Film Rights to " Kim"

Sir James Gets Them for Maude Kiskadden -- Weeping, Wailing

About 117 well-fed motion picture producers are gnashing in the neighborhood of 1,000 gold teeth over the tidings that Rudyard Kipling has parted with the film rights to Kim. The gnashing is particularly reverberant owing to the fact that he has given them to an amateur in the field of flickering drama--and a woman, at that! The woman and the amateur--Miss Maude Adams.

In actual fact Miss Adams is not such an amateur as the majority may suppose. Ever since her recovery from the illness which cut short her tour in 1918 she has been busy studying stage lighting and the mechanics of motion pictures. Her laboratory has been buried in some obscure corner of the General Electric Co., Schenectady, N. Y., and she has consistently resisted attempts to obtain information regarding her activities.

Last Spring she slipped quietly abroad under the misleading but accurate name on the steamship lists of M. Kiskadden. She took her plan to Kipling. He immediately raised two objections but Miss Adams anticipated them before he could put them into words. They were:

1) That Kim should be played by a boy rather than a girl.

2) That the film should be made in India.

Since these were the contingent points on which the author had been skeptical they promptly agreed. Miss Adams secured the motion picture rights to Kim for eight years. Despite this extended contract she expects to start work before next Spring.

It is an open secret that various and opulent magnates of California have bargained unsuccessfully for the Kim rights for many years. Mr. Kipling displayed an unaccountable indifference--no matter how much cash their earnest faces registered.

No doubt his reception of Miss Adams was materially influenced by the recommendations of Sir J. M. Barrie. Although it is not generally known, Barrie sank the larger part of his fortune in a British hospital during the War. By peace time he found himself financially embarrassed. It was then that Miss Adams reconsidered her decision to retire (made on the death of her manager and lifelong friend, Charles Frohman, who went down with the Lusitania ) and trouped as Peter Pan for the better part of two years.