ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the career of one of the leading post-war Czech filmmakers through his own testimony. Miloš Forman has spent much of his life in Czechoslovakia, but he has also lived in the United States and in other countries. Then one day people saw a poster for a dance being given by the local firemen. The author remembers reading the Firemen script during the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the summer of 1966. Then it was evident to all of us that this picture might turn out to be the most penetrating political pamphlet that had ever been made into a movie or written up as a novel or performed on the stage anywhere east of the Elbe. Out of this came an idea for a movie about an American hunting buff that goes to Czechoslovakia to shoot the last surviving bear in the Tatra Mountains.
