Date Announced for Errol Flynn’s Ghost in Key West
Pleased to announce that Errol Flynn’s Ghost will screen at the 2019 Key West Film Festival on Saturday, November 23. Showtime is 5:45 p.m. Join us (and Marilyn) there!
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Category: Errol Flynn
Official Trailer
Featuring original interviews and stunning footage of some of Havana’s most famous movie houses, Errol Flynn’s Ghost chronicles the enduring cultural impact of American movies in Cuba, while recalling the last great real-life adventure of Hollywood swashbuckler Errol Flynn — the Cuban revolution.
Flynn Meets Fidel
Flynn biographer Thomas McNulty (Errol Flynn: The Life and Career) discusses the improbable meeting between Flynn and Fidel Castro in late 1958.The encounter between Flynn and Castro has inspired at least one novel (Boyd Anderson’s Errol, Fidel, and the Cuban Rebel Girls) and served as a backdrop for the narrative film The Last of Robin Hood (starring Kevin Kline as Flynn). We don’t need fictional license. The real story is unbelievable enough.
Actors and Aliens
In 2013, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the release of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), the National Archives at Riverside — which maintains thousands of federal records from Southern California, Arizona, and Clark County, Nevada — published the naturalization records of the film’s two leads, Errol Flynn (Robin) and Olivia de Havilland (Maid Marian).
We reproduce them here as a reminder that Golden Age Hollywood, so adept at exporting American culture around the globe, was an immigrant community, from the Eastern European moguls who founded the studios, to the German emigre directors of the 1930s and 1940s, to numerous other continental types who found work in front of and behind the camera.
Note, by the way, Flynn’s stated profession of “actor-author.” He wrote three books: Beam Ends (1937; an autobiographical account of his sailing exploits), Showdown (1946; an adventure novel), and My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1959; considered by many to be the classic Hollywood autobiography). And, of course, there were his journalistic stints, including his coverage of the revolution in Cuba.
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Flynn’s Last Fling
Errol Flynn’s Ghost is inspired in part by a story that director/producer Gaspar González penned for Cigar Aficionado magazine in 2007. Titled “Flynn’s Last Fling,” it chronicled Flynn’s Cuban exploits, from filming the noir crime thriller The Big Boodle in Havana in 1956 to his role as a war correspondent covering the Cuban revolution.
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An Unlikely Observer
In 1958, Errol Flynn, his screen career mostly behind him, traveled to Cuba as a war correspondent to cover the advance of Fidel Castro’s rebels on Havana. As he always had in the movies, he ended up in the middle of the action.
Errol Flynn’s Ghost will chronicle this little-known episode in the life of Hollywood’s most famous swashbuckler, while delving into a related, equally overlooked phenomenon: the proliferation and cultural impact of Hollywood movies in Cuba from the earliest decades of the 20th century.
Weaving together film history, cultural analysis, and the real-life adventures of this legendary leading man, Errol Flynn’s Ghost will make an important contribution to our understanding of U.S.-Cuba cultural relations.
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Errol Flynn’s Ghost
Errol Flynn’s Ghost: Hollywood in Havana is a new documentary film examining the cultural impact of American movies in mid-20th century Cuba. This project is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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