Alex Cox's Introduction to Film

For a long time the Mexican film industry was protected by a Ley de Cine which insisted that English-language films could not be dubbed in Spanish, only subtitled. This functioned as a literacy programme and limited American penetration of the national cinema.

France only allowed women to vote in 1944, Italy in 1946, Greece in 1952. In Switzerland, so often held up as the European ideal, women were not allowed to vote until 1971!

Ms Nogami also reports that, in the fifties, methamphetamine was legal in Japan, and that studios supplied it free to crews who worked without sleep for days at a time;

And just as it staggered ignominiously into the sunset, the Western was saved – by the Italians. Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars’ trilogy was vastly successful in Italy. Its wider distribution was delayed, for Leone had ‘borrowed’ the plot of A Fistful of Dollars (Italy/Spain, 1964) from a Kurosawa samurai film, Yojimbo (Japan, 1961)

By the late forties, Ford had become frustrated with the Hollywood bookkeeping system known as creative accounting. This term, frequently used within the industry, refers to the studios’ ability to keep adding charges to the accounts of any film they own, in the form of distribution costs, marketing, advertising and overheads (studios routinely add a 20 per cent ‘overhead’ to the budget of any film – money which is then owed to the studio) so that the film never ‘breaks even’. This meant (and still means today) that while the director, producer and lead actors may be well paid up front, they will never share in the profits of the film, because, according to ‘creative accounting’, there are no profits to share.

called the Foley crew because in Hollywood there was once a Mr Foley who did this stuff; in Mexico it was Señor Gavira who did it, so footsteps are called ‘Gavira’

the sequence’s heroic conclusion (‘If they move, kill ’em!’/freeze-frame on the hero’s face/title: Directed by Sam Peckinpah’) is about as clear a celebration of the auteur director as you could ever get