The Film Finances Archive
The Film Finances Archive holds production material for over 600 films the company guaranteed before 1980 — one of the largest collections related to the British film industry.
Film Finances at the BFI Southbank
In summer 2013, Film Finances gave film historians access to its pre-1980 archives; findings were published in a special issue of The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and contributors shared discoveries at a BFI Southbank event, “The Bottom Line: Behind the Scenes with Film Finances,” on May 10, 2014.
Back to the Beginning
The archive dates to the company’s founding in London, February 1950. The earliest surviving document is Robert Garrett’s August 1949 proposal for the world’s first specialized completion guarantor. Garrett had entered the film business in 1935, producing The Amazing Adventure starring Cary Grant at age 25. When staff first opened old archive boxes in 2009, they found well-preserved records untouched for decades — including the box for The Browning Version, one of the earliest films guaranteed.
The First Day
The first film guaranteed by Film Finances was The Woman in Question (Dirk Bogarde, Jean Kent, Susan Shaw; directed by Anthony Asquith, like The Browning Version). It started shooting at Pinewood on April 24, 1950.
The First Year
Company records chart the progress of the first fourteen films Film Finances guaranteed — an early, if modest, proof that the model worked.
Future Plans
The company is still cataloguing the archive and wants to make historians, archivists, and cinephiles aware of it, with future newsletters highlighting more. Our next newsletter will focus on John Croydon, FFI’s consultant from 1950 into the early 1980s, who wrote reports on over 1,000 film proposals. Croydon’s earlier career included Gainsborough/Gaumont Studios, three MGM British productions (A Yank at Oxford, The Citadel, Goodbye, Mr Chips), and Ealing Studios, where he produced Alberto Cavalcanti’s films including the ventriloquist-dummy segment of Dead of Night (1945).