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4 A Brief Stay in Hollywood Opening at the Madeleine-Cinéma in Paris on 13 November 1928 was White Shadows of the South Seas, a romantic, anticolonialist MGM movie set on a Polynesian island, which would captivate Dalí—as he declared in an article in the Barcelona daily paper La Publicitat—Buñuel, and the Surrealists as a whole.1 One of the technical features of the film was that it had been sonorized with music and sound effects—breaking waves, birdsong, and so on—by the Movietone process. This film muet sonore by W. S. Van Dyke launched the sound era in France, an era that had its emphatic confirmation in the release on 30 January 1929 of Alan Crosland’s seminal The Jazz Singer at the Aubert-Palace. The fact that the linguistic aspect of sound film did away with the iconic universality of silent cinema and led to a crisis in the film industry has been abundantly described and studied. In the face of this challenge, one of the first solutions adopted by the big American and German companies was the production of talkies in various languages aimed at diverse linguistic markets and made by professionals contracted in different countries. Buñuel was one such. However, the way in which he was contracted in Paris by L. Laudy Lawrence, MGM’s representative in the French capital, for a stay of six months in Hollywood was due more to his personal contacts than to his professional career. It was Marie-Laure de Noailles, a friend of Lawrence’s, who set the ball rolling, presumably at the suggestion, or at least with the acquiescence, of Buñuel, since it seems unlikely that she would have taken such an initiative without speaking to the filmmaker first. Lawrence had seen L’Âge d’or during a showing organized by the Noailles at the end of September 1930 and hadn’t liked the film. Since neither its private screening at the Cine Panthéon 63 64 A Brief Stay in Hollywood  on 22 October nor its public release on 28 November 1930 at Studio 28 had as yet taken place, the scandal attaching to it could not have acted as either a stimulus or a brake in terms of Lawrence’s decision. The American talent scout’s mistrust of the Spanish director is demonstrated by the fact that he asked for the endorsement of people who’d seen L’Âge d’or. As Buñuel explained years later to Max Aub: “I told the Viscount; he smiled and brought me the testimony of forty of France’s most illustrious names.”2 The agreement was arrived at, therefore, with a certain amount of cynicism on both sides. For the producer it was of interest to attract young and rather inexpert Hispano-French talent to California and to keep it in reserve while the future of talking films was decided; whereas Buñuel had nothing to lose, being protected from the effects of the Great Depression in the Western world’s idyllic Shangri-La. Lya Lys, the female lead in L’Âge d’or, would also be signed up by Lawrence in Paris and would prove to be far more active than her director in French versions like Soyons gais (Arthur Robison, 1930), Buster se marie (Claude Autant-Lara, 1931) and La Veuve joyeuse (Ernst Lubitsch and Marcel Achard, 1934), even going so far as to take part in a few English-language movies. It was stipulated that Buñuel, like other compatriots contracted by MGM, would receive $250 a week during his professional stay of six months in Hollywood , during which time he would learn about studio working methods. On 18 October the cineaste traveled to Spain, where he stayed for a week, taking leave of his mother prior to embarking for New York. At that time the trip to Los Angeles by European filmmakers consisted of the following stages: Paris (Gare Saint-Lazare)–Le Havre, Le Havre–New York in five days of sea travel, and New York–Pasadena (Los Angeles station) by train, in a journey lasting three days and four nights. Thus, on 28 October 1930 Buñuel left Le Havre on board the S.S. Leviathan, in the company of the comedy writer and cartoonist Tono (Antonio de Lara) and his wife Leonor. Tono was traveling with a better contract than Buñuel’s, since it was for five years, renewable every six months, to work in MGM...

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