1956 Color Footage Iran

December 2017
PLS is in the process of scanning over one hundred-forty shots of 35mm color out-takes from a never released re-make of the famous 1925 silent ethnographic film Grass. 
The original b&w documentary was highly successful, produced by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Marguerite E. Harrison. The country was then called Persia; the name was changed to Iran in the mid-thirties.  (Cooper and Schoedsack went on to direct the 1933 King Kong).

 In 1956 Hollywood’s C. V. Whitney Productions tapped Cooper as executive producer and sent a fifteen member Hollywood crew to Iran. The film held by PLS covers aerials of Isfahan, moving povs of crowded street scenes, a train station, university buildings, rug making, a polo match, hospital scenes, Mosques and a handful of shots depicting tribes and their herds crossing the mountains.  A forty minute fund raising version with narration and music failed to pique enough interest and the re-make was never finished; perhaps the only surviving scenes are these out-takes.