- published: 08 Oct 2013
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The Conversation is a 1974 American psychological thriller film written, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman. Also starring are John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford and Robert Duvall.
The Conversation won the Palme d'Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, and in 1995, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Originally, Paramount Pictures distributed the film worldwide. Paramount retains American rights to this day but international rights are now held by Miramax Films and StudioCanal in conjunction with American Zoetrope.
The Conversation was nominated for three Academy Awards in 1974. It lost Best Picture to The Godfather Part II, another Francis Ford Coppola film.
Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a surveillance expert who runs his own company in San Francisco. He is highly respected by others in the profession. Caul is obsessed with his own privacy; his apartment is almost bare behind its triple-locked door and burglar alarm, he uses pay phones to make calls, claims to have no home telephone and his office is enclosed in wire mesh in a corner of a much larger warehouse. Caul is utterly professional at work but finds personal contact extremely difficult because he is intensely secretive about even the most trivial aspects of his life. Dense crowds make him feel uncomfortable and he is withdrawn and taciturn in more intimate social situations. He is also reticent and obsessively secretive with work colleagues. His appearance is nondescript, except for his habit of wearing a translucent grey plastic raincoat almost everywhere he goes, even when it is not raining.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff. Its main responsibility is to provide impartial public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Channel Islands and Isle of Man.
The BBC is a semi-autonomous public service broadcaster that operates under a Royal Charter and a Licence and Agreement from the Home Secretary. Within the United Kingdom its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee, which is charged to all British households, companies and organisations using any type of equipment to record and/or receive live television broadcasts; the level of the fee is set annually by the British Government and agreed by Parliament.
Outside the UK, the BBC World Service has provided services by direct broadcasting and re-transmission contracts by sound radio since the inauguration of the BBC Empire Service in December 1932, and more recently by television and online. Though sharing some of the facilities of the domestic services, particularly for news and current affairs output, the World Service has a separate Managing Director, and its operating costs have historically been funded mainly by direct grants from the British government. These grants were determined independently of the domestic licence fee and were usually awarded from the budget of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. As such, the BBC's international content has traditionally represented – at least in part – an effective foreign policy tool of the British Government. The recent BBC World Service spending review has announced plans for the funding for the world service to be drawn from the domestic licence fee.