THE STORYTELLER
MAKING MOVIES MATTER
Lean had a vision, beyond what'd ever been done before. Someone had to believe in it and back it all the way: It was producer Sam Spiegel ...
 Lean SpiegelRare collaboration. Rare Output: Lawrence of Arabia. |
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 Larence of Arabia |
 Lawrence of Arabia |
COMMENT:
There's more to a movie producer outside of producing movies. It takes knowing a lot of people, people with money and some others with talent, both kinds of people tend to be full of themselves. Obviously the person who must manage these inflated egos must have a superego to survive it and still emerge the winner.
As filmmakers we have a lot to learn from the lives of great individuals whose works have defined everything we know to be the movies. My only hope is that we learn the art and craft of these masters, but when it comes to their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, maybe the lesson is to not indulge our fallacies.
SPIEGEL'S "Larence of Arabia"
Winner of three Academy awards for Best Picture: On the Waterfront (1954), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and Larence of Arabia (1962). The scale of each of these films far exceeds entire filmographies of several major producers combined. Two of these undertakings were collaborations with Sir David Lean. Alas, after spending two years in pre-production and then 14 months of shooting at locations in Jordan, Spain, and Morocco creating the magnum opus, Lawrence of Arabia, the duo split and went their separate ways.
Spiegel's pictures had collected a total of 35 Oscars by the end of his run. Much of this cannot be attributed to fate, there's got to be a story behind it all. One that is intriguing and quite possibly more adventurous than the stories he helped bring to life on the silver screen.
For starters, he was born in the Galicia region (now part of Poland) in 1901. Then in 1920 he left for Palestine, where he got married and had a daughter. Soon he abandoned them and sailed to the United States to risk it all; he predicted of his adventure, "I’ll either become a very rich and famous man or I’ll die like a dog in the gutter."
The following year, he was arrested by the Secret Service in Los Angeles and jailed on charges of illegal immigration and falsifying checks. In 1930, after a brief stint at MGM, he was deported to Poland. Over the next decade, he would hop from city to city, running into trouble with the law everywhere he went, but also producing movies in Berlin, Vienna, and London and forging connections in the international film community. In 1939 he illegally re-entered the United States from Mexico and settled in Los Angeles.
You can read a great article about Spiegel's life and autobiography published in the Variety magazine, April 2003 edition: Spiegel’s Mighty Shadow
The Article on Variety has been excerpted from Sam Spiegel, by Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni; to be published in April by Simon & Schuster; © 2003 by the author.