CHAIR:  Charles Acland

Llewella Chapman 

“The highest salary ever paid to a human being”: Creating a Database of Film Costs from the Bank of England Archive

Following the Cinematograph Films Act 1938, the Bank of England produced a ledger of film production costs, itemising British films produced between April 1938 and November 1939. This paper will demonstrate how this ledger, and the subsequent database I have created based on it, can be of benefit to researchers of British film history based on
papers that are available in the Bank of England Archive (London, UK). The detailed database contains the estimated final costs of 170 British films, including The Citadel, The Drum, The Lady Vanishes, Pygmalion, Sixty Glorious Years, A Yank at Oxford, Jamaica Inn and The Mikado with an accurate breakdown of costs for particular categories. The database can show researchers the impact of American investment in British film production, as well as details of the salaries of the highest paid stars and directors of British films made during this period. It complements work undertaken by Mark Glancy (the Eddie Mannix Ledger for MGM (12:1, 1992) and the William Schaefer Ledger for Warner Bros. (15:1, 1995)), Richard B. Jewell (the C. J. Tevlin Ledger for RKO (14:1, 1994)) and Steve Chibnall (the Teddington Ledger for Warner Bros. -First National (39:4, 2019)) that has been previously published in IAMHIST’s Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.

Robert Shail 

Film in the Workplace: Exploring the Film Holdings of the Marks and Spencer Archive
The Marks and Spencer Archive (Leeds, UK) exists principally to hold the company records and related materials illustrating the history of one of the UK’s longest established and most successful high street retailers. Although extensive, the film holdings are tangential to the main collection and have not been previously recognised by film scholars as a resource. This paper examines these holding arranging them into representative groupings and analyses their style and content with attention paid specifically to their status as history on film and as film form. It also posits the opportunity to consider further film holding normally thought of as outside film scholarship and offers a reassessment of more utilitarian forms of filmmaking.

Kieran Foster

Repurposing the Archive: Unmade films, Vampirella and Adaptation
This paper will examine how archival materials on unmade or unreleased films not only provide valuable evidence for revisionist film histories but can be repurposed as events and media that imaginatively reconstitute unrealised projects. While archives are valued by film historians for the contextual evidence they provide, when it comes to films that never
were they hold potential beyond the circumstantial. Papers on unmade films in the Hammer Script Archive at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) provide the point of departure for an examination of the unproduced project Vampirella, developed in the mid-1970s, and its subsequent adaptation as a live script reading in 2019. By examining this public event and two other live script reading adaptations of unmade Hammer projects, this paper will explore the appeal and cultural function of this phenomenon. In doing so it will pose questions about their status as adaptations (part-augmentations, part-simulacra?), and fan response (nostalgia for that which never was). What can the film historian recover from such creative plundering of the archive that might be useful methodologically?