Publications
Andrew Spicer: The Creative
Producer - The Michael Klinger Papers;
• Paper given at the Faculty of Television
Production and Film Studies at Lillehammer University College, Norway,
31 January 2011
Introduction
- Thanks to Audun and Eva for the invitation
Some of you may know my work, but in brief I’ve developed three
main research foci: constructions of masculinity; film noir and British
cinema. It was very tempting to concentrate on film noir as the Historical
Dictionary of Film Noir is my most recent book,
I’m in the throes of editing the Companion
to Film Noir, and it was through this work that
I first became acquainted with Audun. But my major preoccupation at present
is as the leader or principal investigator of a two-year project cataloguing
and investigating the papers of the British film producer, Michael Klinger,
which develops research that culminated in the study of Sydney
Box (2006).
I have a full-time Research Associate, Dr Anthony
McKenna, who wrote his doctorate on Joe
Levine, a louder, American version of Klinger.
You have a summary of the project on the sheet and because I’m talking
specifically about archival issues to your Historigraphy class tomorrow,
I won’t go into the details of the content of the Papers or their
provenance.
However, just to summarise: the Michael Klinger
Papers were deposited at the University of the
West of England in 2007 by his son, Tony. They consist of roughly 200
suspension files and numerous screenplays concerning 21 projects on which
Klinger worked as producer or executive producer from the late 1960s to
the mid-1980s. They are a very rich source of material, not available
elsewhere, including itemized breakdowns of production costs; film grosses;
copies of financial agreements with investors; distribution sales and
territorial rights; negotiations with authors and actors over rights and
payments; company profit and loss accounts and promotion and publicity
material. The coverage is uneven: comprehensive material on some projects,
none on others. There’s nothing on Klinger’s earlier career
and odd gaps, including, alas, the absence of any material on his most
famous film, Get Carter
- the noir connection. But, as with all projects, you work with what you
have rather than mourn what’s not there. It’s a wonderful
opportunity for me and what I hope to convince you of in the next hour
or so is that it’s worth others’ attention as well.
Klinger’s career/cultural importance
First: he’s an interesting figure in a number of respects:
Varied oeuvre encompassing:
• Art house films
• An assortment of thrillers incl. Get
Carter
• Sexploitation cinema & sex comedies
• International action-adventure films
Overall, Klinger’s career can be characterized as the continuous
struggle between commerce (what would sell), cultural aspiration (making
innovative, challenging films that would showcase new and exciting creative
talent) and entrepreneurial ambition (to make big-budget films that would
rival American productions in the international marketplace).
Second, his career illuminates significant aspects of British economic
& cultural history:
• The British film industry
(1960-80) that at present lacks definitive accounts.
• The Soho Sex Industry
(not enough research; Paul Raymond
study by Paul Willetts,
2010; as I told my Dean, someone has to do this!)
• Jewish entrepreneurialism in the
British entertainment industry (nothing on this,
except individual studies of, e.g. Lew Grade)
• The Creative Industries and how
they function historically, industrially, economically and culturally
in Britain and internationally
Key Issues
In discussing Klinger, I also hope to raise some significant methodological
and conceptual issues within film studies that would allow us to understand
why, given his success and obvious importance, Klinger has not merited
even a single essay up to this point:
• What is the role & function
of the film producer and why has this been so neglected in favour of the
auteur-director?
• What challenges does a focus on
the producer pose to our conceptions of creativity?
• To make the case for foregrounding
contextualisation over interpretation; understanding film as a complex
artistic and commercial process rather than a succession of texts
• What inferences this conception
might have for how we understand film/cinema and how we write film history
• What pedagogical implications this
approach might have
Structure
I’m going to attempt to do this by:
• Surveying Klinger’s career through extracts from a few key
films
• Drilling down into the archive through a case study of a war film
he never made: Green Beach
- I’ll explain why, with 32 films to choose from, I’m focusing
an unmade film
• Returning to the conceptual/methodological issues and the formulation
of the ‘Producer-Artist’ asking if this peculiar to British
cinema - a good question to pose, I hope, in the present company!
I hope you’ll have many questions and points
to raise, but if that’s Ok, I’ll give the whole paper and
then open things up for discussion.
Klinger’s Career
Rotund, cigar-chomping and ebullient - Sheridan
Morley described him as resembling “nothing
so much as a flamboyant character actor doing impressions of Louis B.
Meyer” – Michael Klinger might seem
to fit exactly the conventional caricature of the producer, but this image
belied a quicksilver intelligence, photographic memory and a cultivated
mind.
Born in 1920, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants who had settled in London’s
West End, Klinger’s entry into the film industry came via his ownership
of two Soho strip clubs, the Nell Gwynn
and the Gargoyle - that
were used for promotional events such as the Miss
Cinema competition and by film impresarios such
as James Carreras
- and through an alliance with a fellow Jewish entrepreneur Tony
Tenser, who worked for a film distribution company,
Miracle Films. In October 1960, they set up Compton Films which owned
the Compton Cinema Club
- that showed, to anyone over twenty-one, nudist and other uncertificated,
often foreign, films - and Compton Film Distributors
which started out with a modest slate of salacious imported films (e.g.
Tower of Lust) and a
series of imaginative publicity stunts. However, finding it difficult
to obtain sufficient films, Klinger and Tenser started making their own
low-budget films, beginning with Naked as Nature
Intended (November 1961) directed by George
Harrison Marks and starring his girlfriend Pamela
Green.
On the strength of a modest success, Tenser and Klinger
formed a new company, Compton-Tekli,
to make an assortment of different genres and styles: realism (Saturday
Night Out, 1964), period horror (The
Black Torment, 1964) and sci-fi (The
Projected Man, 1966) - and two ‘shockumentaries’
London in the Raw (1964)
and Primitive London
(1965), faux documentaries that tried to replicate the success of the
Italian film Mondo Carne (1962),
a series of newsreel style reports from around the world featuring ‘unusual’
human behaviour and which created a vogue. Writer Stanley
Long and producer-director Arnold
Miller had already made West
End Jungle (1961). The most distinctive group:
That Kind of Girl (1963),
The Yellow Teddybears
(1963) and The Pleasure Girls
(1965), combined salaciousness with an attempt at examining serious sexual
issues. They engage with a rapidly changing British society and with London
in its incipiently ‘swinging’ phase as both fascinating and
dangerous.
The level of K’s involvement in these films is difficult to judge
and we hope to interview the director, Gerry
O’Hara, in the next few weeks. It was
Tenser who was undoubtedly responsible for the full-on marketing campaign
that emphasised how ‘shocking’ or ‘revealing’
they were while Klinger, not averse to making a profit, nurtured more
‘artistic’ ambitions. Indeed, I would say, on good evidence
from interviewees, that although both Klinger and Tenser were highly ambitious,
they were culturally divergent. Characteristically, when Roman
Polanski arrived in London and approached the
pair to obtain finance having failed elsewhere, it was Klinger who had
seen Knife in the Water
(1962) and therefore gave him the opportunity to make Repulsion
(1965) and the more ambitious Cul-de-sac
(1966). Klinger appreciated Polanski as an outré talent capable
of making challenging films and also as a means through which to increase
his own and the company’s cultural capital. He therefore promoted
Polanski’s films assiduously and both won awards at the Berlin Film
Festival that conferred welcome prestige on Compton-Tekli. Their success
represents a symbiosis of directorial creativity and astute showmanship.
As Klinger’s son Tony has told me, his father always aspired to
‘café society’ and enjoyed Polanski’s left-field,
bohemian cosmopolitanism, even if he had to shout at him about budgets!
However, Tenser, always happier to stay with proven box-office material,
sex films and period horror, saw Polanski as at best a distraction and
at worse a liability.
I suspect everyone is familiar with Repulsion but it’s the story
of a Belgian manicurist Carol (Catherine Deneuve)
working in London and living in her sister’s flat. When her sister
leaves for a holiday she becomes prey to terrifying hallucinatory delusions.
These cultural differences led to the break-up of the
partnership with Tenser in October 1966.
Klinger set up a new company, Avton Films,
and continued to promote young, talented but unproven directors who were
capable of making fresh and challenging features. It’s first two
films were Peter Collinson’s
absurdist/surrealist thriller The Penthouse (1967)
and Alastair Reid’s
Baby Love (1968), another
film that focused on a sexually precocious young female, but with an ambitious
narrative style that included flashbacks and nightmare sequences. Baby
Love is the story of a 15 year-old girl Luci
(Linda Hayden) - recently
traumatised by her working-class mother’s suicide in their grotty
Manchester terraced house - who goes to live in the elegant London home
of her mother’s ex-boyfriend Robert (Keith
Barron) now a successful doctor.
A fourth young talent Klinger championed was Mike
Hodges, to whom he gave his first film directing
opportunity with Get Carter
(1971). Although Get Carter
is now routinely discussed as Hodges’ directorial triumph, it was
Klinger who had bought the rights to Ted Lewis’s
novel Jack’s Return Home
because he sensed its potential to imbue the British crime thriller with
the realism and violence of its American counterparts. Klinger had raised
the finance through MGM-British before Hodges became involved. It has,
of course, become a cult film with several iconic scenes including the
opening that has inspired many subsequent British neo-noir thrillers,
as I noted in my contribution to European Film
Noir (pp. 113-14).
Part of Klinger’s distinctiveness was his ability to tap into various
markets. In the 1970s he continued to make low-budget sexploitation films
with the ‘Confessions’
series (Window Cleaner/Pop Performer/Driving Instructor/Holiday
Camp, 1974-78) whose modest costs could be recouped
(in fact they made substantial profits) even from a rapidly shrinking
domestic market and partly compensate for a British film industry that
now lacked a stable production base, was almost completely casualised,
and where there was a chronic lack of continuous production. Klinger acted
as executive producer, but in a typically combative memo (7 Jan. 1977),
he remonstrated with Greg Smith,
the producer, that the series had lost it s way:
Our original conception of ‘Window Cleaner’
was that we had to have a believable family background that everybody
could understand. There is no doubt that this conception was right and
worked admirably.
In ‘Pop Performer’
we allowed ourselves to be diverted from the
original successful formula and there is no question that it was not
so successful irrespective of the relative merits of the film.
Therefore unless his advice is heeded for the then current production,
‘Holiday Camp’:
We will be making just another sexy comedy which
might be quite funny, but I feel we would be throwing away almost everything
which we have striven so hard to miantain, and which makes
the ‘Confessions’
films different to all the other rubbish that
gets churned out by the mile.
See if you can see his point in these two extracts
from the inaugural film, ‘Window Cleaner’,
directed by industry veteran Val Guest.
Klinger continued to produce recherché and challenging crime thrillers,
including Reid’s neglected Something to Hide
(1972), Collinson’s Tomorrow Never Comes
(1978) and Claude Chabrol’s
Les liens de sang (Blood
Relatives, 1978). However, Klinger’s main
energies went into the production of big-budget action-adventure films
- Gold (1974) and Shout
at the Devil (1976) - based on highly successful
novels by Wilbur Smith
and aimed at the international market.
Given the parlous state of the British film industry, such a strategy
may seem odd or even reckless. However, the selection of the action-adventure
film was based on Klinger’s estimation of public taste - particularly
the popularity of the Bond films - and his conviction, in the context
of a dwindling domestic market, that international productions that could
hope for worldwide sales were the route to survival for the British film
industry. Indeed, he repeatedly attacked the insularity, parochialism
and timorousness of the British film industry in the trade press. Klinger
also saw an opportunity, with the withdrawal of large companies (notably
Rank) from production,
for ambitious (and, one might add, courageous) independent producers to
fill a production vacuum. His problem was that he could no longer rely,
as he had done for Get Carter
and Pulp (1972), on American
finance. As Alexander Walker
has shown, it was largely American money that had sustained the British
film industry in the 1960s and the withdrawal of Hollywood studios from
the industry in the 1970s was swift, unceremonious and catastrophic and
Klinger had to rely on South African sources of money for production finance
for both films.
Case Study: Green Beach
I hope that survey of MK’s career was interesting, and gave you
some idea of why I think he is a fascinating figure, involved in so many,
very different, kinds of film. A much more varied output, probably, than
would be typical of a director, straddling modes of production - exploitation,
middle-brow and art-house - normally regarded as mutually exclusive. However,
I want now to dig deeper and so pinpoint more clearly some of the key
issues. As the project has developed, I’ve become increasingly focused
on what Tony K told me at the outset was the key to understanding his
father’s career, his Jewishness. Although histories exist of modern
British Jewry and their characteristic role as entrepreneurs there has
been no major study of the role of Jews in British cinema - a British
equivalent of Neal Gabler’s
study of the Hollywood moguls, An Empire of Their
Own. I toyed with the idea of discussing Rachel’s
Man (1974) - a Biblical love story shot in Israel
shortly after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 by an Israeli director, Moshe
Mizrahi, but nevertheless an international picture
starring Mickey Rooney!
However, I’ve chosen Green Beach
- a war film that Klinger tried, unsuccessfully, to make for over 20 years
from 1967 through to 1987 – based on a secret memoir of the Dieppe
Raid (August 1942) by a working-class Jewish radar expert, Jack
Nissenthal.
In my view it demonstrates (rather than rhetorically asserts) the importance
of analysing the producer’s role in understanding the complexities
of film-making, the continual struggle to balance the competing demands
of creativity and commerce. In addition, its subject matter – an
undercover raid and a Jewish hero - disturbed the dominant Anglo-American
myths concerning the Second World War, creating what turned out to be
intractable ideological as well as financial problems. In addition, and
this is why I chose it over Rachel’s Man,
it deliberately problematises the object of film study, what we might
mean by a ‘film text’.
Green Beach exists as
a book (by James Leasor,
1975) but Klinger’s film is a ‘lost’ object, one that
has no existence outside the archive, away from the documentation that
exists in the MKP from which its history can be reconstructed, including
its problematic relationship with its various sources notably Leasor’s
book. However, it is not my purpose here to try to recreate, from the
extant scripts, a lost masterpiece, or, more neutrally, to speculate how
Green Beach might have
worked as a film, but to argue that unproduced films are significant items
in a producer’s oeuvre, alerting us to the films s/he wanted to
make, but was not able to and why. What were the various constraints within
which, in this case Klinger, was working and what do they reveal about
the parameters as to what was possible, acceptable or viable at this particular
moment of British film and cultural history?
As Dan North has argued,
focusing on an unrealized project is productive because ‘the lack
of a finished film throws … non-filmic elements into even sharper
relief, shifting attention to the intricacies of the creative process
and to the context in which that creativity began’. As we shall
see, the creative process in this case was closely interwoven with issues
of ethnicity (Klinger’s Jewishness) and, because it was a war film,
with the sensibilities of the combatants who were still living, with the
struggle over the meaning of the Second World War and thus with key issues
of national identities, memories, and myths.
The origins of the Green Beach
project go back to 20 October 1967 when Klinger read an article in the
Jewish Chronicle about the sensational revelations of Jack Nissenthal
concerning his role in the Dieppe Raid of 19 August 1942 when nearly 6,000
troops, mostly Canadian but with some British commandos, landed as part
of Operation Jubilee.
The Dieppe Raid was highly controversial at the time and has remained
a subject of intense debate for historians who have questioned its purpose,
value and whether its orchestrator, Lord Louis
Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, exceeded
his authority.
Nissenthal was involved in the part of the operation known as ‘Green
Beach’, the code name for Pourville, a
small seaside town near Dieppe, where two infantry battalions from the
South Saskatchewan Regiment landed. Nissenthal, a working-class London
Jew who had become an expert on radar, was the only non-combatant on the
raid, deployed on an undercover mission for British Air Intelligence whose
key objective was to ascertain the capability of the German radar system.
Nissenthal’s knowledge was judged so important that he had a bodyguard
of ten Canadians and a British officer to see that he did not fall into
enemy hands, or, if that seemed likely, to shoot him. He was also issued
with a cyanide pill. Despite the heavy casualties, Nissenthal succeeded
in obtaining important information concerning the German radar.
Following the raid, several officers were decorated, but Nissenthal’s
undercover mission could not be officially acknowledged and thus his courageous
exploits went unrecognized and remained unknown. In 1967, after twenty-five
years, Nissenthal was no longer bound by the official secrets act and
was thus at liberty to reveal his story with a view to publication.
After reading the Jewish Chronicle
article, Klinger wrote immediately to Nissenthal (23 October 1967), who
had moved to South Africa and ran an electronics firm, fired up by this
narrative of an unheard of Jewish hero from almost exactly the same background
as Klinger himself. Klinger sensed the thrilling possibility of making
a dramatic, shocking war film depicting a secret mission that revealed
the darker side of British war effort in which orders could be given for
a civilian to be killed rather than risk being captured. The possibility
of making this film comes at a crucial point in Klinger’s career
where, as we have seen, he was attempting to metamorphose from his showmanship/sexploitation
origins into a higher-status producer whose films had a strong chance
of commercial success but which were also capable of dealing with important
subjects. Here was a genuinely sensational story rather than a factitious
one, authentically shocking. More so than crime thrillers or Wilbur
Smith adaptations, Green
Beach was an opportunity for reputation building
as well as financial gain, in addition to being a statement about Jewish
patriotism, the courage and daring of the working-class and casting a
sideways glance at the British war effort from someone who always regarded
himself as outside the British Establishment.
It was an opportunity, but one fraught with difficulties because of the
acute sensitivity of the subject matter illustrated by a letter Klinger
received from Mountbatten in which he denied any knowledge of Nissenthal’s
role. Klinger was anxious to help Nissenthal get his memoirs published,
but needed to ensure he had exclusive film rights. Although he reassured
Nissenthal that ‘the subject matter will be dealt with in a worthy
and honest manner’, Klinger always had very definite ideas about
the nature of the story and the messages it should be espousing. Thus
Klinger replaced the middle-class Barry Wynne
- the author nominated by Nissenthal’s putative publishers Curtis
Brown - with his friend Benny Green,
a broadcaster and prolific writer, who came from the same London working-class
Jewish milieu. Klinger argued that Nissenthal needed a writer who would
‘understand your background and mentality’, commenting that
although Green had ‘possibly taken some artistic liberties, particularly
in the area of the squad of Canadians who accompanied you ... I think
it will make a great action picture and you come out of it as one hell
of a character’.
The project became complicated by Green’s withdrawal (too busy),
Klinger being overstretched producing both Gold
and Rachel’s Man,
and Heinemann bringing out a book adaptation by James
Leasor. Although successful - reissued as a
Corgi paperback in 1976 it became a bestseller - Leasor’s sober,
measured account was not the book Klinger had wanted and was, in his view,
far from an ideal basis for his intended film.
The war film 1: genre and myth
At this point Klinger turned to Stanley Price,
who had adapted Gold,
to write a screenplay. However, Price understood straight away how complex
the task was - how to satisfy the conflicting demands of a screenplay
that had to convey a lot of technical information about radar - the aspect
that consistently exercised Nissenthal in his copious comments on various
drafts - and create an exciting narrative that was true to the main ‘facts’
but also foregrounds Nissenthal’s Jewishness. Even more, he discerned
the acute difficulties in writing a war film in the mid-1970s, observing
that Leasor’s book is ‘all rather gung-ho, jolly heroics when
one reads it. I don’t feel we can get away today with another stiff-upper-lip
wartime romp … So I’ve tried to make it a little more real.’
But the danger, Price felt, was in producing an anti-war film, that he
was ‘getting too close to “The Dirty
Dozen”’, which he felt would not
work with British audiences and produce adverse reviews. The
Dirty Dozen (Robert
Aldrich, 1968) depicts how a group of criminals
led by the maverick Major Reisman (Lee Marvin) succeed in a daring mission
that is important to the war effort despite the cynical attitude of the
top brass. A huge commercial and critical success, The
Dirty Dozen has been identified as initiating
a brief cycle of revisionist war films that implicitly, through the brutality
and violence and the ignoble attitudes of the characters, subverted the
conventional values of the Second World War combat film thereby appealing
to a generation who were becoming disillusioned by America’s involvement
in Vietnam (Basinger 2003, 182-93) and which had an impact on British
war films notably Play Dirty
(André de Toth,
1968) starring Michael Caine
(Murphy 2000, 246-47).
While not interested in producing an unpatriotic war film and without
wishing to import elements of The Dirty Dozen
wholesale (especially the criminality), Klinger, as I have argued, was
deeply attracted to a story that celebrated working-class (specifically
Jewish) courage rather than conventional British middle-class sang-froid
and, on several occasions, referred to Green Beach
as ‘“The Dirty Dozen”
that really happened’. He argued, contra Price, that this was the
style of film he wanted, with ‘the emphasis on some very strong
characterizations built in very early[,] then action all the way. We must
be allowed to do things that are cinematically justifiable even if we
have to bend facts just a titchy bit’. For Klinger, the most pressing
commercial issue was audience appeal: how to interest and engage a different
generation of cinemagoers with changed sensibilities and a different take
on the war, a younger audience than the book-buying public that had responded
so positively to Leasor’s account. Price’s scruples were rejected
and he was dismissed. Leasor was turned to but failed to deliver what
Klinger wanted; neither did writer-director Gerry
O’Hara who’d directed The
Pleasure Girls.
The problem, for any writer, was to make a film based on a story that
actually happened, elements of which were very well-known at that time
and with many of those involved still active. Nissenthal’s role
may have been obscured and uncelebrated, but not the Dieppe landings themselves.
Indeed, their thirty-fifth anniversary in 1977 was marked by parades in
London and elsewhere. Also, the counter-cultural expressions of discontent
- including, of course, protests against the war in Vietnam - that had
marked the release of The Dirty Dozen
had attenuated, and that, certainly in Britain, there was a generic shift
back to safer terrain.
The war film 2: economics and national fictions
Klinger also had difficulties in raising production finance. From the
outset, Klinger conceived of Green Beach
as a ‘mass appeal action picture’, a high-budget production
intended to be sold world-wide. However, during a period when cinema admissions
plummeted, only low-budget films (such as the ‘Confessions’
series) could hope to recoup their costs in the domestic market. More
ambitious films had to have an international appeal in order to penetrate
the all-important American market (Smith 2007). But, in an era of industry
retrenchment, the problem was to raise adequate production monies and
secure the backing of a major Hollywood studio.
However, the problems Green Beach
encountered were as much ideological as economic: the Americans attitude
towards the Dieppe landings was rather different to their British counterparts.
Danton Rissner, United
Artists’ Vice President in charge of East Coast and European Productions
- who had worked with Klinger on Pulp
and with whom, as a fellow Jew, he enjoyed a cordial and informal relationship
- could not see Green Beach’s
fundamental appeal for American audiences. Rissner wrote to Klinger on
7 January 1975: ‘even though I personally always like to see “the
Jews” knocking the shit out of “non-Jews” and especially
the Germans … it seems that the Canadian/British raid on Dieppe
was neither a notable success nor an utter disaster, but rather a frustratingly
botched operation which at best turned into an ambiguous outcome’.
Removed from the pressure of any national investment in the events, or
a deep appreciation of the sensitivities involved, Rissner assumed that
Klinger was ‘just using the book as a frame of reference for a movie’,
precisely what the British writers felt they could not do and the wholesale
compromise that Klinger himself could not countenance: it was ‘The
Dirty Dozen that really happened’, not
a fictional war film.
The Dieppe Raid was indeed, a Canadian-British affair. And, reluctantly
- they were not major players - Klinger negotiated with Canadain film
companies. Alfred Pariser of Cinepix in Montreal advised Klinger that
a group of Canadian veterans, now ‘successful businessmen’
was ‘anxious to have a film produced that would glorify the involvement’
of Canadians in the Raid and had ‘substantial funds’ to invest.
However, Klinger always saw the story as an epic of Jewish heroism and
a revelation about the ‘dirty war’ rather than one of Canadian
valour and sacrifice.
Klinger could not turn to his South African backers - who had financed
Gold, Shout
at the Devil and Rachel’s
Man - as this was not a subject of interest
for them. Most revealingly, he couldn’t expect necessarily expect
investment from major British companies (Rank, EMI) as they withdrew from
indigenous production during this decade. The government organization,
the National Film Finance Company, was generally weak and ineffectual.
However - a mark of his status - Klinger received encouraging letters
from both organisations offering to finance Green
Beach as one element of an ambitious package
of four films. Rank withdrew - it appears because of internal institutional
squabbling rather than economic judgement – and, without Rank’s
presence, the NFFC suddenly required that Klinger demonstrate he had an
American or ‘other international distribution deal’ before
it would loan money. Klinger understood only too well that the NFFC’s
requirement almost completely undermined his bargaining strategy with
potential foreign financiers. In desperation, he tried to scale down the
film. A new writing team of David Pursall
and Jack Seddon was
hired and they made a fairly inept attempt at cost-cutting - by eliminating
any depiction of the initial landings at Dieppe altogether!
After the collapse of the deal with Rank, Klinger’s attitude to
the possibility of a Canadian co-production noticeably mollified, including
a putative mini-series with CBC-Radio-Canada in 1987. However, CBC judged
that Canadian pride would be offended by the glorification of an Englishman.
Thus Green Beach was
stillborn, a Jewish war epic that never was, a casualty of deep-seated
economic problems within the British film industry, of competing national
sensibilities and of the internal politics of large corporations. It was
also a self-deluding fantasy, an impossible dream to unite the authenticity
of the actual Dieppe Raid with a subversive celebration of Jewish working-class
heroism: ‘The Dirty Dozen
that really happened’. But Klinger’s dream and his failure
to produce Green Beach
tells us much about a central aspect of recent British cultural history:
the profound and protracted contest about the meaning of the Second World
War.
Conclusion
I want to return, in conclusion, to the broader issues raised earlier
in the light of this case study.
1) On an obvious
level, we need to get away from the conventional caricature of the producer
as foul-mouthed, louche, conservative, philistine and anti-creative financier.
Klinger was obviously much more than that. This conception, as Alexander
Walker argued, ‘has to be resisted if
films are to make sense as an industry that can sometimes create art’
(Walker, 1986, p. 17). The producer negotiates the twin impulses of art
and commerce, possessing, in the words of another Jewish producer, Michael
Balcon, best known for his Ealing comedies,
‘a dual capacity as the creative man and the trustee of the moneybags’
(Balcon, 1945, p. 5).
But how, exactly, is the producer creative? In contradistinction to other
creative personnel in the film industry - actors, set designers, screenwriters,
directors, cinematographers - the producer does not possess a set of specific
craft skills. Anyone can become a producer. However, his role is more
diffuse but also wide-ranging, working through the talents of others.
Leo Rosten defined
the producer’s key skills as ‘the ability to recognize ability,
the knack of assigning the right creative persons to the right creative
spots. He should have knowledge of audience tastes, a story sense, a businessman’s
approach to costs and the mechanics of picture making. He should be able
to manage, placate, and drive a variety of gifted, impulsive, and egocentric
people’ (Rosten, 1941, pp. 238-39).
In a rare salute to the producer’s importance, John
Caughie identified the ‘producer-artist’,
whose role, he argues, has a particular pertinence to the study of British
film history: ‘Outside of a studio system or a national corporation,
art is too precarious a business to be left to artists: it needs organizers.
The importance of the producer-artist seems to be a specific feature of
British cinema, an effect of the need continually to start again in the
organization of independence.’ (Caughie 1986, 200). This aptly captures
the multi-dimensional nature of Klinger’s activities, their complex
union of art and commerce and their importance to a film industry characterized
throughout its history as under-funded, precarious and haphazardly organized.
This emphasis on creativity, the producer-artist, offers a more adequate
account, in my view, of the producers’ role than that of John
Sedgwick and Michael
Pokorny in their economic history of film-making
who argue that their function is to ‘attenuate’ the inevitable
uncertainty of how a film might perform in the marketplace (Sedgwick and
Pokorny 2005, 19). Is the ‘producer artist’ peculiarly British?
I think not, but would like to take that up in discussion.
However, the point I wish to make here is that the ‘producer-artist’
is not, of course, the same entity as the auteur director whose artistry
may be recognized through a signature visual style or consistent thematic
preoccupations that can be elucidated through the detailed textual interpretation
of his or her films. As with most producers, Klinger’s oeuvre was
diverse and heterogeneous and would elude such an analysis. On the contrary,
understanding a producer’s art, as Vincent
Porter argues, lies in appreciating his or her
ability to manipulate creatively the complex and interlocking relationship
between four key factors: an understanding of public taste - of what subjects
and genres could attract a broad audience; the ability to obtain adequate
production finance; the understanding of who to use in the key creative
roles and on what terms; and the effectiveness of her or his overall control
of the production process.
This understanding of taste, does not have to be conservative. As Sydney
Box argued: ‘A film producer has two responsibilities:
to the public and to his backers. If he is an imaginative and courageous
producer, the two may coincide. The ideal producer, it seems to me, must
always look ahead and try not merely to acquiesce in box-office trends
but to lead public opinion and gauge future audience requirements’
(Box, 1948). Ok, Klinger may not be in the position with the ‘Confessions’
series or even with the action-adventure films, but he certainly was with
the art house films and many of the thrillers.
2) I’ve tried
to show that film scholars need to work with a broad conception of the
‘film text’ as one aspect of the whole production process.
The key to understanding this process is the producer, usually the only
person who is involved in the whole process from conception through to
exhibition, marketing and promotion - though, of course, this never happened
with Green Beach. Balcon
argued that the producer was: ‘[t]he one person who can apprehend
a film as an entity and be able to judge its progress and development
from the point of view of the audience who will eventually view it’.
Focusing on the of the production process, not only undermines the idea
of the auteur director as the central explanatory trope in film studies,
but stresses the multiple, mutable and inevitably collaborative nature
of film-making. As has been shown, in the attempts to make Green
Beach, the key relationships were those between
the producer and his source, Jack Nissenthal, the various writers commissioned
to compose a filmable script, and Klinger and his possible financiers.
In the voluminous correspondence concerning the project only at one point
does Klinger mention, in passing, that the Jewish director, Lewis
Gilbert, is his preferred choice. Even then
it is clear that this decision was less important than getting the script
right and deciding who to cast in the lead role; Klinger always hoped
Michael Caine would
play Nissenthal.
3) So, how do we conceive of film studies as a discipline and how do we
write film history? Modest questions! I can only outline a few possible
implications based on this work on Klinger. In a recent discussion, ‘The
History of Film History’, Eric
Smoodin that while the initial approaches to
the study of film ‘stressed issues of industry and consumption’,
from the mid-1950s it had become dominated by ‘the film itself,
often organized around genre, narration, or authorship’ (2). He
cites exceptions - Ed Buscombe’s
essay ‘Notes on Columbia Pictures Corporation,
1926-1941’, published in Screen
in autumn 1975 and Allen and Gomery’s
Film History: Theory and Practice (1985)
and I’d also cite Chapman, Glancy and
Harper’s The New
Film History (2007) to which I contributed.
But the overwhelming focus of film scholars remains textual interpretation.
I think this has to be resisted! And my focus on the producer’s
role places film within a broad set of contexts that are industrial, social,
historical, ethnic (Klinger’s Jewishness) and cultural. Thus, in
contradistinction to economic film scholars - such as Sedgwick and Pokorny
- this approach would facilitate, not a business history of film, but
a cultural history of creativity in an industrial/commercial context.
I’m not an economist, I hate graphs and charts (!) and I don’t
think that there should be the present division between the number crunchers
and the ‘humanists’. I love films, I want to talk about them
as aesthetic objects not ‘commodities’, but I want to do so
in a way that respects their complexities, as entities rather than merely
‘texts’, if that makes sense.
4) My approach, if
pursued vigorously, has major pedagogic implications. As Smoodin notes,
most film classes are 3 hours duration and wrapped around a film screening
that invites the film-as-text-for-interpretation approach. It trains film
students to think in that way. No wonder they love directors! The trouble
with locating and discussing a producer’s ‘art’, is
that, unlike the director’s that could be discussed using textual
sources, it is elusive because it is, for the most part, invisible. The
critical challenge, as this case study has demonstrated, is to render
that art visible by a detailed examination of the production process that
can be reconstructed using archival sources. And this extends to unproduced
as well as realised films. However, as Buscombe noted, many of the basic
materials needed to facilitate this kind of scholarship are not available.
The Klinger archive, whatever its limitations, is a miracle of preservation
and, to repeat, I’m very lucky to be able to work with its material.
And its accessibility is part of the project: a comprehensive catalogue;
materials uploaded online, visits encouraged. But even without these resources,
it’s important to get students into archives and to look at sources
that take them beyond the film text: to newspapers, the trade press, fan
magazines, studio publications, press books, industry records, government
papers etc. Of course they should still watch films - as many as possible!
- but they should be doing a whole lot more.
Thank you.
Bibliography: Klinger/Green Beach - Andrew Spicer
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Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Allen, Robert C. and Douglas Gomery. 1985. Film
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Aris, Stephen. The Jews in business.
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London: British Film Institute.
Basinger, Jeanine. 2003. The World War II combat
film: Anatomy of a genre. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
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Box, Sydney. 1948. Sadism - it will only bring
us disrepute. Kinematograph Weekly, 27 May.
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