When Austria could still keep up with Hollywood. A count from Bohemia — racing driver, aviator, bon vivant — builds a film industry in a collapsed empire, meant to take on America, and stakes his fortune, his health and very nearly his crew on it.
A morning in October 1921, the Laaer Berg on the edge of Vienna. Since the summer they have been shooting Sodom and Gomorrah here, the largest film the country has ever seen. When Sascha Kolowrat steps out of the limousine with his director and his cameramen, the enormous sets of wood and cardboard are lying flat. A storm took them down in a single night. The night watchman comes over and says: “Whoosh, what a wind that was.” For a moment there is silence. Then Kolowrat starts to laugh.
Four years earlier, late October 1917. On the Isonzo front, the operators of the Imperial War Press Bureau crank away at bombed-out positions, dead horses, wounded men falling back. A few days later Lieutenant Kolowrat is told in Vienna that his newsreels no longer meet requirements — not even those of the Germans — and that he is to be relieved of the war film propaganda office. He should concentrate on what he is actually good at. Making feature films.
Which is exactly what he does. From New York, where the news of his brother’s death reaches him in 1919, he brings back two things: a radio set nobody in Vienna has seen before, and the conviction that epic films are the future. He has watched Griffith’s Intolerance. He wants one of those, whatever it costs.
The director he hires is Mihály Kertész. Gifted, ruthless and unfaithful; his marriage to leading actress Lucy Doraine falls apart during the shoot. He finds his male lead by chance in a coffee house: a young bank clerk named Walter Slezak, whose father is furious when he hears of it. An extra falls from the scaffolding because Kertész wants to demonstrate how to play fear. A pyrotechnician with five fingers across two hands reduces the city to rubble — and more than the city.
The film is a triumph and travels the world. At the same time the first Austrian production companies close their doors for good. Kolowrat marries a princess, goes to London looking for money, is told in Vienna that he is no longer trusted, and stakes everything one more time on The Moon of Israel — while Hollywood works on the same material.
1927, the office on Neubaugasse. He has grown thin, his skin an unhealthy colour. On the set of Café Elektric, where a young actress named Marlene Dietrich stands before the camera, he collapses. In the sanatorium his secretary brings him a newspaper: Kertész is shooting another film in Hollywood. Kolowrat smiles and gives a slight shake of the head.
Count Alexander Joseph Kolowrat-Krakowsky, born in New Jersey in 1886, died in Vienna in 1927 at the age of forty-one, founded the Austrian film industry. His Sascha-Film was the largest production company in the country.
Sodom and Gomorrah of 1922 remains the largest and most expensive production in Austrian film history. It was directed by Mihály Kertész, who twenty years later would make Casablanca in Hollywood under the name Michael Curtiz. Among the extras, by their own accounts, were Willi Forst, Hans Thimig, Paula Wessely and Béla Balázs. It was Kolowrat, too, who discovered Marlene Dietrich for the screen.
He was forty-one when he died. What he had built outlived him by eleven years.