European Film Fund

Last updated

The European Film Fund (EFF), also known as the European Relief Fund, was a non-profit organization established by the talent agent and producer Paul Kohner. [1]

Contents

History

The European Film Fund was founded on November 5, 1938 on the initiative of Paul Kohner, Ernst Lubitsch, and Universal Pictures studio head, Carl Laemmle. [2] [3] Founder members were William Dieterle, Bruno Frank, Felix Jackson, Salka Viertel and Ernst Lubitsch. The Domicile of the EFF was Paul Kohner Talent Agency and president was Ernst Lubitsch, because he was considered the best known European filmmaker in Hollywood. The organisation was founded to help European emigrants who needed Affidavits, money or jobs. That is why, Liesl Frank, Bruno Frank's wife, worked together with the Emergency Rescue Committee.

The Fund collected and distributed money, some filmmakers donated one percent of their fees. For example, Michael Curtiz and William Wyler, both Jewish and of, respectively, Hungarian and Swiss-German origin, were especially generous. Furthermore, there were earnings from benefit performances.

In the early 1940s the Fund earned about $40,000. Some Persons were supported by credits, others by donations. Several beneficiaries of the EFF got jobs in the film industry (esp. at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros.) as screenwriters. [4] These jobs weren't paid very well but they often were the precondition for getting visa. Many European filmmakers couldn't repay the money, because they didn't find well paid jobs.

"The more clear-headed émigrés understood very soon that these salaries paid them by Hollywood were fictitious, at least when the realized that, while they earned $100 or $200 a week for completely useless work, a real screen writer earned $3,500. It was quite symbolic that once their contracts expired[…]." [5]

The Fund was closed in 1948.

List of benefit recipients

[6] [7]

Related Research Articles

<i>The Shop Around the Corner</i> 1940 romantic comedy film by Ernst Lubitsch

The Shop Around the Corner is a 1940 American romantic comedy film produced and directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart and Frank Morgan. The screenplay was written by Samson Raphaelson based on the 1937 Hungarian play Parfumerie by Miklós László. Eschewing regional politics in the years leading up to World War II, the film is about two employees at a leathergoods shop in Budapest who can barely stand each other, not realizing they are falling in love as anonymous correspondents through their letters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernst Lubitsch</span> German American actor, screenwriter, producer and film director

Ernst Lubitsch was a German-born film director, producer, writer, and actor. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch". Among his best known works are Trouble in Paradise (1932), Design for Living (1933), Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Heaven Can Wait (1943).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Losey</span> American filmmaker and theatre director

Joseph Walton Losey III was an American theatre and film director, producer, and screenwriter. Born in Wisconsin, he studied in Germany with Bertolt Brecht and then returned to the United States. Blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950s, he moved to Europe where he made the remainder of his films, mostly in the United Kingdom. Among the most critically and commercially successful were the films with screenplays by Harold Pinter: The Servant (1963) and The Go-Between (1971).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hanns Eisler</span> Austrian and German composer (1898–1962)

Hanns Eisler was a German-Austrian composer. He is best known for composing the national anthem of East Germany, for his long artistic association with Bertolt Brecht, and for the scores he wrote for films. The Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin is named after him.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lupita Tovar</span> Mexican-American actress (1910–2016)

Guadalupe Natalia Tovar Sullivan, known professionally as Lupita Tovar, was a Mexican-American actress best known for her starring role in the 1931 Spanish-language version of Drácula, filmed in Los Angeles by Universal Pictures at night using the same sets as the Bela Lugosi version, but with a different cast and director. She also starred in the 1932 film Santa, one of the first Mexican sound films, and one of the first commercial Spanish-language sound films. At the time of her death, she was the oldest living actress and one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salka Viertel</span> American screenwriter

Salka Viertel was an Austrian actress and Hollywood screenwriter. While under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1933 to 1937, Viertel co-wrote the scripts for many movies, particularly those starring her close friend Greta Garbo, including Queen Christina (1933) and Anna Karenina (1935). She also played opposite Garbo in MGM's German-language version of Anna Christie in 1930.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernst Hermann Meyer</span> German musicologist and composer

Ernst Hermann Ludimar Meyer was a German composer and musicologist, noted for his expertise on seventeenth-century English chamber music.

The comedy of remarriage is a subgenre of American comedy films of the 1930s and 1940s. At the time, the Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, banned any explicit references to or attempts to justify adultery and illicit sex. The comedy of remarriage with the same spouse enabled filmmakers to evade this provision of the Code. The protagonists divorced, flirted, or even had relationships, with strangers without risking the wrath of censorship, and then got back together.

Paul Kohner was an Austrian-American talent agent and producer who managed the careers of many stars and others—like Ingrid Bergman, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, John Huston, Liv Ullmann and Billy Wilder—of the golden age of Hollywood, especially those who came from Europe before World War II. He was married to the Mexican-American actress, Lupita Tovar. His brother was Frederick Kohner, a novelist and screenwriter, his daughter was the actress Susan Kohner. His grandsons are the filmmakers Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz.

Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood (1995) is a documentary film series produced by David Gill and silent film historian Kevin Brownlow. It is a follow-up to their 1980 documentary film series, Hollywood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorothy Spencer</span> American film editor (1909–2002)

Dorothy Spencer, known as Dot Spencer, was an American film editor with 75 feature film credits from a career that spanned more than 50 years. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing on four occasions, she is remembered for editing three of director John Ford's best known movies, including Stagecoach (1939) and My Darling Clementine (1946), which film critic Roger Ebert called "Ford's greatest Western".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gert Heinrich Wollheim</span> German painter (1894–1974)

Gert Heinrich Wollheim was a German expressionist painter later associated with the New Objectivity, who fled Nazi Germany and worked in the United States after 1947.

Hell on Earth is a 1931 German anti-war film directed by Victor Trivas. In France, The film is also known as No Man's Land.

German Exilliteratur is the name for works of German literature written in the German diaspora by refugee authors who fled from Nazi Germany, Nazi Austria, and the occupied territories between 1933 and 1945. These dissident writers, poets and artists, many of whom were of Jewish ancestry or held anti-Nazi beliefs, fled into exile in 1933 after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany and after Nazi Germany annexed Austria by the Anschluss in 1938, abolished the freedom of press, and started to prosecute authors and ban works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clément Moreau</span>

Joseph Carl Meffert, better known by his nom de plumeClément Moreau, was a politically and socially conscious graphic designer and artist. His best-known work is the wordless novel Night over Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernst Glaeser</span> German author

Ernst Glaeser was a German writer, known for his best-selling pacifist novel Jahrgang 1902. He was associated with the political left, and went into exile in Switzerland at the start of the Nazi era after his books had been publicly burned. However, he returned to Germany in 1939, a decision that was attacked by other exiles.

The Villa Aurora at 520 Paseo Miramar is located in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles and has been used as an artists' residence since 1995. It is the former home of the German-Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta. The Feuchtwangers bought this Spanish-style mansion in 1943 for only $9,000, the annual salary of a school teacher. The house was a popular meeting place for artists and the community of German-speaking émigrés. Lion Feuchtwanger wrote six of his historical novels in this house: Der Tag wird kommen, Waffen für Amerika, Die Jüdin von Toledo, Narrenweisheit oder Tod und Verklärung des Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jefta und seine Töchter, and Goya oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis.

The Continental Players was a short-lived albeit well-chronicled Hollywood-based theater workshop and stock company founded in 1938 by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle. It was supported by Hollywood film executives with the aim of boosting the careers of European thespians in America, notably exiled Jews from Germany and Austria.

Hans Josef Schumm(néJohann Josef Eugen Schumm; 2 April 1896 Stuttgart – 2 February 1990 Los Angeles) was a German-born-turned-American actor, notably, a prolific and critically acclaimed Hollywood screen character actor who appeared in some 95 films – including a co-starring villainous role in a 12-episode serial. He also appeared in 15 TV productions and several stage productions, including one on Broadway. Except for about ten cinema productions, Schumm's body of work in cinema and television was filmed in the United States. On stage and in film, he is credited as Hans Josef Schumm or simply Hans Schumm; but in seven films, he is credited under the pseudonym André Pola — three in 1948, one in 1949, one in 1954, and one 1956. In his private life, he was known as Joseph Schumm and Johann J.E. Schumm.

Paul Baudisch was an Austrian screenwriter, novelist and translator. He came to Sweden as a refugee following the Anschluss of 1938 and worked in the country's film industry. He frequently collaborated with fellow Austrian émigré Adolf Schütz. He translated Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls into German.

References

  1. Paul Kohner Agency records, 1935-1988: Biography/History. Los Angeles, CA: Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 1988. OCLC   801267898 . Retrieved 2 September 2015.
  2. Hoffman, Allison (20 February 2013). "Hollywood's Unknown Rescuer". Tablet . Retrieved 2 September 2015.
  3. Doherty, Thomas (29 December 2015). "Remembering the Hollywood Mogul Who Rescued Hundreds of Germany's Jews (Guest Column)". The Hollywood Reporter . Retrieved 30 December 2015.
  4. Adorno, Theodor W./ Eisler, Hanns / McCann, Graham: Composing for the Films. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005. p. XIII-XIV)
  5. Palmier, Jean-Michel (2006). Weimar in exile: the antifascist emigration in Europe and America. London: Verso. p. 550.
  6. "German Exiles: Feuchtwanger Memorial Library". Archived from the original on 2008-08-23. Retrieved 2008-11-07.
  7. Adorno, Theodor W./ Eisler, Hanns / McCann, Graham: Composing for the Films. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005. p. XIV)

Further reading