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Many fans of Charlie
Chan are doubtless aware of the fact that four of the earliest films from the series are currently classified as "lost" with
no known prints being available for viewing. These films, Charlie Chan Carries On
(1931), Charlie Chan's Chance (1932), Charlie
Chan's Greatest Case (1933), and Charlie Chan's Courage (1934)
are, however, to our great good fortune, still available in script form. During the year 2000, four available scripts for the missing films were accessed and transcribed,
an endeavor that required a dozen trips to In 2010, good fortune smiled
again. Scripts for all four "lost" films containing the actual finished dialogue
"taken from the screen" became available. It was immediately evident that our
four "original" production scripts were now woefully inadequate, as the finished dialogue from the actual pictures differed,
sometimes greatly, from that contained in the scripts that we presented here, at our Charlie Chan Family Home. Also, these "dialogue" scripts, while containing complete sequences of all lines spoken by the actors in
the finished films, contain only the most meager of directive or descriptive text. This
presented a dilemma: How to best present the new material in a way that would most accurately – and most enjoyably – convey the best possible representations of how the four "lost" Charlie Chan movies appeared
–and sounded - to audiences who viewed them many decades ago. That was our goal, often
as illusive that robin's egg in winter. The result, after painstaking and sometimes
frustrating effort, is a collection of four "composite" scripts. Each "composite"
script was created by overlaying the text of the "dialogue" script upon the existing text and directions as found in the previous
production scripts. Sometimes, everything fell into place very neatly, as the
two examples meshed almost exactly. However, the opposite was at times the case. In such events, "educated guesses" were used.
In a rare instance or two, is was obvious that an important line was missing from the "dialogue" script, and this made
it necessary to replace that gap with a line from the production script. Each of these scripts has been illustrated
whenever possible with existing images that have been inserted, as accurately as possible, into the text in their appropriate
spots. Most of these images have come to us through publicity stills, as well as images made from stills.
In the case of Charlie Chan Carries On, a goodly amount of visual material
consisting of video captures from the Spanish language version of this film, Eran Trece,
has been used. Much of this material was, in all probability, stock footage which would have also appeared in the "lost"
English language version starring Warner Oland. Also used in a few instances are other captures from Eran Trece,
which, although uniquely from that film, are vague enough, and are probably very similar visually to what appeared
in Charlie Chan Carries On, to faithfully illustrate some of the moments in the latter movie. A wealth
of imagery was also culled from the original trailer for Charlie Chan Carries On which, through great good fortune,
exists today. Fortune still smiling, existing video out-takes from Charlie Chan's
Greatest Case were also accessed for illustrative material for that film's script. Several other stock images,
such as the well-known Chan family group photograph, were also used to enhance the scripts. If necessary, any additional information
that has been placed within the text for purposes of clarity is enclosed in [brackets]. Only when necessary was any
wording from the original scripts been altered, mainly due to changes brought about by added dialogue and the need for
clarity. In such cases, the changes were never in the area of dialogue, but, rather in the cutting
and rearranging of directional text. To proceed, please click
on either the title card or the title of the film script that you wish to view (links to
production scripts are also available)...
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