1954 BBC Telecast of 1984 with Peter Cushing

[Dave Monroe]

On 4/4/07, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6581190966603628731&q=bbc+duration%3Along&hl=en

Thanks!  This, however, might be of interest as well ...

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In his recent biography, INSIDE GEORGE ORWELL, Gordon Bowker says that
after Orwell's death the CIA got control of the film rights for Animal
Farm and 1984:

excerpts from pages 421 to 423:

"...Three weeks after Orwell was buried, Muggeridge and Tosco Fyvel
went with Sonia to discuss with Fredric Warburg the future publication
of his work. The meeting, at which Warburg presided, agreed that the
next George Orwell book should be a collection of essays to be called
Shooting An Elephant - his idea, according to Muggeridge. Sonia's part
in the discussion was not recorded. Richard Rees, it seems, although
named as joint literary executor in Orwell's will was not present.
What Sonia was not to know was that Muggeridge and Fyvel, through
their wartime intelligence work, had contacts with the CIA, and
shortly afterwards, with Warburg, would be involved in the CIA-backed
Congress for Cultural Freedom....Later Warburg would become even more
involved with this shadowy organization when he published and
distributed Encounter magazine secretly funded by the CIA. With these
influential advisers helping Sonia decide what happened to Orwell's
work from early on, it is not difficult to see how decisions were made
which served the interests of Secker and Warburg, and the ideological
aims of her three advisers, as much as the literary estate, and
affected the author's reputation."

"Orwell's two last novels soon became weapons in the hands of
anti-Communist defenders of capitalism opposed to even the democratic
socialism for which he himself stood. The fate of these two books at
the hands of CIA-backed Hollywood production companies, which Frances
Stonar Saunders exposed in her book Who Paid the Piper?, has been
blamed on Sonia. She had been charged with allowing his works to be
misrepresented in the service of the right-wing Cold War cause, while
all the time it appears that Warburg and others were guiding her in
that direction. Orwell himself had been alive to these dangers and
would have avoided them, as he had in standing up to the
Book-of-the-Month Committee and complaining about the
misrepresentation of Nineteen Eighty-Four in Life magazine. But Sonia
was politically naive and, once film rights were sold, control of any
resulting script and film would have been out of her hands."

"In her book Stonar Saunders notes that Warburg took a close interest
in the screenplays of both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. This
seems to point to his hand being somewhere in the deal with Howard
Hunt*, the CIA man who bought the film rights to the former from Sonia
shortly after Orwell's death, and helped set up the first film
production of the latter....Warburg's main purpose would have been the
effect of the huge film publicity on his sales (in 1954 he published
an edition of Animal Farm with illustrations from the CIA-backed Halas
and Bachelor cartoon), though he had also come to commit himself to
the Cold War offensive, and was fully aware of the true funding behind
Encounter. Later Sonia quarelled with Warburg, but at the outset of
her literary executorship (from which Rees seems to have been simply
excluded either by the 'bustling' Sonia or the calculating Warburg)
she must have put her trust in the publisher's judgement and that of
advisers such as Fyvel and Muggeridge."

"Inevitably, the takeover of the film rights of Orwell's last two
books produced movies tailored to ideological ends. In the cartoon
version of Animal Farm the banquet at which the pigs become
indistinguishable from their human oppressors was changed. Orwell's
pessimistic intention was thereby obscured and the messge that the
tyrannical Stalinist pigs are no different from the cruel capitalist
farmers was lost. In the Hollywood Nineteen Eighty-Four the
pessimistic conclusion - that Winston, the spark of individualism
snuffed out, is reduced to loving Big Brother and awaiting the bullet
in the back of the neck - was again replaced by the optimistic message
that the individual is uncrushable, and Winston dies with the cry of
'Down with Big Brother!' on his lips...."

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... "the Hollywood Nineteen Eighty-Four" being, of course, not the one
linked above, or http://imdb.com/title/tt0087803/, but, rather
http://imdb.com/title/tt0048918/ ...