Old London Telegraph Article

This old article from the Daily Telegraph of London should fill some of the gaps in the mysterious backstory behind this film and its sister production, Ken Annakin's "Genghis Khan" . . . it's a pretty strange tale (and not even worth the bother, if the early reviews from Russia are anything to go by).



Sunday Telegraph
June 2, 1996, Sunday

MISSING: ONE $40m EPIC

It cost an estimated $40m, featured a cast of thousands and took almost two years to make, but the film version of 'And Quiet Flows the Don' has disappeared, and so has its producer. Anne Hanley takes up the story

IN 1992, the Russian film director Sergei Bondarchuk finished shooting his epic version of Mikhail Sholokhov's novel, And Quiet Flows the Don. An entire village had been constructed on the banks of the River Don and 10,000 extras drafted in for the battle scenes. With Rupert Everett in the starring role and an estimated budget of $40m, the finished film ran to three and a half hours - the television version to 10. Four years later, And Quiet Flows the Don has never been screened, the whereabouts of the negative are unknown and the film's producer, Enzo Rispoli, has vanished. No one connected with the film has any doubt that Rispoli's disappearance and that of the negative are linked - although there's little agreement on where either of them might be. A front-page article in a recent edition of the Russian newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, claimed that the film was locked away in a Moscow bank vault, having been sold to the Rossiiski Credit Institute for a meagre $1m. This theory, however, has been given little credence. So where could it be? "Gathering dust in Naples, I expect," was Rupert Everett's somewhat peeved guess. And Rispoli? "In Los Angeles, looking for a post-production backer," ventured Thomas Tassara, one of the movie's production team. "I believe he's in London, after a stopover in Hollywood," said Walter Massi, production secretary on And Quiet Flows the Don. "Why that film hasn't been sold yet is a complete mystery." It is not the only one. Little is known of Enzo Rispoli's background. Brought up in Naples, he seems to have had no previous experience of film production. But at the end of the 1980s, the stream of Italian producers flooding into Russia with its low costs and high state subsidies was in full spate. Rispoli joined the flow with a grand vision which far outstripped anyone else's - not content with an adaptation of And Quiet Flows the Don, a massive tale of the Russian Revolution through Cossack eyes, he also planned to film screen biographies of Tamburlaine and Genghis Khan. Tamburlaine remained on the drawing board. The money for Genghis Khan dried up abruptly in the very early stages. "I'll never forget, I got a call at home at two in the morning from a group of desperate crew members who found they'd been abandoned in Tadjikistan, or somewhere, without a rouble," recalled Camillo Coppolo, of the Filis-Cgil entertainment workers' union. "We've been trying to sue Rispoli for years. Those people had contracts. But it's so difficult to get your hands on him. It's like chasing ghosts. It's just one front company after another." Given Rispoli's Russian track record, the fact that And Quiet Flows the Don came so tantalisingly close to readiness for cinema screens before vanishing is little short of a miracle. But how it made it that far is not at all clear. No one - except, perhaps, Rispoli himself - knows where the money for the film came from. "Everyone was very nervous, money-wise," recalled Thomas Tassara, one of whose jobs was to ferry crisp, high-denomination US bills from Italy to Russia. "No, not," he said, "in a suitcase. That would have been too obvious." But he wasn't prepared to say just how he carried what he described as a "bomb of money" across so many international borders. Nor would he speculate on whether the bills were part of an estimated $1 billion - half of all the dollars circulating in Russia today - printed by mafiosi in Naples. "Rispoli said that banks had put the money up, but if they did, they only partly covered the costs. They certainly didn't cover post-production." Walter Massi, who administered the funds as they arrived, didn't consider the question of where the money came from to be of any importance. "It reached us regularly," he said dismissively. "Everything went according to plan. In fact, thanks to careful management, the film remained well under budget. It all went very smoothly." Rupert Everett, however, would beg to differ. "We were on strike half the time. We never knew when our next payment was coming along. Obviously, this isn't my idea and I have no evidence to back it up, but there were some people who reckoned that the film was just an enormous money-laundering operation. I wouldn't say it cost $40m to make, that's for sure. I'd say nearer $8m or L9m." Rispoli's own statistics for And Quiet Flows the Don were in line with his wildly ambitious Russian production schedule. In an interview with the Italian news agency ANSA in 1992, he put total costs at $45m and said that the battle scenes rivalled those of War and Peace, the eight-hour epic which won an Oscar for Bondarchuk in 1968.

THERE can be no doubt that the production was done on a scale worthy of the grandest Hollywood epics. As well as Everett, the cast included F. Murray Abraham and Ben Gazzara. A large international crew was kept on location for close on two years, witnessing the fall of the Soviet Union from the desolate steppe where temperatures plunged to -35 in winter. "I hope the film makes it onto the screen just to make up for that," said Everett; "35 below is not something you forget in a hurry." Walter Massi, who puts the cost of the film at "somewhat around $20m or $22m, give or take a million", is oddly undecided about the artistic worth of the end product. "I'm one of the few people who have seen the film right the way through and I can tell you, it's a splendid film, visually stunning. A real work of art. And crushingly slow. The kind of boredom that only Russians know how to create. What it needed was a good Hollywood editor to sort it out." Again, Everett disagrees. "It was all right. Bondarchuk did a good job, given the conditions he was working under. But he was working from a script for a mini-series, then they expected him to turn it into a film too. You can't blame him if it didn't work. There are some good bits in it. The one great thing about it is its Russian-ness." When Bondarchuk handed the reels over to Rispoli in 1992 to be taken to the West for post-production, editing work was, as far as the director was concerned, complete. "I last saw Bondarchuk two years ago, shortly before his death," says the Italian director, Giorgio Ferrara. "He was desperate. He didn't know what to do about And Quiet Flows the Don. He'd put everything into that movie. He was almost 70 when they started filming, and he suspected it would be his last. Then it vanished into thin air. Films just don't disappear like that." Now Bondarchuk's family have taken up the cause, blaming the pain caused by Rispoli's actions for the director's death in October 1994. His widow Irina Skobtseva, the actress who played Helene in his War and Peace, claims that the whole business continues to give her sleepless nights. "I worked day and night with my husband to put that film together. I still recall every shot, every scene. But now I'm afraid that the film has been sacrificed to the demands of television." Everett, too, was disparaging about the idea of Rispoli tampering with the finished product. "If he's looking to interest Hollywood in it, he's barking up the wrong tree. He hasn't got a clue what Hollywood wants. Anyway, he's too daft to get it on the screen," he said, describing the producer as "a Neapolitan builder". "He's all enthusiasm, that man, without an ounce of practical common sense." Which is, perhaps, why And Quiet Flows the Don made it as far as it did. Practical common sense might have told Rispoli that sinking money into an epic in which war degenerates into revolution and then into civil war with only the most tenuous and rather brutal love story to add human interest was a loser from the start. It might have convinced him to pull out of Russia as the entire political and financial structure collapsed around him. If it was enthusiasm that got him thus far, he's going to need plenty more in the near future. Only unbounded energy and the hot breath of investors - whoever they may be - on the back of his neck will get And Quiet Flows the Don onto cinema screens now. But at this point, it's a race against time. "Every film has its sell-by date," commented Walter Massi. "And Quiet Flows the Don is getting perilously close to reaching it. Rispoli can't afford to lie low much longer."