The idea that the right exotic location will deliver both superior scenery and savings is a fantasy familiar to many vacationers and to the world’s largest purveyors of virtual vacations, Hollywood. It’s also the story of Runaway Hollywood by Daniel Steinhart, a book about the postwar rise of international location shoots, when studios hoped to escape Hollywood production costs while also showcasing authentic locations. Southern California is versatile as a backdrop, but it clearly isn’t everywhere. As William Wyler said when making “Roman Holiday,” “You can’t build me the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps. I’ll shoot the whole picture in Rome or else I won’t make it.”
Work abroad was often dramatically cheaper in the late 1940s. Steinhart quotes a Collier’s magazine story on the filming of “Black Magic” in Italy: “Costumes, sets, and wigs have cost a tenth to a hundredth of what they would in America.” But if costs were lower, there were trade-offs in efficiency, with British tea breaks and French two-hour lunches infuriating the Americans. There were other surprises. The crew position of “gaffer” didn’t exist in France, leaving American directors of photography irritated by the need to set up their own lighting.
Language also caused numerous problems. During the filming of “Fanny” in Marseilles in 1961, “the director called out to actress Leslie Caron to ‘look up!’ Immediately, the French ‘clapper boy,’ thinking the director had called out le clap (the French word for the slate), ran into the shot, ruining the take.” Sometimes actors would be entering a doorway in one country and leaving in another, or in the case of the 1958 film “The Vikings,” a whole crew disembarking from longboats in Norway onto beaches in France. Crews in each location had to coordinate with their English-speaking bosses and also with each other.
Sheer distance from the studios was often nettlesome, involving logistical challenges of supply and communication not much different from the recently concluded conflict. “In order to send exposed footage from Nairobi to Los Angeles during production of ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ (1950),” explains Steinhart, “re-icing stations were placed along a stopover route at Johannesburg, Leopoldville, Dakar, the Azores, and New York to keep the film cool.”
The host countries engaged in various strategies to attract Hollywood investment, some more above-board than others. Battered European economies froze the assets of American studios in Europe, leaving the studios avid for any means to spend their francs and lire abroad. Many bought or established European subdivisions. MGM rebuilt Italy’s Cinecittà. Others invested in anything they could find, from shipbuilding to wine.
Film subsidies, which even Pat Brown wouldn’t countenance in the America of the 1950s, were offered by several European states, usually with conditions attached. Limits were placed on the number of personnel that could be imported, leading to a typical international shoot hierarchy of a few Americans atop mainly foreign crews. Robert Siodmak’s “The Crimson Pirate” (1952) qualified as a British production for purposes of that country’s film quota, despite being shot across three countries. The film’s producers hid from the British Board of Trade the cost of Italian and French labor they had employed on location shoots by charging these expenses to Warner’s Rome and Paris offices instead of its British subsidiary.
Steinhart argues that filming abroad did not fundamentally change the form of Hollywood productions or the working methods of directors. Some, such as John Huston, embraced the opportunity to shoot on location. Other directors had to be prodded to get out of the studio and, once there, to make more use of their foreign locations. Opening sequences, chase sequences, and musical numbers were often created or tweaked explicitly to showcase exotic locales, and promotional material proudly touted these attractions. Posters for “The Vikings” proclaimed: “Actually Filmed Amid the Ice-Capped Fjords of Norway and the Sea-Lashed Cliffs of Brittany!”
The story comes to a close with international shoots becoming both deemphasized and routine. Production costs accelerated to such a point that sending a shoot abroad was no longer a sure money-saver. It could even be a source of runaway costs, as in the case of “Cleopatra.” Ironically, Steinhart notes, “by investing in rebuilding the filmic infrastructures in Western Europe to support runaway productions, Hollywood accelerated the resurgence of film industries that became its own competition.” Hollywood obviously continued to shoot parts of many films abroad, but many directors returned home to the comforts of Southern California. “There is Paramount Paris, and Metro Paris, and of course the real Paris,” said director Ernst Lubitsch, only partly joking. “Paramount’s is the most Parisian of all.”
Anthony Paletta is a freelance writer in New York City.
