Abstract
In May of 1961, director Vincente Minnelli was preparing the production of Two Weeks in Another Town, part of which he planned to shoot in Rome. Hollywood filmmaker Jean Negulesco wrote to Minnelli, offering some advice on working in Italy, where Negulesco had made portions of Three Coins in the Fountain and Boy on a Dolphin, and was at the time producing his next film, Jessica. Negulesco wrote:
I would say that the most difficult and the most important condition of making a picture in Italy is to adapt yourself to their spirit, to their way of life, to their way of working. A small example: This happened to me on location. As I arrive on the set and everything is ready to be done at 9 o’clock—the people are having coffee. Now, your assistant also is having coffee—and if you are foolish enough to start to shout and saying you want to work, right away you’ll have an unhappy crew and not the cooperation needed for the picture. But if you have coffee with them, they will work for you with no time limit or no extra expense.1
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Notes
Toby Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI, 2005), 128–129;
Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan, The Film Studio: Film Production in the Global Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 13–17;
Janet Staiger, “The Package-unit System: Unit Management after 1955,” in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 330–337.
John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008);
Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John T. Caldwell, eds, Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (New York: Routledge, 2009).
Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market1907— 1934 (London: BFI, 1985).
Allen J. Scott, On Hollywood: The Place, The Industry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 6–8.
Interview with Christian Ferry (production manager), February 18, 2011, Paris. For an overview of French studio facilities and equipment, see Annuaire du cinéma, various years. Colin Crisp, The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 121–128.
W. P. Robinson, “The American Producer in England,” Syllabus and Forms on American Motion Picture Production in Foreign Countries (Los Angeles: USC, May 9, 1959), 8, 47.
Interview with Christian Ferry; Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
Gianni Manca, “Certain Relevant Aspects of the Production of Films in Italy by Foreign Producers,” Syllabus and Forms on American Motion Picture Production in Foreign Countries (Los Angeles: USC, May 9, 1959), 20.
Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 216; Forgacs and Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society, 124–140; Crisp, Classical French Cinema, 266–323.
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© 2013 Petr Szczepanik and Patrick Vonderau
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Steinhart, D. (2013). A Flexible Mode of Production: Internationalizing Hollywood Filmmaking in Postwar Europe. In: Szczepanik, P., Vonderau, P. (eds) Behind the Screen. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_9
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