Laurel and Hardy, Original scenarios and scripts from the files of the Hal Roach studio.

Adam Douglas presents this superb collection of original script material from the golden age of the most successful comic partnership in film history.

English-born comedian Stan Laurel (Arthur Stanley Jefferson) and Oliver “Babe” Hardy made over 100 films together, some 30 of them silent, and almost all of them produced by Hal Roach Studios.

Their golden age was between 1929 and 1935, when they created a prolific stream of 20-minute shorts, coming to a close with the classic Thicker Than Water, the last script present here.

In the 1930s they began to make feature films, and in 1940 they left Roach. The subsequent features they made are widely considered a falling-off from the earlier high standards. Laurel and Hardy scripts or scenarios from their golden age are exceptionally rare; we can trace no other example of comparable material ever having appeared in commerce.

These will be of enormous interest to film historians, showing how the original scenario or scenarios (present here in all but three films) differed from the final produced version. For example the original scenario of their last film, Thicker Than Water, notably lacks its famous sight-gag ending, in which Laurel and Hardy swap bodies.

More details of this collection can be found here:

http://www.peterharrington.co.uk/rare...

while the rest of our shelves have been catalogued in their entirety here:

http://www.peterharrington.co.uk/rare...