Publications
Andrew Spicer, University of the West of England:
‘Understanding the Independent Film Producer: Michael Klinger and
New Film History’
• Paper Given
at the Centre for Cinema and Television History, De Montfort University,
17 November 2010
Introduction
- Thanks to Paul for the invitation to speak and thus for the opportunity
to discuss my work on Michael Klinger and to reflect on the protocols
and procedures of what has been labelled New Film
History.
My analysis of Klinger is based on documents - which I’ll refer
to as the Klinger Papers
- that were deposited at the University of the West of England in 2007
by his son, Tony Klinger.
The Klinger Papers consist
of approximately 200 suspension files and numerous screenplays concerning
21 projects on which Klinger worked as producer or executive producer
from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. They are a very rich source of
material, not available elsewhere, including itemized breakdowns of production
costs; film grosses; distribution sales and territorial rights; company
accounts and promotion and publicity material, as well as over 40 scripts
and numerous stills. Comprehensive material exists for several films,
e.g. Something to Hide
(1972) and Gold (1974),
and several unrealised projects, including Green
Beach. As I’ve applied for an AHRC Research
Grant to catalogue and interpret the archive, so far I’ve only made
periodic raids on its contents rather than attempted a systematic scrutiny,
so what I’m presenting here is very much work-in-progress.
Because Klinger is a forgotten figure in film history, I’ll begin
by briefly sketching the main lineaments of his career (you have a list
of his films on the sheet). But, as adumbrated in my abstract, I wish
to use that work to explore what constitutes the ‘archive’,
revisit the concept of agency and to suggest that we need a more inclusive
reconfiguration of film history as an uneven, ‘messy’ cultural
history. In order to give a concrete focus to this exploration, I’ve
decided to channel this exploration through a case study of Green
Beach, a war film that Klinger tried, unsuccessfully,
to make for over 20 years. To speed delivery, I’ve given a list
of references on the back of the Klinger filmography, a copy of the slide
offering a rough timeline of the Green Beach
saga, and one that reproduces an actual document from the archive, a script
outline.
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, outwardly, a 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 East 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 East Ender 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. As Compton-Tekli,
a production-distribution company, they made a series of low-budget ‘sexploitation’
films e.g. The Pleasure Girls
(1965), horror and sci-fi pictures and two ‘shockumentaries’
- London in the Raw (1964)
and Primitive London
(1965). At the same time Tenser and Klinger acquired cinemas in London
(converting the famous Windmill Theatre), Birmingham and Derby.
Keen to take creative risks - he produced Roman
Polanski’s first two British films Repulsion
(1965) and Cul-de-sac
(1966) - Klinger broke with the unadventurous Tenser and set up Avton
Films in late 1966. Klinger’s policy of
promoting young, talented but unproven directors who were capable of making
fresh and challenging features - Peter Collinson,
Alastair Reid and
Mike Hodges - was
financially rewarded when Hodges’ brutal crime thriller
Get Carter (1971) starring Michael
Caine became an international success, enabling
Klinger to mount a more ambitious production programme in the 1970s. He
formed a production company - the Three Michaels
- with Caine and Hodges that made Pulp
(1972), but then dissolved.
Part of Klinger’s success was his ability to tap into various markets.
He continued to make low-budget sexploitation films with the “Confessions
of” series (Window Cleaner/Pop Performer/Driving Instructor/Holiday
Camp, 1974-78), for which he acted as executive producer, whose modest
costs could be recouped from the domestic market: in fact they made substantial
profits. Klinger continued to produce more recherché and challenging
crime thrillers - Hodges’ Pulp
Reid’s neglected Something to Hide
(1972), Collinson’s Tomorrow Never Comes
(1978) and Claude Chabrol’s
Les liens de sang (Blood
Relatives, 1978) - but his main energies went
into the production of big-budget action-adventure films - Gold
(1974) and Shout at the
Devil (1976) - aimed at the international market.
In some respects, Gold
and Shout at the Devil,
which Variety identified as ‘one of the biggest independently financed
films in British cinema history’, were the high watermark of Klinger’s
career and after this point his abiding struggle to finance his films
was largely unsuccessful. His career in the 1980s was lacklustre. Following
the expensive failure of Riding High
(1981), a rather ill-conceived film about the stunt rider
Eddie Kidd, Klinger produced little before his
death in 1989.
However, as with any producer, no doubt most film-makers, there’s
a hidden history buried away here: the unrealised projects that Klinger
was desperate to make, but couldn’t. I’ve chosen Green Beach
because it casts light on the complexities and importance of Klinger’s
Jewishness and because, as a war story, it is part of a hugely important
stratum of post-war cultural history.
Case Study: Green Beach
‘Green Beach’
was the code name for Pourville, a small seaside town near Dieppe, where,
on 19 August 1942, nearly 6,000 troops, mostly Canadian but with some
British commandos, landed in Operation Jubilee,
deemed an essential rehearsal for the D-Day landings two years later.
One of the key objectives was to ascertain the capability of the German
radar systems - hence the need for the only non-combatant on the raid,
the 24 year-old Jack Nissenthal,
a working-class London Jew, who had become an expert on radar. In fact
his 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. Although casualties were very heavy,
Nissenthal survived, and he gained intelligence concerning the German
radar system that enabled the development of sophisticated scrambling
devices that proved invaluable. Following the raid, several officers and
combatants were decorated, but Nissenthal’s exploits went unrecognized
and his story - referred to later as ‘the last great personal adventure
story to come out of World War II’ - remained unknown.
This timeline is a simplified, but not grossly distorted overview of Green
Beach’s complex history, beginning with
Nissenthal’s desire to have his memoirs turned into a book and Klinger’s
to make a major film with a Jewish hero and ending with the failure to
make even a low-budget mini-series. It’s not possible here to examine
Green Beach comprehensively,
but I wanted to have something concrete on which to attach my more general
observations on texts, archives and the multiple determinants of cultural
history.
a) The Text
I need to start with an explanation of my choice of Green
Beach because it may seem odd, even perverse
- after all, Klinger produced 32 films - to choose a project that never
reached the screen. My choice was dictated by wishing to problematise
the nature of the text itself, the actual object of study. With Green
Beach there is a particularly complex relationship
between the actual book, published in 1975 and the putative screenplays.
This concern extends to an important question about what constitutes the
‘legitimate’ field of enquiry in cinema history: is it a history
of films? In his introduction to Sights Unseen:
Unfinished British Films (2008), Dan
North argues that a focus on unrealised projects
not only highlights what we might mean by the ‘film text’
but that ‘the lack of a finished film throws those 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.’.
This shift, from text to processes of production, is of far-reaching significance
and I’ll return to that in my conclusion.
2) The Archive
I also chose Green Beach,
because, as with Klinger’s other failures in the 70s and 80s, there
is voluminous material in the Klinger Papers:
a wide range of correspondence between various individuals and organizations;
newspaper cuttings; publicity material from Heinemann, and Klinger’s
company Avton Films;
an announcement in Klinger’s newspaper Klinger
News; press releases and reviews of the book
by James Leasor; annotated
scripts; and a variety of Avton documents including contracts with various
screenwriters. The extent of the documentation is because Green
Beach was an ongoing project and Klinger needed
to retain all the material. And, because, in general, failed projects
are likely to generate more documentary ‘evidence’ than completed
ones as rejecting a project usually forces potential financiers or organizations
to be explicit in their reasons, as I shall demonstrate. Of course, film
historians, like any other responsible archivists, need to take cognizance
of the provenance and reliability of their sources. I’ve placed
great reliance on the correspondence between Klinger and his potential
investors or his writers because these are private documents in which
there would seem no reason to lie or distort the facts. However, whether
they reveal the whole truth, is a different matter. Klinger News, by contrast,
is the public face of a producer anxious to sell himself and one must
see interpret it in that light. Archives are repositories of what happens
to have been kept - what Carolyn Steedman
calls the ‘mad fragments that no one intended to preserve and just
ended up there’ (68) - rather than comprehensive repositories and
there are significant lacunae in the Green Beach
files. There is extensive correspondence between Klinger and all the writers
involved except Benny Green
who, as a close friend would presumably have ‘phoned Klinger or
gone round to see him rather than written a letter. However, this lack
of written documentation makes Green a vestigial figure in the production
process.
I want now to turn to what NFH would call the multiple determinants that
might explain Klinger’s inability to make Green
Beach in the spirit of new Film History that
stresses that cultural phenomena are the result of a plurality of causal
factors rather than looking for a single explanation.
3) Economic Determinants: the British Film Industry
Another strength of concentrating on unrealised projects, I contend, is
that they often reveal more about the various constraints within which
film-makers were working than ones that received the ‘green light’,
revealing the parameters as to what was permissible, acceptable or economically
viable at any particular moment. From the outset, Klinger conceived of
Green Beach as a ‘mass
appeal action picture’ (Nov. 67), a high-budget production intended
to be sold world-wide. 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 but this, Klinger
argued, was 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. However, in an era of industry
retrenchment, the problem was to raise production finance. Historians
of this period, notably Alexander Walker, all point to the swift and unceremonious
withdrawal of large-scale American finance as the key explanation of the
British film industry’s decline. And indeed, the archive documents
how Klinger’s persistent attempts to interest Hollywood studios
in this project were all rebuffed - I’ll return to Columbia’s
rejection later - which would seem to confirm this paradigm.
Independent producers were caught in a double-bind because major British
companies were also withdrawing from indigenous production. This withdrawal,
as with American finance, was a more complex process of ebbs and flows
than conventional wisdom acknowledges, as illustrated by Klinger’s
relations with Rank over Green Beach.
Following a very encouraging letter (19 Aug 1976) from F.S. Poole the
MD, K believes he has concluded with deal with Rank in which Green
Beach becomes part of the package of four films
that also included: The Chilian Club
a satirical comedy; Eagle in the Sky
an action-adventure story; The Limey,
a heist thriller. The slide shows the trade press announcement, included
in Klinger News. However,
through the correspondence of Klinger and Sir
John Terry who was head of the NFFC, the deal
was more apparent than real as both Rank and the NFFC - approached for
‘end money’ - were not prepared to finance such an expensive
package unless Klinger secured American finance as well and guaranteed
international distribution. Klinger’s argument that he could not
do this unless he had firm assurances from Rank and the NFFC, fell on
deaf ears. In desperation, Klinger tries to scale down the film and, in
the letter/synopsis you have on your sheets, Pinewood writers David
Pursall and Jack Seddon
- they’re working for Klinger on another war film, A
Man and a Half - make, in my judgement, a spectacularly
inept attempt at cost-cutting by eliminating the Dieppe landing itself!
However, the problem with a purely economic explanation is that, as already
mentioned, Klinger successfully mounted two high-budget international
productions: Gold in
1974 and Shout at the Devil
in 1976. Thus the failure to produce Green Beach
needs to be related to the preoccupations and vicissitudes of Klinger’s
career and more specifically, his Jewishness and the subject matter of
the ‘text’ itself.
4) The Jewish Independent Producer
The genesis of GB started in October 1967 when Klinger read an article
in the Jewish Chronicle stating that Nissenthal had written an account
of his role in the Dieppe Raid with a view to publication. Klinger wrote
immediately to Nissenthal, who had moved to South Africa and ran an electronics
firm, fired up by this epic story of an unrecognized Jewish hero from
almost exactly the same background as Klinger himself, with whom he began
to cultivate a warm personal relationship. As a fellow Jew, Klinger is
anxious to help Nissenthal get his memoirs published but at the same time
ensure that he has the exclusive film rights. Klinger reassures Nissenthal
(3 Jan. 68) that ‘the subject matter will be dealt with in a worthy
and honest manner’, but he always has strong ideas about the nature
of the story. Nissenthal is happy with Barry
Wynne, the author nominated by his putative
publishers Curtis Brown,
because Wynne had an established reputation as the author of both fiction
and non-fictional war stories and had researched the Dieppe raid extensively.
For his part, Klinger does not want to deal with a rather self-regarding
(and expensive) middle-class writer - his address is Vicars Bottom, Wormsley,
Stokenchurch, Bucks - and starts to manoeuvre another writer into the
frame, arguing in a letter to Nissenthal (May 71) that ‘the problem
[is] to get a writer who will understand your background and mentality
and be able to translate those things, together with the humour, to the
public’. And for Klinger, that public is always a cinema audience
as well as a book-buying one.
Klinger’s choice is Benny Green,
again from the same background as himself, who was working on other Klinger
projects as well as his numerous radio scripts, journalism and jazz punditry.
Klinger wrote to Nissenthal assuring him that Green’s script has
‘settled the storyline and [has] possibly taken some artistic liberties,
particularly in the area of the squad of Canadians who accompanied you.
But I think it will make a great action picture and you come out of it
as one hell of a character’. Thus Klinger’s emphasis is on
the valorization of an unrecognized Jewish hero.
The ‘Canadian element’ will, as we shall see, come back to
haunt Klinger, and Green’s departure in April 73 - it seems that
he was too busy on Klinger’s other projects but, as mentioned, he
is a silent witness in this affair - means that Klinger starts to lose
control of the material. Anxious to have Nissenthal’s story made
public, Klinger had brokered a deal with Heinemann, a Jewish firm, and
a much bigger publisher. But Heinemann bring in James
Leasor - an experienced writer of fiction and
non-fiction works, to write the book. Leasor’s book, Green
Beach is a rather sober account but one that
gives due weight to the complexity of the Raid and the role of the Canadians.
Although successful - reissued as a Corgi paperback in 1976 it goes into
the bestseller charts - it was not the book Klinger wanted. And he brings
in Stanley Price,
who adapted Gold, to
write a screenplay.
Price sees at once how complex the task is, the conflicting demands of
a story that has to convey a lot of technical stuff about radar, produce
an exciting narrative that is true to the main ‘facts’ and
foreground Nissenthal’s Jewishness. In a letter to Klinger (May
1975), he observes that Nissenthal ‘doesn’t have any [character]
in the book’ and continues: ‘I shan’t bore you with
the job I had trying to establish Jack’s Jewish background, without
making it schmaltzy like ‘Flight-Sergeant
on the Roof’ and Jack singing “If
I was a Squadron-Leader” in Act Two’;
a reference, as I’m sure you’ve worked out, to Topol
and Fiddler on the Roof,
a smash hit in 1971.
For Klinger, Green Beach
was a paean to Jewish expertise and courage , a celebrating of his racial
heritage. He expended an enormous amount of energy, and money, producing
Rachel’s Man (1974),
advertised as: ‘the world’s oldest and greatest love story
photographed in the actual locations where the Old Testament story took
place by Moshe Mizrahi
Israel’s most celebrated film-maker.’ I haven’t completed
much work on this yet - the documentation is huge - but conversations
with Klinger’s son Tony have made me realize that this was a film
Klinger knew, from the outset, was parlous box-office but which he felt
compelled to make as a Jew. One could hardly claim it as a Zionist film
like Land of Promise,
but its making shows how Klinger’s Jewishness occasionally conflicted
with his sense of what might be profitable. With Green
Beach he must have felt he could have both:
a Jewish epic that was good box-office. But the complicating factor was
the conflicting pulls of this story and its imbrication in another history:
that of the meaning of the Second World War in post-war British culture
and that takes us into the realm of genre and myth.
5) The War Film: Genre and Myth
In the same letter in which he described the difficulties of creating
a Jewish hero, Price discerned other difficulties in writing a war film
in the mid-1970s. He complains 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 … Michael
Redgrave saying to Richard
Todd “O.K., old chap. We know we can trust
you to give Jerry something to think about.” And when Todd returns
Sir Michael says “Well done, old boy. By the way, whatever happened
to that right leg of yours? It used to suit you.” So I’ve
tried to make it a little more real.’ What Price mockingly alludes
to as he conflates The Way to the Stars
(1945) and The Dam Busters (1955),
is the exhortatory epics of middle-class courage and fortitude that formed
a central element in what Angus Calder
has identified as the dominant discourse about the Second World War, the
‘myth of the Blitz’, an heroic fable of courage, endurance
and pulling together and which Leasor’s book, no doubt unwittingly,
reconfirms.
The problem was how to deviate from this paradigm, how to be ‘more
real’ without producing an anti-war film and Price was wary about
his treatment ‘getting too close to “The
Dirty Dozen”’, which he felt would
not work with British audiences and produce adverse reviews. However,
in reply Klinger tells Price that his script hovers between The
Longest Day and The
Dirty Dozen and that the latter must be their
model: ‘I feel that we must aim for the latter’s style which
had 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.’ (13
June 75) When Price expresses his further concerns at ‘“fictionalizing”
too outlandishly a story that has been so well-documented, and with so
many of the characters still living’ (10 Sept 75), he’s dropped.
For Klinger, Robert Aldrich’s
The Dirty Dozen (1968)
- which depicts how a group of criminals led by the maverick Major Reisman
(Lee Marvin) succeed
in a daring mission which is important to the war effort despite the cynical
attitude of the top brass - was revisionist war film that foregrounded
character and action and was hugely successful. Having dropped Price,
Klinger approached the book’s author, James
Leasor for a script, arranging a screening of
The Dirty Dozen as inspiration
and insisting in a letter (18 Aug 75) that his screenplay must avoid ‘the
quiet documentary approach or anything reminiscent of 1950’s type
British war films’. Despite Klinger extensive annotations on various
drafts, Leasor proves unable to provide the kind of script Klinger wants
and is dropped in June 1976. K then turned to Gerry
O’Hara, a writer-director with whom he
worked extensively in the 1960s. O’Hara, not, as far as I can judge
a man of excessively refined sensibilities, considers Leasor’s screenplay
to be immoral. Writing in July 76 to Klinger to inform him that he declined
the commission, O’Hara commented that, having carefully written
the book, the way Leasor had ‘then thrown truth right out of the
window in such a reckless way astonished me’.
O’Hara’s reservations show that by the mid-1970s 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 films
released in 1977 - A Bridge Too Far
and The Eagle Has Landed,
if not the same as 1950s war films, are not the ‘British Dirty Dozen’
that Klinger was seeking to make.
Indeed, as Price had argued, it was especially difficult, if not impossible,
to make such a film based on a story that actually happened and that was
part of the ‘Blitz myth’. 1977 was the 35th anniversary of
the Dieppe landings marked bv parades in London and elsewhere. Klinger
had interested Lord Louis Mountbatten,
the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, in the publication of Green
Beach and he had immediately distanced himself
from the decision to kill Nissenthal rather than have him captured. His
disclaimer: ‘If I had been aware of the orders given to the escort
to shoot him rather than have him captured, I would have cancelled them
immediately’, was included in all the publicity for the book and
printed on its back cover. And yet this was just the controversial element
that Klinger was anxious to play up.
6) National sensibilities
Of course, The Dirty Dozen
was an American film and the American take on the Dieppe landings was
rather different. Danton Rissner,
VP at UA in charge of East Coast and European Productions, with whom Klinger
had worked on Pulp, could
not, even as a fellow Jew, see its fundamental appeal of the story. He
wrote to Klinger in Jan 75: ‘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’. Tellingly, he assumes Klinger is ‘just
using the book as a frame of reference for a movie’ - precisely
what The Dirty Dozen
had done - and wants to see a script! However, a cavalier disregard for
the ‘facts’ was precisely what Klinger’s British writers
felt they could not do.
Rissner emphasizes that this was a Canadian-British affair, and this was
a war story that had a huge appeal north of the American border: Heinemann
pre-sold 40,000 copies of Green Beach
in Canada, the highest ever for a hard-back book. The
Klinger Papers reveal a strong and persistent
interest by a number of Canadian companies in the project and in the possibility
of a co-production. Signal Film Corporation of
Quebec, for instance, advised Klinger that a
group of Canadian veterans were interested in investing in a film about
the Raid. However, Klinger was initially unwilling to deal with Canadian
companies without major financial resources or distribution networks and
because he always saw the story as an epic of Jewish heroism.
However, after the collapse of the deal with rank, Klinger’s attitude
to the Canadians mollifies and his two 1978 crime thrillers - Blood Relatives
and Tomorrow Never Comes were co-productions with Classic Film Industries
of Montreal. He asked Rory MacLean,
a Canadian writer who had written the script for Eye of the Tiger to write
yet another screenplay for GB. His third version (Aug 1982) was posted
to a Canadian-Jewish producer, Saul B. Zitzerman
of Orphic Productions,
Winnipeg, accompanied by Klinger’s letter which insisted: ‘You
know what we are driving at; it’s “The
Dirty Dozen” that really happened. We
have taken a few liberties with a real story but we want action, some
fun, authenticity and drama.’. In 1987 Klinger made a final attempt
to produce a mini-series with CBC-Radio-Canada. But CBC’s researcher
questioned the authenticity of the MacLean script and opined that Canadian
pride was offended by the glorification of an Englishman.
Conclusion
I’d like, in conclusion, to draw out a few of the more general implications
of the Case Study. The first is around the multiple and mutable nature
of agency. What I hoped to have established is the importance of the producer
and problematised the idea of the auteur director as the central explanatory
trope in film studies. This focus is part of what I’m arguing should
be a shift - clearly this is a question of emphasis rather than an either-or
- from texts to production processes. I’m arguing for the centrality
of what John Caughie
calls the ‘producer-artist’: ‘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). However, the producer’s ‘art’,
unlike the director’s, is elusive because it is, for the most part,
invisible. And the critical challenge, as I’ve tried to make clear,
is to render that art visible by a detailed examination of the production
process. What the production process of Green Beach
reveals is that the key relationships are those between the producer and
his source - Nissenthal; Klinger and the various writers, and Klinger
and the financiers. At one point Klinger mentions, in passing, that Lewis
Gilbert is his preferred director, but that
decision was always less important than the casting of a particular star
in the lead role; for a long time Klinger hoped Michael
Caine would play Nissenthal.
But I’ve also argued that we need to understand agency as encompassing
generic/mythic discourses. As Raphael Samuel
has shown, historians need to deal with not only with documents but more
intangible factors, with memory and myth. Not only because history, as
he avers, is a hybrid and promiscuous discipline, but also because they
are causal agents with material effects: could Klinger ever have produced
a ‘British Dirty Dozen’ however well-placed economically?
However, I want to emphasise that in this perspective myth and genre are
historical entities rather than transcendent systems; they operate variably
at different historical moments and are part of what Lutz
Koepnick in The Dark
Mirror suggests is the messy incoherence and
contingency that the film historian has to learn to accept.
The second point is partly an archival one. Geoff
Eley in The Crooked
Line identifies that the project of the ‘new
cultural history’ has switched attention from the macro to the micro,
signalling a move away from totalising social histories and the ‘tyranny
of grand narratives’, stressing ambiguities and complexities and
‘general epistemological uncertainties’. In Visceral
Cosmopolitanism, Mica
Nava has urged that new cultural historians
should be orientated to specific detail, ‘thick history’,
and the ‘unexpected discoveries’ that arise from archival
work allowing methods to develop intuitively, moving into the spaces and
going in directions that the ‘evidence’ dictates. Thus although
Klinger’s failure to produce Green Beach
can tell us much about British film history, it has also led me in the
direction of another, overlapping, history of the Jewish entrepreneur
working in the entertainment industry, a history that would have to encompass
Klinger’s cinema building and his role in the expansion of leisure
facilities, as well as his part in the Soho sex industry of the 1960s.
It’s clear that, as far as he could, Klinger tries to work within
a Jewish entrepreneurial community that included writers, publishers,
agents, lawyers and Hollywood executives such as Rissner. I’m not
sure where this direction of my research is heading - I don’t think
one could write a British equivalent of Neal
Gabler’s An Empire
of Their Own - but a history of Jewish entrepreneurialism
in the Britain entertainment industry has not, as far as I’m aware,
been attempted. Even a cursory glance at just the film industry would
show the potential of such a history: Tony Tenser,
Phil and Sid
Hyams at Eros,
Sidney Bernstein,
Michael Balcon, the
Grades/Bernard Delfont
and David Puttnam.
However, if this precise direction is uncertain, it does illustrate my
main point: that even New Film History
needs to be re-conceived as part of a broader and more inclusive cultural
history.
Thank you.
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