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dates booked were relegated to the third-rate limbo — if they could get any bookings at all. Through Three Reigns was still-born.
So I rearranged my material with a number of early Hepworth films which I managed to pick up here and there — comics mostly — into a lecture called The Story of the Films with which, years afterwards, I had a moderate success in all sorts of big towns in England, Ireland and Scotland.
There is very little left to tell, for, though this is the story of my life, my film life is the only part of it that is likely to be of interest to anyone but myself. But it is not to be assumed that there was any moaning. I had had a very full and happy life. I have had a very happy one since; not so full but certainly not empty, and I haven't finished it yet.
The grievous thing about that studio debacle was that I had foreseen and foretold the coming of a great shortage of studio floor space in England before our studios were given away for little more than the value of the land they were built on, and I pleaded for delay and waiting for a better price. It was only a year or two afterwards that producers were screaming for floor space and prices were soaring.
I was in America at the time of the actual sale, trying to dispose of 'Rye' in the interests of the liquidation. I rented a theatre in New York for a private showing and engaged a 'surefire' organist to accompany the film with the special music which had all been so carefully prepared beforehand for the London showing and the British Film Week. He refused the suggestion of a rehearsal; he said he could read music and had played for hundreds of films. He made an awful mess of it; got the most cheerful tunes in the tragic scenes and vice versa, and mucked up the whole thing. But in any case the film was quite unsuited to the then American ideas. I was told that it might not be so bad if it was jazzed up a bit and I came home.
The sale of the negatives — all of the negatives we had issued in twenty-four years — was another blow. They were sold to a man who did not know how to use them and eventually resold them to be melted down for 'dope' for aeroplane wings. And with them he was given, thrown in, the rights of such copyright subjects as Alps Button. I bought-in 'Rye' myself and saved it from that fate — I suppose it would have gone with the others if I had not had it in America.
Now it would be utterly false and unworthy if I pretended I
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