FilmCraft: Producing

LegacyAlexander Korda

In Jeffrey Dell’s 1939 satirical novel Nobody Ordered Wolves, the great Hungarian-born film producer Alexander Korda (1893–1956) is caricatured as Napoleon Bott, head of Paradox Film Productions. Bott is a cigar-chomping magnate—“an arresting figure with an immense cigar…anything from forty to sixty” — who trails chaos in his wake. By the end of the book, wild dogs, unused extras that no one remembers having ordered, are scavenging through Bott’s studios.

The real Korda was indeed as eccentric as Dell’s fictional parody suggests. As historian Sarah Street writes of him, “Korda’s Hungarian background, flamboyant personality, craving for respectability, political connections, sensational financial deals, and alleged espionage ...