Robert Harris, whose second world war film was copied, tells how the scandal led to George Stevens Jr being stripped of his awards
It was a just few seconds of vivid footage: joyous scenes of American troops on tanks and Jeeps driving down a Champs Élysées lined with cheering Parisian crowds. But the rare colour sequence, shot by one of the Hollywood greats, film director George Stevens, sparked a chain of events that has ended in scandal and embarrassment for Stevens’s son and for leading US TV awards the Emmys.
Now for the first time, the former BBC producer Paul Woolwich and his collaborator, the renowned novelist Robert Harris, have revealed the full story behind an unprecedented decision to quietly strip a trio of top awards from two leading American film-makers after the realisation that their work on a 1994 documentary had come from a BBC Newsnight film already broadcast in Britain in 1985.