Elstree's Studios' intriguing original reader's report for Ulysses. 5pp. Typed on rectos only. Reader's delivery stamp to first page dated 19th March 1963.
 
Elstree Studios' original reader's report for Ulysses, based on Jack Cardiff's long-awaited but ultimately fruitless attempt to film Joyce's novel. He acquired the rights in 1962, but ceded them to Joseph Strick in 1964, whose 1967 film was made from a different screenplay. The report gives a synopsis of the plot, then delivers their view: "The authors have made a valiant and praiseworthy attempt to evolve a film script out of a great sprawling literary masterpiece of our time. They have been forced to leave out as much as they have put in, such is the length, complexity and all-embracing nature of the original. The result is that the screenplay is more like an index to the book than a complete transference of the whole vast work into terms of cinema. Thus, for example, lengthy discussions on the nature of Art, in the book appear here only in a sentence or two; the birth of the child, symbolised at great length in the book by passages of literary styles from ancient to modern, flashes by in a few seconds; and, of course, the Nighttown brothel sequence has had to be severely censored. Even so, the Censor, I imagine, would take objection to several portions of the script on the grounds of obscenity or blasphemy. "There seems to be a James Joyce revival just now (witness the phenomenal success of the play Stephen D) but I doubt if it goes wide enough or deep enough to make a film of Ulysses a viable commercial risk. As I see it, to make the story acceptable to mass audiences, further compromises would have to be made— I can't, for example, see working-class audiences coping with the many interior monologues, which often proceed side by side with the actual speech. Nor, from the point of view of a normal cinemagoer, is there much in the way of a central story line. The screenplay as a whole suggests episodes strung together somewhat haphazardly more than a complete work. "But, of course, every compromise made to win the favour of the groundlings will annoy the literati for whom James Joyce is a Bible. So that, as it seems to me, this screenplay must fall between two stools. It would be wiser, then, either to make no concessions at all (in which case we would be lucky if the finished article earned its keep at the Box Office) or to retailor the present screenplay into something more normally understandable and acceptable." Film production companies have been basing themselves at Elstree since 1914, and in most cases, their archives have been dispersed, lost or destroyed. This unique and hitherto unknown document from surviving ABPC reader reports has not been seen since its composition seventy years ago and has never before been offered for sale.