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Printed Matter
SO YOU WANNA BE A DIRECTOR?
By Ken Annakin
Introduced by Lord Attenborough and Mike Leigh
Tomahawk Press $25
Broken Journey (1947) may not turn up on a lot of top films of all-time lists. But ask anyone who saw it even once, no matter how many decades ago, and they will still reverberate at the scene where an opera singer ruins his extraordinary voice yelling for help across the Alps after a plane crash in the snow. Then there is the perfectly paced, intelligent interpretation of "The Colonel's Lady" segment of Quartet (1948), and the masterfully choreographed British landing sequences in The Longest Day (1962).
The above are a few (re)calling cards; spurs to ponder a bit of the work of Ken Annakin--a director of some 50 pictures, but whose name has not been readily on hordes of film buffs' tongues. That can change with the reading of So You Wanna Be a Director? The title notwithstanding, the book isn't a "how to" text, but is an entertaining autobiography through which seasoned directors and aspirants alike can enjoy and, yes, learn from a man with such a versatile and long-lived career.
The director of such films as The Sword and the Rose (1952), Swiss Family Robinson (1960) and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1964), was born in East Yorkshire in Northern England. He entered the magic kingdom of motion pictures when World War II threw him "into a crash course" behind the camera by making documentaries and propaganda films for England's Ministry of Information. (In one series, Crop Rotation [1942], Jack Cardiff and Geoffrey Unsworth were his cinematographers.) Following his move into features, we get some valuable looks into the British film industry in general and Gainsborough/J. Arthur Rank in particular.
Annakin's takes on Walt Disney and Darryl Zanuck give a clear sense of the ways each of these power producers worked with directors. "At their best, they were both great men--geniuses." (Which was more challenging on The Longest Day: derailing a full-length French steam train or having Zanuck ask Annakin to set up the remaining American sequence shots but let him slip in when he could get away and direct them?)
"If you were to ask me now what is the greatest kick in being a director," Annakin muses early on, "I would probably say, 'Knowing at the end of the day you have taken a bare set or piece of scenery and added something to it with actors which could never have existed without your imagination or the conception or the technique to make it happen.'" Toward book's end, his examination of the mistakes he made in The Fifth Musketeer (1977) is better than any list of directorial dos and don'ts.
If Annakin tells of his exasperation over trying to coax performances out of producers' girlfriends, the bad behavior--and sometimes the drug problems--of certain stars, and the vagaries of international film financing, he's providing tales that are as cautionary today as when he lived them. Undeterred, Annakin, now 86, is working on getting his original script, Redwing, into production.
WILLIAM FOX, SOL M. WURTZEL AND THE EARLY FOX FILM CORPORATION: LETTERS, 1917-1923
Edited by Lillian Wurtzel Semenov and Carla Winter
Foreword by Scott Eyman
McFarland & Company $29.95
"For some reason, the current 20th Century-Fox," Carla Winter writes in the preface to this jewel of a book, "seems uninterested in its own early history -- almost denying the existence of its pre-Zanuck roots. Here, nevertheless, is proof that those roots are real. In fact, we might note that 'Wurtzel' in German means 'root' --and fox, of course, is sly and cunning."
Proof in the form of correspondence between New York's William Fox, Chairman of Fox Film Corporation, and Sol M. Wurtzel, who would run Fox's West Coast operation for 28 years, is fascinating reading and invaluable Hollywood history.
Unearthing information through letters and telegrams (some of which had even been in code) is compelling anyway. But this collection especially, though covering only a short period, satisfies on many levels-- not unlike a good movie itself. There is character development, as each man, often at odds with the other, reveals himself on paper. There is the seduction of time traveling back to early Hollywood and getting a whiff of the perils of maintaining a studio that would eventually be worth $300 million. Add to it all the gift of facts-- not legends or hearsay or anecdotes.
Some of the most absorbing tidbits show how much--and often how little--things have changed. In 1921 Wurtzel recognized the need for less violence and more plot in Fox's Sunshine Comedies. In 1918, regarding a complaint to Fox from Sidney Franklin, we get a few of the Chairman's views on directors as he writes to chastise Wurtzel for being a human being to Franklin: "You know that there never was a scene that I ever cut out of a picture that met with the director's approval. Each director thinks the scenes he photographs are the most wonderful in the world, and I never followed the policy of consulting a director when I thought a scene should be eliminated.... The only reason the Fox Film Corporation has made progress is because the power as to what will or will not remain in the film, has been entirely left with me..." Such absolute power could, however, be used quite creatively. Fox, who detested the anti-Semitic campaign that Henry Ford was waging through the Dearborn Independent, confronted the automobile tycoon by threatening to show the results of every accident involving a Ford car in his biweekly newsreels.
We can be grateful that William Fox hated to travel and that these written "meetings" transpired before e-mails and ubiquitous phone contacts made impermanence a way of life. Happily, Sol's daughter, Lillian, who died in 1997, lovingly preserved and edited the material, which was heroically completed by Winters (granddaughter of Sam Wurtzel, youngest brother of Sol), and guided by Sol's son, assistant director and unit production manager, Paul Wurtzel. Certainly we can be grateful that Sol Wurtzel, who hired the 25-year-old Jack (John) Ford to direct Buck Jones pictures and developed stars who would later shine for 20th Century-Fox such as Shirley Temple, is finally getting his due.
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