Essay

Soviet-American 'cinematic diplomacy' in the 1930s: could the Russians really have infiltrated Hollywood?

BRIAN D. HARVEY

When the realm of politics and the world of art intersect, or in some cases collide, does the interaction or the clash substantially affect the outcome of events in either world? This essay reflects upon the conflicting interests of Hollywood in the USSR and of the Soviet film industry in the American film capital during a key period before and after US diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, asking how did this event affect film exchange between the two countries? What is striking about this period is that every major Hollywood studio planned a Soviet-themed film while there was interest on the Soviet side in popular American cinema and in the efficient and profitable economic structure of Hollywood studios. Yet despite a political climate that was conducive to collaboration and degrees of mutual interest on both sides, none of the planned film projects materialized; nor was Boris Shumiatskii, head of the Soviet film industry, able to construct the 'Soviet Hollywood' in the Crimea that he planned with the assistance of blueprints drafted by US architects. Despite the lack of concrete outcomes to the various initiatives, I shall argue that they nevertheless reveal a generally unrecognized episode in the film histories of both countries, in a pre-Cold War climate when the global interests of both film industries found that they had much in common. While most histories concentrate on films that were produced, in this case research into planned but unrealized

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1 Lester H. Brune, Chronological

History of US Foreign Relations.

Volume II (New York, NY and

London: Routledge, 2003), p. 492.

2 Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber,

Harpo Speaks (New York, NY:

Limelight Editions, 1961), p. 314.

3 William Richardson, 'Eisenstein

and California: the "Sutter's Gold"

episode', California History (Fall

1980), p. 199.

4 Ibid., p. 200.

5 For contemporary book-length

studies of this question, see S.6.

Bran, Soviet Economic

Development and American

Business (New York, NY: Horace

Liveright, 1930); M.P. Buehler,

Selected Articles on Recognition

of Soviet Russia (New York, NY:

HW Wilson, 1931); Recognition of

Russia, University Debater's

Annual, 1930-31 (New York, NY:

HW Wilson, 1931); Louis Fischer,

Why Recognize Russia?: the

Arguments For and Against the

Recognition of the Soviet

Government by the United States

(New York, NY: Jonathan Cape

and Harrison Smith, 1931); and

J.K. Trevor, The Recognition of

Soviet Russia: the US and the

Soviet Union (Washington, DC:

The America Foundation, 1933).

6 Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism

in Twentieth-Century America

(New York, NY: Random House,

2003), p. 138.

projects, which can be explained by a specific historical context, can shed light on the impact of politics on culture and vice-versa.

While Soviet-American relations were strained for much of the twentieth century, there was a brief period (1931-4) when in film and diplomatic terms 'recognition' impacted on both politics and culture. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the USA refused to recognize the Soviet government. In 1933, however, Roosevelt determined that the American public no longer strongly opposed acknowledging the Communist regime. It was hoped that the resulting diplomatic agreements of 1933 would stimulate trade between the two countries and create a greater degree of international stability.1 Harpo Marx, the first 'Hollywood diplomat' to visit the USSR right after US recognition, appeared with members of the Moscow Art Theatre and recorded the optimism of the moment:

And on the next day, at 7:50 a.m., to be exact, while I was having my prunes, rolls, and tea in the hotel dining room, Russia became - officially - a friendly country. That was the prearranged time for the pact worked out between Litvinov and Roosevelt to go into effect. The United States now recognized the Soviet Union, and the USSR now recognized the USA.

Immediately before, however, Soviet directors who visited Hollywood were met with suspicion and even hostility. When Eisenstein visited Hollywood, Major Pease, the head of the Technical Directors' Institute, conducted a campaign against the Soviet director and against the Paramount administration for employing him, calling Eisenstein 'Hollywood's Messenger from Hell'.3 The projects he worked on, including an adaptation of Dreiser's An American Tragedy, were not produced, and his contract was swiftly terminated in October 1930. As William Richardson concludes:

the political situation in Southern California was not favorable for a Soviet film director hoping to make a film criticizing any aspect of American life. As the Depression worsened, so too did the chances for any proposal of Eisenstein to be accepted for production.4

His trip to Hollywood coincided with debates for and against the USA resuming diplomatic relations and trading with the Soviet government. The rise in anti-Soviet sentiment during 1930 and 1931 resulted from US confusion about the nature and purpose of the Five-Year Plan and the role of foreign commercial ties in the development of the Soviet planned economic experiment.5

Rather than ease this tense situation, and contrary to what many people expected, relations between the USA and the USSR deteriorated after recognition in 1933.6 Yet the rhetoric surrounding this event created a climate of opinion that was conducive, among certain individuals in Hollywood and the USSR, to collaboration. Many of the contradictory feelings around 'diplomatic recognition' manifested themselves in terms

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of Hollywood's cultural and economic ambitions for world markets, and some key individuals sought to capitalize on the work of Soviet writers who lent an air of 'cultural capital' to genuine curiosity about the USSR and the topicality of the Five-Year Plan. My focus in this essay is on Soviet Russian writers as film scenarists and their collaboration with or ties to various Hollywood directors, most notably Frank Capra, Lewis Milestone and Cecil B. DeMille. I will also investigate the reception of Boris Shumiatskii in Hollywood and his plans to develop the Soviet film industry, as well as discussing some of the Hollywood personalities who visited the USSR in the early to mid 1930s.

7 Fortune (December 1932), p. 63;

cited in Saverio Giovacchini,

Hollywood Modernism: Film and

Politics in the Age of the New

Deal (Philadelphia, PA: Temple

University Press, 2001), p. 15.

8 See Frank Capra, The Name Above

the Title: an Autobiography

(New York, NY: Da Capo Press,

1997), p. 161.

Boris Pilnyak, The Russian Story,

Script Department no. 34384,

MGM Studios, 20 May 1931. A

draft version of Pil'niak's MGM

document is available for

consultation in the Joseph

Freeman Collection at the Hoover

Institution, together with a copy of

Pil'niak's contract with MGM. See

also 'Metro buys a Soviet worker's

script for $30,000 - in Russian',

Variety. 23 June 1931, p. 4.

Hollywood and Soviet writers

Irving Thalberg and Frank Capra In the early 1930s Hollywood was interested in employing established authors to write scenarios, often adapted from successful novels. As Saverio Giovacchini has stated: 'New Yorkers and Europeans had "gone Hollywood" en masse, and by 1932 Fortune magazine noted that the ranks of Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) comprised "more members of the literati than it took to produce the King James Bible'".7 One notable instance of this was the work of the writer Boris Pil'niak at MGM for the film project Soviet (1931-34), a pet project of Irving Thalberg that was to be directed by Capra. Biographies of Thalberg neglect to mention Soviet, but in his autobiography Capra does recall it:

From the dozen scripts he [Thalberg] had me read I chose Soviet, a strong melodrama about an American engineer hired to build a super dam in Russia. Thalberg promised me a 'dream' cast: Wally Beery, Marie Dressier, Joan Crawford, and Clark Gable - wow! Nearing Soviet's, starting date, frail Thalberg had to go to Europe for health reasons. Left in sole command, Mayer couldn't wait to harpoon Thalberg's pet projects. He canceled Soviet, sent me packing back to Columbia.8

Soviet reflected the topical interest in some 3000 US engineers engaged on Soviet construction sites at the height of the Soviet First Five-Year Plan and the American Great Depression. Plans were made to film at Hoover Dam and with the consultation of the US photographer Margaret Bourke-White; Soviet authorities were approached about filming on location in the Soviet Union, but such requests were turned down. In its earlier versions, MGM's story was about the construction of the largest steel plant in the world, called Steel. Before Pil'niak was invited to Hollywood, MGM's leading scenarist, Frances Marion, had drafted a scenario entitled The Blue Story. Pil'niak's treatment, about a US engineer working in the USSR and retitled The Russian Story, is remarkable for its inclusion of details that might be considered to be progagandist, or at least explanatory, to American audiences who might not know the details of the Five-Year Plan and collective farms.9

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10 Richard Glatzer and John Raeburn

(eds), Frank Capra: The Man and

His Films (Ann Arbor, Ml:

University of Michigan Press,

1975), pp. 29-30.

11 For details of these films and the

theme of monumental technology

see J.P. Telotte, A Distant

Technology: Science Fiction Film

and the Machine Age (Hanover,

MA and London: Wesleyan

University Press, 1999).

In view of Capra's own proclivity for populist, anticapitalist narratives, this interest in Soviet themes is not altogether surprising. His films were popular in the USSR, and journalist Alva Johnson called him a 'social revolutionist'. In an interview in the 1970s, Capra described the final script version as follows, which I quote at length since it is the most detailed account of what the film would have been like had it been produced:

It was about the building of a dam in Russia with an American engineer supervising it. Wally Berry was going to play the role of a commissar who was given the job of building this great dam. He didn't know anything about engineering, but was a man in charge who had made his way up from the bottom of the Bolshevik regime. Marie Dressier was his wife, and a very patient, loving wife she was. Joan Crawford was to play a very, very politically minded gal who was the assistant commissar. Clark Gable was an American engineer, sent over to help them build this dam. The conflicts were personal and ideological: the American wants to get things done and the commissar wants to get them done in his own way. Gable falls in love with Joan Crawford, and they have a running battle: he hates anything that is Communistic - all this plus the drama of building this dam. Nothing but great battles: they fought nature, they fought each other, they fought the elements, all to get this great dam built.... I want to tell you about the end of the film. They were celebrating the completion of the dam. The Wally Berry character was particularly complex. One of his hands had been cut off, and on his remaining hand he wore a handcuff - with an empty handcuff dangling - as a symbol of his slavery under the Czarist system that had cut off his hand - he never took this handcuff off. During the celebration the camera pans down the enormous face of the dam and then moves into a close-up and there is this handcuff sticking out of the cement - Berry has been buried inside the dam.10

As Capra's summary reveals, the film would have contained notable discourses on ideology, progress and technology, the handcuffs in the cement perhaps symbolizing the sacrifices made in the name of the revolution and of the continual need to erase the legacy of the 'old order'. This bears intertextual resemblance to the famous last scene of Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924) in which the protagonist ends up handcuffed to his dead antagonist in the desert, preventing him from benefiting from the gold for which he has killed. The theme of monumental technology was also expressed in other contemporary films, but involving different international collaborations, most notably Britain and the USA in The Tunnel (Maurice Elvey, UK, 1935), a film that was released in French and German versions and which expressed ambivalence about the human cost of monumental building projects, in this case a tunnel linking Europe and the USA.11

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12 Alva Johnston, The Saturday

Evening Post (14 May 1938). On

the populist ideology of Frank

Capra, see Lary May, The Big

Tomorrow: Hollywood and the

Politics of the American Way

(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press, 2000), pp. 87-9.

13 ll'ia Erenburg, Materializatsiia

fantastiki (Moscow: Kinopechat',

1927), and Fabrika snov (Berlin:

Petropolis, 1931).

14 llya Erenburg, Truce. 1921-33

(Volume III, Men, Years-Life),

trans. Tatiana Shebunina, in

collaboration with Yvonne Kapp

(London: MacGibbon and Kee,

1963), pp. 124-30, and Liudi,

gody, zhizn', vol. 8. no. 3 (Moscow:

Khudozhestvennaia literature,

1966), pp. 509-14. See also

Anatol Goldberg, llya Ehrenburg:

Revolutionary Novelist, Poet, War

Correspondent, Propagandist: the

Extraordinary Epic of a Russian

Survivor (New York, NY: Viking,

1984), p. 96.

15 Lewis Milestone Collection,

Margaret Herrick Library,

American Academy of Motion

Picture Arts and Sciences.

Milestone's papers include a

typescript of a script based on

Erenburg's novel called Red

Square.

16 llya Erenburg, Eve of the War,

1933-1941, trans. Tatiana

Shebunina, in collaboration with

Yvonne Kapp (London: MacGibbon

and Kee, 1963), pp. 9-10, and

Liudi gody, zhizn', vol. 9, no. 4, pp.

7-8.

Clearly in this case Thalberg and Capra were the driving force behind a project that easily crumbled when halted by a studio boss who was perhaps nervous about the subject matter despite its notable contemporary theme. In an article entitled 'Capra shoots as he pleases', Alva Johnston, writing in the Saturday Evening Post, noted that the 'unborn photoplay' Soviet was 'the best thing he [Capra] ever worked on.... He was getting ready to shoot it for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, when the company decided it was full of controversial dynamite and put it on the shelf.12 In the 1930s a studio boss could halt a project some way into its development, since the system's bias meant that ultimate power lay with the producer rather than the director. Even though Thalberg was vice president of MGM, it was possible, in the circumstances described above, that he could be overruled by MGM's president Louis B. Mayer. 'Controversial dynamite' or not, it appears that no efforts were made to resuscitate the project, although Capra was not alone in wanting to pursue Soviet themes, as demonstrated by the interest shown by Lewis Milestone.

Lewis Milestone Lewis Milestone (who was subsequently one of the Hollywood Ten during the postwar, McCarthyist era) was another major US director who was interested in acquiring and adapting Soviet properties. He visited the Russian-emigre writer Vladimir Nabokov in Berlin to explore the rights to Kamera Obskura, and was particularly keen to work with ll'ia Erenburg, a writer who had written two 'film books' and frequently returned to the cinema and film personalities in his journalism.13 In 1927 he wrote a script for G.W. Pabst's Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney/The Love of Jenny Ney.u Together with the screenwriter Laurence Stallings, Milestone subsequently adapted ll'ia Erenburg's The Rise and Fall of Nikolai Kurbov as a project called Red Square for Columbia Pictures.15

The Russian artist Natan Altman was to have designed the costumes. Red Square, however, was not produced by Columbia Pictures, sharing a similar fate to Thalberg's and Capra's projects. Erenburg writes about this in his autobiography:

He [Milestone] decided to make a film out of my novel The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov. I tried to dissuade him: I did not care for this old book and besides, it would have been ridiculous in 1933 to show an idealistic Communist aghast at the sweeping tide of NEP [New Economic Policy]. Milestone pressed me to write a scenario in any case, suggesting that I alter the story and describe the construction works and the Five-Year Plan: 'Let the Americans see what the Russians are capable of achieving'. I have great doubts about my ability to do the job. I am no playwright and I was not sure I could produce a decent scenario, while a rehash of several books combined seemed to me silly. But I liked Milestone and agreed to try and write the script with his collaboration.16

Milestone invited him to a small English seaside resort in order to collaborate. The Life and Downfall of Nikolai Kurbov chronicles a

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17 Ibid., p. 8.

18 For an account of his trip, see

Donald Hayne (ed.), The

Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille

(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-

Hall, 1959), pp. 308-13.

19 Unpublished letter, 22 March

1932, from DeMille, Hollywood, to

Zamiatin, Paris. Zamiatin Papers,

Box 1: Correspondence,

Bakhmeteff Archive.

20 Unpublished letter, 6 April 1934,

from Eugene Lyons, New York, to

DeMille. Cecil B. DeMille

Collection, Brigham Young

University, Provo, Utah.

committed member of the Cheka (the precursor to the KGB), who toils away against 'enemies of the people'. However, his commitment and faith are undercut when the New Economic Policy (NEP) is announced, and he shoots himself. Erenburg reports that Milestone showed the script to Harry Conn, president of Columbia, who apparently said, 'Too much social stuff and not enough sex. This is no time for throwing money down the drain'.17 In any event, Erenburg was paid and used the money to celebrate the New Year, 1934, in style at a Polish restaurant in Paris. Another project failed to materialize because of the interventon of a studio boss. Milestone's interest in the USSR did not end there, however, since during World War II he directed The North Star, with a screenplay about the Soviet Union written by Lillian Hellman.

Cecil B. DeMille DeMille visited the Soviet Union in the early 1930s before US recognition and subsequently explored the rights to a variety of Soviet literary properties, including Valentin Kataev's Squaring the Circle, Alekandr Tarasov-Rodionov's Chocolate and Evgenii Zamiatin's Atilla. Zamiatin, who had recently emigrated to the west, wrote to DeMille in 1932 from Berlin about the possibility of working in his Hollywood studios. The two had met in Moscow in September 1931 during DeMille's trip to Soviet Russia.18 DeMille replied that he had written to the American Consulate in Berlin, as Zamiatin had requested: 'We are in need of good dramatic brains more than ever at the present time, for good dramatic fare is very scarce; and the "depressions" make it difficult for even good dramatic entertainment to produce good financial results'.19

But this trip never materialized, despite Zamiatin's patience. As late as 1934, he still hoped to go to DeMille's studios. Eugene Lyons, a US writer who had just completed an assignment in Moscow as the United Press correspondent and planned to work in Hollywood on several adaptations of Russian literary works, wrote to DeMille in April 1934, mentioning the project about which DeMille and the novelist had spoken three years earlier:

Incidentally, I have brought with me a batch of Russian plays and novels and for which I hold the film rights. One or two might interest you. When you were in Russia you may recall meeting Eugene Zamiatin, the novelist, and talking to him about a scenario on the life and loves of Atilla. Zamiatin is now in Paris. He gave me a sort of synopsis of his idea for such a scenario. I think it leaves much to be desired. But I'll bring it on with me to Hollywood as the basis for further work.20

As well as exploring possible projects with DeMille, Zamiatin tried other avenues that did not result in a contract. Writing to Joan Malamuth, wife of American translator Charles Malamuth, in Hollywood on 29 December 1932, Zamiatin indicated that his negotiations with Feature

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21 Postcard to Joan Malamuth,

Hollywood, from Zamiatin, Paris.

Charles Malamuth Papers,

Bakhmeteff Archives.

22 '0-503', Box 1: Manuscripts,

Evgenii Zamiatin Papers,

Bakhmeteff Archive.

23 Anthony Slide (ed.), The American

Film Industry: a Historical

Dictionary (Westport, CT:

Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 26,

118.

24 See Louella P. Parsons, 'Russian

films reek with woe, says

Schenck', Los Angeles Examiner,

16 September 1928, section 5, pp.

7-8; from 'Motion Pictures:

Foreign - Russia' file, LA

Examiner clips, Cinema Library,

University of Southern California,

Los Angeles.

25 Unpublished letter in Russian, 14

May 1935, from Zamiatin, Paris.

Malamuth Papers, Bakhmeteff

Archive. Zamiatin adds a footnote

indicating that he would send Le

grand amour Goya later, after he

had transcribed it. Zamiatin's

papers include: Le Tzar

prisonnier/L'amourdu Tzar), a film

scenario (in French); Goya; Le

grand amour de Goya, notes for

apparently related film scenarios

(in French); film scenarios based

on his play Atilla—Bich BozhiUln

Russian) and The Scourge of God

(in English); and Pikovaia dama, a

film scenario (in Russian). The

English version The Captured Tsar

and the French version Le Flean de

Dieu are not preserved in his

papers.

26 'Moscow Romance', 23 June

1934. Box 3 (second copy in Box

4), Eugene Lyons Collection,

Hoover Institution Archives. The

Lyons Collection at Hoover

contains no additional information

about this project. There is,

however, an exchange of

telegrams between Lyons and

George Oppenheimer of United

Artists Corporation in Eugene

Lyons Papers, Box 2, Special

Collections, Library, University of

Oregon, Eugene.

Productions about the filming of his novel, presumably We, had fallen through:

Many thanks for your charming letter and your inquiries. Unfortunately now they have but platonic value to me for this affair of filming my novel broke down - at any rate as far as one place ('Feature Productions') is concerned. Perhaps later I should mail you the synopsis of my novel and use your kind offer of being my 'representative in Hollywood'.21

Zamiatin's Papers at the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University include a scenario, entitled D-503 (in Russian, with an English translation) based on We.22 Feature Productions was created in 1925 by Joseph M. Schenck and was in existence through 1933, producing a number of features at what became known as the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood.23 Possibly, Zamiatin and Schenck met during the Hollywood producer's trip to Soviet Russia in 1928.24 One of Eisenstein's developed projects for Paramount was a film entitled Glass House, certain aspects of which were inspired, in part, by Zamiatin's novel.

Like Pil'niak, Zamiatin turned to MGM, and Charles Malamuth helped him in this regard. Writing to Malamuth in May 1935, he expressed his continuing desire to go to the United States and enclosed four scenarios: The Captured Tsar, about Alexander II; Le grand amour de Goya; Le Flean de Dieu, about Atilla; and Pikovaia dama /The Queen of Spades. He wrote that apparently The Captured Tsar was 'in the hands of Metro-Goldwin' (sic) and that Atilla was 'a theme, of course, for Cecil B. DeMille'. 25 But yet again, despite all these efforts and enquiries, Zamiatin's work was not adapted by Hollywood for the screen. It seems that in this case the projects did not get quite as far as Capra's attempts with Soviet, although it is certainly the case that Zamiatin was supported by enthusiastic 'talent scouts' and advocates such as Lyons and Malamuth. Furthermore, Lyons had his own reasons for promoting Soviet authors since he was quite anxious to break into the film industry upon his return to the USA. In addition to his work with DeMille, he wrote an original screenplay, Moscow Romance, collaborating with Vicki Baum, author of Grand Hotel. The screenplay was intended for Samuel Goldwyn as a vehicle for the Soviet actress Anna Sten, recently imported by Goldwyn to Hollywood to rival Garbo and Dietrich.26

As well as these significant figures who were keen to promote interest in Soviet subject matter, and whose career interests coincided with the broader culture of 'recognition', regular studio employees were also on the lookout for potential material. One of DeMille's employees, for example, sent him a memo on 26 December 1934 with a clipping from the Illustrated Daily News in which E.V. Durling's 'film bet' was Mikhail Sholokov's Quiet Flows the Don, which he claimed was 'a book of film possibilities equal to All Quiet on the Western Front'. The employee noted that the book would 'not be published in America until

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27 Cecil B. DeMille Collection,

Brigham Young University.

28 See reports in Variety, 12

December and 26 December 1933.

29 Unpublished letter, 3 December

1933, from A. Tarasov-Rodionov,

Moscow, to Cecil B. DeMille,

Hollywood. DeMille Collection,

Brigham Young University.

July'; however, she requested that a synopsis from the galleys of the book should be obtained from the New York office.27 So, there was clearly a willingness on the part of some key players to promote Soviet authors, but the process of collaboration could be too complicated, as the next example demonstrates.

In addition to his plans to film Kataev's Squaring the Circle, DeMille's other major project was an adaptation of Aleksandr Tarasov-Rodionov's Chocolate. The publicity and rumour surrounding DeMille's Chocolate conveyed the problem of copyright, which contributed to the project's cancellation and may have been a further complicating factor in adapting Soviet novels. In particular, a dispatch from Moscow published in Variety in December 1933, entitled 'Soviet authors watch Hollywood as market', reported rather sarcastically that yet another Soviet writer wanted to come to Hollywood:

Hollywood's renewed interest in Soviet themes following Washington recognition of Moscow is causing a minor flurry among local authors. They are not at all averse to having their stuff put into American flickers and rewarded with American greenbacks, inflated or otherwise. It is known that Alexander Tarasov-Rodionov, author of Chocolate, has hinted to Cecil B. DeMille his readiness to give a personal hand in its shooting. In general Soviet scribblers are watching the news from Hollywood to see whether their masterpieces are being filched. Their fear is that self-appointed go-betweens will sell Russian plays and books without the author's knowledge. They know that they have little or no legal protection as yet in the USA. But they are ready to make entry through the press. Most of them have copyright protection in Germany and other countries. A flicker down without their consent would therefore run into trouble as soon as it left America. 28

The issue of income was indeed an important one to Tarasov-Rodionov, who wrote to DeMille stating that as author of the book, and as one who had worked in the Soviet film industry, he would be of invaluable assistance. He then inquired about what kind of agreement DeMille wished to make and noted that he had signed a contract with Malamuth, appointing the translator as his representative in the USA, all income from a motion picture being divided equally between the two. Tarasov- Rodionov requested that complete payment be made, not to Malamuth but to his account at a Berlin address.29 These negotiations did not advance the project and the film was never made.

Clearly there were particular complications resulting from adapting Soviet works for the screen, and, as this example illustrates, some were critical about the writers' motivation for allowing their work to be used by Hollywood studios. While it is not clear how many projects were cancelled because of difficulties over copyright and payment, this issue was undoubtedly an added complication that may well have proved in some cases, as with Chocolate, to be insuperable.

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Americans in the USSR

30 For a copy of the scenario, see

Krasnaia no/(1932), no. 8. See

also 'Intermedia Projects' in

http://www.surrey.ac.uk/lcts/

Ivmg/intermedia.html.

31 For a brief overview of Lubitsch's

trip to Moscow, see Scott Eyman,

Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in

Paradise (New York, NY: Simon

and Schuster, 1993), pp. 243-7.

For an analysis of Ninotchka

(1939), see the same source, pp.

265-75.

32 See Arnold Rampersad, The Life of

Langston Hughes. Volume 11902-

1941:1, Too, Sing America

(New York, NY: Oxford University

Press, 1986), pp. 242-75. See

also Faith Berry. Langston Hughes:

Before and Beyond Harlem

(Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill,

1983), pp. 154-71.

As well as Soviet writers being interested in working in and for Hollywood, some US film personnel went to the USSR during this period. Indeed, there is evidence that there was a mutual interest in films produced by both countries. Grigorii Aleksandrov's production of The Circus (1936), for example, demonstrates how Hollywood influenced contemporary Soviet film production and vice-versa. During his stay in Hollywood, Aleksandrov had been impressed by Busby Berkeley's techniques in film musicals. The Hollywood director Ernst Lubitsch was visiting Moscow the very week in 1936 that The Circus premiered. A clever piece of musical comedy propaganda, The Circus tells the tale of an American circus star who has to 'escape' from the USA to the USSR because she has a black baby. The director of The Circus, Aleksandrov, had been with the Eisenstein troupe in Hollywood in 1930. Moreover, the film scenario was written by the satirist team of II 'f and Petrov, who had visited Hollywood in 1935 and briefly collaborated with Milestone, and the scenario was also written by Valentin Kataev as an adaptation of his play Pod kupolom tsyrka/ Under the Circus Dome.30 The Soviet depiction of an American woman prefigures Lubitsch's success three years later with a Hollywood depiction of a Soviet woman; Lubitsch's visit to the USSR may have provided him with useful background and inspiration when he directed Ninotchka (1939).31

An example of Soviet-American 'cinematic diplomacy', where an American went to the USSR to work on a film project there, is illustrated by Langston Hughes's involvement in the film project Black and White at the Mezhrabpomfilm Studios in 1932.32 Hughes and some twenty figures of the Harlem Renaissance were invited to Moscow. Only when he got there did Hughes discover that he was to 'doctor' an existing script full of stereotypes of the American South. Meanwhile, the most prominent US engineer in the USSR, Colonel Hugh L. Cooper, heard about the film project Black and White and reportedly went directly to Stalin via the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, V.M. Molotov.

His purpose was to object to the project, claiming it would damage the chances for Washington's recognition of Moscow. Cooper claimed that if the Soviets did not halt production of the film he would halt the construction of the Dnieprostroi Dam (the largest electrical power station in the world). The US Department of State monitored the film project, showing that there was concern over its development. On Hughes's part, he found the script he was to doctor to be untenable and decided to leave for a trip to Central Asia instead.

In terms of a Hollywood figure who visited the Soviet Union before and after recognition, Mary Pickford visited the USSR on two occasions. She first came to the Soviet Union in 1926 with Douglas Fairbanks and even appeared, amidst much fanfare, in the Soviet film The Kiss of Mary Pickford. Her second visit occurred in 1939, arriving from Scandinavia with her second husband in very different times and under very difficult

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33 Concerning Mary Pickford's

second visit to the USSR in 1939,

there is a photograph of her at the

train station at the Krasnogorsk

photographic and documentary

film archive as well as a very short

article on the back page of an

issue of Kino-gazeta.

34 Richard Taylor, 'Ideology as mass

entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky

and Soviet Cinema of the 1930s1,

in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie

(eds), Inside the Film Factory: New

Approaches to Russian and Soviet

Cinema (New York, NY:

Routledge, 1991), p. 213.

35 The Billy Rose Theatre Collection,

Performing Arts Library, New York

Public Library. This appears to be a

short column from Motion Picture

Herald but is not labeled as such,

nor is the date of publication

noted.

circumstances, one would imagine, given the conclusion of the Soviet- Nazi Pact of 1939.33 It seems from these few examples that while many in the USA were keen to visit the USSR and to promote projects there, there was in fact little opportunity to do so. The 'window' opened by diplomatic recognition provided a few years of potential collaboration, but it seems that Soviet writers were keener to offer their work to Hollywood than the Soviet authorities were willing to initiate collaborations on Soviet soil. The major exception to this will be discussed in the following section, which deals with Boris Shumiatskii's attempts to use Hollywood as an economic model for the development of the Soviet film industry.

Boris Shumiatskii in Hollywood and his plans for a 'Soviet Hollywood'

In 1935 the head of the Soviet film industry, Boris Shumiatskii, undertook a technical film study, which eventually led to plans to construct a 'Soviet Hollywood' in the Crimea, with plans drawn up by American architects in 1936-7, at the height of the Great Purges. Richard Taylor explains his motivation, detailing how Shumiatskii wanted to learn from the West, in keeping with other spheres of Soviet industry in the 1930s. In the summer of 1935 he took a team of specialists on an investigative tour of Europe and America and met, amongst others, Capra and DeMille. 34 By 1935, however, Soviet-American cinema relations had soured, and Shumiatskii found himself the subject of Hollywood columnists' satire, as illustrated by this article entitled 'Russian Blank':

Miss Mae West is 'of no great world significance' but Mr Mickey Mouse 'is of cosmic value' in the opinion of Comrade Boris Shumiatsky, director general of the Cinematography Industry of the USSR, now on a tour of study of the motion picture industry of America. In his opinion, the Russian people would not be interested in Miss West. The proletariat would not understand her, he feels, although he admits, just admits: 'the intelligentsia might know Mae West could exist, but they would not know why'. When Comrade Shumiatsky finds Mickey's whimsies cosmic, we are willing enough to agree, but when he denies for all the Russias and all the Russians a possibility of understanding that unsubtle something in the type that Miss West so ably delineates, we are again convinced that all the Soviet knows about machinery is said with tractors.35

Interestingly, this sarcastic article points to Shumiatskii's concern to learn cultural and economic lessons from Hollywood, a concern that is also demonstrated by material held in the Goskino archives. These contain an order to translate and publish (for internal use) a number of US film scripts, including Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932), Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935) and I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933). Shumiatskii was therefore seriously interested in what

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36 'Shumiatsky, Boris' file, TIME/Life

newsclipping morgue. New York

City.

37 Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet

Society from the Revolution to the

Death of Stalin |New York, NY: IB

Tauris, 2001), p. 118.

Hollywood films had to say to inform the future direction of the Soviet film industry. Yet his efforts to modernize were halted when he was executed in Stalin's Purges. While it is unclear as to exactly why this happened, the US press speculated in a scurrilous manner, its satiric tone indicative of the fact that after recognition, Soviet-American relations deteriorated. TIME Magazine, for example, under the headline 'Sexy Shumiatsky', carried the following account of the reasons for his demise, largely revolving around the release in 1938 of Ostrov sokrovisch (transliterated from the Russian and translated as Treasure Island):

Robert Louis Stevenson never saw a moving picture. He might not have liked Hollywood's version of his Treasure Island (1934). But he would have had a fit at what somebody had done to his un-sexy story in the new Soviet film: transformed Cabin-boy Jim Hawkins into a pretty blonde (Jennie Hawkins). The guilty somebody was Boris Z. Shumiatsky, Will Hayes of the Soviet cinema industry. Last week Boris Shumiatsky was out of a job. Other charges against him: (1) that in attempting to freight 'a bourgeois adventure story' with significance he had introduced the Irish revolutionary movement without considering Karl Marx's letter of 1869 on the same subject; (2) had lured to the theater crowds of Soviet youngsters numerous enough'to worry any pedagogue'; and (3) that his inefficiency, maladministration and attempts to 'out-Hollywood Hollywood' had caused a catastrophic slump in the Soviet film industry. 36

It is likely that Shumiatskii's plans for a 'Soviet Hollywood' sealed his fate because they represented an interest in the USA that was deemed to be more and more inappropriate in a country that was turning towards isolationism. Peter Kenez notes that while the plans for a 'Soviet Hollywood' never materialized, there were technological advances during the 1930s. For instance, the Soviet cinema liberated itself from foreign products. In 1931 the first Soviet factory began to produce raw film and in 1934 portable sound projectors started to be produced. In addition, the Soviet Union began to make its own film cameras and studio lamps. New film studios opened in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and Minsk; as a result of Soviet 'gigantomania', the studios in Moscow and Leningrad were among the largest in the world. As Kenez notes, despite all these advancements, Shumiatskii had even more ambitious plans:

he wanted to imitate the Americans by building a Soviet Hollywood in

the Crimea. In 1935, at a time when artistic contacts between the

Soviet Union and the western world had become increasingly tenuous,

he traveled to America to study the American industry. Like so many

other plans of the period, the projected Soviet Hollywood never

materialized.37

If we return to the central question posed in the title of this article -

'Could the Soviets really have infiltrated Hollywood?' - clearly all the

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38 Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund,

The Inquisition in Hollywood:

Politics in the Film Community,

7930-7960 (Garden City, NY:

Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980),

p. 54, esp. ch. 3, 'The Communist

party in Hollywood: intellectual

ferment brutalized by polities', pp.

47-82.

39 August Raymond Ogden, The Dies

Committee: a Study of the Special

House Committee for the

Investigation of Un-American

Activities, 1938-44 (Washington,

DC: Catholic University of America

Press, 1945), pp. 212-13.

Hollywood film projects planned, and then cancelled, posed no threat, even with the participation of the various Soviet Russian writers.

In their seminal study The Inquisition in Hollywood, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund contend that 'In Hollywood, the Communist Party did not play an important role until 1936'.38 Indeed, there is no evidence that the Hollywood projects using the Soviet Union as background were motivated by Communist forces in Hollywood. When the Dies Committee, a Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, created in 1938 to investigate Nazi and Bolshevik activities, examined Hollywood's alleged Communist personnel, it absolved everyone who had been mentioned by John Leech, an early Communist recruiter among the Hollywood community.39 For the most part, as I have argued, these film projects were motivated by Hollywood's desire to 'recognize' the USSR in the context of debates surrounding diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, and were confined to particular individuals rather than representing a more extensive endorsement of the USSR by Hollywood personnel. The projects were not considered to be particularly controversial although, as we have seen, they could be halted for a variety of reasons which may have included fear of controversy. Yet even though Thalberg's project Soviet was cancelled by Mayer it would not have encountered difficulties with the censors. The Production Code Administration's file on Soviet gave MGM the 'go-ahead' and assigned the film a production number.

For a brief period in the early 1930s, Hollywood was therefore prepared not to be infiltrated but certainly to be entertained by the works and ideas of Soviet writers. The mutual fascination represented by these unrealized projects may nevertheless have had a longer-term impact. Hollywood's interest in the USSR was not confined to the period investigated in this article. The phase produced proto-collaborative projects that in retrospect can be seen as part of a longer trajectory that did not necessarily depend on good diplomatic relations between the two countries. Films with Soviet themes were produced in Hollywood when the USSR was an ally of Nazi Germany in 1939 (for example, Ninotchka [Ernst Lubitsch, 1939] and Comrade X [King Vidor, 1940]) as well as when the USA and the USSR were allies during World War II (for example, Song of Russia [Gregory Ratoff, 1944], The North Star [Lewis Milestone, 1943] and Mission to Moscow [Michael Curtiz, 1943]). While conventional histories reference these films, we can only speculate what the addition of the unmade projects including Soviet, Red Square and Chocolate, had they been produced, might have contributed to the genre of Soviet-themed films. Yet their existence as ideas that received serious consideration and in some cases went some way towards production provides a greater understanding of the complexities surrounding Soviet-American film relations before the Cold War.

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