A production strategy of overdevelopment: Kirk Douglas’s Bryna Productions and the unproduced Viva Gringo!

Abstract

In 1969, after nearly twenty five years in the business and over fifty screen appearances starting with The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Milestone, 1946), Kirk Douglas took the decision to begin donating his personal and business papers to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR). Over the next decade, Douglas continued to donate his papers, leading to the division of the original collection into seven broad categories: correspondence and personal papers; financial and business records; television; theatre; radio; motion picturesproduced; and motion picturesunproduced. Taken together, the Kirk Douglas Papers cover one of the most important and transformational eras in American film history, commencing with the twilight years of the studio system in the 1940s, through its break-up in the 1950s, and the eventual conglomerization of the Hollywood studios in the 1960s. At the same time, the papers reveal Douglas's own centrality to these transformations following the incorporation of his own independent production company in 1949, Bryna Productions. Douglas was one of the first actors to form his own company in the post-World War Two era, precipitating an industrial trend that reached its apogee in the mid-1950s.The Kirk Douglas Papers (KDP), as the collection was eventually named, are quite revealing, with correspondence and other documents that unveil the man behind the screenpersona. What we find is an actor, producer, writer, philanthropist and diplomat who frequently displayed a furious level of perfectionism, determined to ensure his projectsin

John Boorman’s the Lord of the Rings: A Case Study of an Unmade Film

“…This was a process that UA had made a key feature of its contractual arrangements with independent producers. 39 The approach engendered a production strategy of overdevelopment, in which producers and production companies developed more projects than could feasibly be produced, all in a bid to ensure that at least one project could potentially receive production funding.…”