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Robert J. Flaherty : A Biography by Paul Rotha Edited by Jay Ruby University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia 1983 https://annas-archive.org/md5/846e0ab3962bdd2eb5cbad1543986845 Standard oil paid for the entire production cost. I'd be very surprised if they did not have behind-the-scene control of the entire content. TL;DR: Flaherty was a shill for Standard Oil. PAGE 233: [...] At about the same time the Sugar Research Foundation approached him, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey contacted Flaherty about a project which, although it took the best part of the next two years to mature, was to provide him with an opportunity to make another major work of art. Flaherty tells us how, in 1944, he began his next project: It was a day in spring.... I was resting on my farm in Vermont with no particular plans in mind when a note came from a friend of a friend of mine in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. The note put a proposition to me: Would I be interested in making a film which would project the difficulties and risk of getting oil out of the ground—admittedly an industrial film, yet one which would have enough story and entertainment value to play in standard motion picture houses at an admission-price? On my next trip to New York, I had the first of a series of luncheon conferences with people in the Jersey company. In the course of these luncheons they managed to communicate to me some of the excitement and fascination that surrounds the oil-business. The upshot of it was that I agreed to spend three months finding out whether I thought I could make an interesting picture about oil. Mrs. Flaherty and I set out in our car for the southwest. We drove thousands of miles. We visited boom-towns and ghost-towns and listened to tales spun by old-timers. We found limitless plains dotted with derricks. But we kept reminding ourselves that even in Westerns, horses galloped. In the oil country the derricks stood straight and rigid against the sky. Nothing moved. We couldn't get it out of our minds that the real drama of oil was taking place deep in the earth at that very moment, concealed from the eye of the camera. In the course of our wanderings we came to the bayou country of Louisiana. We were enchanted by the gentle, gay and picturesque people of French descent who inhabit this little-known section of the United States; a people who have managed to preserve the individual flavor of their culture. We were delighted with their customs, their superstitions, their folk-tales of werewolves and mermaids, handed down from generation to generation. But we weren't getting any closer to a film about oil. Then one day we stopped the car for lunch near the edge of a bayou. Suddenly, over the heads of the marsh grass, an oil-derrick came into our view. It was moving up the bayou, towed by a launch. In motion, this familiar structure suddenly became poetry, its slim lines rising clean and taut above the unending flatness of the marshes. I looked at Frances. She looked at me. We knew then that we had our picture. Almost immediately a story began to take shape in our minds. It was a story built around that derrick which moved so silently, so majestically into the wilderness; probed for oil beneath the watery ooze, and then moved on again, leaving the land as untouched as before it came. But we had to translate our thesis—the impact of science on a simple, rural community—into terms of people. For our hero, we dreamed up a half-wild Cajun boy of the woods and bayous. To personalize the impact of industry, we developed the character of a driller who would become a friend to the boy, eventually overcoming his shyness and reticence. The other characters in the film developed naturally around these two. All the parts would be played not by professional actors but by people who had never faced a camera. . . . The story almost wrote itself. We shot it up to New York and got an okay from Jerseys board of directors. Only at that point did we make a definite deal to go ahead with the film.1 In their customary manner, the Flahertys established themselves and the unit in Abbeville, Louisiana, in an old rented house. They converted a vast closet in the house into a darkroom, turned the front porch into a makeshift cutting room, installed a silent film projector, and acquired both a station wagon with a camera platform on top and a cabin cruiser to move around in the bayous. For one of their most important locations they were loaned the use of Avery Island, which was owned by Colonel Ned Mcllhenny, an internationally known explorer and sportsman. It is one of the showplaces of the South, a magnificent preserve teeming with wildlife, including alligators. For the oil derrick and drilling sequences, the Humble Oil and Refining Company (a New Jersey affiliate) put at Flahertys disposal the crew of Humble Rig Petite Anse No. 1. As in all earlier films, the first task was to find the main characters. The company broke up into parties and searched the countryside for types which Flaherty had in mind, taking hundreds of still photographs of likely people. They were looking mainly for the boy and his father. Flaherty writes: Mrs. Flaherty and Richard Leacock, our cameraman, heard about a promising boy in a remote parish, and decided to drive over and have a look at him. On the way they stopped at a cabin to ask directions, and there, staring at them from a photograph on top of the radio-set, was the face of Joseph Boudreaux.. . . But Joseph had gone to the nearest town for an ice-cream cone, walking the twelve miles barefoot. My wife and Ricky immediately got into the car and went to look for him, afraid to get too excited until they had seen the necessary tests. They found him resting on a curbstone, took the necessary shots, and hurried home. The tests were highly successful and so Joseph Boudreaux became Alexander Napoleon Ulysses Latour for the purpose of the film. "From that time on," says Frances Flaherty, "Bob was insistent that no one should show any affection for the boy except himself. He wanted sole control over him, as he had done with Sabu and Mikeleen."3 To play the boy's father, Flaherty settled for Lionel LeBlanc, an experienced trapper, who was also the overseer at Colonel Mcllhenny's estate. For the part of Tom Smith, the driller on the oil derrick, they found a "natural" in Frank Hardy, a Texan, who was one of the crew of the Petite Anse No. 1.[...] The contract with Standard Oil was unique in the history of sponsored documentary films. The company paid in advance the sum of $175,000, the estimated cost of the film. Flaherty was to be the sole owner of the distribution rights, with no obligation to refund the cost of production and with absolute control over all revenue. No reference to Standard Oil need appear on the titles of the film. It was to be a Robert J. Flaherty production. The company would be satisfied, in a highly imaginative public relations manner, with what editorial publicity it might reap from the film when made. It was without question the most generous and favorable assignment any producer of documentary films has ever had. But who shall say that Flaherty did not deserve it? He had waited long enough for such confidence in his artistry. Richard Griffith remembers that Flaherty called him up just before taking off for Louisiana and said, "Come on down to the Colonial Trust Company's Bank and help me berth the check. You can't just deposit it in the ordinary way—it's too big. I need some tugs to help me roll her into the slip. Come along!" SEE ALSO (ONE OF NUMEROUS ONLINE SOURCES): http://www.philpaine.com/?p=189 This is scholarship. Not like the stuff you do... Imbecile my ass!... |