Hollywood has long looked overseas to make movies

By Todd Longwell

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Kirk Douglas knows all about "runaway production" to foreign locales.

Sitting on a striped couch in the living room of his Beverly Hills home, surrounded by paintings by Balthus, Vuillard and other modernist masters, the screen legend can still feel the sting of betrayal 50 years later.

After an arduous day of shooting boat-rowing scenes for "The Vikings" (1958) in Norway, Douglas decided to reward the locals who served as oarsmen with a party featuring a burlesque show, starring himself and castmates Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh.

The extras ate the food, drank the booze, laughed, applauded and yelled for more.

"And the next day, they went on strike," says Douglas, who made the film through his production company, Bryna Prods., and starred in the production. He's laughing now, but he wasn't then. "I was very mad. I called my troops together and I said, 'Tell me. What are the shots we still have to do?' I figured out we could do them (on a soundstage) in Munich. So I said, 'Pack up. We're going,' and I left."

Douglas was far from the only star eschewing the comforts of Hollywood to shoot in far-off lands in the 1950s. In September 1956, the New York Times reported that dozens of Hollywood soundstages were dark while 18 of the 39 films in production shot overseas in Europe, Japan and Cuba, and another four shot in other U.S. states.

One of 1956's celluloid expats was "The Mountain," starring Spencer Tracy, shot in Chamonix on France's Mont-Blanc. Unlike most of today's runaway productions, it didn't leave town in search of a deal, according to A.C. Lyles, one of the film's producers.

"We went there for creative enhancement," says Lyles, a fixture at Paramount since 1928. "Chamonix is such a well-known ski resort and Mont-Blanc is very unique. It was the ideal place to shoot the film."