Why the Crown’s creators had to rewrite Churchill
THE makers of the hit Netflix drama The Crown have revealed that they ran into difficulties with Winston Churchill’s estate over their script.
This meant Churchill, as played by John Lithgow in the programme, did not read any of the former prime minister’s real speeches because of the estate’s demands.
The programme’s head of research, Annie Sulzburger, said: ‘The Churchill estate refused to give us any permission to use any of his words without reading every single word that we’d written for every single script regardless of whether or not he was in them.
‘So we just decided that it was an inappropriate relationship to have and we would just go ahead and rewrite. Even things like the king’s eulogy [which Churchill composed for the death of George VI] we had to rewrite, which you think would be publicly owned.’
Speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, she also revealed that the producers decided to take the show to Netflix rather than the BBC because working with the corporation would have involved ‘oversight’ from Buckingham Palace.
It was originally thought they went with the US streaming service because the BBC could not afford the rumoured £76million production costs, making it the most expensive TV drama in history.
But Miss Sulzburger said that with Netflix they could create the show independently from the gaze of the royal family, which would been impossible with the BBC. She added: ‘The Palace, we were completely separate from them. We alerted them that we were writing the show but from that point on we had nothing to do with them.
‘That’s part of the reason we chose Netflix – because the BBC would have involved some oversight.’
Miss Sulzburger was speaking alongside The Crown’s director Philip Martin, who said Netflix ‘left us alone’ and were ‘very respectful’.
Series one of The Crown looked at the royal family from 1947 to 1955. Season two, covering more recent history, is out on December 8.