The support for oil drilling and its benefits illustrated in Louisiana Story should come as no surprise because the Standard Oil Company financed the film. In his biography of Robert Flaherty, The Innocent Eye, Arthur Calder-Marshall asserts that Standard Oil began negotiating with Flaherty as early as 1944 for “a film dramatizing to the public the risk and difficulties of getting oil from beneath the earth” (211).
Roy Stryker, Standard Oil’s public relations officer in New Jersey, suggested that “Flaherty would produce an idea, not yet perceived, which would discover in the romance of oil-drilling a theme so compelling that it would play the commercial theatres” (211). In The World of Robert Flaherty, biographer Richard Griffith associates Standard Oil’s choice of Flaherty to direct their public relations film with the success of Nanook of the North, which had also been sponsored by a commercial company and “hailed as a classic with no complaint from anyone that its finances might be tainted” (148).
In her biography of her husband, Frances Hubbard Flaherty takes this relationship between Flaherty and Standard Oil further, claiming that Standard Oil commissioned Flaherty despite a cynical response from a film industry that saw Flaherty as a free-lance filmmaker without the professional resources to support a film project of this size.
According to Frances Flaherty, instead of the superficial films Hollywood produced, Standard Oil wanted “a classic, a permanent and artistic record of the contribution which the oil industry has made to civilization” presented “with the dignity and epic sweep it deserved and assure this story a lasting place on the highest plane of literature of the screen” (quoted in Flaherty 34). All of these biographical sources suggest that Flaherty has created an art piece that, as did Nanook of the North, transcends its corporate funding.
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