Pinter, authorship and entrepreneurship in 1960s British cinema: the economics of "The Quiller Memorandum"

This article uses primary sources to evaluate how Harold Pinter ’ s screenwriting for the film The Quiller Memorandum (1966) operated in the business context of film production in Britain. In the mid-1960s, British cinema both claimed forms of national distinctiveness and also sought internationalization by drawing on financial and creative resources from both continental Europe and the USA. The Pinter ‘ brand ’ , choices of cast and production personnel, and links with the ascendant spy genre of the period are argued to be aspects of a business risk reduction strategy, mitigating against such risks as working on location in Berlin and expectations set from a distance by US investors, leading to the constant requirement for budgetary management during production. These forces can be regarded as interactions between the film production company as an entrepreneurial organization, the contingent role of brands as repositories of value, and the relatively stable structures of corporate investment by large firms like Rank in the UK and National General Productions in the USA. The article draws on materials in the British Library ’ s Pinter Archive and the Film Finances Archive.

together with other sources, to debate how Pinter's screenplay related to questions of adaptation, professional networks and the economic strategies of British cinema in the mid-1960s. 2 The Pinter 'brand', choices of cast and production personnel, and links with the ascendant spy genre are argued to be aspects of a business risk reduction strategy, mitigating against risks that included working on location in Berlin and expectations set from a distance by the film's US investors. The effect was the constant requirement for budgetary management during production and rapid decision-making during shooting to address escalating costs. These forces can be regarded as interactions between the role of brands as contingent repositories of value that could be associated with the film, the relatively stable structures of corporate investment by international firms, and entrepreneurial project-based business practice organised around key individuals in small, temporary, professional networks. Making a film in the post-studio era is a form of entrepreneurial activity in which a short-term project succeeds by combining, in a new way, elements such as a screenplay, production resources of people and technologies, processes of planning and control, and an address to a specific market segment. In line with the theoretical study of entrepreneurship pioneered by Joseph Schumpeter, detailed historical study of how a film is realized can show how inherited conventions and ways of working enable and constrain individual and corporate agency, as do institutions and laws. 3 Creative work in cinema, therefore, is considered as a property not just of individuals but also professional networks, commercial firms and international corporations. This framework offers a new way of locating Pinter's role as a dramatist and his burgeoning career in cinema in the 1960s, conceptualizing his agency within these networks and levels of ownership and control and also recognizing his dependence on them.

Branding and authorship
The period leading up to Quiller in the early 1960s was when Pinter as a 'brand' or creative property with specific cultural meanings became established, and especially, the idea of the Pinteresque, which meant the dramatization of a feeling of psychological or physical menace and its relationship with ambiguous or inadequate communication. 4 Pinter began playwriting in the mid-1950s, alongside a moderately successful career as a professional actor, but his first full-length play The Birthday Party was almost universally condemned when it premiered in London in 1958. 5 The Guardian's reviewer complained that 'his characters speak in non sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings', for example. 6 But what most commentators took as wilful obscurity was heralded by Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times: 'The fact that no one can say precisely what it is about [ … ] is, of course, one of its greatest merits. It is exactly in this vagueness that its spine-chilling quality lies.' 7 Moreover, this atmosphere of menace, which did not rely on physical action but instead infused scenes set in domestic interiors, was conveyed to large popular audiences in their homes through radio and television dramatizations of Pinter's theatre work, and original dramas by him. His plays were shown on both independent commercial television and BBC television and radio. 8 Pinter quickly acquired a high public profile. Only four years after The Birthday Party's premiere, Pinter was offered the job of scripting an adaptation of the short novel, The Servant, to be directed in Britain by emigr e American Joseph Losey, 9 and in the same year an adaptation of another contemporary British novel, The Pumpkin Eater. 10 He was in a sense a successful entrepreneur, whose early choices in the cinema business changed the conditions under which his future choices were made, exhibiting what economists call 'path dependence'. 11 The first holder of film rights to The Servant had been the film director Michael Anderson, and Losey only acquired them after Anderson's failure to set up financing for his own production with Pinter as screenwriter. In gratitude to Anderson for contributing to the ensuing launch of his screenwriting career, Pinter agreed to script Anderson's next project, which was Quiller. 12 By the mid-1960s Pinter had proven his worth to the British film industry which was itself experiencing a resurgence of creativity and international appeal. 13 Pinter's authorial brand was recognizable and marketable across diverse audiences and across media, and archival documents and historical contextualization can show how economic calculations devised by others to manage their own business careers interacted with Pinter's authorship. There was a rapid escalation in his economic value as a contributor to a film's creative team. Pinter's finished script for The Servant was with Springbok Films, working from Shepperton Studios, in January 1963. 14 He had great success with the film, for which Losey's company had paid £11,500 in story rights to its author Robin Maugham and only £3,000 to Pinter for his screenplay, half upfront and half on completion. 15 By contrast, Losey's fee as director was £10,000, and the star Dirk Bogarde got the same amount. But by the time he wrote the screenplay for Quiller, Pinter (with his wife Vivien Merchant who was named as co-screenwriter) was paid five times as much. 16 Screenwriting ran alongside Pinter's continuing work on new theatre plays and was the foundation of his new-found prosperity.
Quiller is set in contemporary West Berlin, a city divided by the Cold War, but deals with not an East-West conflict but a conspiracy to mould the New Germany into a resurgent Nazi state. Pinter adapted Trevor Dudley-Smith's novel (published under the pseudonym Adam Hall), and Pinter's elliptical script emphasizes representations of place, milieu and the quotidian procedural work of spying. 17 In the novel, Quiller is a one-word codename for a British agent who is gradually revealed to have been working undercover as a guard in the concentration camps of Hitler's Final Solution at the end of the Second World War. He accepts from 'The Bureau', a branch of British Intelligence, a mission to pursue an aristocratic neo-Nazi leader codenamed Oktober; his motive in doing so is to penetrate a shadowy conspiracy aiming to give the Nazis world domination by spreading an infectious biological weapon. Quiller himself wants to take revenge on Zossen, a Nazi leader even higher up in the villains' hierarchy, whom he witnessed committing atrocities in the camps. In the book, Quiller pursues an ambivalent relationship with Inga, whose affair with him turns out to be way of distracting Quiller from her role in inculcating Nazi ideology in the schoolchildren she teaches, and a cover for her fanatical attachment to Hitler whom she recalls from her infant experiences in his bunker in 1945. Right from the first draft of his screenplay, Pinter stripped almost all of this larger history and many secondary characters from the story, leaving a linear narrative of Quiller's detection and discovery of Oktober's lair, Quiller's capture, and his escape and eventual delivery of Oktober's gang (but not Inga) to British intelligence agents and the German police. 18 The storyline becomes leaner and smaller-scale, with little historical contextualization of the characters or their actions. 19 While it is very much a spy thriller, with a car chase and a lengthy interrogation scene, its contained, interpersonal conflicts have affinity with the Pinteresque.
The package required for pre-production included the rights to the novel, negotiated by Dudley-Smith's wife Jonquil, a literary agent. 20 The producer Ivan Foxwell also needed to gather financial backers, and obtain a guarantee to underwrite the costs of production. By the mid-1960s British film production relied on US investment to cover escalating costs, and with a shrinking UK audience and control of 40% of ticket sales by the ABC and Rank cinema chains, producers sought investment by a British distributor in exchange for exclusive first-run screening rights, and designed film projects with overseas audiences in mind by casting American stars, or shooting in attractive foreign locations. 21 Foxwell got a guarantee from Film Finances, a London-based company set up in 1950 by Robert Garrett, to enable British producers to assure investors that a film would be completed. 22 The guarantee of completion gave legal authority for Film Finances to step in and finish a film, and the potentially major financial obligations thus placed on Film Finances meant it assigned an accountant to monitor the spending and production schedule of films it guaranteed. Through the detailed, often weekly reports on production a rich understanding can be gained of how Pinter's script interacted with other aspects of Quiller's production process. Film Finances also underwrote earlier and later films scripted by Pinter: The Servant, 23 Accident, 24 The Birthday Party, 25 The Go-Between 26 and The Homecoming. 27 Its records of the making of Quiller include Pinter's final shooting script on which financial calculations of the film's cost were based, and reports from locations and the studio. These documents provide a unique insight into Pinter's contribution, seeing it as a process rather than the delivery of the script as a finished product.
As Richard Coopey has noted, 'Entrepreneurship usually implies the ability of individuals or key groups to found, run, or expand an enterprise in a successful fashion. More often than not this term is seen as a heightened sense of innovation and risk-taking.' 28 But, as he goes on to argue, 'Entrepreneurship [ … ] is woven into the fabric of the capital investment process, both internally within the firm, through external relationships the firm may have with providers of funds, and within funding individuals or institutions themselves.' In February 1966, Foxwell wrote to Garrett advising him that the schedule for shooting Quiller was completed and that the budget would shortly be produced. 29 At this early stage, Foxwell sent Pinter's script to Garrett, writing that this would be 'advantageous', presumably because it would assure Garrett of the film's quality. Pinter's script and his reputation were important to the viability and attitudes to the film among those making it. Foxwell concluded his letter by asking: 'Please keep this in great confidence, but Alec Guinness is enthusiastic and wants to play the role of Pol, so the snowball of actors has started.' As an international star, having Guinness's name attached to the project boded well for its successful realization, and Pinter's name was appealing to the actors who were approached to appear in the film. Pinter was personally involved in the casting: It was a question of constant consultation between the producer, the director and myself about casting. We agreed on Alec Guinness, we agreed on von Sydow, and we agreed on Senta Burger, so that all the way along the line we were casting together, which I always do. 30 Guinness remarked, when interviewed on location in a bomb-damaged part of Berlin for a television film review programme, that Pinter's script was 'marvellous' because it left 'a lot of loose edges for the actor to fill in. It's very nice not to have an author who's saying it's got to be this or it's got to be that. I think I've invented something within Pinter's framework.' 31 Max von Sydow, playing Oktober, commended the script because 'everything is so understated. There is so little in the text actually and so much between the lines that it gives so many possibilities for a director or the actors to find their own interpretations'. 32 While actors were drawn to the words, Pinter was usually insistent that they had to speak them as written. 33 When he noticed during a viewing of Quiller's final cut that an actor had reversed the lines 'I'll drive, move over', saying instead 'Move over, I'll drive', Pinter was aghast. He recalled: 'I couldn't believe it. I nearly said "Stop! How dare you!" because I knew that wasn't what I had written.' 34 However, as he explained in a BBC documentary when Quiller had just been released: It was really mutual. He [Anderson] would pull me back quite often; a great many of the lines were greatly improved by him, I mean with me, d'you understand. Commas, and dots, and syllables, d'you know. He has a marvellous appreciation of rhythm in every way, I think. It was really a very close participation. He had ideas and I had ideas and we threw them around. 35 The film's authorship was complex not only because of its relationship with its source text, a relatively well-known popular thriller, nor just because of the collaboration between Pinter, Foxwell and Anderson. The Pinter brand worked as a badge of quality for those involved in the production and associated the film with the established cultural meanings of Pinter's stage and screen work. The economist Mark Casson has shown how the intangible values of honesty, dedication, and loyalty that are cultivated by a successful collaborative culture such as the one built up around Anderson, Foxwell and Pinter can reduce transaction costs and enhance commercial performance in a business context. 36 The film exploited those attributes Pinter became known for at Film Finances and elsewherehis dramatic craft in creating a fictional world of existential tension and unspoken menace, and his ability to collaborate effectively with the director to cast and work with actors.

The economics of Quiller
In film production, financial risk is offset by investors' confidence in the production personnel, and especially their track record of timely completion and audience appeal. Quiller's American investor, National General Productions, was a Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television production company spun out from a property business that owned cinema venues. National General Corporation owned about 250 cinemas in the USA, linked to the Twentieth Century-Fox distribution network, and the value of Quiller for the corporation is shown by the fact that Irving Levin, president of the company's entertainment business, flew to London and hosted the film's launch party at the Dorchester Hotel on 9 November 1966, the evening before the British premiere. 37 National General had confidence in Anderson, who had already cemented his reputation in the British cinema industry. 38 With the backing of the Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) he had made the war film adaptation The Dam Busters, the top film at the British box office in 1955. 39 This was followed by a co-production with American finance, an adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, but this was a commercial failure. 40 He took over from John Farrow to direct the epic Around the World in 80 Days when Farrow left because of arguments with its producer Mike Todd, and its international success gained Anderson an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe. 41 After two further films with Todd and ABPC, he made Shake Hands with the Devil for Marlon Brando's Pennebaker company, 42 and worked with the American independent producer Harold Hecht on the adventure Flight from Ashiya, 43 as well as the comedy Wild and Wonderful, 44 each featuring major Hollywood stars. The year before Quiller, MGM and the Italian mogul Carlo Ponti picked Anderson to direct their war film Operation Crossbow, 45 shot in Britain on huge soundstages and with a large international cast. Anderson had considerable experience and international reach; indeed, he had lived in Germany as a child and his collaborator on The Dam Busters, Quiller and other films, emigr e German cameraman Erwin Hillier, had trained at UFA studios in Berlin and worked under Fritz Lang. 46 Anderson was a plausible choice to helm Quiller, a co-produced thriller shot in Berlin and on Pinewood's soundstages, with an international cast headed by the US star George Segal (as Quiller), Guinness as Quiller's superior from British intelligence, and the Austrian star Senta Berger as Inga. While National General was behaving entrepreneurially in backing Quiller, it adopted a risk management strategy based on its trust in the film's creative team and established strategies of casting to appeal to a range of international markets.
The producer, Ivan Foxwell, had also been successful in the 1950s British film industry, often working with Guy Hamilton as his screenwriting partner and director. 47 They made The Intruder, based on Robin Maugham's novel (whose The Servant would be Pinter's first adaptation); 48 but they were most successful with their co-authored adaptation of the prisoner of war memoir The Colditz Story. 49 Foxwell and Hamilton also collaborated on the comedy thriller A Touch of Larceny, 50 starring James Mason, and worked with him again on the comedy Tiara Tahiti that included location work on the island. 51 Quiller would be Foxwell's most ambitious and expensive project, but one that built on his experience with location shooting, American stars and mainstream genres.
Sidney Streeter, the production manager responsible for the schedule and budget for Quiller, was linked into important networks of British cinema production. He had started in the 1930s and was production manager on the war films In Which We Serve 52 and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. 53 He continued with them in the immediate postwar period, organising shooting schedules and directing second unit photography. By 1966, Streeter had supervised production on Powell's The Queen's Guards, 54 and, immediately before Quiller, he was working with Anderson on Operation Crossbow with a script co-written by his former colleague Pressburger (under the pseudonym Richard Imrie). Streeter had a consistent track record on films that secured international distribution and economic success.
Despite Quiller's relatively lavish American funding, Foxwell presented it to Film Finances as a lean and efficient project. In a letter to Garrett accompanying the first draft of the budget and schedule, he wrote: The art director is Maurice Carter and you will see that I have put in a very cautious figure for set construction but hope to bring this in at a considerably reduced figure. The reason I have been particularly cautious is that whenever there has been the slightest doubt in determining sets for Studio or location I have made it Studio. 55 Carter recalled that quality was uppermost in the production team's thoughts at the time: 'they all started off convinced that it was going to be an Oscar picture, [ … ] they were determined to make it as an artistic picture as they possibly could and it was shot largely, almost entirely in Berlin.' 56 The decision to use locations for so many scenes was the result of this pursuit of artistic quality, and Carter recalled that 'we shot on the actual sites, and we shot in the old Japanese Embassy bombed, in Berlin, in the Tiergarten.' Carter's team copied the rooms in the Embassy for the studio interiors at Pinewood, 'in this wonderful state of desolation or abandonment'. Carter was accustomed to elaborate set construction, for example on the historical drama Becket and this explains Foxwell's anticipation of criticism from Film Finances over the costs of realizing Pinter's script. 57 Film Finances employed the very experienced accounts analyst John Croydon to assess the proposed budgets for all the film projects that it guaranteed. Croydon analysed the draft budget for Quiller and provided a detailed three-page report. 58 He was critical of the methodologies employed by the production manager to calculate the film's cost: The film is obviously expected to be a top-quality job; in fact the script indicates that this is so in no uncertain terms. Yet, the X-plot is, I think, somewhat haphazardly put together. In the first place, it seems to be schedule [sic] on a page basis and someone has applied the 'slide rule' principle to it.
An 'X-plot', or cross-plot, is a chart representing the production process on a spreadsheet where each aspect is scheduled along the critical path towards timely completion. Croydon's objection was that the budget and schedule had been based on rule-of-thumb estimates ('the "slide rule" principle')for example, that one page of script equals one minute of screen-time, or that a certain number of hours' shooting will result in a specific number of minutes of completed film. These rough calculations would be affected by the complexity of each shot but, Croydon thought, 'I would guess that, in some cases, the production manager does not know how a particular sequence is to be shot, where or under what conditions.' The effect was to introduce financial risk.

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
There were decisions that Croydon did not understand, and scenes that he thought were unviable to shoot or had been planned in an unnecessarily expensive way. 'Anderson would be hard put to it to maintain the rate of shooting stipulated. I think the location schedule could easily be exceeded by one week and a great deal of that in the night shooting.' 59 Croydon pointed out that it was not clear whether the film would have a second unit to shoot action sequences such as the car chase that is central to its second half. Scenes in the garage of Quiller's hotel at the end of the film, where Quiller's car is blown up, had been scheduled to be shot both in the studio and also on location, without explanation. In the scenes set in a swimming pool that Quiller visits as he retraces the movements of the assassinated agent Kenneth Lindsay Jones ('KLJ'), Croydon noted that in some of the scenes the pool should be full of water (during its daytime opening hours) while in others the pool would be empty (at night), yet the schedule left no time for the pool to be emptied and filled. On several occasions during the studio shoot the cast and crew had to move from one set to another on the same day, which Croydon thought was more time-consuming than had been allowed for. The studio work involved building complex set elements such as a lift without a ceiling, and complex sequences were scheduled in the final days of production when usually these would be tackled early on to allow for potential complications. He advised aggressive action: 'My feeling is that the schedule should be attacked, with, if possible, some additional money to cover what I think will be the over-schedule position on location, i.e. at night, the most expensive outlay.' 60 Croydon was concerned that this high-profile international production was being attempted without proper cost control, placing impossible demands on the crew and probably leading to an overspend that would prevent timely completion.
Obviously big risks apply to a film of this magnitude; the distributors, especially perhaps the Americans, will want the best possible film and usually this is achieved without much reference to the cost. Unfortunately, it is my opinion that the schedule does not give the director time in which to ensure that his first attempt acquires the quality that will undoubtedly be demanded!!! 61 Croydon's triple exclamation marks and frank tone make clear his dissatisfaction. Pinter's script could have been realized with much less location work, more quickly and cheaply, by using the studio backlots at Pinewood (owned by Rank, an investor in the film) that were routinely used for both cinema and filmed television projects that simulated international locations. 62 So Streeter submitted a new schedule to Film Finances, and Croydon reported on it in another letter to Garrett. 63 He was much happier: 'I think that, given any luck at all, Anderson might have a chance of completing the location work on time.' 64 Despite some objections, he concluded that 'provided Anderson hasn't changed his ways I think there is a very reasonable prospect of this schedule being achieved.' 65 The final budget had been based on face-to-face discussions between Foxwell, Streeter and representatives of Film Finances. As was normal practice, Anderson was required to sign an undertaking that sufficient film stock had been budgeted for, since the celluloid was a major component of the shooting cost, 66 and when Anderson signed he was committing himself to delivering Quiller as a 'top-quality job' with the resources available. 67 Contracts to finance the film were signed on 24 May 1966. 68 It would be shot in colour with Panavision cameras, with six weeks on location in Berlin and six weeks at Pinewood. 69 In pre-production, £89,144 was expected to be spent, the majority being for story rights and Pinter's script. Dudley-Smith and his wife got £20,000 up-front but also benefitted from 5% of the film's net profit. In addition to their £7,500 each, Pinter and Merchant got 1% of the film's net profit with an option to take this as a cash settlement instead. 70 The star, Segal, was contracted for ten weeks plus a further fortnight of contingency time, and two days for dubbing dialogue in post-production. This came to $156,000, with a further $1,000 per week for living expenses. Senta Berger got less than half as much, £20,000, for twelve weeks' work, and von Sydow got $100,000. Guinness was by far the greatest cost, although his scenes occupied less screen time. His fee was $250,000, and he was required for only three days on location. Anderson's director's fee was £78,571, a significant element of the overall budget. When the film went on location, the estimated cost was £172,301, but in the studio the much larger sum of £491,226 was budgeted. To shoot the interiors at Pinewood the production got a package deal that included the largest soundstage, a medium stage and the backprojection studio, office space, cutting rooms and the film vault. Quiller's overall budget was £956,339, but £50,000 of that was contingency, £50,999 for finance and legal charges, and £30,357 for overhead payments of £10,000 to Foxwell's production company and $50,000 to National General for its investment. Planning the film was an exercise in risk management; Pinter's script established initial cost parameters, and script development, casting and directorial decision-making in which he collaborated also affected the budget. Once shooting started, Pinter continued to be involved as circumstances required changes to be made and costs controlled.

Shooting Pinter's script
Shooting started on Monday 9 May 1966. Each week the production's chief cost accountant, S. A. Fallow, who was assigned to the film by its British investor Rank, sent a report to Film Finances summarising the work done and detailing any under-or over-spending. Pinter often remarked on how many of his film screenplays had resulted in completed filmsby no means the normand also on his insistence that his scripts were shot exactly as presented on the page. 71 However, while Quiller is indeed similar in its completed form to what Pinter submitted to Foxwell's production office, there are some important changes, all of them omissions from the script. 72 Pinter helped to make these changes during shooting: I was very heartened when they went to Berlin on location that I received a number of phone calls: the most minute points of dialogue and action from Anderson. In other words, he would ring me and say, 'Look you've got a stage direction here and the line following. Don't you think it would actually be better if the line came first and the stage, the action afterwards', in any Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television given case and if I didn't think so I'd say so and he wouldn't actually do it, d'you know, and quite often he was absolutely right. 73 The first week of filming in West Berlin included shop and street locations on the Kuf€ urstendamm. Already, Anderson was £514 over-budget because of bringing two extra personnel to Berlin, using more film stock than planned, and overspending on transportation. 74 Anderson acted quickly and saved £13,071 by casting the local actor Peter Carsten as Hengel, the agent assigned to protect Quiller. 75 Similarly, he saved £2,520 by casting the minor role of Grauber (Ernst Walder) in Berlin. He cut the script's short Scene 22 in the lobby of Quiller's hotel, 76 which served only to convey that Quiller never carried a gun. He also cut Scene 36 in which Hengel commits himself to tailing Quiller. Scene 83 was abbreviated, in which Quiller meets Weng (Robert Helpman) who takes Quiller to meet his handler, Pol, after Quiller's capture by and subsequent escape from Oktober. These changes did not impact much on the realization of Pinter's script, but Anderson's other key decision at this point certainly did.
Pinter's script included Scenes 16 and 17 in a nightclub where a young expatriate American man performed in drag as Lana and where a burly transvestite Andre worked behind the bar. 77 Quiller fruitlessly questioned both about the fate of KLJ. This whole sequence was deleted, saving the costs both of shooting and also the £2,000 budgeted for the actors' fees. The aesthetic effect was to lessen the sense of Berlin's sleaziness and decadence, a clear counterpoint to the slick self-confidence of the New Germany. Performance, and the gap between an optimistic, modern surface appearance versus a corrupt, atavistic reality underneath are important to the structural patterns of Trevor's novel. It begins with a scene at a theatre, and features Lana's cabaret performance whose (almost literal) d enouement is the casting-off of his ostentatiously feminine costume to reveal his youthful male body beneath, and Inga's pretence of being a caring schoolteacher that conceals her obsessive love for the dead F€ uhrer. Pinter's script retained traces of these questions of identity, but Anderson's decisions to cut scenes during production muted the emotional tone of the film and removed some of its potential focus on extremist politics as a symptom of psychic pathology, as well as diluting the issue of deceptive appearance that affects whether any of the characters can be trusted.
Anderson continued to overspend on film stock and on cast and crew transportation as the shoot moved to the swimming bath and school locations where Quiller investigates KLJ's final movements. 78 Anderson was shooting largely in story order, though the next week Guinness arrived in Berlin and scenes at the Olympic Stadium and the British agents' base (from the beginning and end of the story respectively) were filmed. 79 A week of night shooting followed, incurring delays just as Croydon had expected. 80 The production stayed in Berlin for five additional nights, subsequently extended to six, flying back on 23 June. 81 Because of heavy rain, Anderson made do with one fewer night of shooting than planned, finishing his location work with the scene in a bowling alley where Quiller continues to track KLJ's movements. 82 The cast and crew moved into Pinewood studios on 27 June, by which time the longer stay in Berlin had added £7,000 to the film's costs, but Streeter offset this by rescheduling the studio work over twenty-five days, five fewer than budgeted, saving £10,260. 83 But by the end of July, the studio scenes had still not been finished, pushing the film two more days behind schedule. Segal was needed on set, costing an extra £3,214 to retain his services. 84 By 6 August the main shooting with actors was completed. 85 The last scenes to be shot were with the intelligence service mandarins Gibbs (George Saunders) and Rushington (Robert Flemyng) on location in the dining room of the Reform Club in London, deciding over lunch to send Quiller to Berlin. 86 By this point, the film was one day over schedule. 87 The production was averaging 1 minute and 50 seconds of screen time each day, a respectable ratio, and Streeter's progress report shows that Anderson had efficient control of the shoot and the ability to make decisions on the spot to deal with problems and exploit opportunities. 88 He used Berlin locations more than expected: 63 minutes and 12 seconds had been shot on location, versus 49 minutes and 11 seconds in the studio. Pinter's shooting script contained 148 scenes, but by 6 August 153 scenes had been shot after changes to reduce cost by building fewer sets, eliminating studio days and cutting lesser roles. All this simplified Pinter's version of the story even further than the already slimmed-down adaptation he initially scripted.
The screenplay Pinter delivered includes a first meeting between Quiller and Pol at the bird house of Berlin Zoo (not the Olympic Stadium). At first, Quiller approaches an unnamed man who speaks in German throughout; Quiller is there for a rendezvous with an agent whose appearance he does not know. Quiller makes clear that he is a regular visitor to the Zoo, 'an expert on birds', and talks to a parrot. Quiller asks the man, incongruously, 'Where would I find a praying mantis around here?', then walks away when the man replies 'You won't find any praying mantises here. This is a bird house.' Clearly, Quiller's question was a coded signal, and he has approached the wrong person. Then a similar exchange takes place between Quiller and Pol, when Pol asks 'Any idea where I can find a praying mantis?' to which Quiller replies 'Male or female?' This coded confirmation of identity initiates a conversation and then another scene where they look at the zoo's polar bears, telling each other (and thus the audience) their names, then they walk to the buffalo compound. Only at this point does the dialogue follow that of the film as shot, when Pol notes that Quiller has been working in the Middle East and explains Quiller's mission.
In the remainder of August and up to 17 September 1966, a fine cut of the film was made. 89 Dialogue was recorded by the main cast and sound effects added. Being now able to predict the film's timely completion confidently, Foxwell's completion guarantee was no longer needed and he asked Film Finances for his No Claims Bonus back. 90 The film was £43,602 under-budget when delivered to Rank on 2 November. 91 The production team's flexibility, effectiveness and ability to be creative at short notice, with Anderson taking a strong lead supported by Pinter's active collaboration, had enabled successful completion. As the British economist Edith Penrose suggested, in an innovative theory of how economic growth occurs, every firm experiences risk in its business activities, and key individuals like Foxwell and Anderson become 'risk bearers' who must deal with unexpected challenges. But as Penrose argued, an entrepreneurial firm can function as a resilient risk management system, as the structure was that brought Anderson, Pinter and Foxwell together with other production personnel, resources and professional competences to make Quiller: 'uncertainty and risk, though affecting the amount of expansion that a firm will plan, will affect it only to the extent that managerial resources are unavailable to deal with it.' 92 Worth the price?
Quiller was marketed as a spy movie, positioning the film for its audiences and setting up distinctions and connections with comparators. By 1966, spy hits Dr No (1962) and Goldfinger (1964) had led to a series of imitations and parodies, exaggerating sex, action or verisimilitude, debating new kinds of masculinity, modernity and the bloodlessly administrative aspects of the Cold War conflict, and fuelling competition for rights to suitable literary properties for adaptation. 93 Quiller shares some iconography, personnel and aesthetic tone with spy films of its period. 94 Indeed, one the film's posters declared: 'QUILLER is not just another spy and THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM is not just another spy story', deftly linking the film to the genre cycle and separating it at the same time. Poster iconography included a graphical collage of a naked man and woman in bed, Berlin street-signs and an urban elevated railway, identifying the sexual freedom associated with spy mythology and the Cold War setting. The previous year's bleak spy thriller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had a poster with similar iconography. 95 Quiller's score was by John Barry, although the music lacks the punch or striking instrumentation of Barry's Bond scores, and Matt Monro sings the mournful, romantic song 'Wednesday's Child' over Quiller's closing credits, similar to Monro's 'From Russia With Love' for the eponymous 1963 film. 96 The narrative focuses on ratiocination, not action, but the spy and war film genres offered conventions that the screenplay could play off, as Pinter had done in his theatre work when amplifying the domestic entrapment that naturalistic room settings, or the repetitious detail of everyday conversation, offered for generating menace beneath quotidian experience. In Quiller, bright, urban locations like Inga's school emphasize the New Germany's modernity, but details of sets and props visually link the present with Nazi history. 97 For example, the stadium refurbished by the Nazis for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where Quiller meets Pol, was a substitute for Pinter's zoo location, responding to Anderson's recognition of its possibilities while on site in Berlin. Although the ingredients of Pinter's script are key to the film's market positioning, other decisions by Anderson and his team, and the distributors' marketing departments, for example, also frame its identity.
The British distributor, Rank, screened Quiller nationally in its cinemas, benefitting from ticket sales and also from the fee paid for its initial investment. Twentieth Century-Fox, Quiller's US distributor, calculated receipts from the film's international first-run screenings. Against the total cost of $2.6 million, the film made $2.575 million. 98 But this apparent loss takes no account of the sale of subsidiary rights (for example, for television screening and tie-in merchandise) but more importantly of accounting practices that concealed US profits from Britishbased productions. US investors like National General had financed 75% of films released in Britain in 1966, 99 mainly the higher-budget productions, and just before Quiller's release the Monopolies Commission recognized a dearth of domestic investment and the stranglehold by ABC and Rank over distribution, but did not propose measures in response. 100 The National Film Finance Corporation's annual report for 1965 presented British producers as free entrepreneurs, despite their dependence on corporate finance: 'producers are still effectively free-lance, even though they may regularly make use of the attractive facilities available to them and may have certain contractual arrangements with the organizations concerned'. 101 British law allowed American investors to offset costs of UK film production against tax due in the UK, thus National General benefited both from the lower cost of making Quiller in British studios compared to Hollywood and also from tax deductions on its income. Apparent loss-making productions such as Quiller could also be set against profits from such overseas investments.
Pinter was working on his next film-project, Accident, for Losey while Quiller was being made, and he delivered the finished script to Losey's agent at The Grade Organisation in early May 1966. 102 It was only a third as costly as Quiller -£299,772 on completion. 103 Croydon summarised: 'The story and script is typically Harold Pinter and concerns marital infidelity', and although he described the form of the script as 'Pinter's usual "shorthand"'it was 'nevertheless entirely clear' as a template for production. 104 Losey's The Go Between, also scripted by Pinter, was another international production with distribution via Columbia Pictures in the USA and a similar budget to Quiller. Croydon remarked in his initial report on its schedule and budget that 'obviously in translation it has acquired a great deal of Pinter'. 105 He regarded the script as a very professional job, implicitly comparing Pinter's work favourably with Losey's: 'The script is quite well presented; is broken down to a very great extent but whether the break-down represents the manner in which Losey will direct is another matter'. Losey was known to work quickly, but with a tendency towards creative experimentation that could pose financial risk. As this article has shown, Pinter had proven that he could deliver screenplays for commercially successful, international projects that contributed to a resurgence in British film-making. That resurgence was driven by a combination of personal creative agency, entrepreneurship by individuals and firms, and a resilient framework of corporate, legal and financial structures that stimulated both risk and reward.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).