Pinter, Authorship and Entrepreneurship In 1960S British Cinema: The Economics of The Quiller Memorandum (original) (raw)

Calculated Risks: Film Finances and British Independents in the 1970s

This article examines three British films made at Shepperton Studios in the first half of the 1970s. It draws upon the reports filed by Film Finances’ assessor John Croydon to the Chairman Robert Garrett, and correspondence between Film Finances and the films’ producers, as well as scripts, schedules, daily progress reports and budgetary information. Two of the films, The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) and ‘Don’t Look Now’ (Nicolas Roeg, 1973), were backed by the struggling independent British Lion. The third, Lisztomania (Ken Russell, 1975), was the second in a planned three-picture deal with Goodtimes Enterprises’ subsidiary Visual Programme Systems (VPS), and was supported by the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC); but the deal collapsed in spectacular fashion, almost bankrupting its producers in the process. The focus of attention here will be on production histories, rather than the films themselves. I hope to be able to assess, thereby, what additional value the Film Finances Archive can provide in understanding the relations between capital and creativity in the British film industry in this period.

Introduction: Harold Pinter's Transmedial Histories

Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television, 2020

This is the Introduction to a special issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio & TV about the dramatist Harold Pinter. Pinter’s activity across different media of expression makes his work a productive focus for a study of transmediality, and this article focuses on his formal experimentation in television, radio and cinema as well as theatre. Transmediality denotes the tracing of transfers of the same trope, narrative or motif from one medium to another, and Pinter’s work has been a part of the canon of world theatre since the 1960s, his films contributed to the unique nature of British cinema, and he is often cited as one of the most significant British writers of the post-war period. His significance is demonstrated by the acquisition of his papers for the British Library's Pinter Archive, which, along with papers held at the BBC Written Archives Centre, British Film Institute and Film Finance, for example, comprise much of the often unexplored original archival material used in the special issue of HJFRTV for tracing Pinter's histories across media.

AUTHORSHIP IN CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD CINEMA LA AUTORÍA EN EL CINE CLÁSICO DE HOLLYWOOD

From the beginning of the cinema, in which only one person took care of almost everything, the organization of a film progressively evolved, and the different functions in the process got wider and more specialized. The notion of collective authorship is a difficult concept to approach and understand in all its dimensions. In this article we try to clarify it after analyzing how the structure of team collaboration