Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 230
Apart from these changes, the story is told with wonderful fidelity and accuracy. There is no doubt — indeed there could be no doubt — that the transformed story gains enormously from the few incidental alterations necessitated by the film.
Now this little incident has set me thinking over this process of adapting stories for the moving picture and admiring the way in which it was done. And so it chanced that just afterwards, by a fortunate coincidence, I got an opportunity of seeing something of the process itself. There happened to come into my hands the report made to one of the leading film companies by their expert writers on the prospects of adapting one or two well-known stories for moving picture presentation. I presume that it is no improper violation of confidence to present them here, especially as the stories mentioned are so familiar in their original forms as to be almost public property.
The first one is an expert report on the question of adapting the well-known story of Adam and Eve for the moving picture. It is as follows:
The Story of Adam and Eve
Technical Report on Its Adaptation for the Film
“We have looked over this MS. with reference to the question of adapting it to a scenario. We find the two principal characters finely and boldly drawn and both well up to the standard of the moving picture. The man Adam — Christian name only given in the MS. — appeals to us very strongly as a primitive but lovable nature. Adam has “pep” and we think that we could give him an act among the animals, involving the very best class of menagerie and trapeze work which would go over big.
“But we consider that Adam himself would get over better if he represented a more educated type and we wish therefore to make Adam a college man, preferably from a western university.
“We think similarly that the principal female character, Eve, would appeal more directly to the public if it was made clear that she was an independent woman with an avocation of her own. We propose to make her a college teacher of the out-of-door woodland dances now so popular in the leading women’s universities.
“It is better that Adam and Eve should not be married at the opening of the scenario but at the end after they have first found themselves and then found one another.
“We find the ‘Garden’ lonely and the lack of subordinate characters mystifying; we also find the multiplicity of animals difficult to explain without a special setting.
“We therefore propose to remove the scene to the Panama Canal Zone, where the animals are being recruited for a circus troupe. This will allow for mass scenes of Panaminos, Mesquito and other Indians, tourists, bootleggers and the United States navy, offering an environment of greater variety and more distinctive character than an empty garden.
“The snake we do not like. It is an animal difficult to train and lacking in docility. We propose instead to use a goat.”
Report No. II
The story entitled “The Merchant of Venice”
“The outline entitled ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ which comes to us with the signature, ‘W. Shakespeare,’ but with no further hint of the authorship, strikes us at once as a composition of great power. It is full of action. It has color and force, and the leading characters are strongly marked.
“We wish to recommend its immediate adaptation for the film, but at the same time to propose a few incidental changes necessary to make it a success.
“In the first place the character, Shylock, must not be a Jew as this would needlessly antagonize a large section of the public. To avoid all offense it would be better to make him a Mexican.
“A further point to notice is that there are too many Italians in the piece and not enough Americans. It lacks patriotism. We would suggest that either the entire scene be removed to Venice, Illinois, or else that the principal characters such as Bassanio and Antonio be made American visitors to Venice and that for the Doge we substitute the consul general of the United States.
“We would like to replace Portia by one of our great criminal lawyers, leaving Portia as his stenographer.
“We think that the piece would gain in scenic quality by the introduction of a canal scene at night, by the drowning of one of the characters, perhaps several, in the Grand Canal at midnight and by the introduction of the Spanish Inquisition and the massacre of St. Bartholomew. These features would add historical interest, while the American character of the film could be stressed by the insert of a picture of the Supreme Court at Washington.”
Short Circuits in International Relations
Things I Hardly Dare Whisper MORE REVELATIONS OF ANOTHER UNKNOWN EUROPEAN DIPLOMAT. BY AN UNDISCLOSED AUTHOR OF EUROPEAN DISREPUTATION. TWO VOLUMES. TEN DOLLARS EACH, OR THE TWO FOR SEVEN-FIFTY.
AS EVERYBODY KNOWS, the recent craze for publishing diplomatic memoirs is exciting a storm of protest in the highest European circles. It is felt that it involves a dangerous leakage of political secrets. “We are leaking all over the place,” writes Lord Bulkhead. “It has got to stop.”
On the other hand, we cannot resist recommending to the reading public in the warmest terms the extraordinary and fascinating volumes announced above. It is no exaggeration to say that the publication of “Things I Hardly Dare Whisper” is calculated to arouse a whirlwind, the suction of which may carry down two or three of the principal governments of Europe.
The work is all the more intriguing in that the name of the author is buried in absolute secrecy. The publishers themselves are utterly unaware who wrote it. The authorship is variously attributed to Lord Balfour, ex-premier Poincaré, Lady Astor, Douglas Fairbanks, the Queen of Roumania, and Dorothy Gish. Miss Gish, however, on being approached, declared emphatically, “I didn’t write it: so there!” Monsieur Poincaré says that he not only didn’t write it, but he couldn’t write it.
Perhaps the principal feature of the book is the extraordinary boldness of its revelation. Conversations between persons of the very highest rank and the most conspicuous position are reported with a frankness that verges on brutality.
Take, for instance, the passage, one of the most notable in the volumes, in which the unknown author relates a conversation with a Most Exalted Personage.
“We were sitting together in the bar of the House of Lords,” he writes, “the Personage, as usual, sitting with his elbow on my shoulder and whispering into my ear so that Lord Snoop, the Master of the Buckhounds, and Lord Snipe, at that time in office as Black Stick in Waiting — or Yellow Stick in Hiding, I forget which — could not overhear our conversation, which The Royal Personage obviously regarded as for us alone.
“ ’What do you think of Sir Jaugh Bohn?’ I asked. The Royal Personage looked carefully around and then whispered, ‘He’s a pup.’ I made a silent note of this for publication.
“ ’And what is Your Personage’s opinion of the First Lord of the Admiralty?’ His Personage advanced his face closer and took hold of my ear with his hand so as to draw it towards him. ‘I consider the First Lord,’ he whispered, ‘as nothing better than a third-rate bum.’
“Realizing at once the high commercial value of these disclosures, I begged The Royal Personage to sit quiet a moment while I wrote them down.”
A similar frankness and daring is shown not only in the treatment of royalty itself, but in the confidential pen pictures given by the author of the leading statesmen of Europe.
“We were sitting on a bench in the sun,” he writes, “outside the modest little country home of Monsieur Clemenceau, whom I may designate the Old Tiger of France. The Old Tiger, who will be one hundred and six (if he lives long enough), had just spent a busy morning planting radishes. ‘What is your opinion of England?’ I asked of the Old Tiger. For a moment a flash of all his old impetuosity flashed out of the Old Tiger’s eyes. ‘It’s a hell of a place,’ he said.”
But perhaps to most readers the most engrossing chapters of the book are those which deal with the origin, or what the author cleverly calls the genesis, of the Great War. Many memoirs have already dealt intimately with this topic. The Kaiser, General Ludendorf, Lord Grey, and others have essayed to analyze the causes of the conflict. The Kaiser says that it was a world attack directed against himself personally.
Lord Grey, while speaking in a very guarded and moderate way, thinks that the war may have had something to do with England and Germany and possibly with France.
The statement is also made in various quarters that the war represented the eternal conflict of the Zeitgeist with the Zeitschrift. Indeed, a colonel of one of the negro regiments from the United States has said this was exactly his idea in going into it. No doubt it was this idea of a Zeitgeist which inflamed the minds of many of the young men at the time.
In other quarters, and especially in academic circles, the opinion is generally held that the war was a conflict of the Inevitable against the Inexhaustible.
It is all the more interesting to find that our present unknown author makes the astounding statement that he caused the war himself.
“It is strange to realize,” he writes, “that a few casual words dropped by myself in a drawing room in Buda-Pest probably occasioned the entire conflagration.” (It would not perhaps have been so strange if he had dropped them in a garage or somewhere where there was gasoline.)
“I was seated one evening talking with Prince Bughaus of Schlitz-im-Mein, himself of the immediate entourage of the Kaiser and intimate with every Chancellery in Europe. The Prince had been asking me confidentially what I thought Downing Street would do if the Quai d’Orsay lined up solidly with the Ball Platz and came down heavily on the Yildiz Kiosk. At that time (it was July of 1914), the whole atmosphere was tense with diplomatic electricity.
“Unfortunately, Prince Bughaus, who is a master of languages, was talking for greater secrecy in Chinese; and I misunderstood his reference to the Ball Platz and thought he was referring to the World’s Base Ball Series. ‘Everything is arranged,’ I said, ‘for the early autumn. And this time it will be a fight to a finish.’ The Prince repeated quietly (in Chinese), ‘A fight to a finish.’ But that night he telegraphed to Berlin that Germany’s only chance would be to anticipate her enemies by making war in August.
“The result of my casual remark is unfortunately only too well known.”
One must not, however, suppose that these delightful volumes are entirely occupied with the tragic, the somber, or the pompous side of life. The author enlivens his pages with a number of delightful anecdotes in regard to the great people with whom he has been in contact, which are quite as amusing as those in any similar book of memoirs to-day. For example, the following delicious story is related in connection with the same Prince Bughaus of Schlitz-im-Mein just mentioned.
“Bughaus, as his friends call him, is not only one of the most astute men of his time in the diplomatic world, but is decidedly one of the wittiest. Indeed, I have never known any one with such an instantaneous command of repartee.
“I was sitting with Bughaus and several of the corps diplomatique one evening in one of the best-known and most fashionable of the Buda-Pest Magyar restaurants, which perhaps I had better not name, inasmuch as naming it might give an idea which one I mean. The Prince summoned the head waiter to him and asked ‘How much are your cold partridges?’ ‘I am sorry, your Transparency,’ replied the man, ‘we haven’t any cold partridges.’ ‘In that case,’ replied the witty Prince, ‘we won’t have any cold partridges.’
“I need hardly say that the entire corps diplomatique broke out into hearty laughter. In fact, they nearly choked themselves.”
When we add that the two entire volumes are filled with material, grave and gay, on the same level as what we have already narrated, it will be understood that these volumes of confidential memoirs will challenge comparison with anything of the sort written in the last ten years.
Hands Across the Sea WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN AMERICA HAS REMOVED ALL THE EUROPEAN ART
IT HAS BEEN calculated that within the last twenty-five years over a billion dollars’ worth of Art Treasures have been removed from Europe to America. The purchases include a great number of pictures by the old masters, — so great as to alarm the custodians of the Italian galleries, — statues of the highest antiquity and many manuscripts of the masterpieces of literature. Already the question of moving entire buildings, such as Shakespeare’s cottage, etc., has been freely discussed.
It is clear that this movement once well started will know no limit save that of American wealth. And since American wealth has no limit, we shall some day find the journals of New York chronicling the completion of Art Removal something as follows:
FROM THE PRESS OF 1950
The successful removal of Buckingham Palace to its new site in Mauch Chunk, Pa., where it will serve as the home of the Rotary Club may be said to mark the end of the Art Removal Movement. American connoisseurs say that there is now little or nothing left that they care to take. A certain disappointment was expressed in Mauch Chunk art circles when it was found that the king was not included in the palace when brought over. But we have it on good authority that the club will make a further assessment on its members to buy the king if they want him.
It is of interest to look back over the successive phases of history which have thus reached their final culmination.
The removal of valuables from Europe to America seems to have originated with the purchase of pictures and works of art from the European Galleries. It was felt that America ought to have in its possession samples of the work of the great masters. No adverse comment was raised when a considerable number of paintings by Rubens, Titian, Velasquez and other masters were brought over to America. In the same way the original manuscripts of many great authors, Milton, Byron, Dickens, etc., were soon largely in American keeping. At the time it did not occur to the connoisseurs to buy the author himself.
It was soon found that other souvenirs of the past could be lifted and carried over to America as easily as paintings and manuscripts. We learn from old newspapers that it was about 1930 that removal of gravestones and monuments first began. An interesting item on this head may be here reproduced from what seems to have been a leading Texas newspaper in 1935.
“Our enterprising fellow-citizen, Mr. Phineas Q. Cactus, has succeeded in going all the art connoisseurs one better in the unique present which he has just made to this city. Mr. Cactus recently made a visit to the old country and was immensely impressed with some of the scenery which he considers little inferior to that of Texas. While inspecting the grazing lands of Lincolnshire he noticed particularly the little country churchyard, crowded with a jumble of graves and leaning tombstones, with great elms rising among them, and celebrated to all lovers of American poetry as the site of Gray’s famous ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard.’ Mr. Cactus has been enabled to buy the entire spot and is having it moved, trees and all, to Texas. In their new setting the graves, however, will be neatly laid out on a rectangular plan, the plots divided with little streets and avenues, properly numbered and the bygone tenants arranged alphabetically. It is felt that this noble gift will do much to stimulate interest in the study of the history of Texas.”
It appears probable that this unrivaled feat — successfully accomplished — gave the impetus to removal of land sites on a still more generous scale. The removal of the Battle of Hastings which was re-laid out beside West Chicago in 1940 was followed by the careful and methodical transfer of a selected number of battlefields from Europe to America. The Battle of Waterloo, for which the bidding was very keen, was finally purchased by the Ladies’ Country and Golf Club of Fargo, Dakota.
It seems to have been at this point that the first murmurs of disapprobation, if not of protest, were heard from the other side. The following letter, couched in a language perhaps a trifle too warm for the occasion, seems to have appeared in the London Spectator, at some time in the year 1945.
Editor, The Spectator,
Dear Sir:
On returning from a residence of several years in the East and paying a visit to the continent of Europe I noticed, sir, with a certain shock of surprise, sir, that the battle of Waterloo had been removed from its place. Without wishing, sir, to question the perfect legal right of the purchaser, sir, I cannot but express a feeling of regret. And when I add that I have looked all over for Blenheim, Jena, Austerlitz and other battles and cannot find them you will admit, sir, that the situation is one to which the attention of your paper ought to be called.
Yours, etc.,
Tobasco Pepper,
(Retired) Major. Indian Army.
Such excitement as may have been occasioned, however, by the removal of the battlefields was soon forgotten in the mingled wonder and congratulation which followed the transfer of the European landscape on a still larger scale. It was little thought that when the United States federal government accepted the ownership of the forest of Fontainebleau in return for the cancellation of the French debt that they meant to move it to America. The transfer, though vast in its totality, was simplicity itself in detail. Nothing was needed but to dig up the trees and replant them on this side of the water. As it costs only three dollars on the average to remove a tree and as it used to cost an American citizen about five dollars a tree to go over and look at it, the transaction is hugely profitable. The beautiful forest as replanted on the Hudson now reaches from Yonkers to South Troy, containing a gasoline station at every quarter mile.
It appears, however, that the proposal which has just been made in the legislature of Montana is destined, if carried out, to eclipse anything already accomplished. It has long been felt that there is an insufficient amount of scenic art among the Rocky Mountains. The tourist in that district finds himself with nothing to look at. It is proposed, therefore, to establish a special city — the site of which will be the famous Dead Dog’s Gulch — entirely composed of European churches of historic interest. The state has already options on several of these buildings now in America and will buy such few as are left in Europe. When the plan is completed the new city of Ecclesia, Mont., laid out in squares, will contain in one and the same municipality, the Church of Notre Dame, the Madeleine, the Mosque of St. Sofia, York Minster, the Vatican and numerous other interesting specimens. It is further proposed that the legislature shall, by a series of criminal statutes, create a religious atmosphere suitable to the city.
