The 50-Year Struggle to Make ‘Bethune’

Filmline International presents a Pieter Kroonenburg / Nicolas Clermont Production / a Phillip Borsos Film / An official Canada - China - France co-production produced in association with Eiffel / Swann Paris, August First Film Studio Beijing, CBC, China Film Co-Production Corp. with the participation of Telefilm Canada and Bethune Partnership Ltd.

Not exactly sexy language, but then film credits in their sometimes jaw-breaking confusion aren’t supposed to excite. But behind that array of words is the story of a movie project that took almost 50 years to get done, rattling and bumping along, cruising at times, but mostly skidding, stalling and slipping around as it moved across Canada, China, Spain, France and, at various times, in and out of Hollywood.

How this movie came about reveals a lot about the way Hollywood works--then, now and in the future.

In early 1942, a 26-year-old writer, Ted Allan, sold a 185-page treatment for $25,000 to producer Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox. It was to be an epic about the radical Canadian medical doctor Norman Bethune, who exchanged a civilian practice for the battlefields of Communist revolutionary leader Mao Tse-tung and later joined Republican forces fighting against the Spanish strongman Francisco Franco. Five producers, five deals and 48 years later the film was completed. Allan’s story, “Bethune: The Making of a Hero,” starring Donald Sutherland, Helen Mirren and Helen Shaver, was seen for the first time this year at the Cannes and Montreal film festivals and Thursday for the first time in the United States, at the Mill Valley festival.

Clearly in these days of auctioned scripts and million-dollar-plus writing deals, “Bethune” may have set a record for marathon dealmaking, development, persistence, hope and producer credits.

But for the fact that five years ago some filmmakers in Canada got together and joined forces with some like-minded people in China, Spain, Holland and France and lined up a cast of Canadian, American, English and French actors and scratched together about $17 million, this two-hour movie may not have been made.

This multinational form of filmmaking is called co-production and more and more low- and medium-budget film and TV producers are doing it, since heavy expenses are shared and distribution is promised. In its most oversimplified form it’s a partnership, a slicing of the economic pie. The deal starts with a producer and a story and, hopefully, a star. When the producer doesn’t have enough money to make the entire movie, partners are sought. Maybe a television network looking for an exclusive movie and willing to spend some money or maybe a foreign producer willing to exchange studios and locations and actor salaries for future box-office receipts.

The CBS television movie “Coins in the Fountain” is a recent example of a co-production deal involving some American companies and a European partner, shot overseas with American stars and foreign co-stars.

For more than 40 years, Allan tried to get his movie made the traditional, big-studio way where one company does everything. When he first sold the script, then variously titled “Bethune” and “Lifetide,” there was talk of casting Walter Pidgeon as the Canadian doctor who developed the mobile surgical unit (as in “MASH”) in China and of filming in the Orient. But wartime 1942 was no time for picture making in that part of the world, so the treatment languished. No talk of stars or script. The war years passed and the Cold War and the 1950s set in and who in Hollywood was going to make a film about a cantankerous, single-minded Communist doctor anyway?

In the late ‘60s, as the Cold War thawed intermittently, Allan bought his treatment back from Fox and wrote a screenplay, selling that to an independent producer. But that option also lapsed. Another producer bought it. Another lapsed option. In 1972 President Nixon went to China to meet with Mao, and some American studio heads began to entertain China-based scripts. Allan had renamed his script “The Long March” and “Making of a Hero.” Columbia took a long-term option, he says, and held on to it through several executive changes but then passed and Warner Bros. optioned it. Again nothing.

“I made enough money on options to keep me going all those years,” Allan says now. “My agent said this story would never die. He was right. It kept getting me options all those years. I sold it five times and bought it back once.” While he was depositing option money Allan kept writing: co-authoring a book on Bethune plus assorted screenplays, including “Lies My Father Told Me” and “Love Streams.”

In the mid ‘80s Allan’s daughter Julie, an employee of the independent Canadian film company Filmline, showed the “Bethune” script to her bosses, Nicolas Clermont and Pieter Kroonenburg. Why not a motion picture on Bethune, to some a heroic radical figure in Canada, China and parts of Spain? Hadn’t an earlier Canadian Broadcasting Corp. television movie on the doctor, also starring Sutherland, stirred up strong ratings in Canada? What prompted Julie Allan to get her company interested in her father’s script was a short news item in a Hollywood trade newspaper about China opening an import-export office in Los Angeles. As early as the mid-’50s, some Chinese film producers approached Allan about making a Bethune movie, a sanitized, glorified version. He insisted on a warts-and-all production, they wanted sainthood. He stuck with womanizing, drinking and bullheadedness. They passed.

But this was 1985, so Julie Allan contacted the Chinese officials and set up a breakfast meeting with them in Monterey Park where she talked about her father’s script and they wondered about a possible co-production.

For the next six months, messages crossed between China and Canada. Coincident to all of this, the governments of the two countries signed a treaty for mutual filmmaking. Eventually a deal was struck. The Chinese provided the August One Studio, the film studio of the Red Army, plus almost all the below-the-line costs: studios, sets, extras, some actors, transportation. The co-production deal was set to roll.

“What it cost Bertolucci and Spielberg $5 million to $6 million to shoot in China cost us nothing,” producer Clermont said, referring to “The Last Emperor” and “Empire of the Sun,” which also were shot in China in the 1980s.

Well, not exactly nothing if you count the future as a monetary unit. The Chinese got theater distribution rights for China and Eastern Europe. Filmline’s costs were salaries for its stars and its imported crew, plus director Phillip Borsos.

“Bethune” filming began in 1987 and lasted 17 weeks. Then what the producers politely call hiatus set in. Work stopped. Money was running short, some actors were no longer available. Rewriting had to be done.

But if a co-production partnership could work in the East, why not one in the West? Subsequently another deal was worked out. This time with French producer Jacques Dorfmann, who was also trying to make a film in China. This the producers call “twinning,” another form of co-production involving joint actors, joint crews, additional French and Canadian investors. Dorfmann would provide European distribution for the Canadian film and his own production while Filmline held on to North American distribution for “Bethune” plus distribution of Dorfmann’s movie.

“Bethune: The Making of a Hero” goes into distribution in Canada later this month but so far no American distributor has signed on. An earlier U.S. deal died but the partners have hopes of closing in on a distributor this month. They talk of showing their movie in December in Los Angeles, then nationwide next year in specialty theaters.

“We’ve spent the better part of the past five years on this movie,” Clermont says. “We’ll get a distributor.”

The critics who have seen the movie at Cannes and Montreal generally have given it a warm international blessing. So far the only heat or controversy generated in its screenings was produced by Donald Sutherland, who surprised almost everyone at the Montreal Film Festival when he said that Allan shouldn’t get writer credit for the movie, that an American living in Canada, Dennis Clark, deserved it.

It was news to the producers.

It was also news to the Canadian writers guild, which has since asked Sutherland to prove it.

And certainly for a 74-year-old Canadian it was news.