Saturday 6 May
Motion Picture Studio reports that Donald Crisp has taken over Lark’s Gate from John Gliddon, and that he will ‘remake’ it, not necessarily with the same cast.
Ten days earlier, it had been announced that the Bird Film Company, for which Crisp was to have made At Your Service, was being ‘reorganized’. Its two founders appear to have fallen out, and nothing more was heard of it, or of At Your Service. It is unclear what happened to Gliddon, but he never directed again, and his company, International Artists, wrote him out of the publicity.
Lark’s Nest was eventually retitled Tell Your Children, though International Artists was keen to emphasize that Crisp had done something completely new. Interviewing the company’s production chief Martin Sabine, Kinematograph Weekly paraphrased that although both films were based on the same story, ‘Crisp had neither made nor remade the picture’, and ‘not a single inch of the old stuff had been used’.
It is all quite strange. In her autobiography, Doris Eaton recalls the production as a career misstep since it kept her away from Broadway at a critical point in her career. Still in her teens, the decision to appear in the film was made by her mother. Eaton identifies Gliddon as the man who hired her, and Crisp as the film’s only director. She does not recall going to Egypt more than once.
In the same issue of Motion Picture Studio it was reported that ‘Alma Reville, the continuity writer, late of Famous-Lasky, has fully recovered from her recent illness, and is now at liberty to accept engagements.’ According to the biography co-written by her daughter, Pat Hitchcock O’Connell and Laurent Bouzereau, based on evidence in her photo album, Reville worked on Tell Your Children, having previously worked with Crisp when both were employed by Famous Players-Lasky.
John Russell Taylor also has Hitchcock working on the production, which fits with the idea that after the departure of Famous Players-Lasky, Hitchcock remained at Poole Street as part of a skeleton crew.