Carte d'employé à la Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. accompagnée de son stylo Cartier fétiche en plaqué or

BUñUEL Luis
Laminated employee identification card from Warner Bros for Luis Buñuel, with the company logo. With his fetish gold plated Cartier pen Burbank, California 7 July 1944, 96 x 62 mm (3 3/4 x 2 7/16 ”), one laminated card and a pen
Laminated employee identification card from Warner Bros for Luis Buñuel, with the company logo. Anthropometric photo of the director to recto, as well as his autograph signature, under which is the signature of Blayney Matthews, head of security. Fingerprint and physical characteristics of Buñuel to verso.
In December 1930, Buñuel first made the journey from Paris to New York, where MGM engaged to train him in American cinematic techniques. With his freshly-signed contract in his pocket, he went off to settle in Hollywood. Nonetheless, less than four months later, he broke his contract and went back to Europe. The same year, he was put in touch with Paramount Studios in Joinville, near Paris, by his friend Claude de la Torre to supervise the translation and dubbing of films into Spanish. Most of his work was done anonymously and it is therefore difficult to know precisely which projects he worked on. He varied this work with various stays in Spain until 1934, when he ended up settling in Madrid where Warner Brothers took him on for the same task. The Spanish Civil War forced him back to France in September 1937, where he stayed but a year before leaving again for the States.
This card from Warner’s was issued to Buñuel in 1944 during his third stay in Hollywood (Burbank) which was to last about a year and a half and was certainly the most intense. The original idea was for Buñuel to produce and direct Spanish versions of Warner’s big hits. In a telegram from 21 June 1944 to Max Aub, he even says: “Mr. Warner has given me permission to make movies in English.” But all these projects were abandoned as time wore on, and there was nothing but anonymous collaborations in several projects, the most famous of which was The Beast with five fingers, particularly the scene with the hand in the library, which Buñuel claims to have written without ever getting the credit (Buñuel, My Last Sigh, 1982). A director, but above all an emigré, he was eventually employed in various different roles that consisted primarily of reworking English-speaking productions from Warner for the Spanish and Latin American market.
Frustrated by this lack of creative freedom, he struggled intensely trying to adapt to the regulated system of the big studios. Buñuel thus had bitter memories of this experience, which led to his developing a love-hate relationship with the US.
On the 17 November, Warner’s terminated his contract, the dubbing of films into Spanish and Portuguese having been outsourced to Latin American to save money and also for political reasons, given the relations between the US and Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Latin America. Buñuel spent a few more months in Los Angeles before moving to Mexico. Buñuel’s American experience was, in the end, mixed. Though it gave him a certain amount of financial security, it did not allow him to fulfill his cinematic ambitions. The director got there in the end: he took up his directing again in Mexico and won the Best Director prize at Cannes in 1951 for his social drama Los Olvidados.
With a gold plated Cartier pen, Vendôme type, a fetish accessory of the film maker during his career.