Smith).70 Most problematic of all was a series of indirect interventions in the production by intelligence officers, who were concerned that socialist elements in Orwell’s allegory, such as its satirical depiction of neighboring farms meant to represent the western powers, might blunt its value as anticommunist propaganda and invite hostile attention from McCarthyite vigilantes in the United States.71 The most blatant interference occurred in February 1952, shortly after the Psychological Strategy Board had complained about a draft script that “the impact of the story [was] . . . somewhat nebulous.” Lothar Wolff, de Rochemont’s associate producer, sent John Halas a long list of proposed changes, including the addition of scenes showing the other farms in a more flattering light (“maybe a cat which laps up some cream and another animal being fed carrots by a farmer”) and a new ending to Orwell’s story, in which the pigs and dogs eventually face a liberation-style uprising of the other animals.72 Although Wolff told Halas that the revisions had been suggested by the script department of a potential distributor, in fact they had originated during a meeting held two weeks earlier between de Rochemont’s production company and Joe Bryan’s staff.73 “It is reasonable to expect that if Orwell were to write the book today, it would be considerably different,”
explained an anonymously authored review of the script, “and that the changes would tend to make it even more positively anti-Communist and possibly somewhat more favorable to the Western powers.”74 Such alter-ations continued right up to the end of the production process, often over the objections of the animation team (Batchelor in particular fought fiercely, although unsuccessfully, to preserve the original ending), with the script going through a total of nine different versions.75 As well as showing how interfering the CIA could be as a cultural patron, this episode demonstrates that, despite the constant use of his fiction by British and American propaganda agencies, George Orwell’s politics were not simply reducible to Cold War anticommunism.76
Considering the challenges faced by the makers of
120
T H E C U LT U R A L CO L D W A R
proposal for a covertly funded film production based on Khrushchev’s revelations about the Stalin purges as an “excellent idea,” announcing “that he would authorize funds for such a project but would withhold decision on whether to make a movie out of it as was done in the case of the
A more usual approach was for government officials to intervene unob-trusively in commercial film productions, ensuring the insertion of material that displayed the United States in a favorable light, and deletion of what did not. A cache of anonymously written letters dating from early 1953 discovered among the C. D. Jackson records at the Eisenhower Presidential Library reveals a CIA agent based in Hollywood’s Paramount Studios who is engaged in an astounding variety of clandestine activities on the Agency’s behalf. In one letter, he reports having excised a gag involving “the manhandling of Moslem women,” which might have had “potentially disastrous results in the Moslem world,” from a Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin comedy,
One lengthy letter records an attempt to persuade Billy Wilder (“a very, very liberal minded individual” whom “you have to handle . . . easy”) that a movie he planned to direct about the illegitimate Japanese baby of a GI would prove “a wonderful piece of propaganda . . . for the Commies.”