The Making of Max Ophuls' Lola Montès/Lola Montez

MARTINA MÜLLER The Making of Max Ophuls' Lola Montès/Loh Monte? Film history is full of masterpieces financed by rubber checks," as François Truffaut once said: "Sounder financing and less adventurous financiers do not necessarily make for better pictures. They only make for more reasonable pictures" (Ophuls, "Confidentially Ours" 23).1 "Loh Montés premiered at one hundred forty minutes, but was cut (against the director's wishes) to one hundred ten minutes for distribution ."2 Even in 2003 you could read this misinformation on websites. The one hundred forty minutes are still in many books. But this dualistic vision of brave filmmakers and butcher-like producers, victims and perpetrators, is much too simple (not only) in the case ofLola. The first versions of the French and the German Lola were not cut against the director's wishes. But the second versions were butchered behind his back into third versions. The length of the newly restored version corresponds to the one hundred sixteen minutes of the German premiere version. The strange one-hundred-forty-minute rumor started in 1958 when Richard Roud published Max Ophuls: An Index. Since then, the rumor of this never-verified length was repeated for nearly fifty years. The more Lola was cut, the greater the chaos ofprints and reedited versions, the more people would exaggerate the original length. To complete the confusion: Lola, never had one original: it started with three and it ended with none. Nothing was reasonable, normal or moderate around and about Lola. In 1955 it was the most expensive picture made in Europe after World War II. With a budget of more than eight million D-Marks—which Arizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 5, Special Issue 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 26 Martina Müller Figure ?. June, 1955 Bavaria Studios, Munich. Geiselgasteig: Martine Carol and Max Ophuls in Lola's Palace. Courtesy of Martina Müller. would be close to two million dollars. (Approximately the budget of Ophuls' film The Exile in 1947, as Lutz Bacher tells us in his book Max Ophuls in the Hollywood Studios.) Lola, a super-production for post-war Europe, was announced by the producers as the movie the world was waiting for, but was considered by well-meaning critics as an avantgarde film, a term, Ophuls had said years before, assumes a contempt for Lola Montès/Lola Montez 27 the mass of spectators.3 And Lola was a disaster at the box-office—in consideration of the fact that it cost eight million D-Marks to make. Lola had around two million viewers in West Germany but a minimum of eight million viewers would have been necessary for the German coproducer alone to get his money back (not to mention making a profit). Lola was an expensive experimental film about show business, publicity, film promotion and the mass merchandising of stars, about scandals and about public curiosity. Loh seems to be a reflection on the production of Lola and on Ophuls' own longtime experiences in show business. IxAa was a producers' idea. It started with lots of publicity and with no director. The production company was Gamma, a worldwide empire with branches in Europe, North Africa and New York City. The EagleGamma office in New York didn't exist, but Gamma awed the banks with its glamour—the movie business in the fifties enjoyed great esteem —and even had an address in the U.S. that couldn't be found in a phone book. The heads of Gamma were film salesmen, distributors, brokers, real estate businessmen, hotel owners, and the owner of a brewery in West Germany. They did not have much experience in film production but they had a great talent at raising a lot of money—on credit. Even today there are speculations and jokes about where the Lola millions might have come from. Rumors mentioned Switzerland, the Aga Khan, and even the Vatican. Gamma nourished these legends of strong financial partners behind the company. They impressed the banks with arrangements and contracts—executed between different Gamma companies. In 1954 Gamma developed the idea of a triumphal march of the European film and...