NOVELS FOR THE SCREEN

Southland Times, Issue 24056, 21 February 1940, Page 5

NOVELS FOR THE SCREEN

Author Defends Film

Adaptations “Authors who sell their books to the screen have no right to complain about the screen adaptations.” The man who made the remark in Hollywood is not a producer, actor or playwright but an author, Lloyd C. Douglas, who has written five best sellers m a row, and sold them all to Hofiywood for 50,000 dollars each. His “Disputed Passage will be released soon by Paramount, starring Dorothy Lamour, Akim Tamiroff and John Howard. Douglas declared he would say nothing, even i he did not like the screen adaptation of one of his books. , "However, I must say that I have no complaint whatever with the way teat Hollywood has treated my books, he said, “There is a tinge of irony, though, in the adaptation of ‘Disputed Passage.’ Paramount changed the ending to take the characters to China, whereas, in the book, the story opened and closed in America. Now, I don’t know whether my publishers were right or Paramount was right, but Cosmopolitan, which published the story serially, rejected my original ending. In that ending, I took the characters back to China. . “But in regard to authors complaining about adaptations of their books, I personally think they are foolish. In the first place, they are attempting to translate their story into a medium about which they frequently know nothing. You cannot photograph

thoughts running through the mind of the characters. But you can read them. In other words, Hollywood, I can see, has to translate a book into movement which can be photographed, I know nothing about it.”