Paramount Vs. Theodore Dreiser
“This region is stuffed with hard-boiled savage climbers, the lowest grade of political grafters, quacks not calculable as to number or variety … loafers, prostitutes, murderers and perverts. In the bland sunshine here they multiply like germs in the canal zone.” That’s author Theodore Dreiser referring not to Washington, D.C., or any other world capital, but to Hollywood in the early 1930s. Dreiser was then fighting with Paramount over their adaptation of his novel An American Tragedy, inspired by a real-life murder trial that had taken place in New York state in 1906.
Robert Marchand’s article “Century-old Hollywood battle retrieved from archives” in The [Westchester, N.Y.] Journal News discusses Dreiser’s feud with Paramount. (Though the “century-old” battle was actually staged about 75 years ago.)
The now hard-to-find Paramount version of Dreiser’s novel was released in 1931. Directed by Josef von Sternberg, the film stars Phillips Holmes (above), Sylvia Sidney, and Frances Dee. Samuel Hoffenstein was credited for the adaptation.
In 1951, George Stevens officially remade it as A Place in the Sun, starring Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters, and Elizabeth Taylor.
And in 2005, Woody Allen unofficially remade the same story (with elements from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment) as Match Point, with Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, and Emily Mortimer.
For the record, Dreiser called the 1931 adaptation “an utter misrepresentation and libelous distortion of what I wrote.” He died in 1945, and that may well explain why he had nothing negative to say about the glossy and highly romanticized A Place in the Sun.
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Hollywood was adapting books long before Dreiser ever set foot there so I really wonder what on earth her expected from them in the first place. But I can’t really sympathize him because he should have known. A lot of writers still don’t like Hollywood but they like the money just fine. If you can acceot the money but not the changes that’s not compromising. And to be truthful the book was too long in the first place, 700 pages or more and how he expected that to fit into the format of a film back then was unrealistic. Willa Cather had issues with the adaptations of A Lost Lady too, but I can’t fault the studios for the writers not getting their way, if a writer didn’t want their vision altered then the definitely wouldn’t sell to Hollywood at all. But look others like Lillian Hellman, she knew her stuff, as a writer and screenwriter and when a compromise would be necessary. And Lillian came out just fine, yes she did write plays but adapting a play to the screen is just as hard as a novel. The only way that Dreiser would have gotten what he wanted was is Von Stroheim and not Von Sternberg had directed, but we know how that story would have ended, bankruptcy.