Shadow Cinema

The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films

James Fenwick, Kieran Foster, David Eldridge, James Fenwick, Kieran Foster, David Eldridge

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781501370960
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501351600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Filmmakers and cinema industries across the globe invest more time, money and creative energy in projects and ideas that never get produced than in the movies that actually make it to the screens. Thousands of projects are abandoned in pre-production, halted, cut short, or even made and never distributed – a "shadow cinema" that exists only in the archives.

This collection of essays by leading scholars and researchers opens those archives to draw on a wealth of previously unexamined scripts, correspondence and production material, reconstructing many of the hidden histories of the last hundred years of world cinema. Highlighting the fact that the movies we see are actually the exception to the rule, this study uncovers the myriad reasons why 'failures' occur and considers how understanding those failures can transform the disciplines of film and media history. The first survey of this new area of empirical study across transnational borders, Shadow Cinema is a vital and fascinating demonstration of the importance of the unmade, unseen, and unknown history of cinema.

PART ONE

Producers and production companies

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 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 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.

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.
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

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 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 195...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Producers and production companies
• Part II Directors and auteurs
• Part III Questioning the unmade
• Part IV Reconstructing the unmade
• Index
• eCopyright