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7 Time-Serving at Paramount-Joinville When it came to the rather unproductive phase that followed the repression of his second film and his separation from the Surrealist Group, Buñuel wrote in the July 1939 autobiography he drafted in the United States: “To earn a living I began to collaborate anonymously in my profession, entering as a writer in Paramount Studios in Paris, adapting pictures from English to Spanish.”1 In fact, following his return from Hollywood and his subsequent trip to Spain, where he witnessed the proclamation of the Second Republic, Buñuel told Charles de Noailles that he was seeking gainful employment and was contemplating the possibility of entering the Spanish section of Paramount, although he didn’t want to work there as a director.2 The banning of L’Âge d’or, along with the uncertainty involved in the shift from silent to sound cinema and the professional frustration he had just suffered at MGM, had put Buñuel in a difficult position, but in order to preserve his prestige he was not prepared to become a director of Paramount’s insipid, standardized talkies. Anonymous, subaltern work in the company’s Spanish section was more palatable to him. Paramount’s plan to produce sound films in different languages in France was a complex affair. In May 1929 Jesse L. Lasky, studio vice-president, traveled to France in the company of Walter Wanger, his production manager, and announced his project for multilingual production to the press. In December of that year Cinémagazine informed its readers: “One of Hollywood’s most important producers, Robert T. Kane, has announced the creation of a Franco-American group with a capital of 250 million francs for the production of talkies filmed 116 entirely in French; the first movie should be finished by 15 April [1930]. The Studios des Réservoirs in Joinville have been rented on a long-term basis and carpenters and bricklayers are there getting ready for the equipping of the studios with Western Electric machines. The production contemplated is for twentyfour films a year, maybe more.”3 Kane would become, in effect, the architect of a project that far outstripped this initial idea. His participation as an officer in World War I had won him the Belgian Croix de Guerre, but he spoke neither French nor any other European language. In the States he had worked as an independent producer for Paramount and First National. In 1928 he’d begun running the small New York company Sound Studios Inc., which, equipped with RCA’s Photophone system, sonorized such famous silent films as King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927). In January 1930, with the backing of film distributor Adolphe Osso, managing director of the Société Française des Films Paramount founded in Paris in 1920, Kane began renting Gaumont’s former Studios des Réservoirs in Joinville-le-Pont, some six miles southeast of Paris. After the renovating and modernizing of its five stages and then an adjacent studio in Saint-Maurice, the complex, which officially opened in April, had seven stages and its own laboratories. While this modernization work was underway, Kane began his multilingual production in March 1930 in the old Gaumont studios in Buttes Chaumont with an adaptation of the comedy Un trou dans le mur by Yves Mirande and Gustave Quinson, directed by René Barbéris. To take advantage of the same sets, within a month were added a Spanish version, Un hombre de suerte, directed by Benito Perojo (with dialogues by Pedro Muñoz Seca), and a Swedish one, När rosorna sla ut, by Edvin Adolphson. At the closing dinner of the annual Paramount congress held in Paris in March 1930, Osso announced the agreement signed with Kane to distribute the French-speaking movies that his company, Société Cinéstudio Continental, was going to produce in France. The fusion between Kane and Paramount would not be legally formalized until July 1930, an event reprised by La Cinématographie Française: “The Société Cinéstudio Continental has assumed the new name of Studios Paramount and has increased its capital from 6M to 10M francs.”4 In the new managerial structure Kane became the managing director of the company, presided over by J. C. Graham, with Osso as vice-president. Kane was seconded in turn by two trusted assistants, Richard Blumenthal and Jacob Karol. In frantic shift work, Paramount’s round-the-clock production spooled out, as the company’s...

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