Andrew Spicer
"For a number of years I have been exploring and analysing the role of the film producer, one that has been consistently caricatured, ignored or marginalised within Film Studies which has tended to overprivilege the role of the director and to be more concerned with interpreting films than with scrutinising the processes of their production. I'm not anti interpretation, nor do I dislike directors, it's more that I think that investigating the role of the producer is the best way of trying to understand how the film industry actually works, 'an industry that can sometimes produce art' in Alexander Walker's deft phrase.
I'll try to justify this contention through discussing two AHRC-funded research projects. The first, 2005-06, was on Sydney Box who ran Verity Films during the war, producing over 100 short propaganda films for the Ministry of Information. Box moved into feature film making, running Gainsborough Pictures for three years (1946-49) before going into independent production in the 1950s. The material held on Box in the BFI Special Collections was indispensable for this investigation and I managed to add to this through my own research and to locate Box's 'lost' autobiography, which I subsequently edited, as well as authoring a monograph on Box. The second and current research project (2010-12) concerns Michael Klinger who made his initial foray into the film industry through 'shockumentaries' and sexploitation films, before switching direction decisively through producing Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966). Klinger went on to become Britain's most successful independent producer during the 1970s. The primary material for this investigation is Klinger's own papers, lent to the University of the West of England by his son Tony, which have now been catalogued and form the basis of a co-authored book.
In both cases I found the task of analysing the material more complex and difficult than I had anticipated, allied to the conceptual problems of defining and delineating what Box's or Klinger's contribution to the creative processes of filmmaking actually was. Were they creative? If so, in what ways? Is the nature of the producer's contribution necessarily and fundamentally different from that of other key personnel, including the director? How does one understand a producer's career that often consists of as many (or more) uncompleted or aborted films than ones that actually made it to the screen?"
Dr Andrew Spicer is Reader in Cultural History at University of the West of England.
Andrew Spicer's books include:
- Sydney Box (Manchester University Press, 2007)
- The Man Who Got Carter: Michael Klinger, Independent Production and British Cinema, 1960-1980 (IB Tauris, forthcoming, 2012, with A.T. McKenna)
September 2011.
