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19 26
THE MOTION PICTURE DIRECTOR
29
Just an extra who inherits a million, then starts out to spend it.
imons
IF Dickens were alive today with all his literary urge and power of old, would he write of the old times or of the new?
He wrote of the things modern in his day. Modern life, contemporary problems held his interest. His claim to imortality lies in his revelation of human frailty and strength of humanness in general, unchanging within the short span of history. One is constrained to believe that if the question were put to him, he would reply,
“Of course I would write of the Jazz Age! Character is unchanging, but the conditions surrounding it and modifying its manifestations, change with the passing years. This day is more advanced, more
complex, more fascinating in its possibilities than those of my time. It is not fair to let my work, with its comparatively dull atmosphere, stand judgment upon its humanness alone. I would give it the advantage of a modern background, a tempo and color contemporaneous with its modern readers.”
A somewhat similar problem confronted the Paramount organization in filming “Brewster’s Millions.” The George Barr McCutcheon story appeared some twentyfive years ago in the form of a novel and a stage play. Five years ago it was brought to the screen as a Paramount production featuring Roscoe Arbuckle.
Such great technical progress has been
made in motion pictures that any reissue of the original film would be impractical.
The change in public taste, the amazing metamorphosis in the lives and surroundings of the screen patrons themselves, is a development that relegates any previous version of the story still farther into the background of the past. Stories of the year 1900 fall into a peculiar class that has neither the romantic color of tales of the more distant past, nor the present-day interest of our own modern times.
A picturization of the exact story against a modern background could not satisfy the modern taste, yet the basic dramatic elements of the story were too good to be laid away in the museum of past successes.