Robert J. Flaherty - Hollywood

Hollywood

Nanook of the North (1922) was a successful film, and Flaherty was in great demand afterwards. On a contract with Paramount to produce another film on the order of Nanook, Flaherty went to Samoa to film Moana (1926). Flaherty shot Moana in Safune on the island of Savai'i where he lived with his wife and family for more than a year. The studio heads repeatedly asked for daily rushes but Flaherty had nothing to show because he had not filmed anything yet — his approach was to try to live with the community, becoming familiar with their way of life before building a story around it to film. Flaherty was also concerned that there was no inherent conflict in the islanders' way of life, providing further incentive not to shoot anything. Eventually he decided to build the film around the ritual of a boy's entry to manhood. Flaherty was in Samoa from April 1923 until December 1924, with the film completed in December 1925 and released the following month. The film, on its release, was not as successful as Nanook of the North domestically, but it did very well in Europe, inspiring John Grierson to coin the word "documentary."

Before the release of Moana, Flaherty made two short films in New York City with private backing, The Pottery Maker (1925) and The Twenty-Four Dollar Island (1927). Irving Thalberg of M-G-M invited Flaherty to film White Shadows in the South Seas (1928) in collaboration with W. S. Van Dyke, but their talents proved an uncomfortable fit, and Flaherty resigned from the production. Moving to Fox, Flaherty spent eight months working on the Native American documentary Acoma the Sky City (1929) but the production was shut down, and subsequently Flaherty's footage was lost in a studio vault fire. Flaherty then agreed to collaborate with F. W. Murnau on another South Seas picture, Tabu, but this combination proved even more volatile, and while Flaherty did contribute significantly to the story, the finished film is essentially Murnau's.