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Good afternoon Insiders, welcome back to another edition of our weekly newsletter to cap off what’s been a busy week. I’m Max Goldbart. Do sign up here.

‘Salt Path’ Scandal

What’s in a story?: Up until last Sunday, Gillian Anderson pic The Salt Path, a true-to-life underdog film about a couple made homeless who walk along a South England coastal path, was a local box office hit. Then, The Observer dropped a bombshell investigation, questioning multiple elements of the couple’s story and revealing that the author of the source material, Raynor Winn, was once arrested after being accused of stealing tens of thousands of pounds from her employer. What’s followed has been an almost nationwide debate around truth, fiction and just how far Raynor Winn was able to push the believability of her story. Given that it is supposed to be a raw, honest re-telling of a couple finding light amid disaster, The Observer report called the very essence of the book into question. Having spoken to multiple experts, it also queried Raynor’s husband Moth Winn’s CBD, a debilitating disorder that has an average life expectancy of 6-8 years, and which he has been living with for more than double that period. Both the book’s publisher Penguin and the movie’s producer Number 9 Films said they had undertaken “all due diligence,” yet the messy affair raises interesting questions over just how far these efforts should stretch, and just how far Raynor Winn had been stretching her story. She hit back furiously Wednesday, issuing a lengthy statement partnered with hard medical evidence of Moth Winn’s CBD, while calling The Observer’s report “grotesquely unfair, highly misleading and [seeking] to systematically pick apart my life.” 

Disney & ITV Deal

‘Love Island’ meets ‘The Bear’: It’s been a summer of streamer-broadcaster co-operation. The latest American SVoD to land a bedfellow is Disney+, which has struck a landmark deal with ITV that will see a “Taste of Disney+” rail feature on ITVX and vice versa. Content heading to ITV includes The Bear, Andor and The Kardashians, while Love Island, Mr Bates vs the Post Office and Vera head the other way. Karl Holmes, Disney+’s boss in EMEA, told us the secret of the deal’s success will be in its complementary nature, (Less than 10% of Disney+’s audience is over the age of 55, while for ITV the figure is around 40%) while ITV content chief Kevin Lygo labeled the tie-up a “mutually beneficial alliance.” Free-to-air VoD players and U.S. streamers will “come closer in the future,” Holmes said, as he teased more Disney partnerships of this ilk to come. Disney hasn’t been the only big player looking to collaborate. Netflix and France’s TF1 struck a “new kind of partnership” last month that will see the former carry channels from the latter, while Amazon and France Télévisions did similarly for France Télévisions’ streaming service a couple weeks later. The new age is upon us and collaboration between old and new is the name of the game.

Britain & France Team On Cinema Pact

‘Plein’ sailing: More collaboration, this time between nations, was revealed after French President Emmanuel Macron visited the UK this week. Macron was in Britain to try and strike a UK-France illegal migration deal but his trip offered an opportunity for the two nations’ movie industries to deepen ties. As Macron hob-nobbed with King Charles, Kate Middleton and the Prime Minister, the BFI and France’s CNC signed a Moving Image Co-operation Agreement aimed at fostering closer collaboration between the UK and French film industries. Given the strength of their respective movie sectors, Mel’s dispatch from the BFI Southbank, where the deal was revealed, notes that co-operation of this ilk has not always been straightforward. The two have vastly different financing systems and legislation, while Brexit has been an impediment to collaboration. Never one to miss an opportunity to address a crowd of culture vultures, UK Minister Chris Bryant, who speaks fluent French, waxed lyrical about French cinema, citing Plein Soleil and Les Enfants du Paradis as personal faves.

Czeching Out Karlovy Vary

Soft power “depleting”: There was some serious star power in town at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), with Dakota Johnson, Michael Douglas and Peter Sarsgaard making the journey to the Czech Republic for what is always a lively event. But in one of the more intriguing sessions, Hollywood’s very status as a titan of global cinema was called into question. The latest Nostradamus report from the Göteborg Film Festival, which was unveiled during the Karlovy industry sidebar, found that Hollywood is losing its “symbolic value” in mainstream culture, as it went on to posit that America’s soft power is being depleted despite the appearance of the A-list stars. “The concept of Americanization has been quite challenged for some time,” Göteborg boss Josef Kullengärd told an audience at the KVIFF industry headquarters. This session came after one where more local concerns were aired, as figureheads made impassioned speeches about how far-right purges are threatening cultural sectors in Hungary and Slovakia. Elsewhere, there remained plenty of glitz and glamor. One of the most popular sessions was Fifty Shades star Johnson’s, who had two films at the fest, Celine Song’s sleeper Materialists and Michael Angelo Corvino’s Cannes hit Splitsville. The two modern dating films got Johnson thinking that “dating sucks,” she told an engaged audience. Karlovy coverage can be found here.

Terry Gilliam Reflects

No more fights: Nancy sat down with the weird and wacky Terry Gilliam on Monday as he headed to the Umbria Film Festival in Italy, where a screening next weekend of his iconic 1985 dystopian black comedy Brazil will celebrate the film’s 40th anniversary. The Oscar-nominated icon, a former member of the Monty Python troupe, is always happy to speak with honesty and purpose but appears to be mellowing with age. He told us that while he has often courted controversy during a lengthy career, he doesn’t want “any more fights.” His views on the current state of cinema are rather depressing. “It just feels like it’s not a very interesting time,” he added. “I watch movies now, and I see very technically skilled films, but they are not doing anything to make my view of the world different.” That is certainly a thought to ponder. The director has lined up the likes of Johnny Depp, Adam Driver, Jeff Bridges, Jason Momoa and Tom Waits for his next project, Carnival at the End of Days, but financing is proving a challenge. Dive deeper.

The Essentials

🌶️ Hot One: Black Mirror creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones have exited their Netflix-owned prodco Broke & Bones.

🌶️ Another One: Kenya’s Oscar entry Nawi: Dear Future Me landed a North American deal.

🌶️ A third: Netflix promoted Łukasz Kłuskiewicz to run TV and movies out of the growing Central and Eastern Europe hub.

📈 Analysis: Jake examined how the frequency of UK Culture Sec Lisa Nandy’s interventions with the BBC are sparking concern.

🏆 Awards latest: Juliette Binoche surprised Brazilian star Wagner Moura with a gong at the Cinéma Paradiso Louvre Festival in Paris.

📕 Novel ideas: Frankfurt Book Fair is in talks to launch a network of book-to-screen markets at Venice, Busan and Toronto.

🖊️ Agents: Stalwart UK lit agency Casarotto Ramsay & Associates has appointed leading agent Jodi Shields as Chairwoman.

🎮 Gaming: The highly-anticipated Esports World Cup kicked off in Riyadh and unveiled a partnership with IMG.

🏕️ Fest latest: Former BBC News chief James Harding will deliver the prestigious MacTaggart lecture at the 50th Edinburgh TV Festival.

📣 New voice: Michelle Yeoh will voice the English-language version of Chinese breakout blockbuster Ne Zha 2.

🍿 Box Office: Saudi action-comedy Alzarfa: Escape from Hanhounia Hell topped the local box office at home in its opening weekend, beating Jurassic World Rebirth.

🎥 Trail: For 2000 Meters to Andriivka, an intimate depiction of the Ukraine War from Oscar winner Mstyslav Chernov.

International Insider was written by Max Goldbart and edited by Stewart Clarke.

One of the biggest TV hits of the 1960s was Double Your Money, a  kind of low-fi precursor to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. Its presenter, Hughie Green, was a titan of family entertainment who drew audiences of more than 8 million to the ITV gameshow, in which contestants chose whether to double their prize pot between questions.

It was, of course, all about the cash, even if TV-rich in those days involved maximum winnings of £1,000 (about £18,000 in today’s money). The show’s baked-in avarice made the entry in the TV Times for 7pm on 8 November 1966 surprising: “Double Your Money visits Moscow with People to People … the first ever western quiz game in the Soviet Union.”

For two consecutive Tuesdays, millions of Britons watched Green and his sidekick Monica Rose present a heavily adapted version of the show from a rudimentary studio in the House of Friendship, a mock-Moorish castle near the Kremlin that served as a theatre for communist propaganda.

Subtitled “People to People” in the listings, the show was renamed “Do You Want to Go On?” in Moscow. Money did not feature. Instead contestants competed for points, which could be exchanged for state-made goodies such as toasters and televisions.

The recordings were beset with technical difficulties. Lights went out, speakers failed. “But what impressed me most was the excitement and enthusiasm of the audience,” recalled show producer Bill Costello in 2018. “To them the show was unusual, different and original and they really got carried away by the competitive spirit.”

Viewed from today, the export of a British cash-prize gameshow to Moscow seems fanciful, not least given the current state of relations between Russia and the west. Yet they were in keeping with a wider tradition of cold war cultural exchanges from 1955 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This soft-power tit-for-tat involved the shipping of entire ballet, opera and theatre companies as respective governments, and a string of impresarios, swept back the iron curtain to reveal the best each side had to offer.

The cultural contest was instigated in Moscow after the death of Stalin in 1953. His successors quickly set about softening relations with the west. “They needed to open up, but they wanted to open up in a kind of controlled way,” says Sarah Davies, a history professor at Durham University, who is working on a book about these exchanges.

Within weeks of Stalin’s fatal stroke, Lilian Hochhauser, a London impresario with Russian heritage, began to shuttle top dancers and musicians between the countries, including Mstislav Rostropovich, Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten. Hochauser, who is now 98, said in 2019 that a mutual cultural appetite that had flourished during the Anglo-Soviet allyship in the second world war had only grown under Stalin. “Everybody wanted to see the folk-dance companies from the Ukraine, the Moiseyev Dance Company,” she told the Times. “Everything was exotic. Because it had been such a closed book for so long.”

London initially feared the propaganda potential in such swaps and used the British Council to exert its own control. The first sanctioned visit arranged under its auspices came in 1955 when the 30-year-old director Peter Brook took Hamlet to Moscow, with Paul Scofield in the leading role. It was doubly symbolic; Stalin had hated Hamlet. “It had almost been taboo,” Davies says of the play.

The Soviet regime also sought legitimacy in the patronage of such heavyweights as Scofield, Britten and even Hughie Green. Stars would be given tours of key Soviet sites, captured by news crews whose films could be narrated as each side saw fit. “How do they live, these mysterious human beings, once our wartime allies but always an unknown quantity to us,” a narrator says in clipped English over a 1965 Pathé news film of Olivier touring Moscow, where the National Theatre was staging Othello a year after the Bolshoi had visited London.

By then, the risks of these exchanges had become dramatically apparent, with the defection of Rudolf Nureyev during a Kirov Ballet tour of Europe. Before that, in 1958, MI5 were caught on the hop when Michael Redgrave secretly met his old Cambridge friend and notorious double agent Guy Burgess during another tour of Hamlet in Moscow. In an intercepted letter to his mother, Burgess said the men had enjoyed “fine gossips” and that Redgrave had been “much better than Paul Scofield” as Hamlet. But such high-profile brushes with scandal failed to close the curtain on the project, which had been formalised in 1959 with the Anglo-Soviet Cultural Agreement between the British Council and its Soviet counterpart.

It wasn’t all Shakespeare and ballet. Some cultural exchanges continued to take place outside the official agreement. The British Council had no role in the Double Your Money episodes, which were hosted by Moscow Television during a relative thaw, before the Red Army crushed the 1968 Prague Spring, an attempt by Czechoslovakia to loosen Moscow’s grip. This perhaps partly explains the knockabout tone of the TV Times coverage of the enterprise. “Caviar for breakfast? Well, why not? At 7s 6d for a large dollop, it’s a fabulous buy,” wrote Dave Lanning, a columnist and ITV darts commentator, who joined Green for a tour of Moscow.

In 1976, Cliff Richard became the first major western pop musician to visit Moscow. He later recalled being given an ornate tea urn in exchange for a pair of his blue jeans. To the delight of fans who had devoured bootlegged records by the Beatles et al, more big names followed in the 1980s, particularly during glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to open up. Elton John made the trip. Billy Joel crowd surfed in Leningrad while draped in the American and Russian flags.

Some culture was considered beyond the pale for longer, most notably modern art. “Because Soviet art was generally socialist-realist, they found western abstract art a bit of a challenge,” Davies says. But, by 1988, James Birch, a provocative 32-year-old London art curator, spied an opportunity. He had befriended Sergei Klokov, an enterprising KGB agent, and conspired with him to put on a Francis Bacon exhibition in Moscow. Birch says the artist, whom he had known since childhood, was buzzing. “He even went out and bought himself a Walkman and learned Russian on cassette,” he says. In the end, the notoriously capricious Bacon decided not to go, but 400,000 Russians filed through the city’s Central House of Artists to see his work.

Birch and Klokov teamed up again in April 1990, in the dying days of the USSR, to take Gilbert & George to Moscow. The exhibition was another hit, and open to interpretation. While looking at Coming (1983), in which the artists look up at a sky filled with flying underpants, a Russian man told Birch he thought it represented the west invading Russia, with the pants symbolising war planes or parachutes.

Whether these exchanges played any significant role in hastening the demise of the Soviet Union remains a matter of debate. Davies says cultural figures who appeared through the iron curtain sometimes overestimated their influence. “It was part of this whole triumphalist narrative that the west undermined the Soviet system because we presented this better, brighter alternative, but I think a lot of scholars challenge that,” she says.

The tradition of cultural exchanges endured after the cold war, and visits continued to serve the Kremlin as an opportunity to sell its legitimacy on an international stage. In 2003, Paul McCartney performed Beatles hits in a landmark Red Square concert. Vladimir Putin, three years into his presidency, was enthusiastic. Over tea, he told McCartney the Beatles’ music had been “like a gulp of freedom … an open window to the world”. When Putin arrived halfway through the gig, McCartney played Back in the USSR, his 1968 parody of western patriotism.

Two decades later, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has plunged cultural relations into a new ice age. “It reminds me of the Stalin years, when there was no contact at all,” Davies says. But she has noticed a slight softening. In September, the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko is due to perform at the Royal Opera House in London, three years after New York’s Metropolitan Opera dropped her for refusing to denounce Putin, whom she had supported (she later criticised his invasion and sued the Met).

In the meantime, the battle for ideas is playing out on new stages. Godfrey Cromwell, a hereditary peer and the director of The British East-West Centre, formerly the The Great Britain-USSR Association, says the use of social media as a propaganda tool has become more important than physical exchanges. Such accounts, he says, “can deliver focused messages to far larger audiences at far less cost”.

Regardless of their diplomatic potential, cultural exchanges have always opened windows to the people behind the regimes. As Bill Costello put it, decades after Double Your Money’s unlikely jolly in Moscow: “It was an incredible experience and a very human one – because underneath all the language problems and differences in culture it certainly proved to me that people are the same the world over.”