In case you just tuned in, I am using Louella Parson’s May 15, 1944, item on Rouben Mamoulian being replaced as the director of “Laura” to take a meandering detour into the making of the film.

Most recently, we have been focusing on a series of eight stories sold to the studios by “Laura” novelist Vera Caspary, starting with “Suburb,” made as “The Night of June 13” (1932) and ending with “Scandal Street” (1938) that were variations on the same plot — “a murder story without a murder” in Caspary’s words, although that description isn’t entirely true, as we saw with “Private Scandal” (1934) and will see in “Scandal Street.”

Although “Laura” is not precisely “a murder story without a murder” it comes close. Instead of the wrong cause of death as in “Suburb” and it variations (a suicide mistaken for a murder or a murder mistaken as a suicide as in “Private Scandal”), “Laura” has the wrong victim.

Caspary’s stories were  so similar that Paramount finally realized what she was doing and told her to stop because it was worried about a plagiarism suit, according to her autobiography. Paramount’s concerns seem justified; notice that she sold this version of the story to Fox.

The Making of “Laura” Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII | Part VIII

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In case you just tuned in, I’m using Louella Parsons’ May 15, 1944, item on Rouben Mamoulian being removed as the director of “Laura” to take a long and meandering look at the making of the film. In examining Caspary’s career prior to “Laura,” we have found that by the 1930s, she had been the ghostwriter of a correspondence course on writing films,  and had done a couple of novels and several plays, one of which, “Blind Mice,” was made into the 1931 film “Working Girls”

In her autobiography, “The Secrets of Grown-Ups,” she brags that between 1932 and 1938 she sold eight versions of the same story (“Suburb”) to the studios before Paramount told her to knock it off, all of them involving some permutation of what she called “a murder story without a murder.”  As we will see in this post — and with the last of the films, “Scandal Street,” (1938) — this isn’t always true, but that’s how she described them.

We previously looked at the 1932 film “The Night of June 13,” based on the root story “Suburb,” and in the next post, we will next look at “Such Women Are Dangerous,”  (released in June 1934).

The Making of “Laura” Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII

Continue reading →