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108 5 • COSMOPOLITAN VISIONS, COLD WAR FEARS A continuing shift in the center of motion-picture production, away from the familiar American facilities into the booming European studios, is a wellnigh inevitable occurrence within the next few years, if conditions continue to prevail and develop in the way they are going today. So don’t say we didn’t warn you if, five or so years from now, you will find that the majority of movies shown in this country have been made abroad. This is the startling conclusion your humble observer brings back from a tour of European film centers and a knowledge of conditions in Hollywood. —Bosley Crowther, New York Times T his “humble observer,” the New York Times’ long-standing film critic Bosley Crowther, called belated attention to the film industry’s new European focus in a series of dispatches filed during his travels in Europe in June 1960. Noting that of “thirty-one films being made by American companies last week, eleven of them were being shot in foreign locations and studios,” he concluded, “As things stand now, the magnetism of the European centers has a strong pull and the balance is shifting in their direction. It looks bad for Hollywood.”1 The American film industry’s orientation toward Europe during the 1950s was both a reflection and a harbinger of the dramatic power shift occurring between a superannuated Hollywood and a vibrant European cinema. As European films began to perform strongly in America as well as in their home markets, the U.S. studios no longer wanted to make films in Europe simply for financial reasons— they wanted to make “European” films. This was particularly so in Britain, where the domestic and international success of films such as Room at the Top (dir. Jack Clayton, 1959) and Tom Jones (dir. Tony Richardson, 1963) convinced producers of the merit of hiring indigenous, as opposed to Hollywood, talent. Mike Frankovich, Columbia’s powerful London-based chief of production, explained these changes in a 1961 interview: “[The British] go to see their own films. You Cosmopolitan Visions, Cold War Fears 109 have to compete with the native product.”2 The perception of a dynamic, creative British film industry also proved attractive to the ambitious, non-blacklisted American directors and screenwriters who poured into London in the late 1950s and, in doing so, deprived the exiles of their unique position as Hollywoodtrained , Europe-based talent. By 1960, the major Hollywood studios were increasingly adopting the socalled “European approach” to circumvent the blacklist. Because the Waldorf Statement’s interdiction against hiring suspected subversives had generally been interpreted in relation to Hollywood productions, the studios saw a loophole that would allow them to acquire the European-made films of the blacklisted and even enter directly into production deals with blacklisted talent in Europe without violating the agreement’s terms. In May 1960, Twentieth Century–Fox announced that it had signed a contract with Sidney Buchman, one of Hollywood ’s highest-paid writers before he was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1953. According to the terms of the deal, Buchman would write and produce films in Europe for distribution by Fox.3 The previous March, Jules Dassin had signed a four-picture production deal with Lopert Films, a production company and foreign film distributor owned by United Artists.4 MGM had recently purchased the distribution rights to Dassin’s La Loi (1959), and Paramount’s controversial acquisition of Losey’s Chance Meeting (1959) was also public knowledge.5 That the studios were not only willing, but eager, to hire blacklisted talent in Europe reflects how dramatically the industry had changed since the exiles left Hollywood ten years earlier. With European cinema all the rage, the exiles’ experience of European production made them highly attractive to Hollywood, much as their Hollywood training had initially recommended them to European producers. Likewise, the more overtly transnational structure of the film industry created new opportunities for the exiles to showcase their increasingly transnational vision. Both geographically and mentally, Hollywood had decamped to Europe to such a degree that a joint report submitted by the AFL Film Council and the Motion Picture Producers Association to the U.S. Department of Labor in 1963 forecast the “eventual destruction” of the American movie industry as a result of “foreign subsidies and quota restrictions.”6 This chapter poses a number of questions: What impact did the more competitive professional environment of the late 1950s and early 1960s have on...

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