a genre intended to ‘scare and/or disturb its audience’ (Classen 2017: 3), is seen as particularly adept at dramatizing the issues that unsettle a society by tapping into ‘phobic pressure points’ (King 2010:  4–5) primarily by drawing upon contemporaneous ‘social upheaval[s], anxieties about natural and manmade disasters, conflicts and wars, crime and violence’ (Cherry 2009: 11). Prior to 9/11, the zombie mythos, as popularized by George A. Romero, routinely exploited fears that came to be associated with its aftermath: biochemical terrorism, breakdown of social infrastructure, inefficient and ineffective government response, and survivalism (Bishop 2009: 17). Zombies strongly resonated in a post-911 environment, in part because their ‘literal, predatory, and disease-salient presence’ (Clasen 2012: 225) dovetailed into prescient fears of ‘wide-scale destruction and destruction which 9/11 brought once again into the communal consciousness’ (Dendle 2007: 54). Early films in the zombie cycle, especially 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead, fed on fears generated by 9/11 through their nihilistic story arcs, their use of news reports to drive storylines, their employment of shaky

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cam footage for action sequences and their showing of bloodied, confused victims. As time passed, however, post-9/11 fears were superseded by the fears associated with the 2007–8 financial crisis. As noted above, starting in 2007 there was an influx of horror films that situated the home as ‘a site of threat, instability, and disruption [that exposed] the inequality of recessionera households’ (Snelson 2014:  162). Post-recessionary horror films ‘implicitly and explicitly reference the financial crisis [that] has adversely affected the lives of millions of ordinary American families’ (Murphy 2016: 243), particularly younger audiences who have begun ‘facing a future in which the milestones that should punctuate and enrich a lifetime – finding a job, buying property and starting a family  – are ever harder to reach’ (Mann 2017: 176). The path paved by early post-9/11 zombie films could not speak as cogently to these concerns. It is worth noting that later films in the zombie cycle were less dependent on the issues that came to be associated with 9/11 paranoia. The Resident Evil series had always relied on action sequences more than traditional zombie films, and as the series progressed, it ran with the context of corporate corruption run amok (Kellner 2016: 18–20). Zombieland pulled mostly from the comedic themes associated with road-trip movies (Bishop 2015:  23–40). Warm Bodies borrowed from saccharine romance tropes that helped make Twilight a sensation (Tenga and Zimmerman 2013: 84). The group of six unmade zombie films would have likely continued the cycle’s later variations. The Gatekeeper and Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament were set to follow the romantic zombie comedy formula that experienced success with Shaun of the Dead and Warm Bodies. I Walked with a Zombie was going to be an attempt to return the zombie to its Caribbean origins. Deadworld was intended to be a franchise centred around King Zombie, the hero of the eponymous comic book series (Fischer 2009). Chopper Zombie would have probably focused on the vigilante/revenge plot found in the graphic novel. Only Army of the Dead was going to use the survivors-in-anapocalyptic-backdrop plotline most associated with zombie cinema. Despite the zombie’s ability to change its spots, however, audiences flocked to haunted house movies in the wake of the financial crisis. During the crisis, suicide rates rose, the unemployment rate skyrocketed and millions of Americans lost their homes as foreclosures reached their highest levels (Mann 2017:  176). Haunted house films with their themes of home loss amid an economic crisis better touched a cathartic nerve. Put differently, the zeitgeist that propelled films in the early part of the cycle had been replaced. (It is also significant to note that many commentators saw the zombie as a conduit for post-recessionary anxieties (see Blake 2015:  26–41; Rubin 2015: 69–94)). While the noting the profitability of zombies and taking stock of the contemporary social issues overly or covertly depicted in cinematic storylines can help to pinpoint the appeal of such films for audiences, they do not

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speak to the diverse logics that inform decisions to greenlight, produce and distribute individual films, including the decision to halt production on new zombie films. Accordingly, to gain a greater understanding of the rise and fall of the post-9/11 zombie cycle, the final two analytic sections consider how supporting cultural phenomena and ephemera and industrial compatibility fuelled the first wave of the cycle and stifled the cycle’s potential second wave of films.

Supporting cultural phenomena and ephemera Zombie related popular culture has witnessed unprecedented levels of popularity in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. For the first time ever, the zombie is truly a multimedia monster with bestselling books such as The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) and World War Z (2006), highly profitable videogame franchises like Resident Evil (1996–) and Dead Rising (2006–), and television shows including The Walking Dead (2010–) and iZombie (2015–), to name a few (Platts 2016: 228–33). Several early entrants in the zombie cycle were bolstered by such related phenomena. Resident Evil was part of Hollywood’s renewed confidence in adapting videogames to the silver screen (Takahashi 1999:  R14), while also being representative of a trend in action horror films akin to Blade (1998) and The Mummy (1999) (Platts and Clasen 2017). 28 Days Later was an attempt by its production company, DNA Films, to align with a more commercial style of filmmaking (Dawtrey 2001: 10). For its part, Dawn of the Dead was part of a general trend of remaking old films of which horror remakes were only a small part (Bing 2002: 1,64). Zombie cinema was also bolstered by the renewed popularity of horror films in the early-2000s (Shone 2005). Just when the zombie was gaining traction in platforms outside of film, the monster started experiencing roadblocks in the film world that would ultimately help grind the cycle to a halt. In the midst of an uptick in the genre, horror became straddled with concerns over ratings. In the mid2000s, industry logic gravitated away from R-rated films, the rating most associated with zombies, because of their perceived lower earning potential (Snyder 2005: 8, 45). Meanwhile, overseas markets, which were growing in importance, often imposed stricter ratings ‘which [could] cut into the genre’s core teen aud and in some cases preclude any TV sales’ (LaPorte 2005: 9). Moreover, 2007 was seen as a particularly lean year for horror films with Grindhouse (2007), 28 Weeks Later and Hostel:  Part II (2007) falling short of expectations. The underperformance of these films was blamed on ‘marketplace glut’ (Cieply 2007:  E3) and ‘oversaturation’ of horror films (McNary 2007: 8). Atop these developments, numerous low- to mid-budget film projects were jettisoned due to the 2007–8 Writers Guild of America strike (Thomson and Siegel 2007: 10–11). Collectively, these events would have mitigated interest in producing the group of six unmade zombie films.

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Concurrently, as the presence of zombies waned on the silver screen, it waxed on the small screen. The ‘golden age of zombie TV’ (Abbott 2016: 118) has occurred, in part, because the themes best investigated by zombie narratives – human relations in response to change and uncertainty – are better dramatized on television. Good zombie narratives are less about the zombies and more about the tribulations of human characters. Telling such stories necessitates ‘long-arc storylines with sufficient time for substantial character development’ (Bishop 2015: 182), which is not afforded in a 90to 120-minute cinematic narrative. Since the filmmaking industry aims to offer an experience that television cannot deliver, the superior quality of zombie television has pre-empted all but a select few of mainstream zombie films (see Bishop 2015: 181–90; Abbott 2016: 93–119;). Be that as it may, it would still be possible to for at least one of the six unmade zombie films to make it to screen provided the right business conditions and/or the diligence of their backers. The final analytic section gages how large-scale industry shifts and changing interests in the films’ backers put the final nail in the coffin of the post-9/11 zombie cycle.

Industrial compatibility Individual films and film cycles must be vetted through the mediating structures of industry practice. Across the span of the post-9/11 zombie cycle, Hollywood business practice underwent significant changes. Through the 1990s, Hollywood entered what Thomas Schatz has called the ‘conglomerate era’ of production (Schatz 2008: 14). Within this system, Hollywood’s major studios became subsumed into larger corporations where filmmaking comprised a fraction of each parent company’s profits. To deal with the burgeoning independent film market during the 1990s, the conglomerated studios either acquired successful independent film companies or launched their own semi-autonomous subdivisions tasked with producing mid-budget genre films, most notably horror. This state of affairs helped to sustain horror productions across much of the 2000s (Platts and Clasen 2017). Since the 2008 recession, however, the studios have scrapped or scaled back their independent divisions (Fritz 2018: 188), resulting in a significant decline of horror film production (Platts and Clasen 2017). In this new environment, Blumhouse Productions has emerged as the premiere producer of horror films. From the beginning, they have operated under streamlined production model that has favoured haunted house films over other types of horror (Murphy 2016: 236–7; Platts and Clasen 2017), severely limiting the prospects of zombie film production in the process. In light of these conditions, the personnel attached to the six unmade zombie films moved on to different projects. Army of the Dead fell through, in part, due to the recession. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., who was set to direct, revealed, ‘We were in pre-production for Warner Bros.  – this was

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around October 2008 – and the movie became bigger and bigger [budgetwise] because it was so difficult to shoot in Las Vegas. Then the financial crisis happened, Wall Street collapsed and Warner Bros. pulled the plug.’ Van Heijningen Jr. would go one to direct The Thing (2011) while producer Zack Snyder went to direct Watchmen (2009) and is now entrenched in films associated with the DC Extended Universe. Adam Marcus went from directing I Walked with a Zombie to writing the script for Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013) and is currently trying to develop a Friday the 13th spinoff. Diablo Cody left Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament in favour of finishing Jennifer’s Body (2009), 500 Days of Summer (2009) and working on the television series United States of Tara (2009–11). Cody’s association with Breathers occurred during a rough patch in her career and this seemed significant in its demise, ‘suddenly, movies that her name had been attached to – Breather: A Zombie’s Lament with ScarJo and JGL, a Hugh Hefner biopic, and a reboot of Sweet Valley High – died in development or hell – like the Evil Dead remake – were rewritten by someone else’ (Rowles 2015). Writer Geoff LaTulippe revealed on his website that Fox Searchlight turned down Breathers because of ‘its similarity to Warm Bodies’ while also noting an ‘exec shuffle in the middle of doing drafts’ (LaTulippe 2015). With a completed script, a director and a cast, The Gatekeeper seemed destined for the silver screen. However, in June 2011, director Isaac Meisenheimer took to Kickstarter to find funding for the film. Meisenheimer seemingly noted The Gatekeeper was a casualty of shaking industry confidence in zombies and horror, ‘for the last five years, we’ve been navigating the studios and production companies of Hollywood and to make a long story short, we’ve had the funding pulled out from under our feet several times’ (Meisenheimer 2011). Meisenheimer was only able to collect a little more than $3,000; he was hoping to get $1 million. Chopper Zombie went cold after 2008. In 2011, Thom Beers indicated that he wanted to make the film but got behind 1,000 Ways to Die (2008–11) as the ‘closest [he] would ever get to making horror films’ (Crowell 2011: 48). Deadworld suffered being connected to an ill-fated studio, Framelight Productions. In 2008, the company optioned numerous graphic novels for adaptation (Goldstein 2008), with none of the projects coming to fruition. In 2017, the company released its only film, Residue (2017), a horror, detective thriller hybrid. The same fate befell Shaun of the Dead (‘ “Shaun” Comes Back to Life at WT2’ 2003: 18), but it was quickly grabbed by another company due to the popularity of zombies as the time.

Conclusion Horror genres never stay dead. While zombie cinema has not had a mainstream theatrical release since Resident Evil:  The Final Chapter

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(2016), there are rumours of rebooting the series (Hopewell 2017:  55). And shortly after writing this chapter, a sequel to Zombieland was released, Zombieland:  Double Tap (2019). This is not to mention the continued presence of low-budget zombie movies like the highly acclaimed The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) and the derivative Day of the Dead:  Bloodline (2018). This study contributes to film cycle scholarship by employing a comparative analytic that oscillated focus from the conditions that facilitated the continuation of cycle to the conditions that hindered the same cycle. The use of this approach not only allowed for an enhanced understanding of the zombie cycle’s denouement but also offered a window into how one cycle can be replaced by another. While future research must offer a clearer understanding of cyclical transition, the approach applied above can be used to study other cyclical transitions such as the transition from historical epics in the 1950s (e.g. The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959)) to big-budget musicals in the 1960s (e.g. West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965)).

Note 1. Other mainstream zombie films released in this window include 28 Weeks Later (2007), Zombieland (2009), Warm Bodies (2013) and World War Z (2013).

References Abbott, S. (2016), Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the Twenty-First Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Beale, L. (2004), ‘The Zombies Brought Him: George Romero is Back’, New York Times, 3 November, E1, E4. Bing, J. (2002), ‘H’wood Raids Its Vaults…’, Variety, 386 (3): 1, 64. Bing, J. (2003), ‘Hip to be Ghoul: H’Wood Unearths New Wave of Zombie Tales’, Variety, 391 (6): 5. Bishop, K. (2009), ‘Dead Man Still Walking: Explaining the Zombie Renaissance’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 37 (1): 16–25. Bishop, K. W. (2015), How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture: The Multifarious Walking Dead in the 21st Century, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Blake, L. (2015), ‘ “Are We Worth Saving? You Tell Me”: Neoliberalism, Zombies and the Failure of Free Trade’, Gothic Studies, 17 (2): 26–41. Brown, S. G. (2009), ‘Fox Searchlight Acquires “Breathers” ’, February. Available online: http://sgbrowne.com/2009/02/fox-searchlight-acquires-breathers/ (accessed 23 June 2020).

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Klein, A. A. (2011), American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures, Austin: University of Texas Press. Kunze, P. C. (2017), ‘Herding Cats: or, the Possibilities of Unproduction Studies’, Velvet Light Trap, 80: 18–31. LaPorte, N. (2005), ‘Horror Hits Have Higher Hopes’, Variety, 401 (6): 9. LaTulippe, G. (2015), ‘Response to Jeanne V. Bowerman and Script Magazine’, 27 March. Available online: www.geofflatulippe.com/?p=256 (accessed 23 June 2020). ‘Lions Gate Entertainment Reports Fiscal 2004 Revenues of $384.9 Million’ (2004), Business Wire, 29 June. Available online: https://www.businesswire.com/ news/home/20040629005409/en/Lions-Gate-Entertainment-Reports-Fiscal2004-Revenues (accessed 23 June 2020). Mann, C. I. (2017), ‘Death and Dead-End Jobs: Independent Horror and the Great Recession’, in P. Bennett and J. McDougall (eds), Popular Culture and the Austerity Myth: Hard Times Today, 175–88, New York: Routledge. McClintock, P. (2007), ‘WB Fleshing Out Zombies’, Daily Variety, 26 March, 1: 8. McNary, D. (2007), ‘Horror Scares Up Overseas Biz’, Variety, 407 (10): 8. McNary, D. (2009), ‘Zombie Pic Undead at Circle’, Daily Variety, 13 July, 7. Meisenheimer, I. (2011), ‘The Gatekeeper’, 1 June. Available online: https://www. kickstarter.com/projects/isaacmeisenheimer/the-gatekeeper-a-feel-good-zombiemovie/?ref=kicktraq (accessed 23 June 2020). Murphy, B. (2016), ‘ “It’s Not the House That’s Haunted”: Demons, Debt, and the Family in Peril Formula in Recent Horror Cinema’, in M. Leeder (ed.), Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era, 235–51, New York: Bloomsbury. Nowell, R. (2011), Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle, New York: Continuum. Nowell, R. (2012), ‘Getting Down to Genre Business’, Iluminace, 24 (3): 5–12. Nowell, R. (2013), ‘Hollywood Don’t Skate: US Production Trends, Industry Analysis, and the Roller Disco Movie’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 11 (1): 73–91. Platts, T. K. (2015), ‘The New Horror Movie’, in T. Gencarelli and B. Cogan (eds), Baby Boomers and Popular Culture: An Inquiry into America’s Most Powerful Generation, 147–63, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Platts, T. K. (2016), ‘From White Zombies to Night Zombies and Beyond: The Evolution of the Zombie in Western Popular Culture’, in B. Brodman and J. E. Doan (eds), The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to 21st Century Chic, 228–33, Madison, WI: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Platts, T. K. (2017), ‘A Comparative Analysis of the Factors Driving Film Cycles: Italian and American Zombie Film Production, 1978–82’, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 5 (2): 191–210. Platts, T. K., and Clasen, M. (2017), ‘Scary Business: Horror at the North American Box Office, 2006–2016’, Frames Cinema Journal, 11. Available online: http:// framescinemajournal.com/article/scary-business-horror-at-the-north-americanbox-office-2006-2016/ (accessed 23 June 2020). Quigley, A. (2010), ‘Scarlett Johansson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt to Star in Diablo Cody’s “Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament?” ’, Slash Film, 1 September. Available online: www.slashfilm.com/

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INDEX

20th Century Fox 46, 171, 175, 178 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 39, 46 adaptation 3, 5, 7–9, 21, 32, 34, 40, 43, 49–50, 59, 74–6, 79, 82, 84–6, 92, 97–8, 100, 103, 106, 122, 129–30, 134–8, 141–2, 145–8, 153, 156–9, 167, 175, 188, 220, 225–6, 236–7, 253, 260, 262 Alice in Wonderland 11, 217–20, 222–3, 225–8 Amblin Entertainment 134, 138, 140, 143–5 American Heritage Center 34 archive methods 5–7, 10–11, 18–19, 23–31, 34–5, 40–1, 51–3, 58, 73–4, 92–3, 116, 132, 146, 154, 156, 199, 203, 219, 225, 237 archival catalogues 9–10, 19–21, 24–5, 29, 34, 40–1, 190 Associated Artists Pictures 156 Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTTS) 247 auteur 3–4, 8–9, 40, 91–2, 193 Avton Films 58 Balcon, Sir Michael 95, 105 Bengal Film Laboratory 115 Bergman, Ingmar 84, 218 Berlin International Film Festival 221, 224 Bibliothèque du cinéma François Truffaut 74, 86 Bibliothèque du Film 74, 86–7 Bloomsbury group 99, 103

Blumhouse Productions 261 Brecht, Bertolt 74–5, 83–4, 86–7 Breen, Joseph 43 British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) 159–61 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 3, 91–6, 98–106, 156 British Film Institute (BFI) 3, 12, 95–6, 154, 158 BFI Archive 154, 163–4 British Film Producers Association 66 Broadway 78, 130, 137–9, 144–5, 148 Bromberg, Serge 10, 185–6, 189–97 Cannes Film Festival 60, 86, 221 Carreras, Michael 154–9, 161–2, 164–7 Carroll, Lewis 11, 217–24, 226–9 censorship 7–8, 29–30, 42–4, 76, 124, 159, 172, 256 CFSK Central Film Studios Kosutnjak 64–5 Chabrol, Claude 186, 194–6, 226 Chase, Borden 24–9, 31, 34 Clouzot, Henri-Georges 10, 185–96 Columbia Pictures 154, 161–2, 165, 185, 189, 196 Communist Party of India (CPI) 113, 115–16, 118, 123–4 Communist Party of India Marxist (CPIM) 116 Cushing, Peter 153, 157, 165 David O. Selznick Collection 8, 39 De Palma, Brian 238–9, 247 Democratic Front in Collective Arts (DFCA) 117 development hell 2–3, 131–2

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INDEX

Disney, Walt 135, 138 Douglas, Kirk 8, 17–37 DreamWorks 144–5 Eady Levy 155, 159 Ealing Studios 67, 95 Eisenstein, Sergei 74 Eisner, Michael 139 Eliot, T. S. 140–1, 143, 145, 148 Elmes, Guy 59–61, 64, 68–9 European Film Agency 66 failure 2–3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 22–3, 45, 47, 57, 86, 92, 106, 120–1, 129–34, 137, 144, 146–8, 172, 186, 189, 192–3, 196, 199, 244, 151 failure studies 131–4 Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) 116, 121 Fisher, Terence 153, 163–4 French New Wave 98, 185–8, 194 Fuller, Samuel 171–84 Gable, Clark 48, 50 Ghatak, Ritwik 8–9, 109–24 Gilliam, Terry 1–2 Giraudoux, Jean 9, 74, 76–81, 85–6 Godard, Jean-Luc 1, 8–9, 73–87, 194–5 Goldwyn, Samuel 46 Hammer Films 3, 10, 153–67 Hammer Script Archive 156 Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation 22–3 Harry Ransom Center 8, 39, 132, 134 Hays, Will 42–3 Herrmann, Bernard 191 Hitchcock, Alfred 2–3, 12, 40, 163, 188, 191, 195 Holocaust 3, 5, 10, 199–201, 204–7, 210–12 Hudson, Rock 26–8, 33–4 Hyman, Eliot 154, 156, 158, 160–1, 167 Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) 111, 113–16, 118, 121

Jarmusch, Jim 171, 173, 179–83 Karina, Anna 75–6, 79, 81 Kaurismäki, Mika 171–3, 182–3 Kirk Douglas Papers (KDP) 17–20, 23–5, 28–9, 31, 35 Klinger, Michael 8, 57–69 Klinger, Tony 58–9, 61, 63, 65 Kubrick, Stanley 3–4, 22–3 Lanzmann, Claude 5, 10, 199–212 Lawrence, D. H. 100, 106 Leeds Revolutionary Feminists 242 Leigh, Vivian 45 Lewton, Val 39, 41, 43–5, 47–52 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 130, 135–45, 147 Lobster Films 190 Lucas, George 130 Manson, Marilyn 11, 217–30 Margaret Herrick Library 29–30, 241 Mayer, Louis B. 42 McNeill, Sandra 238, 244, 246–7 Melvin, Murray 93–4, 105 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) 22–3, 34, 39, 41–2, 44, 46, 48–52, 65, 183, 236, 239–44, 248 Michael Klinger Papers 58, 69 Miller, Jonathan 101 Mirisch Corporation 22–3 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) 5, 26, 29, 257 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Title Registration Bureau 5, 26 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) 42–3, 51 National Film Archive of India (NFAI) 115, 124 National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) 67 Ophuls, Max 74, 82, 87 overdevelopment 8, 18, 22–3, 31–5

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Paramount Pictures 22, 47, 61 producer studies 7 Production Code Administration (PCA) 29, 42, 44 production studies 7, 9, 11, 134, 146–7, 167 Rank Organisation, The 67 Rice, Tim 130, 135 Ritwik Memorial Trust 115, 122, 124 Rivette, Jacques 75–6, 82, 84, 194 RKO Pictures 45–6, 190 Robert Lippert Productions 155–6 Rohmer, Eric 194–5 Romero, George A. 252, 258 Rumbelow, Donald (see also Sutcliffe, Peter) 239–42 Russell, Ken 9, 91–105 Sangster, Jimmy 154, 159–60, 162, 165–6 Schulberg, B. P. 45–6 Selznick, David O. 8. 39–53 Selznick International Pictures (SIP) 39–40, 42, 44–52 Seven Arts Pictures 22 shadow cinema 4–12, 18, 29, 35, 40–1, 44, 52, 91–2, 94, 96–7, 105, 109, 129–30, 172–3, 196, 211–12, 218– 19, 230, 235 Shurlock, Geoffrey 29–30 Siemel, Sasha 171, 173–4 Spielberg, Steven 130, 134, 138–40, 142–7 Stanley Kubrick Archive 3 Stoppard, Tom 9, 129, 134, 139–47 studio system 170, 40, 73, 119 Subotsky, Milton 154–61, 166

269

Sutcliffe, Peter (see also Yorkshire Ripper) 11, 235–8, 244–8 Truffaut, François 74, 82, 86, 185, 194–5 UK Women’s Liberation Movement 237, 248 United Artists (UA) 18–19, 21–23, 30, 52, 63, 66, 236, 244 United Artists Corporation Records 18 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) 199–200, 212 Universal Pictures 24, 26–35, 45–6, 51, 130, 138, 140, 142–5, 157–61, 165–7 unproduction studies 9, 129, 134, 146–7 unreleased 4, 10 Walsh, Raoul 74 Walt Disney Company, The 135–6, 138–9, 144, 218 Wanger, Walter 52 Warner Bros. 52, 261–2 Warner Bros. Archive 154 Wayne, John 171, 178, 180, 183 Welles, Orson 1–3, 60, 74, 194 Whale, James 157–9 Wilcox, Larry 239–40, 243 Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) 17–18 Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) 246–7 Yorkshire Ripper 11, 235–45, 248 Zanuck, Darryl 171, 175, 178, 180

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