Oh dear. Here we are at the sixth installment on the making of the film “Laura” and novelist Vera Caspary is barely out of diapers. Be assured that the actors will eventually be cast, the sets will be built, the costumes will be made and the script will be written … and rewritten … and rewritten. Gathering “Laura” material has been quite a treasure hunt and here’s a special shout-out to Mike Hawks of Larry Edmunds for a “final draft” of the heavily revised script. Comparing it to the completed film has been a revelation.

Last time, we had gotten Caspary’s work to Hollywood (she remained on the East Coast), where her play “Blind Mice” with an all-female cast had been turned into the 1931 film “Working Girls” – with the addition of male actors, including Buddy Rogers and Stu Erwin.

Caspary’s autobiography is rich in details about Depression-era New York, but it casts little light on her growth as a writer and the creative process behind “Laura,” so I’m skipping the daily drama of her life except where it touches on films.

She writes that in 1932, she encountered Laura Wilck, a story editor for Paramount, in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel.

“We need material badly. Can’t you girls come up with a good story?” Wilck said.

Caspary says that she invoked all that she had learned in the “Fox Plan of Photoplay Writing” and pounded out a 40-page story titled “Suburb”* (filmed as “The Night of June 13th”) in a weekend, with several days of revisions.

She writes: “Paramount paid $2,000 for it; $200,000 couldn’t have delighted me more. Ten years later, Paramount still gave out mimeographed copies to show how an original (narrative material written directly for the screen) should be done.”

She was so pleased with the story that she sold it seven more times, with small variations, over the next seven years (it was remade in 1938 as “Scandal Street”).   Finally Caspary was confronted by Paramount over plagiarizing herself and paid $8,000 with the promise that she would never write the story again – in any form.

After more travails, Caspary finally arrived in Pasadena. (An ardent New Yorker, she did not like Los Angeles. Nor did she care for studios.)

Her account of her time at Columbia, where she had the nerve to disagree with Harry Cohn, is amusing, but alas, not terribly relevant and she’s brutally dismissive of the scripts she revised.

“A script had to be rewritten,” she writes. “The story that I was called on to revise was a so-called mystery whose clues could have been spotted by a retarded 10-year-old. I suggested a new story with less visible clues. The producer loved the clumsy device. I declined to work on such dreck and wrote a short potent note to Sam Briskin … Would he please release me from my contract?”

We’ll skip her departure from Los Angeles and a trip to the Soviet Union as interesting but irrelevant to the creation of “Laura” except to note that she had become passionately  involved with communism and then painfully disillusioned.  Finally, Caspary says that in late 1939 “to escape the incessant talk of politics I tried to write a mystery play.”

She subsequently returned to Hollywood, where she wrote original stories for Twentieth Century-Fox that were never made. “At Republic, I was the eighth or 11th writer on a John Wayne feature,” she says. That would be “Lady From Louisiana” (1941).

“In a suitcase lay the scruffy typescript of the play I’d written as an escape from political argument.”

To be continued.

*The title is often rendered “Suburbs.” Caspary, however, says “Suburb.”