More on film, what the status of Hollywood's big movie studios (e.g. Warner Brothers, Universal, Paramount, Disney, MGM, United Artists)? Are any European filmmakers famous as they were ITTL? Like Alfred Hitchcock, Leni Riefenstahl, Charlie Chaplin, David Lean, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel, and Federico Fellini to name a few. Speaking of Chaplin, I could definitely see him making a TL-191 version of The Great Dictator.
As of 2021, major US film studios based in Los Angeles include National Pictures, Pinnacle, Union Productions, and Battleground. A relative newcomer in LA is Burroughs & Graf, which produces many “independent” movies. Of course, in 2021, LA is no longer the center of US filmmaking. New York City, due to the presence of several major US film schools and several “local” production companies, is turning more and more into its own film and television-making center with each passing year. There are also local filmmaking communities of note in San Francisco and Tucson, even if they’re not as yet to the scale of LA or NYC.
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Alfred Hitchcock entered into service with the Royal Engineers on the British homefront at the very end of the war in 1917. After the war, Hitchcock worked, usually as a technical clerk, for a number of telegraph companies. He never became a filmmaker; in the bleak postwar British world of national loss and economic recession, survival was the paramount concern for a wide cross-section of society. Hitchcock did enjoy going to the movies whenever he could, even if he could never openly discuss enjoying US or German releases.
Hitchcock did find an outlet in creative writing, mostly in short stories submitted to any publication that would accept them. Of course, he never earned enough from while living in London to make it his full time profession. Hitchcock’s writing gravitated towards mysteries and thrillers.
The Silver Shirt regime, under the Churchill-Mosley alliance changed Hitchcock’s circumstances. Although never in any real danger of being targeted by the regime, Hitchcock had a genuine wariness of the authorities in the best of times. On the eve of the Second Great War, Hitchcock and his wife moved to Australia, through the offices of a London-based Australian “Poacher” (someone tasked by the Australian government with recruiting skilled immigrants). Hitchcock never returned to the UK; in Australia, his career as novelist began to finally take shape. Most of Hitchcock’s novels published in the 1940s-1950s were mysteries and thrillers centered around the expatriate British community. Australian cultural historians later credited Hitchcock (and similar writers) with creating a “paranoid style” in Australian literature and cinema. Many of Hitchcock’s novels were later adopted by Australian filmmakers in the 1970s, albeit more often than not with an American Nihilist aspect.
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Charles Chaplin never became a prominent movie star and director in TTL. An early point of divergence from our world was Chaplin not joining Fred Karno’s comedy company; he never had the opportunity to tour the US as a performer (it’s just as well, since US audiences in TTL’s 1900 would not have been particularly hospitable to a British entertainer). He did find steady work as a comedic performer in London theaters and music halls, while also improving his skills as a musician and composer.
Chaplin was in Britain when war broke out in 1914, and was eventually conscripted. He was wounded in action in 1916 and sent home. Any prospects he had once had as a public entertainer before the war were gone. However, Chaplin was able to find work in orchestras that accompanied silent movies. Eventually, he would find a place in the British film industry, such as it was, as a composer.
This career was cut short by the rise of the Silver Shirt regime. Although Chaplin had never been political in the activist sense of the word, he was well known in his own circles for having anti-war and internationalist views. This was enough for him to be blacklisted within the British film industry; it wasn’t long before he found himself in Australia as another exile, in Melbourne.
Chaplin discovered the hard way that there was not exactly a high demand in Australia for film composers. However, he was able to find relatively steady employment in orchestras and as a private musician. Chaplin is thought to be the real world inspiration for the recurring character of Aldershot, a down on his luck musician who appeared in several of Alfred Hitchcock’s Australian mysteries and thrillers.
Chaplin spent the rest of his life in Australia. His interwar film scores would later enjoy a renewed popularity in the 1990s among Australian fans of Fabrika-Punk music (which, as in Russia, was accompanied with a 1930s/1940s “dieselpunk” aesthetic), who used his scores, rearranged with modern instruments and styles, as a basis for what ultimately became Australian Fabrika-Punk’s New Old sound.
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Leni Riefenstahl had a very different career to our world. During the interwar years, she started as a dancer for several theater companies, before eventually becoming a (Berlin-based) playwright and director. None of her productions from this time are particularly well-known or remembered as of 2021.
After the war, Riefenstahl attempted to reinvent herself professionally, first as a photographer and later as a documentary filmmaker, with a focus on exploring the American West; these documentaries were fairly popular for a German audience that still enjoyed the Western genre. An intended longer stay in Los Angeles was interrupted in 1967 by the mass evacuations that preceded the Fourth Pacific War, which Riefenstahl participated in with the goal of making another documentary. As luck would have it, she would be in Tucson for the very first Battlefield Jamboree concert in 1968, which turned out to be the third act of her documentary
Running. She retired from filmmaking afterwards.
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Luis Buñuel, as in our world, had a lifelong fascination with cinema. However, due to a rather different set of circumstances, he did not go to Paris in the 1920s, as in our world. Instead, Buñuel would eventually wind up as one of the most influential film theorists and critics of the Twentieth Century, albeit with a tendency to enthusiastically promote any movie that appeared to challenge established conventions. He left Spain during the civil war in the late 1930s, and eventually reestablished himself in Los Angeles, among a large Mexican artistic community that had largely left their own country following the Imperial victory in Mexico’s own civil war. He remained in Los Angeles for most of the rest of his life, always on the periphery of the US film industry while never succeeding in breaking in.
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David Lean never became involved in filmmaking in this world (due, in part, to never receiving a camera as a gift while still a child). He started his career as an accountant before moving to Australia in the late 1920s. Lean made this move due to a combination of boredom with his work and a desire for some sort of radical change in his life, although ultimately he wound up working as an accountant in Sydney as well. He was, however, an enthusiastic movie goer throughout his life.
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Federico Fellini, in TTL, was a man of many hats, working at various times in 1950s-1960s Rome as a journalist, film critic, writer, fixer, and at one point as the part time owner of a nightclub (which failed). He never became a world famous movie director, although he always had an enthusiasm for cinema, and appeared, at one point by the late 1960s, to be at least an acquaintance of every major figure in an Italian film industry attempting to challenge the dominant Austro-Hungarian/German mega studios.
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Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda don’t exist in this world.