Abstract
Throughout the 1960s, political and economic liberalization in Czechoslovakia and other Central and Eastern European countries had stimulated an increase in film trade with the West. Around 1968, most of the major Hollywood studios were involved in one way or another in planning, producing, or at least co-financing films (mostly historical dramas) in collaboration with the state-run industries across the region. This chapter uses a case study of The Bridge at Remagen (John Guillermin, 1969) and the Barrandov Studios to propose a revisionist, industry-studies account of the early history of the US "runaway production" (Hollywood films shot entirely or partially overseas, primarily for financial reasons) behind the Iron Curtain and of Eastern Europe's pragmatic dealings with Hollywood. The Bridge at Remagen's location shooting collided with the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, 1968, and its complicated production history shows how Cold War reality seemed to work against the emerging business ties between the state-socialist studios and Hollywood. Indeed, the surreal encounter between the old US military equipment used by The Bridge at Remagen's crew and Soviet soldiers outside Prague gave rise to conspiracy theories about the film's supposed role in the KGB's case for the invasion and speculations about the catastrophic consequences for the international reputation of Czechoslovak State Film (Československý státní film, the state-run film corporation). Yet the aim of this chapter is different: to show that the presence of American filmmakers in Prague in 1968 was not surprising. Nor would it be the last-instead, it was a part of a longer industry history.
With the arrival of West European and Hollywood runaways to Eastern Bloc countries in the 1950s and especially 1960s, two distinct production systems and production cultures collided: a centralized, state-controlled, command-economy model-what I elsewhere call the "state-socialist mode of production"-versus US/Western European flexible, project-based organization; the egalitarian, self-censoring culture of state-socialist studios' permanent employees versus the highly hierarchical work world and competitive informal networks of freelance above-the-line talent and below-the-line labor. The success of the Western runaway strategy as well as of the Eastern endeavor to reach new sources of hard currency depended not so much on finding themes of joint interest (as in co-productions), but rather on the ability of both sides to understand and mediate between these two production systems and cultures.
Research on Eastern European cinemas' international relations has so far tended to focus on cinema's role in the cultural Cold War, its links to cultural-diplomatic objectives, and the ideological perils of co-productions between Eastern and Western countries, disregarding a longer tradition of "opportunistic" production services that eventually became the economically dominant industry mode across the region after 1989. This revisionist case study thus could be also perceived as a pre-history of East-Central European studios' current business model, which is based predominantly on servicing foreign producers, a type of economically driven collaboration that falls under what Mette Hjort called "opportunistic transnationalism".