Abstract
Francisco Franco was a seemingly unlikely patron of Hollywood film production. Yet from the early 1950s through the end of the 1960s and beyond, independent American filmmakers would trek to Spain to enlist his regime’s cooperation in producing big-budget motion pictures. These producers and the Spanish dictatorship developed a symbiotic relationship that made Spain a major film center in the 1960s. Beleaguered by television and anti-trust rulings, Hollywood studios relied on independent producers who shaved costs by working outside the US. Spain was an attractive option, and the Franco regime welcomed Hollywood with an abrazo,as in the case of tourism, for both reputation-building and economic reasons. Local American filmmaking efforts held a significant value in helping to cultivate a positive image for a government with an image problem, through positive portrayals of Spain and Spaniards, and the imprimatur of both glamour and “normality” conferred by Hollywood operations in the country. Moreover, the regime craved the access to dollars the Yanqui movie makers offered, which would flow from both production expenditures and the tourism that would be spurred by widely disseminated film depictions of Spain’s history, culture and scenery.
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Notes
Joseph Nye explicitly included Hollywood as a factor in US soft power in the volume in which he introduced the idea, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990, 1991), p. 194. For a discussion of other countries’ anxieties, see e.g. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through 20th-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard, 2005)
Richard H. Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997)
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Stephen Ricci, eds., Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945–95 (London: British Film Institute Press, 1998)
John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
Neal M. Rosendorf, “Social and Cultural Globalization: Concepts, History, and America’s Role,” in Joseph S. Nye and John D. Donahue, eds., Governance in a Globalizing World (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), pp. 118–119.
Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon, 1988)
Michael Conant, “The Impact of the Paramount Decrees,” in Tino Balio, ed., The American Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), pp. 347–348
As Business Week noted at the time, “Set owners, millions of them, were not going to pay to see mediocre films; they could watch similar entertainment at home for nothing.” (“A Turn for the Bigger,” Business Week, 11/14/53, p. 149.) This is not to say that inexpensively produced films, or films about modest subjects, were abandoned by Hollywood. Marty, the story of a lonely Bronx butcher, filmed on a shoestring budget in black and white and scripted by television writer Paddy Chayefsky, won the 1955 Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Screenplay (Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 79–82).
Carlos F. Heredero, Las Huellas del Tiempo: Cine espanol, 1951–1961 (Valencia: Archivo de la Filmoteca de la Generalitat Valenciana, 1993), p. 29.
U.S. Embassy, Madrid to State Dept., 1/8/63, “Efforts of Motion Picture Export Association of America to Persuade Spanish Government to Liberalize Restrictions on Distribution of United States Motion Pictures,” 852.452/1-863, box 2583 NND 959000, Record Group 59, US Department of State Central Files [RG 59], National Archives and Record Administration-Archives II, College Park, Maryland [NARA-A2]. For a discussion of the complicated US-French film industry/cinema culture relationship, see Vanessa R. Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
“Borrador Previo para un Estudio Sobre Fines y Medios de la Propaganda de España en el Exterior,” dated August 1960, p. 12, in signatura [S] 28353, signatura topográfica [ST] 22/19, fondo [F] 49.06, procedencia [P] “Cultura,” Archivo General de la Administración, Alcala de Henares, Spain [AGA]. For an in-depth discussion of the long imbroglio between the MPEA and the Franco regime in the postwar era, see Pablo León Aguinaga, Sospechos Habituales: El cine norteamericano, Estados Unidos y la Espana franquista, 1939–1960 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 2010).
Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography, pp. 417–418; Aurora Bosch and M. Fernanda del Rincon, “Dreams in a Dictatorship: Hollywood and Franco’s Spain, 1939–1956,” in Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May, eds., “Here, There and Everywhere”: The Foreign Politics ofAmerican Popular Culture (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 2000), p. 100.
Paul Preston, Juan Carlos: Steering Spain From Dictatorship to Democracy (New York: Norton, 2004), pp. 29–30
Testimony of Samuel Bronston, 6/24/66, pp. 8–17, in Bankruptcy of Samuel Bronston, 64 B 464, US District Court, New York City, in author’s collection (files originally stored in NARA facility Lee’s Summit, MO, but subsequently destroyed as per standard policy); author interview with Paul Lazarus, Jr., former senior vice-president of Samuel Bronston Productions, Santa Barbara, CA, 1996; and Paul Lazarus, Jr., “The Madrid Movie Caper,” Focus (University of California Santa Barbara), v. 16 (1995), pp. 45–47.
Charlton Heston, who starred as Don Rodrigo, was met at the airport by the producer and marveled at “the immigration and customs clearance [Bronston had] arranged…. My bags were off-loaded directly into the trunk of his Rolls, and we whirled away to the best suite in one of Madrid’s grandest hotels.” Quoted in Heston, In The Arena: An Autobiography (New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 1997), p. 240.
For details on Allard Lowenstein’s political career, see William H. Chafe, Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
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© 2014 Neal M. Rosendorf
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Rosendorf, N.M. (2014). “Hollywood in Madrid”: The Franco Regime and the American Film Industry. In: Franco Sells Spain to America. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137372574_3
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