(Co-written with @Instant Sunrise . Special thanks to her for all her diligent work.)
Article from The Economist:“Havanawood: How A Small Island Became a Cultural Powerhouse.” (Published May 2008. London.)
The Second American Civil War split Hollywood in almost the same way it had broken up the once-mighty US Army. While many of the ground talent (directors, set designers, writers, actors, cameramen, etc.) stayed behind because of the perceived benefits of the new regime, the enterprising studio heads had left after the Red victory.
However, their journeys would be widely spread. Adolf Zukor used the Paramount owned cinemas in Canada to comfortably re-establish Paramount Pictures in Ottawa. Louis B. Mayer took Metro Goldwyn Mayer to Britain, creating a home within Alexander Korda’s Denham Film Studio. The rest of the major studios, including Universal, RKO, Warner Brothers and Columbia settled in Cuba.
Within the new exile community, the studio heads in Havana were struck with a deep fear of a repeat of the 1927 price war, so an agreement was secretly reached to continue the ticket pricing arrangements from before the revolution. Beginning in 1938, movie ticket prices would be kept at the same price across studios, subject to regular increases. What the new “Wilshire Agreement” brought to the table was that sales of snack foods within the cinemas was now the exclusive province of the cinema owners, whereas before the sales of food and drinks within the cinemas had been done by independent vendors. The cinema then would sublet a concession within the cinema lobby to a contracted vendor who would supply audiences with food and drinks, while the cinema owner would collect rent. Under this model, it was the concession stand that became the primary driver of revenue for the cinema.
Eventually, Warner Bros and Columbia would come to dominate the Cuban-American film scene, with respective studio heads Jack Warner and Harry Cohn becoming parts of MacArthur’s inner circle and their sponsored brand of propaganda (most notably wartime “Macaco” films) becoming big hits. Universal, however, managed to survive by merging with Fox Films[1], and RKO would largely compete in the periphery with other low-budget studios.
Among other emigres to the island was the husband and wife duo of Herbert and Natalie Kalmus, who had co-founded Technicolour in 1916 alongside Daniel Comstock[2]. Due to the labour unrest in Los Angeles and the bulky size and weight of the Dye Transfer Machinery, Mr. and Mrs. Kalmus had been forced to leave behind their life’s work and start fresh in Havana. The newly established Technicolour Ltd. would bring full colour to the emerging Havanawood.
In response to pressure from Mayer, Warner and Cohn, the colour camera system had been simplified to use two strips of film. One strip was a strip of orthochromatic film that was only sensitive to blue light, the other strip of film was loaded into the camera behind the first one (known in the motion picture industry as “bipack style”) and had two emulsion layers, one on the front of the film that was only sensitive to green light and a final panchromatic layer that was only sensitive to red light. The streamlined process was one that was easier for the film crews to handle and required less photographic film, something that had been a firm requirement of the major studios. While early colour films made using the new “Technicolour Process 5” had suffered teething issues due to poor colour balancing by Technicolour’s Havana laboratory, Havanawood soon began producing bright colourful motion pictures.
Nevertheless, the Kalmuses were both loved and hated on the Havana studio lots. While Herbert Kalmus was largely welcomed for his colour process, his business model of only allowing the rental of cameras with the caveat that his wife be on set as a “colour consultant” had drawn the ire of many a director who found their artistic choices second guessed.
Herbert and Natalie Kalmus were recruited by Warner producer David O. Selznick to craft a unique, saturated look for a Civil War movie he was making as a Warner Bros-Columbia co-production based on a big hit in the exile press by Margaret Mitchell. Hoping to capture the brutality and scale of the war in full colour, Selznick hoped to make a film whose colour would set it apart from any prior colour movies. A film that could show the strength of the Hollywood-in-exile motion picture industry.
Sure enough, Gone With the Wind , with British-born actress Vivian Leigh and Australian Errol Flynn in the leads, would be that film, winning acclaim in the free world upon its release in 1938. Massive lines formed during its London, Paris, and Berlin premieres, and tickets for the first week of showings sold out completely. Technicolour’s laboratory in Havana was forced to delay the printing of colour rushes for several pictures that were in production just to keep up with the need for copies of Gone With The Wind.
The film would go on to earn an impressive $191 million CUD from worldwide ticket sales at the box office, which in today’s money would be just under £3 billion FBP.
The Technicolour marvel of Gone With The Wind had also convinced British filmmakers to consider the process, and so in 1940 Hebert Kalmus, flush with cash and buoyed by the success of Gone With The Wind travelled to London to open up a second Technicolour laboratory in the neighbourhood of Iver Heath. Herbert’s second laboratory for Technicolour had barely been finished when the United Kingdom entered the war. With the demands of the war effort, Technicolour’s expensive dye separation process was put on hold, with the laboratory being used to process film from the RAF’s photo-reconnaissance planes.
In Havana, the blockbuster success of Gone With The Wind had put a second wind into the exile film studios in Cuba. With President MacArthur’s goal of reconquering the American continent still in sight, the American government in Cuba authorised a programme of subsidisation for any film that would “promote the traditional American way of life” to audiences in Europe, under the auspices of building up support in Europe for the reconquista of continental America.
Warner and Cohn would take to this program with gusto, producing patriotic content that endorsed American values. From films depicting the nation’s formation to films depicting both of America’s Civil Wars, the Cuban Studio System had managed to ingratiate itself as the propaganda arm of MacArthur’s government, with Hearst’s Department of Communications having an eye towards courting the foreign market (and by extension, increase support for the American exile state).
The propaganda was largely unremarkable at first, consisting of either historical epics that valourised the use of federal force to suppress armed rebellions (such as 1940’s Washington’s War, which explored President Washington fight against Shay’s Rebellion in 1791 or that same year’s Lincoln, about his controversial use of force to suppress dissent during the Civil War) or films that would valourise MacArthur himself or members of his government (1927 was a rebuttal to Orson Welles’ Hearst , showing Hearst as a unifying figure in the aftermath of Leonard Wood’s assassination.)
By 1941, however, the growing threat of Nazi Germany and the neutrality policy of the MacArthur administration in the conflict would spur Jack Warner and Harry Cohn into action. Warner approved several films explicitly attacking the National Socialist system, such as Crystal Night(a romance set in the backdrop of Kristallnacht) and I Was Hitler’s Driver. Conservative elements of MacArthur’s government such as the Silver Legion would come to see Warner and Cohn as an undesirable influence on MacArthur that threatened the island nation’s policy of neutrality, and the studio presidents themselves would even become the victims of government investigations and even physical attacks (including one directly on the newly merged Warner-Columbia lot).
When MacArthur eventually did enter the war in Brazil in 1942, Warner and Cohn were tasked to make a film that would both rally the home front for the war effort and promote it in the recently formed Franco-British Union.
Published accounts of the following events would vary wildly. The official history of Warner-Columbia (published in 1960) stated that Warner, director Sam Wood, and screenwriter Ruth Nagel* worked on the script to In the Jungle together, relying on contemporary accounts and eyewitnesses to make the scenes more accurate.
However, in 1969, Nagel admitted that In the Jungle was actually largely plagiarised from a 1924 script called The Glory by screenwriter Deanne Finkel*, centering a group of American soldiers defending a French village. Finkel supported this in a 1974 interview, and a comparison between the surviving script for The Glory and In the Jungle revealed massive similarities.
Nagel stated that MacArthur wanted the film done quickly, to push out to troops on the ground and on the home front. After failing to come up with a script, Warner had Nagel and Wood find one in the archives.
Regardless, In the Jungle would be a production on the scale of Gone with the Wind. Errol Flynn (by then having attained Cuban-American citizenship) would star against silent legend William Demerest and up-and-coming jazz bandlander Desi Arnaz (son of the mayor of Santiago), as a squadron of American soldiers who come across a village, which they defend from increasing Integralist attacks. All the while, Arnaz’s character Santos falls in love with the daughter of the mayor, played by a young actress named Rosario Zaragosa.
Filmed in the moist forest of Santiago de Cuba, the production was notoriously difficult, with long shoots, difficult weather, arguments between director Wood, Jack Warner, and new Warner producer Frank McCarthy, restless extras, and the lack of proper equipment due to war shortages.
Nevertheless, In the Jungle would become a hit, and regarded as the progenitor of the so-called Macaco genre, which saw large scale war epics set in the South American front that would focus on the Cuban-American war effort, featuring a unified front against the nebulous “Brazilian threat” (post war examples downplayed the Integralist element). And Warner and Cohn would produce more as the war went on, producing more stories to adapt.
While Macaco movies were successful domestically and internationally, many film scholars would criticize the patronizing and sexualized view of both native Cubans and Brazilians, and the overt violence and terror inherent in them.
David O. Selznick would leave Warner to instead become an independent producer focusing on cultivating a relationship between the Franco-British Union and the American government in Cuba in terms of propaganda. He secured a coup by attracting British director Alfred Hitchcock on several joint ventures. This partnership would result in acclaimed Cuban-American and British co-productions like Saboteur and Notorious
Macaco movies and other Cuban-American films would be massive hits in a time when Britain and Free France’s own film industries were compromised by the war. However, by 1946, both had recovered enough to begin producing again. The new films, of significantly higher quality and quantity, would become a threat to Havanawood’s native productions. Similarly, the large-scale Macaco productions were becoming a strain on Warner-Columbia, by then the dominant two studios in the exile nation.
The resulting combination would culminate in the Cinema Act of 1946, an attempt to stem the tide of foreign films outcompeting Havanawood. The Cinema Act would institute a quota system that, invoking the Wilshire Agreement, proclaimed that “50% of programming in [Cuban-]American theatres will be dedicated to local content, produced by local studios and featuring themes that pertain to the needs, desires, and tastes of Americans”, and provided a sizeable tax credit to any production that follows these guidelines. Harry Cohn would be a strong advocate for the law, believing it would “save Havanawood from being priced out of its own country,” whilst Warner was more cautious, believing that collaboration with the FBU was key to ensuring a healthy native film industry.
Indeed, British film companies were circling around Cuba. In 1947, Universal Pictures was acquired by the London-based Rank Organisation. They would be restructured into “Universal World Pictures,” which would largely become the Cuban subsidiary to J. Arthur Rank’s film company. By virtue of being both technically a Cuban-American studio and owned by a British company, Universal World Pictures would produce both “quota quickies” (films that had a strong emphasis on the exotic setting of Cuba to sell to a European audience, and a technicality to get around the restrictions of the Cinema Act) and larger scale adventure films set around the globe. Howard Hughes, an aviation and real estate businessman and American expatriate in Britain purchased RKO outright in 1948. He had already been successful in Hollywood, having won the first Academy Award in 1927 for The Racket. Hughes would slowly build RKO’s library with cheap “Poverty Row” movies that would appeal to wide audiences. In 1952, Deliverance , a film starring ageing Western star Tom Mix, would be described by The Times as “a cheaper, rougher experience than most mainland Westerns. One could call it a ‘mambo western’”
The term would quickly evolve into “Mambo movie”⸻another name for the films made to specifically exploit their exotic Cuban setting or exaggerate any aspect of traditional American culture to make cheaply and sell directly to audiences in Britain and India. The genre would come to be seen as both a disgrace to the nation and a hotbed of innovation that subtly subverted the propaganda of the MacArthur era…..
Article from The Daily Worker Weekend Supplement, March 6th, 1993: “My Time In Havanawood” by Julio García Espinosa
It’s easy to look at the films of the former Havanawood and simply nod along with the now-common platitude that Cubano cinema is “a vast cultural wasteland.” After all, citizens of Miami had long become accustomed to the laughable propaganda broadcasts by Radio Free America[3], with RFA broadcasts reaching as far as New Afrika during the so-called “Broadcast Power Wars.” But to simply write off Cubano cinema as the dying gasps of an increasingly irrelevant bourgeoisie is to ignore the struggles of those Cubanos who had to fight to define our own cultural identity out from under the American invaders who stole it.
What many history books about the glitz and glamor of Havanawood leave out is the hard work and gueling conditions that those of us working on the sets had to endure. Crews would be expected to film 6 to 8 pages of script per day. (for comparison, the standard for films in the UASR is 1-2 pages per day)[4]. Our production days would frequently run into overtime, with a 12 hour working day being a short day and days that would be 16-18 hours long with a 4 hour turnaround were distressingly common under the Cuban Studio System[5]. Inside the sound stages at Warner Bros. and Columbia, the air temperature would reach well over 40 degrees[6], and the sound stages lacked any kind of air circulation system to keep it cool due to concerns over noise.
The press in the Blue Bloc also love to give Herbert and Natalie Kalmus credit for bringing color to the silver screen, ignoring the many color films that had been made in the silent era in the second republic, like 1925’s Phantom of the Opera. The truth is that most of the below-the-line crew hated working with Natalie. On the sets, the contracts that productions would have to sign in order to use Technicolour’s equipment meant giving up control over your production to Natalie Kalmus. Natalie would force changes in everything from costume and set design all the way to the director’s shot choices, something that is normally sacrosanct for a director.
My first documentary was about the 1954 Warner Bros Cameraman Strike. While the subsidies from El Generalissmo ‘s regime were generous to producers, those of us who were below the line saw very little of those subsidies, something that made us look enviously towards our hermanós on the mainland. Despite the cost of living increasing year after year, our wages had been frozen at 1940 levels due to the war effort, and yet they were never unfrozen after the war ended. The final straw in 1954 came when Warner Bros decided that as a cost-cutting measure, they would be eliminating the position of second assistant cameraman.
For those who are not in the motion picture business, it takes a minimum of three people to operate a professional motion picture camera. The main job of a camera operator is to be the one who is pointing the camera and keeping the camera body in good working order. It then falls to the first assistant camera to maintain the lens, keeping it focused and clear. The final member of the camera team is the second assistant camera, who loads blank film into magazines, takes spent film and places it into cans, sealing them with tape to mark them as used so they can be sent to the lab for processing. Of these three people, the second assistant camera is the only one who can be away from the camera for any length of time, as it is extremely dangerous to leave a camera unattended on set for any length of time, due to the risk of equipment damage.
With the position of second assistant camera eliminated, the 1st AC would have to do double duty as a focus puller as well as loading the camera. Due to the bulk of the camera, the operator is not in a position to see what’s going on in front of the camera, save what is seen through the lens. The camera crews in Havanawood all knew that the elimination of the 2nd AC role would inevitably lead to more broken cameras and time lost.
So it was for the good of the very studios that we walked out on May 1st 1954 and began picketing.
Unlike our comrades on the mainland, we didn’t have a union, didn’t have a strike fund, had almost no communication with our comrades at the other studios in Havana, let alone the Los Angeles collectives. But we still walked out and formed a picket line, and I went with them, carrying my own little 16mm Bolex camera to document the strike.
Without any kind of warning or attempt at negotiation, Warner Bros fired their entire camera department and replaced us all with scab workers. But we kept up the picket line. Harry Cohn and Jack Warner threatened to blacklist all of us from working in Havanawood ever again, but we kept up the strike. Within a week, MacArthur had sent troops from the National Defense Corps to put down the strike. They would pick out picketers at random, accuse them of being the ringleaders of the strike, and then cart them off to prison for “Seditious Activity.” Every day I’d film what the NDC were doing with my little Bolex and then at night I’d develop the film myself in the bathroom, as all of us striking cameramen were blackballed from the film labs in Havana.
But despite all of this, we still marched. The radio stations in Havana called us traitors in league with Foster, while the radio stations in Miami would call us heroes. By the end of the strike, Warner Bros had finally agreed to our demands, pay would be increased, and the job of Second Assistant Camera was safe. For us picketers though, it was a bittersweet reward. We were still fired from Warner Bros., and with our names run through the mud, opportunities for work dried up from the other Havana studios. Many of my comrades in Cuba would choose to seek refuge on the mainland, injecting life into Miami’s burgeoning film scene, while others such as myself, chose to make their own films outside of the Havana studios. The footage that I shot on my little Bolex was edited together into a short documentary called Los Camarógrafos en Huelga (1955) that would be smuggled out of Cuba onto the mainland where the Workers Film and Photo League would show it across theaters in the Comintern.
From then on, I knew that I was not welcome within the Havana Studios, but I had still managed to create a niche for myself. I’d use my trusty little Bolex to make a few more documentaries about labor unrest in Cuba, before I was given a new camera courtesy of Manuel Trujillo* and the Glendale Motion Picture Camera Company in Los Angeles so that I could keep making my documentaries.
From documenting the heavy handed tactics against other strikes in Cuba, to finding ways to hide a camera on my person to show how the bosses would act when they thought nobody was recording, I laid bare the many abuses of power under MacArthur and showed how little things changed in the day to day under Kennedy, my films were shown in underground theaters, often using 16mm projectors borrowed from schools and universities to improvise a screening room.
After 1979, I had felt that my luck was due to run out, and that my awful revelation about how far the leadership of the “free world” was willing to go for the sake of “preventing the spread of communism” meant that there was no point in remaining in Cuba anymore. So, I made the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my life. I packed up my belongings into a backpack, grabbed the Bolex camera that had served me all these years to take with me, and I snuck onto a boat under cover of darkness with fifty other people bound for Miami.
Today when I visit film festivals in the Comintern, the one question that people always ask me is why I didn’t move to Los Angeles after coming to the mainland. The truth is that while the Los Angeles film industry has some of the best talent and highest quality productions in the world, the crews have become so used to life under the socialist system that many writers and directors have lost sight of what life is like for those who don’t have the luxury to be born into Communism. The Miami film scene, though nowhere near as large as the one in Hollywood, has an audience that still remembers what life is like under capitalism.
Julio García Espinosa is an Award-winning filmmaker based out of Miami Florida. He has won the Academy Award for “Best Documentary, Short Subject” four times, and has produced over 50 films for the Workers Film and Photo League, PBS, MBS, and Discovery Pictures. He is best known for the 1985 film El otro Francisco (The Other Francisco) a drama about life on a sugarcane plantation following MacArthur’s invasion.
(CW:Sexual Assault)
Excerpts from You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again: From Havanawood to Galaxy, by Rosario Zaragosa (2003)
_Upon her death in 2002 at age 81, actress turned producer Rosario Zaragosa left many papers in her London office. Among the many proposals, unmade screenplays, and transcripts of meetings, there was a manuscript for an autobiography. She had almost finished it at the time of her death. Her daughter, football star Carmela, and Guardian journalist Lauren Paige* would finish the book and release it to wide acclaim in 2003. Many praised Zaragosa’s honestly, caustic look at the capitalist film industry, first as a rising star in Havanawood, a character actor in the Franco-British Union, and eventually, a producer for Ted Kennedy’s media empire.
The following excerpt was most notable and controversial, as it featured allegations of sexual misconduct against star Errol Flynn on the set of the 1943 film “In the Jungle”._
My family was never one to want for money as a kid. Under Machado, we had been one of the main sugarcane producers, so my siblings and I rarely wanted for much. Our mother being a German emigre had meant that we were fortunate enough to inherit many of her fair features.
Many times as a child, my sisters and I were often mistaken for Europeans by those visiting. As a little girl, I used to sneak down to the parlour downstairs and try playing the piano. It didn’t take long for my parents to encourage me to practice my music, with both singing and dancing. I remember my parents taking me to a cinema showing one of Charlie Chaplin’s pictures, it was a rare treat for me, to visit something so crass and “low class” as a cinema, but as soon as I saw the flickering image on the silver screen, I knew that I wanted to make it in Hollywood.
My father didn’t agree with my dreams, as I was the eldest daughter, it was expected that I would marry a nice boy with a head for business so that he could take over our family’s sugarcane farm. Even so, I still held on to my dream, all the way until The Jazz Singer came out.
The girls on the silver screen before talkies could be anybody, it didn’t matter if they had an accent because nobody could hear them speak. Once movies became talkies, I only knew that my accent would make it impossible for me to find work.
[…]
When Los Angeles fell to the Reds, I thought that my dreams were dead. The communists were the monsters hiding under our beds and I grew up knowing that I’d be shot if I ever set foot in Hollywood.
I was only 12 years old when MacArthur came. I had been practising my dancing out in the garden when I heard what sounded like thunder. My father shouted at me to get into the house and we all hid in the cellar for that day, with the servants bringing us meals down there.
When we woke up the next morning, we found out the news. Machado had resigned and the American General Douglas MacArthur was the new president.
While my family was a favourite of Machado, we knew that we would have very little pull with MacArthur’s. My father met with many other prominent members of Cuban society, and they were able to sound out MacArthur and keep their positions. As more Americans arrived, fleeing the communists, we opened our home to them, even giving up a portion of our family lands and loaning some of our workers to Walter Knott so he could rebuild his family’s berry farm here in Cuba.
[…]
It was as if fortune smiled upon me, because I soon learned that if I couldn’t go to Hollywood, Hollywood could come to me.
The first time I visited the Warner Bros lot as a girl I snuck onto the lot to see if I could catch a glimpse of Errol Flynn. They were in the middle of making Gone With The Wind , an incredible epic about the first American Civil War. I was only 16 at the time, but I was a girl with a crush. I had snuck in wearing my Sunday best, and the people on the lot simply thought that I was a lost extra. At one point, somebody came by and grabbed me by the arm. I thought for sure that I had been caught sneaking onto the lot, but the person who caught me told me that the extras for the ballroom scene were supposed to be on set 15 minutes ago.
So I was herded over to the stage where they were filming Gone With The Wind and got put into the crowd for one of the scenes in the movie.
I spent the rest of the day learning how to act silently on camera for the first time, and it wasn’t until the end of the day that anybody realised that I wasn’t actually supposed to be there. The assistant director pulled me aside, told me never to do that again, and then told me to be back here on Monday.
[…]
During the war, I had plenty of work being in the background for Macaco movies. I had wanted to get bigger roles, but my accent was holding me back. After coming home in tears one too many times after having been turned down from a speaking role because of my accent, my father went out and hired a vocal tutor for me, so that I could train my voice to no longer have an accent.
It was a gruelling several months of work, having to speak with a posh Mid-Atlantic accent at all times. Even around my family, he was so strict that I couldn’t even speak my native Spanish at home. But slowly and surely, speaking that way became more and more natural to me until it became second nature. When I would go out into town to visit a cinema or the market, people who didn’t know me began to treat me like an americana as opposed to a Cuban.
My big break came then when I got cast as Maria Espinosa in Sam Wood’s movie In The Jungle. I was to play an Argentenian villager who found her home town being invaded by the Brazilian Integralists, and the American military would come riding in to save us. The production would be done on as grand a scale as Gone With The Wind but instead of the First Civil War it was about the current conflict in South America.
[…]
I can still remember the first time that I walked into my dressing room and I found Errol Flynn there waiting for me. My adolescent crush on him had largely faded, mostly because I had spent the past few weeks working with him, so I had gotten used to him as a person.
To this day, I can remember the stench of liquor on his breath as he held me close and said that he first noticed me that day I snuck onto the set of Gone With The Wind. It took all of my strength to push him off of me, and I ran out of my dressing room and back to my family’s house still in costume.
When I showed up for work the next day, Errol tried to act like what had happened last night never happened. When I confronted him about it he laughed and said that I was imagining things.
When it happened again, I confronted Errol about it, and he denied it happening that time as well. After that, Jack Warner took me aside and said that if I didn’t stop making these kinds of false accusations against one of his stars, he’d tell my parents that he was deeply concerned for my mental health and that I was having trouble telling the difference between fantasy and reality.
I never confronted Errol about him showing up in my dressing room again.
[…]
After what happened with Errol, I struggled to keep my composure while filming. The trauma of it just distracted me, on top of all the other issues. After filming, I would just sit and stare, thinking, processing.
The production was terrible, as many film histories have discussed. Jack and my future ex-father-in-law the late Frank McCarthy managed every aspect of production. They were constantly on set, inspecting everything. Warner was a tiny bold man who mostly scowled and complained. McCarthy was this loud, pompous cabron who chomped on his cigar and constantly picked fights with Sam [Wood], Jack, the leads, basically everyone if something was remotely off. I read later he was there as Harry Cohn’s man on the inside. He looked a little like James Cagney. In fact, I overheard him talk about how the communists had ruined Chicago sports.
Most of the crew worked long hours in the Cuban summer. The heat would get so bad, they couldn’t film to avoid camera damage. Most of the crew weren’t used to the insects either. I could shrug it off, but a lot of the white crews were terrified or easily out of commission with bug bites. Warner also refused to replace anyone or have a native crew.
Outside of filming, I avoided Errol and his advances and tried to avoid others. Bill Demarest mainly drank by himself. I think, despite everything, he never really got used to Cuba. He was a Hollywood man through and through, and didn’t really adapt as well as he might’ve (the fact he was a silent star in a talkie probably didn’t help).
I got on well with Desi Arnaz. He was similar to myself. His father was a pro-MacArthur mayor of Santiago. He was very proud of his Spanish heritage. He was the only one I could really speak to in Spanish to a significant degree. While our on-screen romance stayed there, he became a good friend.
Still, outside of him, I felt isolated. So many workers, and we were still distant. There were exceptions. I was sweating very hard after a long day of shooting. In spite of my thirst, I didn’t feel the energy to really go and get some water. I just laid in the shade, sweating. Eventually, one of the extras, a very young Cubano kid came by, about 16 or 17, and gave me a cup of water.
He sat by me, and we talked for a little bit. He introduced himself as Fidel. He was a student at a Jesuit school in Santiago, but did occasional extras work in film in preparation for university.
Despite myself, it was a relief to be speaking Spanish without shame.
[…]
I had my first taste of real stardom at the film’s premiere. I had my nicest white nylon dress, and I posed for my photos to the press. In spite of myself, I did enjoy the attention. I had finally achieved my dream of a feature role. And people really enjoyed the film. They had shipped it to Canada and Britain, and apparently, it was even shown on the front.
The audience really enjoyed the film, with it ending in a standing ovation.
For better or worse, that premiere would define the rest of my life.
[1] OTL this studio would have become 20th Century Fox later on.
[2] Herbert and Natalie Kalmus were actually divorced at the time, a fact that the couple took great pains not to publicize. After the Revolution, Daniel Frost Comstock remained in the UASR and worked in theoretical physics, while occasionally working in a consulting role at the Technicolor Motion Picture Technology Collective.
[3] Based on the real Radio Martí propaganda station in Miami that broadcasts anti-communist propaganda to Cuba.
[4] For reference in OTL, 2 Pages per day is what studio feature films would generally shoot before the MCU, for comparison, independent films would shoot 4 pages/day and TV shows would shoot around 8 pages/day.
[5] Sadly, this is the standard that most OTL film shoots in Hollywood operate under, film crews often have to work 16-18 hour days with very short turnarounds. As a result, there have been several tragedies on film shoots caused by crew members driving while being extremely fatigued, most infamously was the case of the movie Pleasantville in 1997 where second assistant camera Brent Hershman died in a car accident after he fell asleep while driving after working four 15-hour days in a row followed by a 19 hour day.
[6] Celsius temperature, in Fahrenheit this would be 104 degrees. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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