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Dr. Blofeld and Charles01 thank you for your work on this article. I watched both the film and the DVD extras last night. I wanted to let you know that there are interviews with the composer Eduard Artemyev and the director Nikita Mikhalkov. They both mention that they were working on a film that was to be titled Unexpected Joys. A conflict at the studio (Rustam) - that neither of them were involved so the don't remember the details - arose and that film was cancelled. Mikhalov was given the opportunity to make a different film on the money that was left over which both state was 300,000 rubles. Mikhalkov states that this was about half of the usual budget for a film in that era. Mikhalov and the writers Gorenshteyn, and Konchalovskiy had discussed a project about the making of a silent film at the time of the revolution before and the idea of including a fictional version of Vera Kholodnaya brought everything together. They both state that the film was made very quickly but they don't give the number of days/weeks involved. Artemyev mentions that Mikhalov had him compose all of the music for the film including the march that the band is playing when the cameraman is shot. Now I don't know how either of you feel about including info from interviews made for DVDs so I will leave it up to you whether to add any of this to the article - also some of it might be mentioned in other sources out there. I will relate one other story that is on the fun side. When the film was shown at a festival in NY Jack Nicholson went to Mikhalov to tell him how much he liked it. He then took Mikhalov out drinking and - as Mikhalov puts it - they ended the night in a fashion that he could not talk about to the interviewer. MarnetteD|Talk05:06, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Here's what I was about to post when Dr B got in first .....
Interesting stuff. I have the sense that the film you mention called Unexpected Joys is almost certainly the film "Нечаянные радости" mentioned in the "Slave of Love" entry. I translated that title as "Inadvertent Pleasures", but I am not a film buff and I never got past first base with the Russian language (despite being taught it for a year at junior school by a man who I see has ended up with his own wiki entry - seriously spooky). If you or Dr B or anyone else know enough Russian (or if there is some widely used English language title for the film that you know but I didn't) please do not hesitate to improve on my version of that title: please do it.
If there is ADDITIONAL or CORRECTING information that you can enter to the text in the para mentioning "Нечаянные радости", again, go ahead and do it. I do not have the information you have. You should, as far as possible, put in a source note or six (but realistically one or two) for the obvious reasons. I'm sure there are wiki-guidelines out there on the subject. Self-evidently some of the more anecdotal stuff needs to be inserted very sparingly or not at all .... because of the way in which Wikipedia is pitched and because of what Wikipedia thinks it is for. Nevertheless, the odd slightly racy anecdote with an unexpected denouement could well be used to keep the reader awake, or to spice up the footnotes section. And footnote sections are often short on spice.
If you have a lot more on "Нечаянные радости", however, don't add it here. Start a new entry on "Нечаянные радости". If you don't know where to begin, find a wiki-movie entry that you like, copy its subheadings onto a page on your sandbox. See if there is anything usable you can find in Russian or other language versions on that you can adapt for an English language entry. Remove the subheadings on your "scheme" for which you have nothing to enter. Add subheadings which, based on information you do have, should be there .... and write the entry. Please forgive me if you have already started 500 wiki-pages and do it all quite differently and I am telling you stuff you already know or never needed to know. But either way, if you have more than say ten/twenty lines of info on "Нечаянные радости", then in my judgement it probably deserves that you (unless someone else gets in first) make a start on its own entry.
Thanks to you both for your replies. According to both men interviewed the Unexpected Joys project was permanently shelved. I don't think it is the one that you found Charles01. It carries the dates 72 to 74 which means (I think) it was either a film or TV series and it predates Slave.... I do appreciate the time you took in your reply and the extra searching of that interwebs that you did. Many thanks. MarnetteD|Talk12:40, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Dr. Blofeld based on C's research I found this. This must be some of the footage for the abandoned project but my Russian is even less that C's. Elena Solovey looks like a cross between Bernadette Peters and Isabelle Adjani (especially in her Nosferatu performance. It looks like there is more to the story than we will ever know. Cheers to you both. MarnetteD|Talk12:44, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]